Most Western readers know Crimea as the place Russia took in 2014, with little green men and a referendum almost nobody outside Moscow recognized. Fewer people know who lived there first. This is their story, and it did not end in 1944.

Eighty-two years ago this week, the Soviet state deported an entire people from their homeland in the space of three days — one of the fastest mass deportations ever carried out. Ukraine marks 18 May as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People. The reason it still matters in 2026, and not only as a date on a calendar, is that the people in these stories, or their children, are being uprooted and jailed again right now.

Osman Kadyraliyev

The soldiers told Osman Kadyraliyev's family to bring food for three days. "Then you'll come back," they said. It was four in the morning on 18 May 1944, in a mountain village above Alushta, in Crimea. The family had time to get dressed and grab a little of whatever food a just-liberated village still had, which was almost none. They were marched to the square, held there all day, loaded standing into trucks, then packed into a freight car. Osman's mother had hit her head badly during the journey. She died a week after they arrived in Uzbekistan. She was 35. His father gave his share of food to the children and died of starvation half a year later.

They did not come back. Not in three days, not in three years. Most who survived would not see Crimea again for half a century, and a great many never saw it again at all.

The people who were there first

The Crimean Tatars are the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula, where they have lived for over a thousand years. They had their own state, the Crimean Khanate, centered on Bakhchysarai, with its own court, language, and architecture. On the eve of Russia's 2014 occupation they numbered roughly 300,000 — about a tenth of Crimea's population.

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Russia's interest in the peninsula is not new. Catherine II's generals finally took Crimea in 1771 not by burning it — earlier scorched-earth campaigns had failed for lack of anyone left to feed the army — but by buying off factions inside the Khanate and dividing it from within. Formal annexation by the Russian Empire followed in 1783. Within a few years a third of the Crimean Tatar population had fled across the Black Sea. That is the first of what Crimean Tatars count as their three black dates: 1783, 1944, 2014.

Sürgünlik — the exile

The Crimean Tatars have a word for what happened in 1944: Sürgünlik — the exile. Crimea was retaken from the Germans in mid-May 1944. Within days, the NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria recommended to Stalin that the whole nation be removed for "treason," and Stalin signed GKO Order No. 5859ss, banishing the Crimean Tatars from their homeland "permanently as special settlers." The charge of mass collaboration was a pretext: Crimean Tatar men were at that moment fighting in the Red Army, and when the war ended they were demobilized straight from the front into exile alongside their families.

Some 32,000 NKVD personnel ran the operation. Families were given between 15 and 30 minutes, woken at gunpoint, marched to collection points, then loaded onto cattle trains at the stations of Bakhchysarai, Dzhankoi, and Simferopol and sent some 4,000 kilometers east, to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Siberia. Soviet figures put the number deported at over 190,000; other estimates run to 200,000 and beyond. Surveys later conducted by Crimean Tatar activists found that 109,956 of 238,500 deportees — 46.2 percent — died of starvation and disease within the first two and a half years. In one episode on the Arabat Spit, the inhabitants of remote fishing villages were herded onto a barge, towed into the Sea of Azov, and scuttled, with a machine-gun boat standing by to make sure no one swam.

The survivors describe the journey in the same flat detail, as if the horror had worn the adjectives off. No water. No toilet. No medical help. The dead left on the railway sleepers under a rag. Seitmemet Ibragimov, eleven years old, in a car of 41 people, found a stub of candle in his pocket and lit it so the families could find each other in the dark. He worked nineteen-hour days for nine years on a collective farm in Uzbekistan.

"We worked like slaves," he said. "And we were slaves, on someone else's land."

Ediye

Ediye Karaieva was two years old, still in a cradle, when Soviet soldiers came to her family's house in the Bakhchysarai hills and asked her father for vodka. There was none in the house. He brought them apples instead. Angry that he had not produced vodka, the soldiers shot him on the doorstep and walked away. A neighbor's boy saw it and told the family what had happened. When her mother came back from the trenches with the other children, the father was lying dead across the threshold.

The night before the deportation — 17 May — her eight-year-old brother Yakub had been too tired to walk the six kilometers home from the fields, so their mother had left him to sleep at his aunt's. At dawn the soldiers gave the family 15 minutes. The mother gathered five daughters and ran. Yakub was not there.

At the station the boy went from freight car to freight car looking for his family and could not find them. The aunt, on a different train, took him; she said everyone was being taken to the same place anyway. The trains went in different directions. The aunt ended up in Kostroma Oblast in Russia. The family ended up in the Mari ASSR, deep in the forest, where the locals had been told that one-eyed savages who had sold their homeland were coming, and where the first word the children heard from a neighbor's boy was "traitors." They did not understand it. They did not speak Russian.

They did not see Yakub for ten years.

In 1954, after Stalin's death, the mother and the eldest daughter were allowed to travel to Kostroma. The boy was eighteen now. They met on a riverbank. The mother recognized her son, standing there, crying. Those were the first tears of joy since the deportation.

The signature

Exile was not a single act but a regime. Every month, the deportees had to report to a Soviet commandant's office and sign that they had not left their assigned settlement. Children signed too, once they turned sixteen. Stepping outside the zone could mean twenty years. This is the part the anniversaries tend to compress — that the erasure had a paperwork rhythm, a monthly signature, kept up for more than a decade. It was not until the late 1980s, under Gorbachev, that surviving families could begin returning to Crimea in real numbers. They came back to find their houses occupied and their villages renamed.

For about two decades, they lived at home. In 2013, the year before the second uprooting, more than 40,000 people gathered in central Simferopol to mark the anniversary of the deportation. It was the last time they could do so freely.

The third date

Then 2014. Russia occupied Crimea, and the people who had spent fifty years getting home began, again, to be pushed out of it. The occupation authorities banned the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatars' elected self-governing body, branding it extremist; shut the Crimean Tatar television channel ATR; and barred Crimean Tatar leaders from returning to the peninsula. Tens of thousands left. Crimean Tatars themselves call it a "hybrid deportation" — the same outcome as 1944, achieved with courts and entry bans instead of cattle trains.

The courts are the engine now. Russia outlawed the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir as terrorist in 2003 — it is legal in Ukraine and most countries, and not one of its members has ever been convicted of a terrorist act — and uses membership accusations as a template for mass prosecutions. By August 2025, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center counted 122 people prosecuted in these cases, 119 of them Crimean Tatars; 83 were serving sentences in Russian prisons. Those cases have left 252 children without fathers. By December 2025, across all categories of political prosecution, the Crimean Resource Center recorded 486 political prisoners over the occupation, 272 of them Crimean Tatars — roughly two-thirds of the human-rights violations it documented fell on this one people.

Some of the prisoners are sick enough that Russian courts have ordered them released, and then re-arrested them. Oleksandr Sizikov, a blind activist from Bakhchysarai serving 17 years on a Hizb ut-Tahrir charge, was freed on health grounds in May 2025 and seized again in October. His mother had described how she guided her blind son around the house by touch and sound. Lenur Khalilov, who has cancer, was let out in August and sent back to prison within months.

Server Mustafayev, who co-founded the grassroots Crimean Solidarity network to support persecuted families and is now serving fourteen years himself, wrote from prison that Russia had destroyed all dissent, journalism, and justice in Crimea, and that thousands had been forced out of "homes they returned to after the genocide and deportation of 1944."

That sentence is the whole story, said by someone living inside it.

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What the world is doing about it

Ukraine's parliament recognized the 1944 deportation as genocide on 12 November 2015. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has called on others to do the same. By mid-2025, the Netherlands had become the seventh state to formally recognize it as genocide, after Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and others including Poland. Historians describe a deliberate attempt to make the people disappear from the record — even, for years, to strike the words "Crimean Tatar" from official documents.

At the same time, a US-backed peace proposal — reported to have been shaped with Russian input — would have Crimea recognized as Russian. The Crimean Resource Center warned that such a settlement would legitimize the occupation and the prosecutions running under it. So the position, stated plainly, is this: seven parliaments have now named what was done to the Crimean Tatars in 1944, while a deal is being negotiated that would formally place the survivors' grandchildren, and the men in those prison cells, back under the state that put them there.

The activist Luftiye Zudiyeva, who coordinates Crimean Solidarity, has made the point that the people who actually remember 1944 are dying, and that there are fewer of them every year. The accounts in this piece were given by people who were children in 1944 — eleven, eight, two years old. They are among the last who can say what the knock on the door sounded like.

Ediye Karaieva's mother stood on that riverbank in 1954 and recognized the boy she had not seen in ten years. He was crying. It was the first good thing that had happened to the family since the soldiers came. The grandchildren of that family are now Crimean Tatars again under Russian rule, signing their names not at a commandant's window but in the cages of military courtrooms in Rostov-on-Don, while governments far away decide what Crimea is called.

Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) have begun firing unguided aviation rockets from long-range drones deep inside Russian-held territory, the force's commander Robert Brovdi, call sign Madyar, announced on 17 May 2026. The drones now add a stand-off rocket strike to their kamikaze role, a profile built to destroy the mobile teams that shield Russia's air defenses. The first confirmed strike hit a Black Sea Fleet site in occupied Crimea.

What Ukraine added to the drones

Brovdi said operators paired a 60-kilogram strike warhead with eight unguided rockets carried on the drone, used at depths of up to 500 kilometers. The NURS unguided aviation rockets, the Soviet-era S-5 and S-8 family, are normally fired by ground-attack jets like the Su-25 and helicopters such as the Mi-24 against targets on the ground.

No crewed aircraft can survive reaching the depths where these drones operate, which is why the combined kamikaze-plus-rockets method opens new options. Brovdi framed the program as a hunt for the gunners and shoulder-fired missile teams that guard Russian surface-to-air batteries, and taunted those crews directly. He said Russian air-defense work was being dismantled steadily, with "more and more systems already afraid to switch on" for fear of the drones above them.

The strike on occupied Crimea

Militarnyi noted that the Unmanned Systems Forces struck a strategic protected-communications node of Russia's Black Sea Fleet near the settlement of Myrnyi in occupied Crimea. The 1st Separate Center of Unmanned Systems released thermal video and said every strategic enemy site would be destroyed, with nowhere left to hide on land, at sea, or in the air.

The rocket fit on these drones first became known in mid-May 2026 through Russian Telegram channels. Russian military accounts claimed the drones hit mobile air-defense groups using two launchers of four rockets each. The same logic has driven Ukraine's wider effort to hunt the air-defense systems screening Russian forces in the occupied south.

A command post on the Arabat Spit

The Defense Forces also struck a Russian command post on the Arabat Spit in Kherson Oblast, Militarnyi reported. NASA's FIRMS satellite monitoring recorded a strong thermal signature at 02:58, and local residents reported an attack by six strike drones that set off a large fire.

Russia has built a major base on the spit, including the headquarters of its Dnepr group of forces and training grounds. The main occupier headquarters is in the village of Shchaslyvtseve, at the seized Bryhantyna resort base, and Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly visited that site in 2023.

On 13–14 May, Russia battered Ukraine with more than 1,500 attack drones and missiles over roughly 30 hours—one of the biggest raids in the 51 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine. In Kyiv, a single Kh-101 cruise missile collapsed a stairwell of a nine-story apartment block. Twenty-four people died, three of them girls aged 12, 15, and 17.

Ukraine stopped most of it. In that heaviest overnight wave, on 14 May, 43 of 753 attack drones and six of 35 Kh-101 cruise missiles got past Ukrainian missiles, guns, interceptor drones and electronic warfare. Ukraine already builds effective defenses against one-way attack drones. In particular, speedy interceptor drones that cost just a few thousand dollars apiece. And Ukrainian air force warplanes have proved they can intercept cruise missiles.

The ballistic missiles are the exception. Six of 18 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles got through, and all three Kinzhals. Against those, Ukraine has fewer than a dozen Patriot and SAMP/T batteries, and they are running out of interceptors.

The war in Iran has drained nearly half the US Patriot stockpile. The intercept rate has slipped to around 25%. Kyiv has received 600 interceptors in four years. It says it needs 2,000 a year.

Determined to fill the air defense gap with a Ukrainian-made system, Kyiv munitions firm Fire Point is proposing to transform its FP-7 ballistic missile into an air defense missile under the auspices of the Freya initiative.

Fire Point is Ukraine's most prominent munitions maker, and also its most scrutinized. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau has been investigating the company over allegations it inflated component prices and overstated drone deliveries, and over reported ownership ties to Tymur Mindich, the businessman at the center of the Operation Midas graft case. Fire Point denies the allegations, and no charges have been filed. The Freya promises that follow are the company's own.

"Despite attempts to hinder us and many distractions, our caravan is moving forward," Fire Point co-owner and chief designer Denys Shtilierman stated. "Fire Point is joining the anti-ballistic coalition."

The Freya initiative aims to take the FP-7, a 200-km range surface-to-surface missile, and tweak it for surface-to-air missions. It's much harder to hit an incoming ballistic missile than it is to strike a stationary target on the ground, but that doesn't mean Freya won't work.

The hardest version of that problem is the Kinzhal. It flies fast and lofted, and even Patriot has struggled to stop it reliably. Freya has not been shown against anything yet.

Indeed, many of the major subsystems are in place for a mostly Ukrainian-made long-range air defense system in the same class as the Patriot and SAMP/T. According to Shtilierman, the air defense FP-7 will integrate with a wide array of American- and European-made radars and command systems that are already in Ukrainian service.

That leaves the missile itself. Can Ukraine really build its own version of the Patriot?

Ukro-Patriot

Maybe. Fire Point wisely based the FP-7 on the tried-and-true 48N6 missile that arms Soviet-made S-300 air defense batteries. The Ukrainian air force began the wider war with dozens of active S-300 batteries, but the type has fallen out of favor as more Western air defense systems have arrived in Ukraine—and stocks of 30-year-old 48N6s and other S-300-compatible missiles have run low.

Given Ukraine's long association with the 48N6, it shouldn't be too hard for Fire Point to manufacture the basic airframe for the 7.25-m FP-7, swapping the 48N6's aluminum frame for a lighter composite frame with great maneuverability. Producing the missile's solid fuel is also within the means of Ukraine's sprawling rocket industry.

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The big challenge may be the infrared seeker. The 48N6 follows reflections from a ground-based radar, but an effective missile interceptor should have a built-in infrared seeker. A very sensitive one.

The Freya system's seeker may be beyond the means of Ukrainian industry, but it's well within the means of German industry. Sure enough, Shtilierman mentioned that Fire Point is co-developing an infrared seeker with Germany's Diehl Defense.

Combining Western radars and command systems with Ukrainian missiles tipped with German seekers, Fire Point really could produce a long-range air defense system. A Ukro-Patriot, if you will.

The need is clear. The tech exists. Shtilierman, for one, is optimistic that the Freya system will work. "Soon, interceptor missiles will be in the skies not only over Ukraine, but over all of Europe," he wrote.

The B4Ukraine conference was fourteen hours of near-relentless discussion on one question: how to make sanctions on Russia actually bite. Ella Skybenko was there throughout — sometimes on the main stage and at other times listening attentively to other speakers.

I sat down with her on the sidelines, and it quickly became clear why she was worth listening to. Skybenko is direct in a way that feels almost rare: European governments, she argues, are acting in open contradiction with themselves — imposing sanctions with one hand while allowing their own companies to keep funding the war with the other. The logic sustaining it all is, in her own words, inexplicable.

Swedish intelligence said that sanctions aren't changing Russia's core goals to destroy Ukraine and Europe. What can be done about that?

Well, I think we still need to continue exhausting Russia economically as much as possible and ensure that businesses contribute as little as possible to supporting the economy.

"Very large sums of money — and I'm not talking about sanctions now — flow into Russia's budget thanks to the many international companies that continue to operate there," the expert said. 

The taxes are enormous. And all of this is prolonging the war. So, in any case, we must keep pressing and continue to the maximum extent possible.

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"I think the turning point will come when they simply have no money left to continue the war and no access to technology," Skybenko believes.

Two things keep Russia going: finances — and of course, manpower, of which they have plenty — and technology. Every missile, every Shahed, every weapon system requires either the machinery and machine tools to manufacture it, or the components, without which production is equally impossible.

China is playing an increasingly significant role in supplying these, but there are still critical components made exclusively by Western countries, without which Russia cannot sustain the war at full capacity.

I absolutely agree that none of this will change their goals. They will push to the very end. The quality of life of their population, the suffering of ordinary people — none of it moves them. Their goal, in my view, will never change. It has always been one and the same: the complete and total destruction of Ukraine.

Do you think there is a fear in Europe of Russia defaulting? 

I completely agree. Europe fears a Russian default precisely because its own financial interests are deeply embedded there — ongoing trade, critical minerals, and much else besides. And so, unfortunately, a complete Russian economic collapse is not something European governments actually want. It also carries a security risk in their eyes: they worry that chaos could follow, with unpredictable consequences.

But this leads to a logic that is, frankly, contradictory.

"On the one hand, European governments are supporting Ukraine. On the other hand, they do almost nothing to make their own companies stop supporting the war, which they continue to do financially," Skybenko said. 

Ukraine's Defense Intelligence publishes a list of companies that are still not under sanctions almost every week. Why does this happen?

Financial interests, most likely. Frankly, I can't explain the logic of their actions at all. Companies operating in Russia are earning enormous revenues and have no desire to walk away from that. And yet, those same governments are now spending enormous sums on defense — preparing, in effect, for a war that their own companies are helping to fund.

Sanctions don't only hit Russia — they hit Europeans too. How do you make Europeans understand that this is a sacrifice worth making for their own future security?

The argument is straightforward: when your own security is at stake, some economic discomfort is a price worth paying. This is no longer an abstract concern — it is already a matter of their survival.

"If Russia is not stopped now, the consequences for Europe will be far worse down the line, and the question may ultimately become one of physical existence," the expert stressed. 

The choice, as uncomfortable as it is, comes down to the lesser of two evils.

Europe has agreed to allow Russian oil to pass through Hungary and Slovakia via the Druzhba pipeline. What do you think the Ukrainians, victims of genocide, feel when they are essentially forced to allow the transit of resources that will ultimately fund the killing of their own civilians?

"The Ukrainians feel betrayed. This inertia, Europe's inability to act effectively, is deeply disappointing," said Skybenko. 

Many Ukrainians are simply disillusioned with partners who nominally support them but don't do enough to help Ukraine win the war quickly. Again, because of their fear that completely destroying Russia would harm them as well.

Experts say energy is Russia's primary source of war revenue. What comes second or third? It's rarely talked about.

Definitely the financial sector. Beyond that, significant revenue continues to flow from international companies still operating on Russian soil — consumer goods, retail, and everyday commerce. 

Is the Russian economy being destroyed by sanctions right now, or is it actually being propped up by the situation with Iran?

I think it has been deteriorating gradually, very slowly — partly thanks to sanctions. But with the current war with Iran and the oil prices, it is winning right now. That is to say, we don't know how long this will last, but if oil prices continue to rise, unfortunately, Russia will only benefit. But I hope it won't last long and that we'll return to a stage where its economy continues to worsen.

Six months after capturing the ruins of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, the Russian Center Group of Forces is trying to break out of Pokrovsk and neighboring Myrnohrad—and march on the free twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 40 km to the north.

And they've brought in reinforcements to help make it possible. The Russian army's 90th Tank Division, which until recently was fighting in southeast Ukraine, has shifted at least some of its regiments 75 km to the northeast to bolster the units already deployed in and around Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, including the powerful—and growing—76th Air Assault Division.

Can Ukrainian troops kill enough Russian troops fast enough to blunt the effect of these reinforcements? The answer to that question will shape the eastern front as Russia's wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 51st month.

The 90th Tank Division didn't necessarily bring the equipment that made it famous: its tanks. Instead, the division is, like other Russian formation, fighting on foot. Russian assaults around Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are "just infantry," Lt. Col. Yevhen Bespalov, the commander of Ukraine's 38th Marine Brigade, told Rob Lee, an American analyst who has teamed up with Ukrainian marine corps drone operator Kriegsforscher to form a new analysis group, Two Marines.

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But the lack of heavy equipment isn't necessary a problem for the Russians. Armored vehicles struggle to cross the wide, drone-patrolled and mine-infested gray zone that threads 1,200 km between free and occupied Ukraine. The Russians decided more than a year ago to park most of their tanks and other combat vehicles—and attack with small groups of infantry infiltrators who stand a better chance of slipping past the drones, and who can slowly but steadily sow chaos among Ukrainian defenders.

Infiltration was the key to the Russians' conquest of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in heady few weeks late last year and early this year. Sneaking into the cities under the cover of thick winter fog, the Russians gradually enveloped the cities' Ukrainian garrisons, capturing one city block at a time while also bringing more firepower to bear on the Ukrainians' supply lines.

"Their task is just to go forward and get in buildings, in basements and all," Bespalov said of the infiltrators.

Slow war of drones

"Instead of armored breakthroughs, there is a slow war of drones, FPV systems and reconnaissance," the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps explained. "The enemy is attempting to degrade our logistics, cut off UAV launch sites and push their own FPV teams closer to the front line, operating through infiltration in forested areas and urban terrain."

If there's any hope for the Ukrainian 7th Rapid Reaction Corps and other formations defending north of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, it's that there are fewer buildings for the Russians to occupy now that they've fully occupied Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad—and must cross less built-up terrain in order to reach the next major settlement: Dobropillia, around 20 km north of Pokrovsk.

If there's reason for alarm for the Ukrainians, it's that the natural geography of the area is still pretty favorable to Russian infiltration. "Riverbeds, road networks and green zones ... are being used for movement and infiltration," the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps warned.

Can Ukrainian forces kill enough infiltrators to prevent the reinforced Russians from gaining new lodgements around Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in the coming weeks, setting themselves up for a push toward Dobropillia? "The enemy is trying to convert quantitative advantages in drones and infantry into gradual territorial pressure and fire control over logistics routes," the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps noted. Ukrainian forces must erase that advantage in order to win.

At this early stage in the Russians' renewed march on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the news is mixed for the Ukrainians. Analyst and mapper Clément Molin observed two separate Russian assault lanes pointing at Dobropillia: one coming right out of Pokrovsk and the other—the more direct assault—originating just north of the ruined city.

"As you can see, the progress is mainly coming out of Pokrovsk," Molin noted, "while the direct Dobropillia direction is currently stopped."

But Molin stressed that the situation could change. Russian reinforcements are flowing in. The weather is more favorable for assaults. And while Russia's annual spring offensive has been a bust so far and overall, it's possible it's merely delayed—not fatally damaged.

"It is very difficult to make any prediction," Molin wrote.

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A clearly marked UN humanitarian convoy was struck by Russian FPV drones in Kherson on 14 May, according to the UN and regional authorities. The UN says it cannot identify who carried out the attack. 

Russian forces regularly carry out drone strikes on civilians and infrastructure in Kherson, which lies across the Dnipro River from Russian-occupied territory and remains one of the most dangerous cities in Ukraine. 

After the incident, Russian Telegram channels released FPV drone footage showing a strike on vehicles marked with UN insignia. 

UN fails to name the perpetrator of the strike

“I don’t know who did the attack,” said Andrea de Domenico, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Ukraine, who was travelling with the mission at the time.

The convoy was delivering aid to civilians in one of Kherson’s hardest-hit areas when it was struck by two FPV drones. The team later evacuated the site.

UNHCR representative, Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, again refused to name the perpetrator of the attack, saying “both Russian and Ukrainian authorities had, as usual, been informed in advance of this humanitarian mission.”

“I am alarmed by the repeated instances of violence against humanitarian workers that raise questions about the adherence to International Humanitarian Law,” she added, again failing to name the guilty party.

She said this was the second such incident within a week, after another marked UN vehicle was hit while delivering aid in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

Russia's "human safari" in Kherson

Russian drones hunt civilians, terrorize Kherson with “human safari”

Ukrainian officials say strike was deliberate Russian attack

Kherson Oblast Military Administration head Oleksandr Prokudin said he spoke with the UN delegation shortly after the incident.

“I spoke with the delegation of @UNOCHA, whose vehicle was hit by two Russian drones shortly before our meeting. The enemy deliberately attacked the humanitarian mission’s vehicle while it was delivering aid to Kherson,” Prokudin said. 

Russian channels publish FPV footage of the strike 

The drone footage of the strike was circulated by the “From Mariupol to the Carpathians” channel, which regularly publishes footage of Russian drone operations in Kherson.

The accompanying post frames the convoy as a “dual-use target,” a justification frequently used by Russian sources to describe attacks on civilian or humanitarian vehicles.

The video was deleted from the channel, but is visible in a Telegram archive.

FPV “human safari” strikes in Kherson

Since Ukraine’s liberation of the right bank of Kherson in 2022, the city has remained under sustained Russian FPV drone pressure from across the Dnipro River, with operators targeting civilian vehicles, emergency services, and aid convoys in repeated strike waves described locally as a “human safari” campaign.

Despite clear markings and prior coordination of humanitarian movements, aid routes through Kherson have continued to be hit in a pattern Ukrainian officials and residents describe as systematic drone hunting of civilians and support teams operating in the city.

From fall 2025 through spring 2026, the words “aerostat notice” have appeared hundreds of times on Russian Telegram channels that monitor Ukrainian air threats. 

This means that somewhere high overhead, carried east by prevailing winds, are Ukrainian helium balloons carrying retroreflective decoys, surveillance equipment, bombs, attack drones, or radio repeaters that allow other drones to strike Russian targets. Ukrainian forces have launched in excess of 1,000 balloons into Russia and more are on the way. 

Untethered aerostats have participated in strikes on the deep rear of Russia since 2024, but have become ever more active in 2025-2026, targeting refineries, railways, and other infrastructure. 

Euromaidan Press spoke with a few people closely familiar with this tech. Because most people involved with these operations are high on the Russians’ shit list, they spoke on condition of not being identified by name or affiliation.

“Yes, indeed, balloons are actively used by the Defense Forces of Ukraine mainly as support platforms and as means for medium and deep strikes,” said Viktor Kevliuk, a retired Ukrainian colonel and analyst with the Center for Defense Strategies. “They are inexpensive, inconspicuous on radars, can hang in the air for a long time and carry a payload.”

While balloons are indeed inconspicuous—most of them are translucent, blending with the sky—one source said that getting noticed is often the whole idea, to cause Russia’s air defenses to fire everything, from Pantsirs, Tors and Buks, to even their S-300 and S-400 missiles. 

“You want to be detected,” they told Euromaidan Press. “They cause panic for the Russians and they are very hard to shoot down,” at high altitudes, causing the Russians to waste their air defenses.

“If you approach a sensitive area like Moscow, they get so scared, they fire everything without hesitation.” 

Depending on their size, balloons can lift heavy payloads, can be launched from anywhere, and be used to get above or behind air defenses to strike targets from the rear. They can carry signal repeaters that extend over 100 kilometers, which can be daisy chained together to provide continual control for long-range weapons. Aerostats can go very long distances, with a record mission traveling over 4,000 kilometers into Russia. 

While the aerostat industry is still quite niche, sources said that adoption is growing among Ukrainian forces, with more units training up in their use. On the other hand, Kevliuk sees this growth as driven more by innovators and enthusiasts than a systemic defense policy, citing lack of central state will and lack of resources for implementation by individual units.

One of the sources said that it would behoove allies to pay closer attention to this tech, which can deliver strike capabilities and a variety of weapons behind Russian lines, including UGVs and USVs. “Imagine a (Ukrainian) UGV on Red Square,” they said.

Wind be at your back

Ukraine was dragged into the full-scale war with many disadvantages. But it does have one advantage granted by nature and ripe for exploitation: the prevailing wind. 

At these latitudes, the Westerlies blow from the direction of Ukraine into Russia. That means that aerostatic balloons require no propulsion in order to make their way into enemy airspace. The Russians have aerostats too but the atmosphere is not on their side in this arena.

Being at the mercy of the wind does limit untethered aerostats as a technology because operators cannot ensure precisely where the balloons will go.

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However, there are two enablers, sources said. Firstly, people have a sufficiently advanced understanding of meteorology and ability to predict wind trajectories to make balloons viable tools of war. AI modeling and sophisticated algorithms are bringing still more improvements. 

Secondly, the balloons can be launched from anywhere, taking as little as 15 minutes to set up and deploy by a skilled team when conditions are right for the mission. They can also easily go over 10 kilometers into the air, where inclement weather becomes less of an issue. 

Evolving technology

On the other hand, GPS becomes more of an issue within certain altitudes. Higher up, the aerostat starts picking up jamming and spoofing waveforms from a very wide area. This makes it harder to guide balloon-launched drones and be certain of their initial launch location. 

This, plus the inherent unpredictability of relying on the wind means that there are always sizable error bars sitting around any one operation that involves aerostats. That includes missions that use aerostats as weapons carriers and signal repeaters for separately-launched deep strike or middle strike drones.  

Still, this issue is surmountable enough that the tech remains viable. One source said that “there might be issues, but it’s better to have an aerostat than not” when conducting offensive operations. 

As signals equipment clashes against electronic warfare on Ukrainian battlefields, both technologies are constantly evolving. Aerostats can also mount satellite terminals. While Starlink doesn’t work over Russia, there are other alternatives. 

As well, Ukrainians already use drones that navigate by matching preloaded terrain contours and require less steering. AI models are making this technology more viable over time as sophistication grows, machine learning experts have said in prior interviews.  

Tethered aerostats and mid-range strikes

Ukraine also makes increasing use of tethered aerostats—balloons that stay in one place, anchored by a cable. The company Aerobavovna is the best-known Ukrainian player in this space: their models are designed to go up between 500 and 1,000 meters in the air for up to three days at a time. Electricity feeds equipment through the tether.  

These provide both defensive and offensive utility to Ukraine’s armed forces. They serve as potent communications relays and provide reconnaissance and monitoring with their cameras and sensor suites, able to detect Shaheds and other drones.

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They are also instrumental in helping operators communicate with both FPVs and middle range attack drones, which have been increasingly hitting Russian targets at ranges of several hundred kilometers. 

According to Kevliuk, only two of these systems have been confirmed shot down, although another source said that they can be vulnerable to friendly fire. 

Cost and supply chains

Built from latex, nylon, and polyethylene, the balloons are very cheap and can be made of all-Ukrainian components, unlike many drones, which rely on China as a supplier. 

The helium that fills them is slightly more complicated. The US-Israeli war on Iran led to strikes on Qatar, which produces close to a third of the world’s helium supply. The subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz has imposed further strain on the global supply. 

On the other hand, aerostats don’t need high-purity helium to operate, which brings the cost down significantly. Kevliuk estimates that the daily operating cost of a tethered aerostat is $15. 

One source said that the Iran war hasn’t affected operations and that helium is available in sufficient quantities. 

“The technology is coming to life as an asymmetric response: cheap, effective for drone warfare,” Kevliuk said. “The trend is clear—balloons have become part of the arsenal for medium/deep strikes.”

Ukraine's Fire Point FP-1/2 one-way attack drones, designed to fly into their targets and explode on impact, now have the option of attacking and then returning to base to reload.

That's because at least one Ukrainian drone unit has equipped its propeller-driven FP-1/2s with underwing air-to-surface rockets. A video of an FP-1/2 firing a rocket has circulated online.

It's a surprise development, but potentially a welcome one among Ukrainian drone operators as they scale up their air campaign over occupied Ukraine and adjacent Russian oblasts.

For certain target sets, Ukrainian drone operators wouldn't need to expend their FP-1/2s. Instead, they could attack with underwing munitions and then bring the drone back for future use. Or an FP-1/2 could attack with rockets and then follow-up by slamming itself into the same target for maximal damage.

Reusability is appealing. The more often operators can fly their drones before the drones are destroyed, the more targets they can strike, overall. Ukrainian industry builds thousands of one-way attack drones every month; reusing some of them effectively increases the inventory—and at low cost.

In Horynych's and Aeroprakt's footsteps

There's precedent for this efficiency. Ukrainian deep strike forces have adapted Horynych E-300 and Aeroprakt A-22 manned sport planes into one-way unmanned attack drones by installing inertial or satellite navigation and stuffing explosives into the cabin or hanging bombs from underneath.

Apparently deciding the airframes are too expensive for strictly one-way missions (E-300s and A-22s cost between $250,000 and $450,000 brand new, depending on the configuration), some Ukrainian units including the Unmanned Systems Forces 1st Center have modified the sport plane drones to drop 250-kg bombs and then fly back to base for rearming.

The rocket-armed FP-1/2s are like much smaller cousins of the bomb-dropping sport plane drones. At just $50,000 a copy, the FP-1/2s are more expendable than the E-300s and A-22s are, but that doesn't mean some operators wouldn't prefer to sortie their FP-1/2s more than once.

There are constraints. An FP-1/2 can't carry a very big payload. The upgraded big boom FP-2 with wing fuel tanks is the most capacious of the Fire Point drones, and it carries just 158 kg of explosives.

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Moreover, the unguided rockets that may be the FP-1/2's only armament are inaccurate under the best of conditions. They're likely to be even more inaccurate when fired by a remotely piloted drone whose pilot might be hundreds of kilometers away, seeing what the drone sees via a video feed with some degree of lag.

But if the Ukrainians keep innovating, the reusable FP-1/2 could improve. There are small guided missiles that could fit under an FP-1/2's wing.

Don't be shocked if the FP-1/2 continues to evolve. Recall that Ukraine's first drone boats were one-way models packed with explosives and with no external armament. But the Ukrainians quickly added rockets, guns, infrared-guided surface-to-air missiles and even explosive aerial drones to the boats.

Some of the weapons work best for self-defense. But others are offensive. A drone boat firing rockets or launching tiny aerial drones could attack its targets and then return to base to reload.

More FP-1/2s may soon do the same.

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“Just reaching the front line has become very risky”: Ukraine’s AI drones are hunting Russia’s supply vans

Russia's Center Group of Forces is determined to open a path toward the twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last big free settlements in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

There's more than one possible path. The Russians could advance through Siversk, 30 km east of Sloviansk. Or they could attempt to advance on the twin cities from the ruins of Pokrovsk, 40 km to the southwest.

The southern route, through the fortress city of Konstyantynivka just east of Pokrovsk, is the shortest for the Russians: just 18 km. But there's a problem for the Russians: the Ukrainian 1st Azov Corps and adjacent units have dug in in Konstyantynivka, and aren't inclined to give up the critical city.

And they have help from a legion of ground robots that keep garrison in Kostiantynivka supplied with food, fuel and ammunition. The roads into Kostiantynivka from the north are too dangerous for routine travel by human beings, so the unmanned ground vehicles—some of the roughly 25,000 UGVs Ukrainian industry expects to produce this year—have taken over.

Yes, it's also possible to resupply the Kostiantynivka garrison by air with heavylift drones. But a ground robot might carry hundreds of kilograms of supplies versus the tens of kilograms a drone might carry. UGVs "are the main resupply method" for Kostiantynivka, analyst Moklasen noted. The same 'bots evacuate wounded troops out of the city.

There are so many of the remote-controlled, wheeled resupply UGVs rolling back and forth along the Kryvyi Torets River threading through Kostiantynivka that Russian first-person-view drone operators are deliberately hunting them. According to Moklasen, there are no fewer than 50 wrecked UGVs on the roads running along both banks of the Kryvyi Torets.

Fifty UGVs, each costing a few tens of thousands of dollars, is a small price to pay to keep the Kostiantynivka garrison fed, fueled and armed. Manpower-starved Ukrainian forces can't afford to lose drivers on the roads into Kostiantynivka, but they can afford to lose a few robots.

Robot resupply

In pivoting to UGVs for resupply, the Ukrainians are hoping to thwart Russia's normal strategy for defeating entrenched Ukrainian garrisons in urban areas. Time and again, Russian field armies have opted to starve Ukrainian garrisons in the best-fortified cities and towns before directly assaulting them.

A focused Russian campaign targeting Ukrainian trucks preceded the final Russian counterattack that finally dislodged Ukrainian troops occupying Russia's Kursk Oblast in the spring of 2025. Russian glide bombs, drones and artillery pummeled the supply routes into Pokrovsk for months before the Center Group of Forces finally captured the city back in December.

In a desperate bid to prevent that from happening again, Ukrainian forces massively scaled up their deployment of UGVs. According to The Telegraph, the Ukrainians performed nearly 10,300 resupply and evacuation missions by UGVs in April, a nearly fourfold increase in unmanned ground logistics ops compared to six months ago.

A garrison resupplied by machines can hold out much longer than one resupplied by human beings whose deaths impose much greater stress on the overall force. And who are more expensive to recruit, train, deploy and support than any UGV.

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If there's a weak link in Ukraine's increasingly unmanned logistics, it's that the infantry, gunners and drone operators who actually hold ground in and around Konstyantynivka must still get into and out of the city during rotations. These rotations are when Ukrainian units suffer their worst casualties.

Robotic resupply prolongs Ukraine's defense of Kostiantynivka but only significant human reinforcements can decisively win the battle and close off the most direct route toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. A massive deployment of Ukrainian assault troops could allow the 1st Azov Corps to go on the offensive and relieve Kostiantynivka for good.

But where would those assault troops come from? Ukraine's reserves are nearly if not fully committed holding the line around Siversk and Pokrovsk while also pushing back against Russian field armies in the southeast.

"The closest analogy to the current situation is a dam that is at its cracking phase and might soon either suddenly give up or slowly continue to crack until all the water seeps out," analyst and mapper Playfra explained. "That is, we might see a big but very unlikely Russian breakthrough in the city or a moderate advancement of Russian infiltration groups in the city ... repeating the process until Kostiantynivka is eventually lost."

In that context, UGV resupply mitigates Ukraine's manpower crisis, but doesn't solve it.

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Russia's "exaggerated territorial ambitions and aggressive territorial demands run completely counter to battlefield reality," the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed on 13 May. It can no longer forecast when Russia might seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast — or whether it can at all.

Kremlin doubles down on four oblasts as precondition for talks

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on 13 May restated Moscow's demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from four oblasts before negotiations can resume. Russia illegally annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts in 2022, but does not fully control any of them.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the same day that, despite recent US-Russia dialogue, "nothing is happening" in negotiations. Peskov's demanding the very Ukrainian land Russia has been unable to take by force.

Russian commanders briefed the Kremlin on Donbas by autumn

Senior Russian commanders pitched to Putin a full Donbas seizure by fall 2026, Financial Times reported on 13 May. The outlet cited anonymous sources close to Putin and a Ukrainian intelligence assessment.

Anonymous sources also told FT that Putin intends to add fresh territorial conditions to any future ceasefire deal. Putin's actual ambitions still stretch beyond Donbas, two back-channel negotiators told the same outlet. His wider goal is to push Russian control over everything east of the Dnipro and, if he can, into Kyiv and Ukraine's southern coast.

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ISW noted that Putin's thinking has moved further and further from battlefield realities. The Kremlin likely issues orders to Russian commanders to make gains that the army cannot achieve.

The battlefield: 2.63 km² a day, six months stuck at Kostiantynivka

Russia's 2026 advance in Donetsk Oblast totals 349.89 km², ISW reported. That works out to 2.63 km² per day.

Russian troops first infiltrated Kostiantynivka, the southernmost city of Ukraine's fortress belt, in October 2025. Six months on, Russian forces have produced no meaningful battlefield progress there.

Ukrainian counterattacks since early 2026 have forced Russia to split its manpower between defending the south and pushing on the fortress belt. Heavy Ukrainian fortifications, the terrain itself, and a Ukrainian mid-range strike campaign have slowed Russian offensive movements theater-wide, ISW said.

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Russian advance is slowing — and ISW’s numbers prove the Kremlin’s demands on Donetsk have no basis on the battlefield

US President Donald Trump claimed on 13 May that he has no agreement with Putin on Russia gaining control over the entire Donbas. He made the statement in response to a journalist's question.

Russian troops in Ukraine fell back for the second month in a row in April, giving up an estimated 46 square kilometers of occupied territory last month after giving up 13 square kilometers in March, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

Through the spring of 2025, the Russians steadily advanced at a pace of around 40 square kilometers a month. This year's Russian retreat means something has changed. By now it's worth asking if Russia's usual spring offensive has been delayed or even defeated.

One mapper and analyst senses delay, for now. But delay that could foretell a longer-term loss of momentum for the Russians. Another mapper and analyst warns against complacency on the Ukrainian side. In the air if not on the ground, the Russians are far from giving up.

"It seems the Russian offensive has been postponed, if there will be one at all," Ukrainian mapper Vitaly wrote. According to Vitaly, the Russians' main problem all along the 1,200-km front line is "manpower supply."

Yes, the Russian force in Ukraine still numbers more than 700,000 troops, the same overall strength as last year—and enough to lend Russian regiments a significant manpower advantage in the most important sectors. And yes, the Kremlin is still recruiting more than 20,000 fresh troops every month through generous, but potentially unsustainable, cash bonuses.

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“Just reaching the front line has become very risky”: Ukraine’s AI drones are hunting Russia’s supply vans

But escalating Ukrainian drone strikes are killing at least as many Russians as the Kremlin recruits every month, intensifying the strain on an occupying force that has been struggling to mass enough troops in the right sectors to sustain an offensive despite heavy losses.

Massing troops quickly and replacing combat losses with equal speed requires the Russians to maintain a strategic reserve of around 20,000 troops just behind the front line. The only alternative is to mass troops for an offensive in one area by pulling troops from another area, but that kind of trade risks weakening Russian positions and inviting local Ukrainian counterattacks—a dynamic we observed earlier this year as Ukrainian troops gained ground the southeast around the town of Huliaipole after Russian troops shifted north to press their offensive through the twin cities of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.

Russian commanders relearned the hard way in the southeast that a strategic reserve is critical. But they've struggled to generate enough fresh troops, month after month, to build up and maintain that reserve.

Manpower problem

The Russians' current manpower generation problem began last year. "The Russian military failed to achieve its goals in 2025 due to the heavy [losses] sustained during offensive operations," Ukrainian-American analysis team Two Marines explained.

"If the current recruitment trend continues until the end of the year, the Russian army will only fulfill its recruitment plan by 80-85%," Two Marines added. "Even for Russia’s Unmanned Systems Forces, there is a catastrophic shortage of recruits thus far. After the first four months of the year, Russia has only met 16% of its recruitment quota for the year."

It certainly doesn't help that Ukraine has significantly expanded its campaign of drone strikes across the Russian logistical zone, which extends around 200 km from the front line. Striking depots, trains and trucks at a pace of hundreds per month, Ukrainian drone units are weakening Russian regiments before they can even launch an assault. "Supplies are attacked in production and transit before they reach the front," Ukrainian analysis group Tochnyi observed.

The intensifying pressure from Ukrainian drones certainly bodes ill for Russia's much-delayed annual offensive. But the Russians aren't exactly idle in the air. If there's a case to be made that a Russian offensive is still in the works, it's in the pattern of glide-bomb strikes on Ukrainian defenses.

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Ukraine might have the drone edge. But Russia has the edge in manned warplanes lobbing precision glide bombs from tens of kilometers behind the front line. The KAB bombs wreck Ukrainian fortifications, kill and maim Ukrainian troops and complicate Ukraine's own front-line logistics.

On the "hottest areas" of the front line around Hulialpole in the southeast, Dobropillia north of Pokrovsk in the east as well as Sloviansk in the east, "Russia is constantly hitting everything with KABs," French mapper Clément Molin noted. Molin claimed he identified 6,600 KAB impacts along just 150 km of the front in just the last three months. And there are probably many thousands of additional impacts Molin conceded he couldn't pinpoint.

The bomb blasts threaten to weaken the Ukrainian defense even more than drone strikes weaken the Russian offense, potentially allowing a belated Russian offensive to finally kick off. The "challenge for the next few months is to counter the massive ... KAB campaign," Molin stressed.

But with too few long-range surface-to-air missile batteries and too few manned fighters with long-range air-to-air missiles, Ukraine has few options for intercepting the KAB bombers before they release their deadly munitions.

So in a sense, it's a race. Can Ukraine drone Russian forces into submission before Russia bombs Ukrainian forces into submission?

We don't know how many Hornet one-way attack drones US firm Swift Beat has produced for Ukraine. But there are enough of the approximately 2-meter wingspan drones that they occasionally cross paths with each other as they hunt for targets.

At least two of the drone meet-ups, one propeller-driven Hornet capturing another Hornet on its forward-looking camera, are captured in a new montage of drone strikes posted by the Ukrainian National Guard's 1st Azov Corps.

The crowded skies are the point. Ukrainian drone units are striking Russian supply trucks, depots and rear-area infrastructure deeper and more often than ever before—and the front-line regiments those trucks were meant to supply are arriving short on fuel, ammunition and people. When they arrive at all.

Also captured in the montage: a series of Hornet strikes on Russian trucks. This spring, Ukrainian drone forces dramatically escalated their strikes on the Russian logistical zone stretching a couple of hundred kilometers from the disputed gray zone.

The number of these mid-range strikes more than doubled between February and March to a new high of no fewer than 288 strikes, according to analysis group Tochnyi. That's 288 raids targeting Russian supply depots; the trucks, vans and trains that haul supplies; the electrical grid powering the rear-area logistical system; and the air defenses protecting all of the above.

The pace of mid-range drone strikes is only increasing. Tochnyi observed 99 mid-range strikes in just the first 10 days of April. Blowing up more of the Russians' supplies and reinforcements as they're en route to front-line regiments, Ukrainian drone units are weakening those regiments before they can even begin an assault across the gray zone.

For the Russians, "just reaching the front line (which is the prerequisite for an assault) has become very risky," French mapper and analyst Clément Molin noted. The intensifying attacks on Russian logistics may explain why Russia's traditional spring offensive is off to such an unimpressive start this year.

According to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., Russian forces lost 67 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in April after losing 31 square kilometers in March. Their last monthly gain, in February, was just 119 square kilometers.

From Mariupol to wherever's next

An array of Ukrainian drone types carry out the raids in the logistical zone, including Fire Point FP-1 and FP-2 drones that pilots on the ground directly control via satellite or mesh radio network. The first-person-view FP-1s and FP-2s are vulnerable to Russian jamming that can interrupt their control signals, however, which is why more Ukrainian units are deploying AI-assisted drones that rely less on direct human control.

AI-assisted drones including the Hornet. Yes, the drone pipes video back to its operators via satellite or mesh radio, but its onboard AI spots targets and steers the drone to a strike, all by itself. It's apparent that many Hornets are programmed to look for Russian trucks. And they're doing so as far away as the ruins of Mariupol, 100 km from the southeastern front line.

"Enemy forces are using Ukrainian roads in the city and its outskirts to move personnel and military hardware," the 1st Azov Corps stated. The corps "continues to establish a 'sanitary zone' for Russian logistics."

"The strike depth will increase," the 1st Azov Corps pledged as more drones fill the sky over the logistical zone and occasionally even cross paths. Hornets reportedly range as far as 150 km, so the corps isn't bluffing.

More drones will fly, farther and farther. More Russian trucks will burn. More Russian regiments will suffer shortages of people and supplies.

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There are people who know things, and there are people who will say them. Simon Papuashvili, Program Director of the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), is rare in being both.

The Brussels-based NGO documents killings, torture, and abductions through open-source investigations — and in 2016, their evidence contributed to the International Court of Justice proceedings against Russia over crimes in occupied Crimea.

Which is why, when I spotted him at B4Ukraine, a conference on strengthening sanctions against Russia, I wanted to talk to him.

What strikes you first is that he doesn't convey urgency. He is calm, with the occasional trace of a smile that suggests he has already thought through whatever you're about to ask. What he says, however, is not calm at all. He is one of the few voices willing to state it plainly: Europe has adopted sanction after sanction against Russia, and then, quietly, looked the other way on enforcement.

Can you tell what works better, kinetic or economic sanctions? 

Well, I think they're both important, and they should be seen as complementary rather than one or the other.

If you look at the Russian state budget, a large part of its revenue comes from the sale of fossil fuels. Still, four years after the full-scale war, a big chunk of the fossil fuels that Russia sells are being bought by the European states. We're talking about hundreds of billions of euros that go directly into the Russian state budget.

Taking this into consideration, the most effective sanction would be to basically say no to buying Russian oil and gas. That will have a direct, immediate impact on the war and Russia's ability to continue it.

Is Russia's gas and oil biggest part of Russian budget?

Well, the most conservative estimate is 30%, and even if we stick to that, 30% of income is a lot, you know. Russia has still been able to operate a shadow fleet, beside Europeans continue to buy oil and gas.

"The price cap on oil and gas, mostly on oil, has not been effectively enforced. There are things that can be done in this regard," Papuashvili said. 

What has worked with sanctions and what hasn't, and how can we tell?

The sanctions' impact has been limited, and this is partly because we have a big problem with enforcement. 

This problem is partly due to the fact that sanctions are not far-reaching and come very slowly and painfully. Also, it's because Europeans and Americans, Ukraine's allies, don't have, and haven't been put in place, proper institutions that are well-resourced to ensure that the sanctions in place are effectively enforced.

"So you can adopt as many sanctions as you want, but if you don't enforce them, there's no point. We have a big problem with enforcement, or the lack of enforcement," the human rights lawyer explained. 

Experts say that Russia's overall goals — Ukraine and Europe's destruction — will not change, even if its economy declines 

To gauge the war, you need resources. War is expensive, and you can't conduct a war if you don't have money. It’s very simple.

The Russians are used to living in harsh conditions, and they probably still have room to go in terms of how bad it can get.

"But if the government of Russia does not have money to produce drones, missiles, military equipment, and pay the soldiers, they just will not be able to sustain this. Full stop," he stressed. 

It's not just about worsening economic conditions. Generally speaking, it's about financing actual military combat operations.

We can see that Hungary demanded that Russian gas be delivered to Europe through Druzhba pipeline, despite many years of genocide…

I do hope that, in the medium to long term, this Hungarian government and other European nations disengage from dependence on Russian fossil fuels and build infrastructure for renewable energy that can make this possible.

Saying no to Russian fossil fuels cannot possibly happen overnight; it doesn't matter how much Ukraine wants this. It takes some time. But what is clear is that we're like four years in the full-scale war, and if the European nations, including Hungary, had wanted to do that, they could have done a lot. 

Hungary and its former prime minister, Orban, did not want to do that. Hopefully, this will change now that they have the new government.

However, it’s clear that Peter Magyar would have likely avoided implementing unpopular decisions amid the election campaign. As it could have had a negative impact on the Hungarian economy, leading to him losing elections and, in the future, to Fidesz returning to power.

So maybe problem is talking to society and explaining why prices are rising? 

Absolutely, yeah. Finland has been doing a great job in this regard. They take this whole-society approach, with drastic policy measures, including saying no to Russian fossil fuels. They spend a great deal of time, energy, and resources explaining to society why they do this, why it will be painful, and why they have to endure this pain.

They run information campaigns, produce explainers that are shared on social media, have dedicated TV programs, and people write articles in the news to explain this.

What do Western governments believe about how this war ends? How? Do they have strategy?

Unfortunately, they don't. I don't see that, especially in Europe. The US is a particular case right now.

"The Europeans don't seem to have a vision for how to end this war. That's a big problem," Papuashvili noted. 

I really believe that if they wanted to end the war, they have the power to do so. If they say, "In one year, we want the Russian economy to be in tatters, and we want Russian troops to be out of all temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, and we want Ukraine to join the EU", this is possible. But they are not doing it. They're not doing it because of…

… because they feel comfortable with what is going on right now? “Ukraine fights, but Russia doesn't lose? 

Unfortunately, it is so. 

Back in September, the Kremlin began pulling as many as 1,000 1970s-vintage T-72A tanks out of long-term storage and preparing them for modernization. This week, we caught our first glimpse of these very old, but freshly upgraded, Russian tanks in active service. Meet the T-72AM.

Their appearance is significant for two reasons. It's evidence Russia is now digging deep enough into Soviet-era storage to bring 50-year-old tanks to the front. And it's a test of whether tanks that old, with armor that thin, can survive a battlefield that already kills the new ones.

Video of the 46-ton, three-person T-72AM in service with the 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment recently appeared online. The 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment is deployed just east of the city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

Kostiantynivka is arguably the main focus of Russia's spring offensive. To march on the free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk from the south, the Russians may first need to advance through Kostiantynivka.

That offensive is off to a very slow start, likely owing to escalating Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian supply lines that are weakening front-line regiments before they can even begin an assault. If and when the Russians finally gain momentum, achieve some kind of breakthrough and once again deploy large numbers of armored vehicles for a push toward Kostiantynivka, those T-72AMs could see their first combat.

If that happens, and that's a big "if," expect losses. The refurbished, enhanced T-72AM is still a 50-year-old tank in its bones. Yes, it's probably got new sensors and fire-controls. It also has many of the add-on protections the Russians have developed to help defend their tanks from the tiny explosive drones that are everywhere all the time over 1,200-km front line of Russia's 51-month wider war on Ukraine.

Added protection

These add-ons include explosive reactive armor, chains, rubber mats and a drone-blocking "cope cage" atop the turret. If the 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment does what most Russian regiments do, it'll eventually add additional protections, potentially including metal spines that block incoming drones.

The problem is the basic armor. The T-72A was one of the earliest mass-produced T-72s in Soviet service and sports thin armor compared to later models. The best-protected part of the turret, the frontal arc, is just 280 mm thick. The T-72B that followed the T-72A added armor to the turret, among other enhancements.

So the T-72A is a flimsier tank than newer T-72 models including the latest T-72B3M. But that may not matter very much on a battlefield where even the best-protected tanks are extremely vulnerable to the twin threat of buried mines exploding underneath them and explosive drones barreling down from above.

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It's not for no reason that Russian forces have largely parked their surviving armored fighting vehicles after losing around 14,000 of them in Ukraine. These days Russian regiments tend to attack on foot, theorizing that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of avoiding drone surveillance as they infiltrate across the wide disputed gray zone.

The thousands of replacement tanks Russian industry has either built new since 2022 or fetched from long-term storage have more than replaced the 4,400 tanks the Russians have lost in Ukraine. But that doesn't mean those replacement tanks are going to attack in large numbers anytime soon.

The gray zone is a kill zone for all armored vehicles, whether they're brand new or 50 years old.

There will be no aerial ceasefire for Russia's 9 May Victory Day celebration in Moscow. Russian air defenses are massing around the city to prevent Ukrainian drones and missiles from raining down on the Russian parade. But Ukrainian drones have already penetrated that air defense shield. They could do it again.

Ukraine had proposed a temporary ceasefire to coincide with Victory Day, when Russians commemorate the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany. But Russian missiles and drones kept pummeling Ukrainian cities. Now there will be no ceasefire, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky stated on Wednesday.

"I thank every state and leader who supported Ukraine’s proposal for a full ceasefire," Zelensky wrote. "Russia responded to it only with new strikes and attacks. Throughout the entire day, almost every hour, reports of strikes have been coming in from different regions of Ukraine. Ukraine will act in kind."

Russian forces are preparing for Ukrainian strikes on Moscow. Stripping air defenses from other cities in Russia, and even from the front line Ukraine, they've massed those defenses around Moscow. Mapper DroneBomber has pinpointed no fewer than 101 air defense positions in three layers. They include:

These shooters, supported by an array of radars and other sensors, pose a serious threat to incoming Ukrainian drones and missiles. In theory.

Air defense gaps

In practice, there are gaps in the Moscow air defense network. On Monday, a Ukrainian drone—apparently a Fire Point FP-1—threaded past the radars, missiles and guns and struck a residential building in Moscow’s wealthy Mosfilm neighborhood, 6 km from the Kremlin.

As a signal, that FP-1 raid was "quite routine," according to Mark Krutov, who scrutinizes satellite imagery for Radio Free Europe. The upcoming Victory Day parade will be the sixth since Russia widened its war on Ukraine. Ukrainian drones have been striking Moscow since at least May 2023.

But the Ukrainians have yet to directly target the 9 May parade, even as Russian drones and missiles relentlessly strike Kyiv and other major cities—even on holidays. "The Russian military strikes Kyiv with missiles and drones every week anyway, without any clear goals or reasonable conditions for stopping," Krutov noted.

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“Just reaching the front line has become very risky”: Ukraine’s AI drones are hunting Russia’s supply vans

Zelensky may finally be running out of patience. Whether he orders Ukrainian deep strike forces to attack Moscow on 9 May remains to be seen. But he struck a firm tone on Wednesday. "Depending on the situation overnight and tomorrow, we will also determine our fully justified responses," Zelensky stated. "Enough is enough."

Ukrainian forces are better equipped than ever for strikes at targets deep inside Russia. Fire Point FP-1 drones range as far as 1,600 km with a 120-kg warhead. Sport planes converted into one-way drones range at least as far and carry even more explosives. Fire Point FP-5 cruise missiles reach as far as 3,000 km with whopping 1,150-kg warheads.

Ukrainian missiles and drones have been striking more than 60 major targets inside Russian every month for several months, now. Whether the Victory Day celebration is the next major target is something we won't know until the Russian troops line up for the parade on 9 May.

Whether Ukraine strikes is a political decision. But it's obvious it can strike, despite the many missiles and guns the Russians have deployed around Moscow.

Steadily ramping up drone sorties and cruise missile barrages starting this spring, Ukrainian forces are now hitting Russian air defenses, depots and electrical infrastructure in occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself at a rate of around 300 major strikes every month. 10 per day.

The middle- and deep-strike escalation "creates a layered attrition" that's fraying Russian logistics and depleting the combat power of front-line regiments, according to analysis group Tochnyi. "Supplies are attacked in production and transit before they reach the front; and the [air defense] environment over the occupied territory is simultaneously degraded to enable further strikes."

Wondering why Russia's annual spring offensive has, so far, been unusually anemic this year—capturing just 94 square kilometers in April 2026 compared to 226 square kilometers in April 2025? It's increasingly apparent Russian units are struggling to move sufficient troops, ammunition and supplies toward the disputed gray zone. Attacks on supply lines weaken Russian forces before they can even begin an assault.

One-way attack drones such as the Fire Point FP-1 and FP-2 account for a most of Ukraine's 300 monthly middle and deep strikes, but reusable drone bombers are in the mix, too. Dropping bombs and then returning to base for more bombs, the reusable Horynych E-300 and Aeroprakt A-22 two-way drone bombers—built on commercial sport plane airframes that retail around $50,000, with factory-built variants reportedly running $250,000 to $450,000 depending on configuration—help drive down the overall cost of the Ukrainian strike campaign.

The pilotless, propeller-driven sport planes are reusable in part because they're tough—and capable of absorbing Russian ground fire that might bring down a smaller, flimsier one-way drone. A recent image apparently captured by a Russian interceptor drone depicts one E-300 with scores of bullet holes in its wings and fuselage. It's possible the interceptor drone ultimately downed the E-300, finally achieving what the gunfire failed to achieve.

Many damaged E-300s manage to drop their bombs and land safely. Operators from the Unmanned Systems Forces' 1st Center are asking for $23,000 to repair battle-damaged E-300s.

Damaged but flyable

The damage to there-and-back drones is a function of Ukraine's expanding strike campaign. Increasing medium and deep strikes by an order of six in 10 months—from 60 in July 2025 to 354 in March—the USF and other Ukrainian drone forces are increasingly dominating the sky over occupied Ukraine and the nearest Russian oblasts.

"The target analysis indicates that the campaign is organized around three interrelated lines of effort, with the primary focus on dismantling Russian [air defense] systems," Tochnyi explained. "Nearly a third of all strikes are aimed specifically at air defense targets."

"Alongside this," Tochnyi added, "logistics interdiction emerges as the second major pillar. Strikes against storage facilities, particularly ammunition depots as well as fuel infrastructure and rail networks, form over a quarter of total activity." Those attacks have led to what Tochnyi characterized as "observed reductions in Russian artillery usage."

¹ Zozulia is capable of 2,100 km at reduced payload but currently deployed in the middle-strike role.
² Trembita is a cheap pulsejet saturation and decoy weapon ($3,000–$4,000 per unit), not a precision platform.
³ Both run dual-mode: reusable bomber or one-way kamikaze. Horynych converted unit cost ~$50,000.

Meanwhile, raids targeting the power grid in occupied territories and adjacent Russian oblasts "support both military and occupation functions," Tochnyi noted. "When combined with attacks on telecommunications infrastructure, this demonstrates a broader attempt to degrade operational coherence and administrative control."

The big picture is becoming clearer. Striking increasingly relentlessly with one-way and reusable munitions and drones, Ukraine is slowly achieving from the air what its outnumbered ground forces have struggled to achieve from the ground: dramatically slowing the pace of Russian advances.

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“Just reaching the front line has become very risky”: Ukraine’s AI drones are hunting Russia’s supply vans

Russia’s invasion has created a defense tech revolution that’s going global as Ukraine-style warfare proliferates. Some defense companies will succeed. Many others will fail. 

The difference between them is their willingness to learn from what Ukrainian forces need on the battlefield, warfighters said at the Kyiv Defense Tech Week, which took place between 27 April and 3 May. 

Ukraine’s defense industry more than doubled in 2025, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. Foreign firms are coming in greater numbers to test their products in live-fire conditions or offer them to the men and women standing between Russia and the rest of Europe. 

But Ukrainian combat veterans said that for every brilliant answer to a real battlefield challenge, there is an overengineered solution in search of a problem, or a copy of something that already exists. 

They then named what’s missing: mesh communications systems, better batteries, scalable UGVs, smarter electronic warfare, systems for infantry protection, among other technologies. Scalability and standardization are critical factors, too, as brigades try to move from a chaotic “zoo” of systems towards reliable supply chains that require minimal field tinkering. 

Ukrainian and foreign firms looking to get into the Ukrainian market—or draw lessons from it to succeed in modern conflicts elsewhere—and those who would invest in these companies would do well to keep the following lessons in mind. 

What tells you that a company is worth it?

“It's their openness to hearing the feedback, good or bad,”  Mykyta Puz, a technology liaison with the Azov Corps, told Euromaidan Press in an interview. “And their ability to quickly adapt to the feedback that they're hearing if we're talking about startups.”

Very often, companies, especially startups, tend to build something they think is valid based on cursory research, he said.  

For example, he said he'd been pitched a fast, reusable interceptor drone with a big wingspan. It was cool in concept, but its radar cross-section would get it clocked as a Russian Shahed and shot down by friendlies.

In another example, manufacturers pitched a product whose selling point is radio stealth. Puz said this misunderstands the battlefield, which is “so oversaturated with thousands of signals that it's not a concern anymore. And you spent like half a year several million investments in order to make you ‘radio silent.’ Why would you do that?"

Puz said Azov and Ukrainian forces more broadly are looking for companies that see a clear problem and set out to find a solution for it. The problem has to be deeper than "we need to shoot down aerial targets." Context matters. 

“When I ask the guys, like, what is your concept of operation? And they say, ‘you tell us.’ I'm like, no guys, you got to start from the concept of operation from a scenario and then you build the technology on it. I don't need ultra super quantum high tech, you know.”

Captain Markiian Yatsyniak of the 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, said something similar.

“Only specific kinds of manufacturers who are still in close, efficient communication with end-users like us… may have a chance to be successful in expanding and exporting Ukrainian experience all over the globe.” 

Puz and Yatsyniak said that with the current pace of innovation on the battlefield, companies have three or four months between tackling an idea and showing that it works on the battlefield, occasionally given a bit of grace time for manufacturing.  

“If we're interested in a certain solution for a particular thing, we give them at least four-five months to show efficiency,” Yatsyniak said. “If not, we just sweep the page.” 

What specific problems need to be solved right now?

Radio communication and mesh networks

“There are two areas where I think innovation needs to happen,” Puz said. The first is “communication systems… data links, command and control systems. Mesh systems are becoming a buzzword. Like really scalable, robust mesh systems designed for battlefield use.”

In other words, a system that can cover 100 square kilometers with a network of mesh nodes that can provide stable data connection for equipment to fly or drive through, with redundancy. “This is what I haven’t seen at all, yet.”

Yatsyniak added that the Ukrainian military just needs radios in general, as units are forced to wait months to get their hands on some. “The shelves of Ukrainian UAV manufacturers are full of drones, but empty of radios.”

Better batteries

Another need is high-capacity batteries, Puz said. “Something above 400 watt-hours per kilogram. I think this is where there is a huge amount of opportunity for great companies, but it requires advanced chemistry knowledge.”

Pawell Power is one success story in this space: through careful iteration, they figured out how to double battery efficiency last year. But there is plenty of room for additional innovation from other companies. 

More simple, scalable Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Andrei Kushniarou, Commander of the 108 Battalion “Da Vinci Wolves” and UGV expert, said that cheap, simple UGVs are in demand, as his unit’s goal is to equip every small team of soldiers with a UGV that can go in front to demine, carry equipment, or draw FPV fire. 

According to KSE, the UGV market is still very young and has yet to reach its full potential, worth just $252 million in 2025. Still, this market is “highly diversified” by manufacturer, with room for producers to enter if they have good products.

Better Unmanned Ground Vehicles for casevac

Kushniarou added that in spite of glowing news reports on UGVs evacuating wounded troops, really good casevac machines are not available on the market—casualty evacuation is being done by machines specced for logistics tasks and aren’t great at handling the wounded. 

“Right now on the market, there are zero UGVs for medical evacuation,” he said. “Medical evacuation is a priority for many units… for that, we simply don't have any specialized solutions right now.”

Even as logistics UGVs proliferate, casevac remains extremely challenging, with several soldiers telling Euromaidan Press that it can often take days and multiple steps to pull wounded people out of their positions to a safe area. 

More protection for infantry

“We should improve the abilities of the regular infantry man or operator,” Kushniarou said. “It's like a shield and spear battle from ancient times. Your attacking ability and your defense ability. Our attacking ability now was significantly improved by FPVs.”

“But the defense of the regular soldier is on a really low level. Probably the last significant improvement was armor vests. We need something new. We need individual interceptors to remove FPVs, some anti-FPV turrets, some different types of defense on the field and so on.”

Wider-band EW and detection systems

Callsign Archean, an electronic warfare specialist with Azov, said that EW and drone detection systems that work across broader ranges of frequencies are needed. 

“EW solutions must be universal. It must work from, 400 MHz to 8 GHz minimum, if we’re talking about jamming or spoofing options,” he said. “If we talk about detection today, we like to see solutions from 200 MHz to 15 GHz.”

Communication protocols and modulation are also fertile ground for innovation, Archean added.

Ukraine’s EW sector has expanded rapidly in recent years, moving from a relatively small and volatile segment to one of the key technology-driven components of the defense ecosystem. In 2025, this part of the market generated $220 million, growing 3.4 times.

AI-enhanced analytics

Multiple veterans said that the most useful direction of AI technologies is in analyzing data after their job is done: crunching through reconnaissance intel, assisting with logistics, enhancing jamming and electronic intelligence. 

These tools help with assimilating the terabytes of data Ukraine collects each day. They both increase the speed at which military decisions can be made and also tend to amplify the impact of any one decision, retired Lt. Col. Christopher Ghorbani of the US Army said in a previous interview. 

Other useful AI tools include converting photos and videos from drones into 3D maps for better situational awareness. 

Working with troops to identify further problems 

While feedback from the troops is important, not all brigades have an equal understanding of what their principal challenges are, according to Kushniarou. 

“We're facing a problem of creating analytical centers” at the brigade level, he said. “In famous units like Azov and Khartia, this problem is already close to being solved. But for many brigades, they simply don’t have any analytical centers.” 

Such centers are important for troops to outline their needs. This is especially critical for UGVs, to figure out what works best and what to buy. Many UGV operators are relatively inexperienced.

“And this is also an area where you can invest,” Kushniarou said. “It's analytics, it's statistics, and it's communication between different UGVs."

"It's the planning of missions, also a great problem. I know cases where operators use the same route to deliver logistics for a half a year.”

“My advice is that investors should come directly to units and not only listen to them, but try to work with them to find out what's really happening.”

Scalability, standardization more important than FPV #1,000

Multiple veterans said that they don’t need yet another FPV that’s functionally the same as the majority of others on the market, while also coming with its own teething troubles that the unit must spend time fixing.

“Everyone… is making drones which are conceptually the same thing,” Puz said. “But the problem is that none of this is standardized or scalable. Quality control is always a very big problem because you cannot rely on stable equipment to come in.”

Most units are forced to maintain their own workshops or even R&D laboratories to modify or improve equipment that comes to them, in order to make it combat-capable. Few things are ready out of the box. This is especially an issue with UGVs, soldiers said. 

"It's a terrible zoo inside of a lot of units when you have 20, 25 different types of UGV's, none of them are working from the box,” Kushniarou said. “We have to modify everything.”

While continued innovation and incremental improvement will remain important, the time has come to invest in standardization, industrialization, and scalability.

Ukraine doesn't have the kind of industrial base Western countries do, with its Soviet-inherited industry eroding over the years and being pounded with Russian attacks. The scientific base has eroded from brain drain. However, foreign companies lack the awareness of what to make compared to Ukrainians. 

“The trend is that both of us are trying to industrialize through the framework of joint ventures,” Puz said. “Or Western companies opening up offices in Ukraine.” 

“There needs to be a model of cooperation. It's slowly getting there. There is a good trend that I'm observing but let's see how it goes.”

What kinds of technologies are overhyped?

There are a variety of products and tech that the veterans see as overhyped — from overly-expensive, over-engineered solutions, to the role of battlefield AI.  

While machine learning is helping make drones more precise at navigating or locking onto targets, full-spectrum autonomy is a long way off, they said.

“Total BS: replacing the human factor in UAV operations. Even until now we cannot hand over the control to the AI,” Yatsyniak said. “We have manual real people, operators who make final decisions. So any advertisement by manufacturers that their drones are flying fully autonomously is a lie.”

Puz said that drone swarms are a way off as well, not just technologically, but in their purpose and application as well. “I still have yet to see any proper concept of operation for those.” 

While drone swarms would be useful for a paramilitary group conducting terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure, they are less useful for an organized military fighting another military force, he believes. 

“We don't have this kind of problem to solve,” he told Euromaidan Press. “But I would love to be wrong about that.”

Ukraine's middle-range zones are striking harder and more often, fraying Russia's front-line logistics at the very moment Russian field armies should be launching their usual spring offensive.

Russian regiments need buhankas to move troops and supplies from rear bases to staging points near the front. Blowing up more of the vans with increasingly far-flying, accurate and autonomous drones, the Ukrainians are starving Russian regiments of supplies and manpower before the regiments even get a chance to engage Ukrainian defenders along the gray zone—and Russia's spring 2026 offensive is the first one in this war to stall before it started.

For the Russians, "just reaching the front line (which is the prerequisite for an assault) has become very risky," French mapper and analyst Clément Molin noted.

The drumbeat of buhanka hits seems to be quickening.

On or just before Monday, a Ukrainian Hornet drone blasted a buhanka right outside a Russian brigade headquarters, likely tens of kilometers inside the logistical zone stretching as far as 200 km behind the gray zone. "We are deep in the rear, not far from the forward base of one of the brigades," one witness to the strike wrote.

The occupants of that particular buhanka may have thought they were safe from drones. The van was "packed to the brim with electronic warfare systems," the witness wrote. "Yet the weather is clear enough for flight operations. And nowadays, that is often the deciding factor for everything."

Left unsaid by the witness is that the Hornet drone is highly autonomous thanks to its AI targeting system, which can be programmed to recognize buhankas and other targets—and home in on them without help from a human operator.

Radio jamming and other traditional forms of electronic warfare don't work against A.I. drones, as they don't rely on radio signals to search and destroy. Other Hornets operated by the Ukrainian 3rd National Guard Brigade have been hunting buhankas and other supply vehicles around Donetsk city, as far as 80 km from the gray zone in eastern Ukraine.

AI targeting

The Ukrainian Bulava drone also has A.I. for targeting. Which may be how a Bulava blew up a buhanka at a Russian checkpoint on or just before Thursday.

All these van strikes have a corrosive effect on Russian logistics. And that corrosion can be felt in the gray zone, as Russian regiments struggle to conduct assaults with too few troops and supplies.

"Ukraine has largely stymied Russian advances across the front line, blunting the Russian spring-summer 2026 offensive thus far," the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, DC reported.

The Russians not only aren't advancing, overall—they're actually falling back. According to ISW, Russian forces lost 67 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in April after losing 31 square kilometers in March. Their last monthly gain, in February, was just 119 square kilometers.

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More Ukrainian drones are hitting Russian supply lines. The hardened targets are fine.

"The start of 2026 is not going very well for the Russian army," Molin quipped. And it may get worse for the Russians. Every week they fail to seize the initiative is another week Ukrainian forces can devote to strengthening their fortifications all along the 1,200-km gray zone.

"In addition to the classic obstacle lines," Molin explained, "the Ukrainian army has placed barbed wire everywhere along the front, and we've already seen the conclusive results of this strategy."

Russian forces are attacking while weak, and running headlong into new trenches, concrete obstacles and barbed wire. Further slowed by the fortifications, Russian troops are easier targets for the same Ukrainian drones that are also blowing up the Russians' buhankas—and starving the troops before they even attack.

Ukrainian drones are striking harder and more often across occupied Ukraine and even deep into Russia itself. At the same time, Russia's spring offensive is off to a slow start—if not already faltering.

The two things are almost certainly related. Russian forces still enjoy a manpower and firepower advantage over Ukrainian defenders. But Ukraine's intensifying heavy drone strikes are fraying Russian logistics and chipping away at Russian regiments' combat power before the regiments even begin their attacks.

There's still time for Russia's usual spring offensive to gain momentum, potentially leading to significant territorial gains for Moscow. But there's another possible outcome for the regime of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. "With large-scale deep strikes on his territory, and a ground campaign not generating tempo, 2026 may be the worst year yet for Putin," commented Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general.

Russia Matters, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, quantified what Ryan described as the "sputtering" Russian offensive. Borrowing data from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War, Russia Matters found that Russian forces suffered a loss of 67 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in the month ending 28 April.

The Russians have actually been falling back, overall, for two months now. Russian forces gave up 31 square kilometers in March after gaining 119 square kilometers in February.

The important caveat, according to Russia Matters, is that the Russians' losses are net losses. Moscow's regiments have retreated from some settlements in southeastern Ukraine but, according to Ukrainian mapper DeepState, have advanced in 10 other settlements: some in the southeast and others along the most important axes in the east including the Pokrovsk-to-Kramatorsk axis and the Chasiv Yar-to-Kramatorsk axis.

But losses are losses, and reason for optimism in Kyiv if they continue. They're also evidence that Ukraine's drone campaign is working. "It seems Ukraine want to use strategic drones as a game-changer," mapper Clément Molin explained.

Molin mapped 440 drone strikes in April alone: 330 mid-range strikes inside occupied Ukraine and another 110 long-range strikes inside Russia.

Mid-range strikes in the Russian logistical zone, stretching as far as 200 km from the disputed gray zone, have an immediate military impact as supply trucks, regimental headquarters and drone bases burn. Long-range strikes inside Russia damage factories and refiners in pursuit of longer-term economic impact.

Turning point

Shaun Pinner, a former British soldier who has fought for Ukraine, identified last year's battle for Pokrovsk as a turning point. Russian forces finally captured the fortress city in December after a costly 18-month effort. "Pokrovsk is where Putin smashed his teeth," Pinner wrote.

But the battle didn't occur in a vacuum. Since last summer, Ukrainian drone teams have been systematically targeting Russian radars, surface-to-air missile batteries and mobile air defense systems all along the 1,200-km gray zone.

The strikes on Russian air defenses—at least 492 of them between June and early March—are “collaps[ing] the layered defensive architecture that the Russian integrated air defense doctrine depends upon to function,” according to an in-depth investigation by Tochnyi.info.

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More Ukrainian drones are hitting Russian supply lines. The hardened targets are fine.

Destroying the right air defenses faster than the Russians can replace them has the effect of “facilitating strikes on more critical targets deep within Russian territory,” Tochnyi.info explained.

It seems those strikes are in turn gradually eroding the Russians' fighting strength. “We are methodically destroying the key elements of the enemy’s military infrastructure," stated Yevhen Khmara, the head of Ukraine's state security service.

No one pretends the drone campaign will bring a swift end to Russia's wider war on Ukraine. It is, at best, a slow strategic effort that could gradually tilt the battlefield back in Ukraine's favor.

The Russians may still advance in the short and medium term. They may even advance a lot when and where local conditions favor Russia's larger front-line force.

But that doesn't necessarily mean Russia is winning.

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Ukraine’s new B-2 drone is a mystery. Its kills aren’t.

Boiling oil flowed into the streets of Tuapse this week. A Ukrainian drone strike on 28 April, the third in less than two weeks, reignited fires that had been burning since 16 April at one of Russia's top ten refineries, the only major facility on its Black Sea coast.

Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev ordered the evacuation of residents in the area. More than 300 emergency personnel were deployed. Black rain has been falling on the city since the second strike on 20 April. An oil slick of around 10,000 square meters spread across the Black Sea after the first.

The smoke plume from Tuapse is visible from Krasnaya Polyana, around 100 kilometers down the coast.

That's the ski resort built for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Krasnaya Polyana means "Red Glade" in Russian. The name has nothing to do with snow.

Forgotten genocide on Russia's Black Sea coast

On 21 May 1864, Russian forces held a victory parade at a place the Adyghe people called Kbaada. The Russian Empire had been at war in the Caucasus for a hundred years. The parade marked the end. Approximately 20,000 Adyghe, mostly from the Ubykh tribe, had made a final stand there against around 250,000 Russian troops, according to Ukrainian historians who marked the date this year.

The Russians renamed the site Krasnaya Polyana. By "red," they meant blood.

The Adyghe, called Circassians by their neighbors and on European maps from the 16th century onward, had lived along the Black Sea coast and in the Caucasus mountains since at least the 6th century. They had their own laws, an elaborate culture, and one of the most complex languages in the world. By the time Russia's southern conquest reached them in the late 18th century, they numbered in the millions.

By 1864, ninety percent of them were gone.

What General Velyaminov did

The town now called Tuapse was founded in 1838 as a Russian fort named Velyaminovskoye, after General Alexei Velyaminov, who had proposed what Russian military historians call "a new strategy for the conquest of the Caucasus." The strategy was attrition. Russian forces destroyed villages, burned crops, and poisoned wells to engineer famine. They shelled Adyghe settlements with artillery from the sea.

Velyaminov's protégé, General Grigory Zass, took the work further. He paid his soldiers for the severed heads of Circassians. The heads were boiled in cauldrons in his camp, and the cleaned skulls were sent to the Russian Academy of Sciences to the Kunstkamera, Russia's first museum, in St. Petersburg, and to anatomical collections in European universities.

Fatima Tlisova, an ethnic Circassian journalist who has worked at Voice of America, has written about her family's oral history of the conquest. Russian troops attacked villages at night, hoping to catch people asleep. Often, the villagers escaped only because their animals raised the alarm first. Later, the survivors understood why: the Russian columns moved with carts of severed body parts, and the smell carried ahead of them.

Expulsion

After the surrender at Kbaada in 1864, the Russian Empire deported the surviving Adyghe. They were Muslims; the destination was the Ottoman Empire. The Russian term for the operation was the same one used for routine forced relocations: pereselenie. The Circassians have their own word for exile—muhajirstvo.

Tens of thousands were held in camps along the Black Sea coast at the ports of Sochi and Sukhumi. They lived on bare ground without sufficient food, water, or shelter. Typhus killed many of them before the ships arrived. To board, they had to pay. Ships built for 100 passengers carried 300 to 400. Many drowned from suffocation or starvation in transit. Many ships sank in Black Sea storms.

Estimates of the dead and expelled run from 1.2 million to 2.8 million people, between ninety and ninety-seven percent of the Circassian population. The largest Circassian diaspora today lives in Türkiye. Their language is endangered. Approximately 700,000 to 800,000 Circassians remain in the Caucasus, divided among three small Russian republics: Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria.

Olympic Village

For Vladimir Putin, the 2014 Winter Olympics were a prestige project. Russia spent more than $50 billion on them, the most expensive Games ever held. The Olympic mountain cluster, where the alpine and sliding events took place, was built at Krasnaya Polyana. Circassian activists from across the diaspora petitioned the International Olympic Committee, asking that the Games not be held on the burial site of the people they had erased. The IOC declined to intervene.

The opening ceremony took place on 7 February 2014. Eleven days later, the Maidan revolution in Kyiv reached its bloody climax. Within two weeks, Russian forces, many of them shifted south through the same Black Sea coast that had once held the Circassian deportation camps, were occupying Crimea.

What Ukraine recognized

On 9 January 2025, Ukraine's parliament voted to recognize the Circassian genocide. The resolution passed 232 to zero, with no abstentions. Ukraine became the second country in the world to do so, after Georgia in 2011.

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Ukraine Parliament condemns Russian Empire’s Circassian genocide that killed and exiled 90% of population

The resolution names the perpetrator (the Russian Empire), the victims (the Adyghe people), and the period (1763 to 1864). It calls on Russia to recognize the crime and apologize. It calls on other countries to do the same. It affirms the right of Circassians to return to their lands and to self-determination. It instructs Ukrainian institutions to teach history.

The Ukrainian co-author of the resolution, MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, framed it as part of a broader project: condemning what he called Russia's colonial policy across centuries and across name changes—Muscovite, imperial, Soviet, post-Soviet. Ukraine had previously recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as occupied by Russia in 2022 and the Ingush right to self-determination in 2024. The Circassian resolution sits in that sequence.

The International Circassian Association, the Moscow-recognized body operating in Russia, condemned the recognition. The Association said the Circassian people had no need of such recognition from "illegitimate Ukrainian authorities." Circassian organizations in the diaspora—in Turkiye, Syria, Jordan, the United States—welcomed it.

Why this matters now

The Russian state's response to Tuapse this week has followed a pattern. The first strike on 16 April was reported as an industrial accident. The black rain was attributed to local factory emissions. The oil slick was acknowledged only after satellite images were already circulating. After the third strike on 28 April, Putin commented for the first time, and only to assure Russians that the situation was under control. A journalist from the independent Russian outlet Kedr, reporting on pollution caused by the strikes, was briefly detained by police in Tuapse this week.

Erasure is the through-line. The 19th-century version was conducted with artillery and mass deportation. The 21st-century version is conducted with denial, censorship, and, in Ukraine since 2022, with the same tactics Russian forces used in the Caucasus: the destruction of food stores, the deliberate creation of conditions designed to make a population leave or die, the deportation of children to the imperial center for re-education. The UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine has documented the pattern.

Most Western readers have never heard the word Circassian. The reason is not an accident. Russia spent 160 years removing the people, the language, the maps, the memory, and the bones, and then put a ski resort on top of the burial ground.

The smoke from Tuapse this week was visible from there.

Yet another medium-range attack drone has joined Ukraine's escalating campaign targeting Russian logistics in the critical zone stretching from the contested gray zone as far back as 200 km.

Outnumbered Ukrainian forces use the middle-strike drones to degrade Russian regiments before they reach the front—hitting trains, fuel, and air defense up to 200 km deep. The Zozulia middle-strike drone pushes that reach to 1,100 km, but its 50-kg warhead is the ceiling on what the whole campaign can achieve: the drones lack explosive firepower.

Zozulia isn't exactly new: it first broke cover last fall. But its role in the counterlogistics campaign might be new. The 422nd Luftwaffe Regiment, part of the Ukrainian ground forces' 17th Corps, recently circulated images of its Zozulias in action.

In just the last week or so, Zozulias have ranged across southern Ukraine, striking Russian bases, trains rocket launchers and even a tugboat and a cargo ship. Together with Ukraine's FP-1, FP-2 and B-2 drones, the Zozulias are fraying Russian supply lines and the air defenses protecting them, and thus degrading front-line regiments before they can roll or march into battle.

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Ukraine’s new B-2 drone is a mystery. Its kills aren’t.

The 170-kg, propeller-driven Zozulia is broadly similar to the more ubiquitous FP-2, although the FP-2 has a rear-mounted "pusher" propeller and the Zozulia's propeller is mounted on its nose. Both the FP-2 and the Zozulia share a similar display optimized for direct control by a remote operator, although both types also have satellite and unjammable inertial systems for navigation.

The big different between the types is their range and payload. The FP-2 flies around 200 km with a 100-kg warhead. The Zozulia flies as far as 1,100 km with a much smaller 50-kg warhead. The Zozulia gets much of its range from the extra fuel tanks in its wings, an innovation FP-2-maker Fire Point is adding to its own middle-strike drones.

Tiny warhead

If there's a problem with the Zozulia, it's the tiny warhead. Ukrainian industry has quickly developed a dizzying array of attack drones, including models with impressive range like the Zozulia possesses. But the fuel load necessary for such long range squeezes the explosive payload to the point that the farthest-flying Ukrainian drones usually carry warheads weighing just tens of kilograms.

While Ukrainian drones are striking more targets across occupied Ukraine and deep inside Russia, especially in the logistical zone, they struggle to inflict lasting damage. Their warheads are simply too small.

The FP-2 partially addresses the problem. With its 100-kg warhead, it’s among the hardest-hitting middle-range drones.

But even the FP-2 really only works against fairly thin-skinned targets: unreinforced hangars, commercial-style storage tanks and residential buildings doubling as front-line bases, for example. It’s not unusual for the Ukrainians to hit even these relatively flimsy targets with several FP-2s in order to ensure their destruction.

Truly hardened targets brush off FP-2 strikes. When Ukrainian special forces targeted a Russian missile complex in occupied Crimea on or just before Tuesday, the video feeds from the attacking FP-2s depicted fireballs and flames on and around the presumably concrete-and-steel bunkers reportedly sheltering unused Iskander ballistic missiles. The videos didn't clearly depict any serious damage.

If the FP-2 can't bust a Russian missile bunker, the Zozulia stands no chance of inflicting any meaningful damage on a similar target. The Zozulia is helping intensify Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets in the logistical zone. But only certain types of targets.

The toughest Russian facilities are all but impervious to drone strikes. They're not impervious to strikes by Ukraine's much heavier and faster cruise missiles. But where Ukrainian forces launch thousands of middle-range attack drones every month, they launch only a handful of the much pricier, much heavier cruise missiles.

¹ The Zozulia is capable of 1,100 km flights at full warhead, or up to 2,100 km at reduced payload, but the 422nd Battalion of Unmanned Systems is currently deploying it in the middle-strike role against Russian logistics within ~200 km of the gray zone.
² The Trembita is a pulsejet-powered cruise missile in the V-1 lineage, designed as a cheap saturation and decoy weapon to exhaust Russian air defenses—not a precision strike platform. Roughly $3,000–$4,000 per unit.

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Critics said Ukraine was losing the mid-range drone war. Russia’s burning trucks disagree.

The town of Chasiv Yar, in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, blocks the path to the city of Kostiantynivka, 7 km to the west.

Kostiantynivka blocks the path to the city of Kramatorsk, 15 km to the north.

Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk are the last big free cities in Donetsk Oblast. Russia has spent two years trying to break through Chasiv Yar to reach them. So far, it hasn't.

And that's why Chasiv Yar—what's left of it after years of fighting—matters. After two days of failed mechanized assaults, the Russians' plans for getting around Ukrainian defenders clinging to the western outskirts, in order to then drive on Kostiantynivka, are coming into focus.

"Russians have several options they will probably try to exploit," mapper and observer Vitaly wrote. The easiest for the Russians, they added, may be to infiltrate past the battered Ukrainian defenders of Chasiv Yar and into Novodmytrivka, a village just east of Kostiantynivka.

If enough Russian troops can entrench in Novodmytrivka, they could get access to the H20 road leading north from Kostiantynivka to Kramatorsk. As a bonus, Vitaly pointed out, a Russian occupation of Novodmytrivka would "cut off" Chasiv Yar from Ukrainian reinforcements and bottle up any Ukrainian defenders left behind.

The Russian plans are coming into focus because they're already underway. The Russian push toward Novodmytrivka has begun, according to Ukrainian military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets. He and other observers and analysts have noted "ongoing attempts by Russian troops to seize Novodmytrivka," according to the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team.

Novodmytrivka holds for now, largely because Ukrainian positions in and around Chasiv Yar hold. Two days in a row starting 18 April, the Russian 70th Motor Rifle Division attacked Ukrainian 24th Mechanized Brigade holding positions in western Chasiv Yar. Two days in a row, the Ukrainian brigade fought back with drones, artillery and infantry.

"The enemy achieved no success," the Ukrainian brigade reported.

The Russians' 18 April attack involved one tank, five infantry fighting vehicles, 10 motorcycles and some all-terrain vehicles. The 24th Mechanized Brigade logged hits on several vehicles, bikes and ATVs. The Sunday assault group was similar in composition. It met the same fate as the Saturday group.

"The attack was repelled," the 24th Mechanized Brigade reported. "Enemy armored vehicles, transport and assault troops were destroyed."

Vehicles failed. Foot soldiers may not.

The two days of failed assaults were a costly setback for the Russians, but don't expect them to give up. "The Russians maintain a high level of staffing in their units located near" Kostiantynivka, Ukrainian drone operator and analyst Kriegsforscher noted. "Russian forces will likely increase their activity in this direction with armored vehicles."

But vehicles aren't the biggest threat. The Ukrainians' greatest problem is the same problem they have everywhere along the 1,200-km front line, Vitaly stressed. Ukrainian defenses are optimized for detecting and defeating Russian mechanized columns. The same defenses don't work as well when the Russians send in small groups of infantry on foot or on motorcycles.

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Widely spread Ukrainian forces can detect a big, noisy mechanized assault and halt it with drones and artillery. But the same Ukrainian forces are spread too thin to detect and block every small group of Russian infiltrators—especially as Russian bombs rain down. A "sparse and suppressed defense with gaps in drone surveillance ... allows the enemy to slip into the gaps," Vitaly explained.

Infantry infiltration is how Russian forces ultimately captured the city of Pokrovsk and neighboring Myrnohrad late last year, pushing Russians closer to Kostiantynivka and Kramatorsk from the west.

Infiltration may be how they finally push past Chasiv Yar—and pressure those same cities from the east.

We don't know much about Ukraine's newest attack drone aside from its name: the B-2. We do know what the "middle-strike" B-2 is doing. (Some sources call the B-2 the "V-2.")

It's helping a growing array of Ukrainian drone units strike Russian bases, supply convoys and air defenses in the middle zone stretching as far as 200 km behind the disputed gray zone threading 1,200 km from northern Ukraine to southern Ukraine.

The B-2 broke cover recently, when the new 13th Detachment—a drone unit formed around veteran drone operators from the 414th Brigade—circulated footage of its work.

The footage depicts the B-2s from the drones' points of view as they strike four Russian air defense systems in one night on or just before 23 April: three Tor-M2s and an Osa system. The 13th Detachment hunted down the mobile surface-to-air missile systems in occupied Ukraine as well as in Russia's Bryansk Oblast, just across the border.

The hits on Russian SAM vehicles are a clear indicator that the B-2s are supporting Ukraine's slow-burn effort to suppress Russian air defenses across occupied territories and adjacent Russian oblasts.

The suppression campaign—at least 492 drone strikes on Russian air defenses between June 2025 and early March 2026—is clearing the way for Ukraine's drone teams and fighter regiments to target Russian headquarters, drone teams, supply convoys and, yes, any surviving air defenses in the middle zone.

Drones suppress Russian air defenses, enabling manned and unmanned aircraft to strike harder and more frequently, further degrading those air defenses in the process. It's a beneficial cycle for Ukrainian forces—and a death spiral for Russian forces.

Destroying air defense systems faster than the Russians can replace them has the effect of "facilitating strikes on more critical targets deep within Russian territory," Tochnyi.info explained in a recent study.

Drones and comms

The suppression campaign is only as impactful as the middle-strike drones are effective. There are many different types, including the Hornet, the HF-1 and HF-2, the RAM-2X, and Bulava. They tend to be either first-person-view models that are directly steered by a remote operator, or autonomous models that can select and strike their own targets. Some models combine direct operator control with autonomous targeting assistance.

Some long-range drones support the mid-range suppression effort, in particular the FP-2. With its 158-kg warhead, the FP-2 is an outlier. Most of the middle-strike drones strike with much smaller warheads weighing just 5 kg or so.

Inasmuch as many of the drones rely on a low-lag radio link to their operators, the suppression campaign is also a connectivity campaign. Quietly and without many people noticing, Ukrainian forces have established overlapping communications networks across the gray zone and the middle zone behind it. The comms nets include line-of-sight radios, Starlink satellite terminals and mesh radio nets formed by many interconnected drones.

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It's unclear whether the B-2 navigates by GPS or by some self-contained inertial or terrain-following system (which matches the landscape below the drone to a pre-installed digital map). It's evident, from footage of air defense strikes, that the drone can be directly steered by a remote operator for maximum precision in the seconds before impact.

That precision makes the B-2 effective for strikes on mobile targets such as those Tor-M2s and that Osa. One more arrow in the quiver of an expanding drone army, the B-2 is helping to clear the air space over the war zone for follow-on drone, missile and bombing raids on Russian headquarters, drone teams, supply lines and, yes, any surviving air defenses.

Each successful strike is enabled by the strikes that preceded it.

The head of Ukraine's Office of the President, Kyrylo Budanov, has listed the Ukrainian weapons Ukraine has outgrown but could still suit foreign buyers — older FPV drones, sea drones, bombers, long-range UAVs from 2022-2023, and armored vehicles, in an NV interview at a defense conference on 26 April.

"We ourselves don't have enough"

Ukraine's arms exports remain "let's say inactive" today, Budanov noted, with the country still short of weapons in a "hot phase" of ongoing full-scale war. Opening free arms sales abroad would be wrong, he argued — strange for Ukraine, unclear to its foreign partners, and morally unjustifiable while Ukrainians fight.

"It would be incomprehensible to neither us nor foreign partners on whom we depend in many ways," Budanov said.

But pockets of overproduction have begun appearing, the head of the Office of the President added. 

"Pointwise, I am sure that work can be started in this regard," he said.

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The risk of high-tech leaking to Russia through such exports is a real concern, Budanov noted. Ukraine itself has procured foreign weapons through such routes many times.

What Ukraine can actually sell

Budanov named several categories where production exceeds front-line need:

• Sea drones — "we definitely produce more of them than we use," he said.
• Older FPV drones — saturation of Russian electronic warfare has rendered them unable to take off at the front. "They simply don't fly anymore," Budanov said. Bomber drones fall in the same category.
• Long-range UAVs from 2022 and 2023 — once Ukraine's flagship deep-strike capability, now too short-ranged to reach Russian targets. "They simply won't reach anywhere," Budanov said. For Asia and Africa, he added, such drones "are still suitable."
• Armored vehicles — combat vehicles with two-axle steering for off-road performance. Ukraine produces these "quite a lot," Budanov said, with the volumes "significantly larger than what we can afford" for ourselves.

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A narrowing export window

The bigger picture is that Ukraine's exports were largely suspended after 2022 and were only recently unblocked. Bureaucratic friction, intellectual property concerns, and the threat of sabotage have left €150 billion in potential European partnerships stuck in limbo awaiting approval. UK Armed Forces Minister Al Carns warned earlier this month that Ukraine is running out of time to export, with global rivals catching up.

Kyiv has been working to widen the channel. The Defense City legal regime, launched in January, cuts the time for export license reviews from 90 to 15 days for participating companies. Ukrainian firms are also moving production abroad.

11 countries have signaled interest in Ukrainian air-defense drone tech, with three Gulf states already signed up to 10-year deals. Budanov also said Ukrainian drone makers need to focus next on artificial intelligence and a domestic command-and-control architecture.

One of Ukraine's most unusual and most efficient defenses against Russian Shahed attack drones—an aging Antonov An-28 light transport plane armed with side-firing gun—is about to become a lot more capable with the addition of air-to-air interceptor drones.

The An-28 crew has been testing at least two different types of interceptor: the SkyFall P1-Sun and the Wild Hornet Sting. Both drones launch from a simple rack attached to the starboard wing of the twin-engine An-28. After launch, operators aboard the transport steer the interceptors toward nearby Shaheds.

The aim: to slam into the Russian drones with a small explosive payload.

Video of the tests appeared online on Thursday. One observer, Timur Fatkullin, claimed the An-28 has already used the P1-Sun in combat. "You could call it a cheap air-to-air missile," Fatkullin explained.

The 1980s-vintage An-28 isn't normally associated with an air defense role. But late last year, some enterprising Ukrainian volunteers armed one of the transports with a 7.62-mm minigun firing from the transport's open side hatch.

Stable and cheap to operate, the An-28 is an excellent gunnery platform. In the roughly six months since the armed An-28 first appeared in the sky over Ukraine, its crew has shot down more than 220 Shaheds, Fatkullin claimed.

Four problems, one airplane

The tandem solves four problems that neither ground-launched drone interceptors nor an An-28 with a gunner could solve alone.

First, a minigun is effective only as far as the gunner can aim and see. Interceptors such as the P1-Sun and Sting can cruise for tens of kilometers. Operators aboard the An-28, connected to their drones via radio, see what the drones see through forward-looking cameras.

Launching from altitude also solves a battery and speed problem. Ground-launched interceptors burn significant power climbing to cruise speed. An air-launched drone inherits starts the chase already at altitude, already moving at roughly 300 km/hr, and with its battery untouched.

Normally cruising slower than 200 km/hr, the interceptors can accelerate to around twice that speed in order to overtake and strike Shaheds that hum along at 185 km/hr for the Shahed-136s at 185 km/hr and catch jet-powered Geran variants at their 300–350 km/hr cruise. 

Weather is the third factor. Ground-launched drones are exposed to cloud cover that can blind their operators; an An-28 can climb above it. "The An-28 will allow drones to operate in zero visibility," Fatkullin wrote.

The fourth is radio range. Line-of-sight radio scales with altitude. An operator a few thousand feet up can guide interceptors much farther than a ground team can.

Hundreds of Shaheds

Interceptor drones costing around $3,000 apiece aren't the cheapest way to down $50,000 Shaheds—that honorific belongs to ground-based mobile gun vehicles such as the German-made Gepard—but they're still much more cost-effective than the best Western-made surface-to-air missiles, which can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars apiece.

The cost curve is now driving scale. Wild Hornets produces more than 10,000 Sting interceptors per month. Ukraine's military took delivery of roughly 40,000 interceptor drones in January 2026 alone, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine could scale that to 2,000 a day with sufficient funding. SkyFall's P1-Sun has destroyed more than 3,000 Shahed-type drones since the start of 2026, according to Hanna Hvozdiar, an adviser to Fedorov.

The Russians routinely launch hundreds of Shaheds at a time at Ukrainian cities and power plants, usually at a rate of once or twice a week. Normally just 10% of the 200-kg drones get through Ukrainian defenses, but that 10% is enough to inflict widespread damage.

The Russians kept scaling the Shahed attacks. Several hundred were launched a month while supplies came from Iran. But domestic production starting at the Alabuga factory, a second factory at Kupol, and the manufacturing of Gerbera decoys have ramped up attack numbers to thousands monthly. Ukrainian air defenses caught 99% of the drones by late 2024—but have struggled to keep up as monthly launches climbed past 6,000.

The imperative, for Ukrainian air defenders, has been to scale up defenses against the Shaheds without spending so much money that the defenses ultimately become unaffordable. Inexpensive interceptor drones, which Ukrainian factories churn out by the thousands every month, have helped the defenders balance capability versus cost.

And their numbers are rising. Deborah Fairlamb of Green Flag Ventures puts the broader pattern this way: one in three Russian aerial targets is now brought down by an interceptor drone rather than a missile.

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Ukrainian forces deploy an array of aircraft for anti-Shahed duty, including old training planes and at least one modified cropduster. There's a good chance many of them could get racks for interceptor drones. "This isn’t a one-off—there are already several projects where Sting is deployed from different platforms, both maritime and airborne," Wild Hornets stated.

The maritime version was demonstrated on 19 April, when Ukraine's 412th Nemesis Brigade launched a Sting from an unmanned surface vessel and intercepted a Russian Shahed over the Black Sea—a world first for naval-launched drone interception.

The Ukrainians are also getting better at striking Shahed-type drones at a longer range. On 4 April, a pilot from Ukraine's Bulava unit downed two Shaheds with a single Sting interceptor from 500 kilometers away, using Wild Hornets' HORNET VISION Ctrl remote-control system. By 23 April, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported that pilots were guiding interceptors from up to 2,000 kilometers away—including from outside the country entirely.

Russia is adapting too. Jet-propelled Shahed variants now cruise at 300–350 km/hr and can burst to 500–600 km/hr — still faster than any interceptor Ukraine currently fields. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called the jet variants the most urgent unsolved problem; Brave1 is channeling grants toward interceptors capable of exceeding 450 km/hr.

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Modern problems require modern solutions. If shooting down cheap Russian Shaheds with air-to-air missiles from jets is not cost-effective, why not replace MiGs and F-16s with An-28 turboprop transport planes and missiles with interceptor drones?

Ukrainian interceptor producer SkyFall posted an Instagram video showing a rare glimpse of how this works. A civilian-designed An-28 plane was modified with three hardpoints on each wing, which could fit SkyFall's cheekily-named P1-SUN interceptor. The crews also tested the American Merops interceptor drones from this platform.

Shaheds are relatively slow-moving targets, letting the plane crews spot them from the sky, then launch the drones, which onboard pilots use to intercept the Russian terror weapons. 

“Visual on target, request permission to engage,” a Ukrainian crew member says in the video. A few moments later, permission is granted. The interceptor detaches from the wing and speeds off towards the Russian attack drone. 

"I'm on his tail. Coming up on target. Come on, work, you beauty,” the interceptor pilot reports, as the characteristic triangular shape of the Shahed looms in the camera view. The P1-SUN sidles up behind it before both it and the target burst into a midair fireball. 

“Yes! Detonation! Ha ha!” 

The celebration doesn’t last longer than a second. There are other Shaheds around them to destroy. The crews get to work. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Timur Fatkullin (@aero.tim)

Cheap and effective 

Ukraine officially started using light aircraft to fight Shaheds in 2025. These are often converted civilian planes that are much cheaper to operate than dedicated fighter jets, which are often employed to bring down Russian cruise missiles, among many other combat assignments. 

The An-28 is a short-range airliner, whose maiden flight was in 1969. Pressed into Ukrainian military service, the venerable plane has been downing Shaheds with machine guns and other weapons. In February, French journalists from TF1 Info reported that some of the crews are civilian volunteers.

The combination of this plane with Ukraine’s rapidly expanding interceptor use was, perhaps, a no-brainer.

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"The drone interceptor doesn't have to waste energy to get off the ground, and from up there, you can see all the Shaheds," said Kostyantyn Kryvolap, a former aviation test engineer at the Antonov Design Bureau, which created the An-28. 

Ukraine’s shootdown rate of Russian air attacks has been climbing consistently since December, even as Russia sends unprecedented numbers of drones and missiles, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense.

The MoD posted an interception success rate of 89.9% for March, compared to 85.6% in February, 82.5% in January, and 80.2% in December. That is a 9.7 percentage point increase in three months. Kyiv’s goal is to destroy at least 95% of all incoming weapons.

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A post shared by Timur Fatkullin (@aero.tim)

Ukraine is surging more explosive drones into Russia's vulnerable logistical zone, aiming to weaken Russian regiments before the regiments can attack.

At least two Ukrainian units, the 12th Azov Brigade and the 20th Unmanned Systems Brigade, are deploying the new SETH mid-range drone for these raids in the logistical zone, which stretches from around 10 km to around 200 km behind the disputed gray zone where most of the direct ground combat takes place.

Recent video montages from the two Ukrainian units depict SETH strikes on Russian trucks, vans and motorcycles. "We cut off the enemy's logistics, we destroy them before they even reach the front line," the 20th Unmanned Systems Brigade stated.

mini-shahed strikes in the russian rear around Lysychansk-Siverskodonetskhttps://t.co/68zrIXuMLc pic.twitter.com/NTl8h2gHI5

— imi (m) (@moklasen) April 19, 2026

The SETH is a "pusher" design with a rear-mounted propeller and 1.5-meter wingspan. It hauls a 3-kg warhead as far as 40 km under satellite navigation. The drone spots targets such as trucks or trains using an AI-assisted camera. A remote operator approves the target before the drone barrels in.

A single SETH reportedly cost several hundred thousand dollars as recently as a year ago, potentially making it much more expensive than the other Ukrainian attack drones in its class. The Fire Point FP-2, which Ukrainian drone forces have used to hit Russian air bases in Crimea, reportedly costs around $50,000 per unit. The Swift Beat Hornet, built by a US company owned by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is supplied to Ukraine at cost price under a 2025 memorandum.

Drones tend to come down in cost as the production rate increases, however. And Ukrainian production of mid- and long-range drones is increasing a lot, to a new high of 7,000 copies in March 2026. Robert Brovdi, call sign "Magyar," the commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, recently announced four more USF brigades would re-equip with mid- and long-range drones.

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Contents

• Donetsk was Russia’s safe rear. Now AI drones hunt its supply trucks.
  1. Fast drone expansion
     • Ukraine tips drone war in its favor
     • Russian air defenses are collapsing. Now Ukrainian warplanes can hit harder.

Donetsk was Russia’s safe rear. Now AI drones hunt its supply trucks.

Fast drone expansion

The fast expansion of Ukraine's mid-range strike campaign represents a profound reversal. Just a few months ago, Ryan O'Leary, an American who once led a volunteer company fighting for Ukraine, worried that Ukrainian leaders were effectively handing Russia the drone advantage in the logistical zone—by focusing too much on the shortest- and longest-range drones while neglecting the mid-range ones.

Short-range first-person-view drones, patrolling the gray zone, can inflict heavy casualties on Russian infantry. But heavy infantry losses may not mean much to the Kremlin, which continues to recruit enough fresh troops to replace combat losses.

"Ukrainian drones are still optimized for destroying infantry, not for changing sectors," O'Leary wrote in a since-deleted post. "This creates cool videos, but delivers weak strategic effect."

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Ukraine tips drone war in its favor

"The drone war is not about the number of killed today," O'Leary added. "It is about controlling the space tomorrow. Ownership of the depth means control of movement, logistics, [surveillance], communication and decisions in the sector, not just in the trench."

Ukrainian commanders clearly shared O'Leary's concern. Efforts were already underway to pivot drone units to mid-range strikes.

By this spring, these efforts were explosively evident as more FP-2s, Hornets and SETHs surged into the logistical zone—and more Russian trucks, trains, headquarters and air defenses went up in flames. A mid-March Institute for the Study of War assessment found monthly Ukrainian mid-range strikes had quadrupled since November 2025.

The mid-range strikes on logistical targets are only as effective as Russia's air defenses are ineffective. A mid-range drone might spend several minutes in the air at an altitude that could make it an easy target for an intact air defense network.

But Russia's air defense is not intact. Relentless Ukrainian drone strikes on radars, surface-to-air missile launchers and mobile guns—at least 492 of them between June 2025 and early March—are "facilitating strikes on more critical targets deep within Russian territory," Tochnyi.info explained in a recent report.

The Ukrainian strikes on Russian air defenses continue in parallel with the expansion of the mid-range strikes on logistical targets. Just how much damage FP-2s, Hornets and SETHs can inflict on Russian logistics may depend on how many more Russian air defenses the Ukrainians can knock out.

The impact on Russia's spring offensive, which is just starting in some sectors, may be hard to measure. But if the offensive falters without the Russians capturing much new ground, it may be thanks to the mid-range drone strikes that sapped the Russians' combat power before they could bring that combat power to bear in the gray zone.

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Russian air defenses are collapsing. Now Ukrainian warplanes can hit harder.

mini-shahed strikes in the russian rear around Lysychansk-Siverskodonetskhttps://t.co/68zrIXuMLc pic.twitter.com/NTl8h2gHI5

— imi (m) (@moklasen) April 19, 2026

Dialing up the pressure on Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian 225th Assault Regiment is flying tiny explosive drones into buildings in search of Russian armored vehicles.

The goal: to knock out the vehicles before the Russians can deploy them for a fresh push toward Zaporizhzhia city, 75 km to the west of the disputed gray zone threading south from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast through Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

The vehicles the Ukrainian drones operators are finding and destroying in their indoor shelters are some of the oldest and weirdest in Russia's 50-month wider war on Ukraine. Blasting awkwardly up-armored T-55 tanks from the 1950s, the Ukrainians are discovering just how poorly equipped some of the Russian regiments and brigades in the southeast actually are.

That the Russian 5th and 36th Combined Arms Armies in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts ride in geriatric T-55s among other aged vehicles doesn't mean the CAAs—part of the Eastern Group of Forces—can't advance toward Zaporizhzhia. It does mean they may struggle. Especially given the increasing density of Ukrainian drones and other defenses in the area.

A recent montage of first-person-view drone strikes, circulated by the 225th Assault Regiment, depicts regimental FPV pilots deftly maneuvering through narrow gaps between the walls and roofs of sheds, garages and warehouses somewhere in the regiment's sector, which stretches between the Ukrainian base in Verkhnia Tersa and the Russian base in Zelene, 8 km to the east. The logistical hub of Huliaipole, captured by the Russians back in December, lies a few kilometers to the south.

Bad armor

In the montage, the drone operators find and strike at least three T-55s with add-on anti-drone armor. Not good add-on anti-drone armor, the likes of which you can see on the heavily up-armored T-72 "giga turtle" tanks belonging to the Russian 4th Motor Rifle Brigade, which fights around the Ukrainian stronghold of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

Where the T-72 giga turtles boast layers of blast-absorbing sheet metal buttressed by drone-blocking spines, at least one of the 35-ton, four-person T-55s the 225th Assault Regiment blew up sported a layer of discarded ammunition canisters that almost certainly offer very little protection from an FPV drone. Especially one with a shaped-charge warhead that can punch right through the outermost layer of armor on most vehicles.

Lackluster equipment isn't the only thing holding back the 5th and 36th CAAs in southeastern Ukraine. In early February, Elon Musk's Starlink bricked thousands of stolen or smuggled satellite communications terminals that Russian forces relied on for front-line command and control. Ukrainian forces in the southeast took advantage of the ensuing chaos, and counterattacked along a 30-km front between Huliaipole in the south and Ternove in the north.

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The Russians fell back. In a heady two months, Ukrainian troops liberated a couple of hundred square kilometers of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. As they scrambled to restore their communications, the Russians also rushed a clutch of marine brigades and other reinforcements to the area.

Today "the Huliaipole direction remains one of the most challenging for the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Ukrainian drone operator and analyst Kriegsforscher reported. "The Russians have deployed three naval infantry divisions (brigade strength) to this area, significantly enhancing the offensive capabilities of the East[ern] Group of Forces. The situation will likely deteriorate in the future, including an increase in assaults with armor."

The 225th Assault Regiment and adjacent Ukrainian units aren't just sitting around waiting for the coming Russian offensive. They're hunting down that Russian armor before it can roll into action. Armor that includes some very old, weirdly up-armored T-55s.

Ukrainian company Tencore and French company Shark Robotics will build Unmanned Ground Vehicles together, European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos announced at the Ukraine Business Summit on 22 April.

Tencore confirmed the joint venture, created under the aegis of the Build with Ukraine initiative, which aims to boost Ukraine's defense industry by creating partnerships and joint production lines abroad.

“In Ukraine, we create solutions under pressure and in real conditions. Together with Shark Robotics, we combine combat robotics and robotics for civil protection,” CEO Maksim Vasylchenko posted on social media. “It is this complementarity that makes our partnership strong.”

The role of UGVs in the full-scale invasion has soared recently, with production climbing by 488% in 2025, the Kyiv School of Economics estimated. 

In Ukraine, this segment of the industry is still quite young and has yet to reach its full potential, worth just $252 million in 2025. Still, the UGV market is “highly diversified” by manufacturer, with room for producers to enter if they have good products, according to KSE.

The innovation on display appears to be attracting increasing attention from Europeans. Kos called Ukraine "central to European security and economic resilience," adding that Ukrainians are building an "Arsenal of Democracy."

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Tencore is known for its TerMIT system, a highly modular ground robot that’s serving with multiple Ukrainian brigades on the front lines. With a carrying capacity of 300 kilograms, it can be turned into a logistics vehicle to resupply or evacuate the wounded, it can lay mines, or mount weapons to attack enemy forces.

Shark Robotics builds several lines of firefighting robots, a logistics and transport robot, a demining robot, and remote-controlled spike strips for civil security. 

This is not Tencore’s first European joint venture this year. In February, the Ukrainian company signed an agreement with Germany’s autonomous truck producer FERNRIDE to manufacture TerMIT UGVs.

Also at the Ukraine Business Summit, Danish satellite producer GomSpace signed a deal with Ukrainian satellite producer Stetman.