The Ukrainian navy's tiny fleet of donated Westland Sea King helicopters appears to have a new mission: hunting Russian Geran drones.

Aviation reporter H.I. Sutton was the first to note the new mission, when he spotted a specially equipped Sea King on the ground at the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom this week.

The 1970s-vintage Sea King had new equipment: an under-fuselage railing for small interceptor drones. Ukrainian forces use the inexpensive interceptors to chase down and take down Russia's Geran one-way attack drones. Some of the remote-controlled interceptors feature A.I.-assisted targeting and pack tiny explosive charges. Others are strictly manually controlled and knock down their targets through the sheer force of impact.

Regardless of the details of their designs, interceptors costing just a few thousand dollars apiece have helped Ukrainian air defenders blunt the impact of the thousands of Gerans, drones modeled after Iranian-made Shaheds, that Russia launches at Ukrainian cities every month. Air defenders typically take out around 90% of incoming Gerans.

But interceptor drones come with limitations. They're powered by batteries that exhaust themselves after just a few minutes of flight. And they are prone to being blinded by bad weather and low clouds. To prolong the interceptors' flights and get them above the rain and clouds, Ukrainian forces have begun using manned aircraft to loft the interceptors into the air before launching them.

The Sea King, it seems, is Ukraine's latest interceptor drone carrier. While the helicopter Sutton spotted at Farnborough was unmarked, it's likely one of six Sea Kings Germany has donated to the Ukrainian war effort. The United Kingdom previously donated three surplus Sea Kings to Ukraine. The Ukrainian navy's sole helicopter unit, the 10th Naval Aviation Brigade, reportedly operates the Ukrainian Sea Kings.

Before now, it seems the Ukrainian Sea Kings strictly flew coastal search and rescue flights in support of Ukrainian ground and naval forces. But there's an obvious need for more air defenses over the Ukrainian coast. Sea Kings hauling interceptor drones under their bellies, and the drones' operators in their cabins, could be just the thing.

Geran killer

The threat: A.I.-assisted Geran drones. Shortly after Ukrainian drone forces began targeting the tankers, dry cargo ships and auxiliaries belonging to the unregistered "shadow fleet," Russian forces retaliated, launching cruise missiles and Gerans at grain ships and infrastructure in Odesa and other ports in southern Ukraine. Over weeks of near-daily port strikes, Russian missiles and drones have repeatedly hit grain carriers and terminals; the deadliest, a cruise-missile strike on the bulk carrier Golden Leo on 19 July, killed 10 of its crew.

An interceptor drone flying around 350 km/h is too slow to hit a cruise missile flying 900 km/h, but all but the fastest jet-powered Gerans are within the targeting envelope of all but the slowest interceptor drones. The problem, of course, is battery life and weather. To stand the greatest chance of hitting the most Gerans, the interceptors should launch from around a thousand meters in the air.

The Sea King is an old helicopter. But it's also reliable, cheap to operate and capacious. A solid platform for drone launches.

And it's part of a widening trend. This spring, Ukrainian forces armed an Antonov An-28 light turboprop transport with interceptor drones, complementing the An-28's existing side-firing gun and giving the lumbering transport great reach during its drone hunts.

As a drone platform, the An-28 apparently works. Well enough, in fact, that Russian forces have copied the concept. A recent video depicts two old Russian warplanes getting the fittings for aerial interceptor drone launch: a Yakovlev Yak-52 turboprop trainer and an Antonov An-2 piston-powered transport.

Like the Ukrainians do, the Russians hang drones under the planes' wings and seat the drones' operators inside the cabin or cockpit. All aerial drone platforms require add-on radios and antennae to connect the seated operators to their interceptors so that the operators can see what the drones see, and steer them to a hit.

If the Sea Kings also work well as drone platforms (and there's no reason they shouldn't), the Ukrainians may well extend the concept to other airframes. Any helicopter, transport or trainer with a reasonable payload and some space in the cabin or cockpit is eligible.

The Sea King is the latest Ukrainian drone hunter, but it's probably not the last.

Overeager to break through Ukrainian defenses and march on the city of Kramatorsk from the south, the Russian Center Group of Forces got desperate and sloppy this week. They paid for their desperation and sloppiness in lives and metal. The tanks were carrying a brand-new anti-drone shield, and they had left the welded scrap metal at home.

That combination is the news. For more than a year, Russian commanders have kept their armor off the roads because Ukrainian drones kill tanks faster than factories can rebuild them. The Arena-M active protection system is the fix that was supposed to let the tanks come back—reliable enough, the Kremlin's own press said 10 days ago, to make the improvised cages unnecessary. This week it went out on a road in Donetsk Oblast without them.

On and around 23 July, the Russians rolled tanks along the road through the village of Pankivka, roughly 36 km southwest of Kramatorsk and its twin free city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian drones spotted the tanks coming, and attacked.

When the smoke and dust cleared, the Russians had lost at least 9 tanks. Ukrainian tank kills were already running hot: the general staff in Kyiv claimed Ukrainian forces took out 28 Russian tanks across the 1,200-km gray zone in the two days before, 21–22 July. "It was a good day," wrote Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier with the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces' 413th Regiment.

The mechanized assault was unusual for its rarity. For more than a year now, the Russian army of occupation in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles, and instead attacked on foot or on motorcycles or other light vehicles. The pause in mechanized assaults has bought time for the Kremlin to ramp up vehicle production and bring battered regiments and brigades back to up to their full allotment of tanks and other armored vehicles.

But those vehicles aren't necessarily being used in Ukraine. Ukrainian tiny explosive drones are everywhere all the time, and Russian forces have few ways of reliably defeating them. Russian commanders correctly concluded that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of slipping past Ukraine's undermanned defenses than big, easy-to-detect tanks do.

Infantry infiltrations work. They're how Russian assault groups have ground their way into the city of Kostiantynivka, 24 km southeast of Kramatorsk. Moscow claimed the city on 3 July. Ukraine's general staff says it still holds it. And infiltration is how the Russians are gradually creeping around the city of Lyman, 21 km northeast of Sloviansk. The infiltrations are slowly closing a vice around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last free big cities in Donetsk Oblast.

Costly attacks

But the infantry action is costly. The Kremlin recruits around 30,000 fresh troops every month but, if the Ukrainian general staff's tallies of killed and wounded are accurate, loses roughly that many troops every month. Ukraine is desperately short of infantry. Russia isn't nearly as desperate, but that doesn't mean it's got infantry to spare.

Last month, analyst Jompy predicted that if infantry casualties spiked or recruitment slipped, Russian commanders "could also be forced to go back to mechanized warfare." That may be why the Center Group of Forces pivoted back to tank-led assaults in their south-to-north push toward Kramatorsk.

The shield that replaced the scrap metal

Without so-called "active defenses" that can shoot down incoming drones, "it is currently very easy to throw a tank battalion into [an] assault and lose it all without achieving anything," analyst Jakub Janovsky explained. The Arena-M is Russia's answer. It uses a Doppler radar to spot incoming rockets, missiles, and drones, and 12 launchers ringed around the turret fire tiny charges meant to shred the threat a few meters out.

Twelve is the whole magazine. And the system does not run itself: the commander switches it on when reconnaissance or a drone detector warns him, the Russian state newspaper Izvestia reported on 13 July, in a dispatch from a training range where crews of the Center grouping's 90th Tank Division were learning the new machines.

That dispatch is worth reading for what the reporter noticed was missing. No turtle armor. No tsar-mangal. No dreads, no cages, no hedgehogs—none of the welded scrap the Russian army has bolted onto its armor for two years. A company commander told Izvestia the system had shown high effectiveness against drones on the range, and that the tanks would reach the line of contact within days. Russian industry has been calling the Arena-M the first system in the world able to protect armor from FPV drones and loitering munitions. Israel's Rafael announced drone-interception upgrades to its Trophy system in January 2025.

Ten days later the tanks were on the road, without the cages, and Ukrainian drones found them. Footage published by Ukraine's border guards and by the National Guard's Omega unit shows a T-72B3A taking a hit to the rear, then two more drones finishing it. A second tank—this one wearing a conventional mangal cage—was leading it and was immobilized too. Both Russian answers to the drone problem were on that road. Neither one came off it.

What the shield actually did is contested, and the argument is worth following. One Russian armor specialist watching the video saw no reaction at all—countermeasures still sitting in their launchers, no attempt to engage. Observer Matt Drew, watching the same footage, read it the other way: a puff of smoke off the turret in the opening seconds, an explosion to the side, and several drone feeds that cut out before reaching the tank—which is what an interception looks like from the drone's camera. Only after the tanks were disabled and abandoned could the drones close in and linger, and it took bomber drones to finish the hulks. "Probably not the success the Russians were hoping for," Drew wrote, "but it definitely worked for a while."

A while is the problem. Twelve charges is a finite number and Ukrainian drone crews do not attack in twelves. A shield that intercepts the first drones and runs dry against the tenth turns a tank into a slower target, not a surviving one. And the latest push toward Kramatorsk failed.

That doesn't mean Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are safe. Hurling tens of thousands of troops and, occasionally, a few armored vehicles against Ukrainian defenses, the Russian Center Group of Forces is making very, very slow progress toward the twin cities from both the south and the north.

But every assault the Ukrainians defeat delays the day when Kramatorsk and Sloviansk come under direct siege and infiltration. The cities are most vulnerable from the north around Lyman, mapper Clément Molin noted. "The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction."

At the current rate of advance, the Russians may be able to slip their first infiltrators into Sloviansk from the north some time next year, Molin concluded.

Sometime late last year, some enterprising Ukrainian volunteers mounted a 7.62-millimeter minigun to the port fuselage hatch of an Antonov An-28 turboprop transport—and went hunting for Russian Shahed attack drones.

Months later, in April, the same crew added much heavier armament to their Shahed-killing gunship—in the form of inexpensive interceptor drones hanging from the old transport's wings. Interceptor drones normally launch from the ground before slamming into their Russian targets. But low clouds can blind them. Launching from an airborne An-28 means the interceptors can get above the clouds—and continue their hunt in all but the worst weather.

It's such a good idea that Russian forces have copied it. A new video that circulated online depicts Russian aircrew arming an Antonov An-2 biplane and a Yakovlev Yak-52 turboprop training plane with underwing interceptor drones. The Ukrainians also use Yak-52s for air defense against drones, albeit with a gun-armed shooter in the back seat.

The An-2 was designed in the 1940s. It cruises at barely 250 km/hr. The 1970s-vintage Yak-52 is slightly faster at 285 km/hr. But both types are stable and maneuverable and cheap to operate. They may not be able to take down the highest and fastest aerial targets, but they don't have to. They're for the lower, slower targets.

In other words, the An-2s and Yak-52s complement surface-to-air missiles and missile-armed fighters. They don't replace them. "This is the low-cost way if providing area air defense," wrote Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the California think tank RAND.

The interceptor drones hanging under the An-2 and Yak-52's wings function as inexpensive air-to-air missiles, helping the old planes hit Ukrainian drones from potentially 10 km away or farther. The concept is simple. The biplane or trainer takes off, maneuvers between incoming Ukrainian drones and their target and launches its underwing interceptors, most likely one at a time.

A crew member in the cabin of the An-2 or the back seat of the Yak-52 sees what the interceptor sees on a handheld console, and steers the interceptor to a collision with a Ukrainian drone. Some interceptors drones have a small explosive payload, but they don't normally need it: the impact alone should take down a drone.

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Enviable concept

It's obvious why the Russians copied the Ukrainian gunship concept. Ukrainian drones struck no fewer than 1,000 Russian air defense systems and related facilities just between June and March, according to Ukrainian analysis group Tochnyii. The resulting gaps in Russian air defenses helped more Ukrainian drones reach strategic targets such as munitions factories and oil refineries.

Now the Ukrainians are launching more than 11,000 one-way attack drones a month at targets in occupied Ukraine and Russia itself, steadily bleeding the Russian war effort through thousands of pinpricks. Russia needs more air defenses, fast. The cheaper the better as it scrambles to replace destroyed missile batteries and plug gaps in the overall air defense network.

Old turboprop planes costing just a few thousand dollars and hour to fly, and carrying interceptor drones also costing just a few thousand dollars, are just the thing. An-2s and Yak-52s could fly over Moscow or other cities in western Russia, swatting down incoming Ukrainian drones and freeing up higher-end air defenses to focus on harder targets such as Ukraine's Fire Point FP-5 cruise missiles.

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Where a propeller-driven attack drone cruising at just 200 km/hr is vulnerable to an interceptor drone speeding along at 350 km/hr or faster, an FP-5 jetting along at 950 km/hr is too fast to intercept with a drone. It's not that the Russians can't shoot down an FP-5—they can and do—but it's apparent they usually do so with missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece or more.

Those missiles are in increasingly short supply in Russia, just as they are in Ukraine. The Russians are keen to save them for the hardest targets. And that means taking down the easiest targets with something like an old transport plane lugging $2,000 interceptor drones.

The Russians' improvised gunships aren't foolproof, of course. Russian forces adapted to Ukrainian forces' gunships by acquiring more jet-propelled Shaheds that can outrun the gunships. The Ukrainians could adapt in the same way: adding more jet drones to their attack mix in order to thwart the Russian gunships.

A Crimean Tatar human rights movement has ended a decade of documenting political persecution in Russian-occupied Crimea, Crimean Solidarity said in its final statement. The status Russia imposed on it puts anyone connected to it at risk, from the lawyers named on the same list to people who simply pass its reports on. Its website and social media pages have stopped updating, and the movement plans to appeal.

Why it stopped

Russia's Justice Ministry entered Crimean Solidarity in its register of so-called "foreign agents" on 26 June 2026. That status changes neither the movement's values nor its goals, the activists said, but leaves no possibility of working in the earlier format. Every text they publish must now carry an 18+ marking and a block-capital disclaimer, which in occupied territory and Russia must sit above the text. That disclaimer opens administrative and then criminal cases against designated people and against whoever shares what they publish, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group noted. With the label in place, the rights group said, no one who has had dealings with the movement is safe from prosecution.

"We have carefully studied the legislation and taken a joint decision to terminate the activities of our civic movement," the activists wrote on 21 July.

Eleven names, sentences up to 20 years

The ministry listed eleven Crimean Tatar lawyers, journalists, rights defenders, and activists alongside the movement. Among them are Server Mustafaiev, already a political prisoner, and journalist Lutfiye Zudiieva, designated separately in May 2025. Three well-known defense lawyers are on the list as well. Many of the movement's people are serving terms of up to 20 years, and Russian officers detained more than 20 of its men in a single raid on 27 March 2019.

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What the peninsula loses

For 10 years the movement supported families of the detained, arranged legal defense and put out material that often never reached the official agenda. Many of the people doing that work were themselves fined, held under administrative arrest or prosecuted.

"History shows that civic solidarity is not defined by state registers," the statement said.

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Tamila Tasheva, a Ukrainian lawmaker and former permanent representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, called the decision an act of pressure meant to isolate and discredit rights defenders. Hundreds of families of political prisoners and thousands of residents of occupied Crimea may now be left without legal support, she wrote on Facebook.

A decade under pressure

Crimean Solidarity took shape in 2016, after Russian forces stormed Crimean Tatar homes and jailed the human rights defender Emir-Usein Kuku along with three others. By 2017 the Russian FSB was fairly openly going after its civic journalists and activists. In August 2023, FSB officers searched Crimean Tatar homes and took several activists to the security service's office in Simferopol. Pressure on independent initiatives there has built up for years.

Crimean Tatars who stayed there could still become the backbone of resistance to the Russians when Crimea is liberated, Aider Rustemov, mufti of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, told ZN in an earlier interview.

Just days after landing robots on an enemy shore in the first all-robot amphibious assault, Ukrainian forces flew one into battle. This week, a Russian video circulated depicting a Ukrainian heavy bomber drone airlifting an explosives-laden unmanned ground vehicle into action.

What happened next is unclear. Did the exploding UGV successfully strike its target?

Regardless of the outcome, however, the unmanned air assault is notable. If Ukrainian forces can use an unmanned aerial vehicle to airlift one unmanned ground vehicle, they can do it a second time. And a third. And fourth. So on until these kinds of all-robot operations become routine.

And that's indeed the aim in Kyiv. To make robotic combat operations an everyday occurrence in order to help alleviate a deep and persistent manpower shortage. This spring, recently sacked Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov claimed Ukraine would acquire 25,000 UGVs in just the first six months of 2026.

That's twice as many UGVs as Kyiv bought in all of 2025. The rapid mass acquisition would allow more Ukrainian brigades to shift to robotic resupply missions, removing potentially thousands of precious human logisticians from dangerous roads.

But UGVs perform combat missions, too. Armed with guns, they help counterattack Russian infiltrators and also patrol roads inside the disputed gray zone. In November, one gun-armed UGV belonging to the Ukrainian 5th Assault Brigade, fighting north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, inadvertently advanced UGV tactics in an accidental encounter with an up-armored Russian MT-LB infantry transport.

The UGV, equipped with thermal night vision and armed with a remotely operated M2 .50-caliber machine gun, was reportedly on a combat trial—crawling around the battlefield at nighttime for testing purposes—when an MT-LB rolled toward it on the same road.

Connected via radio, the UGV operators opened fire, peppering the tracked MT-LB with rounds until the Russian vehicle passed by—and escaped in the opposite direction.

One-way drones

Other Ukrainian UGVs are meant to fight exactly once. They're suicide bombers, hauling payloads of explosives into Russian strongpoints and blowing themselves up. Back in January, the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade's NC-13 robotics unit piled a dozen TM-62 anti-tank mines, each with 7.5 kg of explosives, onto one of its UGVs and carefully steered the robot into a Russian bunker presumably somewhere south of the ruins of Kupiansk in eastern Ukraine's Kharkiv Oblast.

It made a very big boom. As seen in an official video, the NC-13 team broke into cheers when an escorting aerial drone registered the blast. The team had carefully assembled, painted, and deployed the robot apparently over a period of days before maneuvering it 19 km across rough terrain to deliver the explosive payload.

The recent robotic air assault addressed the mobility problem. A 19-km trip is a long trip for a remotely controlled vehicle that's susceptible to enemy radio jamming and prone to getting stuck in potholes. Airlifting a UGV underneath a heavy bomber drone gets the UGV into action faster and with less risk of a loss or accident en route.

A heavy bomber drone could just drop a bomb, of course. But a UGV can do something an aerial bomber can't do: drive straight through the open door of a Russian bunker regardless of how much protection the Russians pile atop the door.

The Ukrainians are finding more and more new ways to get their UGVs into action. On 13 July, the Ukrainian 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade sailed several unmanned surface vessels across the western Black Sea and landed gun-armed unmanned ground vehicles on the Kinburn Spit, at the westernmost edge of the Russian occupation zone in southern Ukraine.

The 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade released a video montage—shot by a USV, a UGV and an escorting UAV—depicting the UGV firing on a Russian installation with its suppressed .50-caliber machine gun.

It was an all-robot amphibious assault. "An impressive feat," RAND analyst Michael Bohnert wrote.

The later robotic airlift was no less impressive.

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Ukraine's drone force is walking a fine line as it escalates its attacks on Russia's unregistered commercial "shadow fleet" in the Sea of Azov and eastern Black Sea. The drone operators are trying to immobilize the ships without breaching their hulls and spilling fuel or crude oil into the water.

That fleet is a big piece of how Moscow keeps its war funded—the aging tankers move Russian oil around Western sanctions—which is why Ukraine's drones have spent the past two weeks hunting it across the Azov and Black seas at better than a dozen ships a day.

"The goal is not to pollute the sea with oil spills; therefore, there must be no hull breaches," wrote Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine's independent Unmanned Systems Forces.

Instead, Brovdi stressed, the objective is "irreversible paralysis of oil, fuel and cargo logistics operating around sanctions. Turn every self-propelled vessel into a drifting barge, blind and deaf."

To immobilize a ship without breaching its hull requires accuracy: the drone must strike the ship's superstructure or screws, and only its superstructure or screws. Hitting a ship, but hitting it along its biggest part—its hull—risks polluting the already fragile Black Sea ecosystem.

The Black Sea is home to many unique species. But the pollution and stress resulting from more than four years of naval warfare threatens to drive many of these species toward extinction. Scientists estimate tens of thousands of dolphins have died; others have fled to the Black Sea's southwestern edge in the hope of escaping the poison and noise.

Ukrainian commanders aim to throttle Russia's sea trade across the Sea of Azov and Black Sea and through the Bosporus Strait into the Mediterranean. But they hope to do it without further harming the ecosystem.

Balancing act

It's a difficult balancing act. Post-strike imagery from some of the 159 ships Ukrainian drones have struck, by Brovdi's count, since the countershipping campaign commenced on 6 July shows scorched or burning ships, but no oil slicks. Other imagery depicts oil in the water, however.

The clean hits point to skilled operators. Videos from the 12-day countershipping campaign depict remote-controlled Fire Point FP-1/2 drones maneuvering to strike the bulky sterns of dry-cargo ships and tankers, where crew and vital above-the-waterline systems are concentrated.

The targeting parameters have narrowed since the strikes commenced. "Initially, they fired at the crew in the wheelhouse—the vessel would be blinded, but the engine would still work, and the crews learned to steer from the wheelhouse using a compass and telephone," Russian political analyst Igor Dimitriev explained.

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"Then they started firing at the stern: after this, the vessel is left drifting or being towed, and the tugs are also knocked out. The crews usually survive. But a disabled stern is no less unusable, and it also takes up ship repair capacity, which is otherwise almost nonexistent."

There's a new complication in this fight for clean anti-ship strikes, however. Some recent videos of FP-1/2 strikes feature the telltale symbology of AI-assisted targeting. More and more Ukrainian deep-strike drones have on-board AI systems for automatically spotting pre-programmed target types—trucks, air defenses, ships, helicopters, whatever—and autonomously maneuvering for an accurate hit.

The main benefit of AI targeting is that it works even when Russian radio jamming scrambles a drone's connection to its remote human operator. The main downside is that AI is only as good as its training. And the AI targeting seems to be struggling when it comes to ships. A video of recent shipping strikes shows one AI guiding a drone to a strike on a tanker's hold, where the oil is.

The AI may be able to tell a ship from the surrounding water, but it may not be able to tell the best part of a ship to strike for a spill-free hit.

Yet. AI improves as its data set expands. More anti-ship strikes mean more data and better AI.

And, hopefully, more clean hits.

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Seven months after capturing the city of Siversk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces are inching toward their next objective on the hard road to the ultimate prize: Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk.

The Russians' advance around the city of Lyman, 20 km northeast of Siversk, is both bad news and good news for Ukraine. Yes, the Russians are closer to Lyman and thus closer to Sloviansk. But it's taken them far longer than anyone anticipated to close that gap. And time isn't necessarily on the Russians' side as Ukrainian drones strike deeper and harder.

Since marching through the ruins of Siversk in mid-December, Russian attacks have nudged the disputed gray zone halfway toward Lyman, 20 km to the west. "The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction," mapper Clément Molin noted. Having captured Siversk and, earlier, Soledar and Bakhmut, Russian commanders "have a very good accumulation possibility," Molin pointed out. That is, they have plenty of urban bases where they can hide troops and equipment. It helps that the Russians have also captured disused mine complexes that can function as secure, largely drone-proof bases. "It is therefore easier to have troops ready for assault at any moment," Molin explained.

The Russians' goal, Molin concluded, is to march through or around Lyman, consolidate control over the town of Mykolaivka and nearby Rai Oleksandrivka, and begin heavily bombarding Ukrainian supply lines no later than the end of the year. That could position the Russians to assault Sloviansk in 2027.

The attacks on Ukrainian supply lines around Lyman are already intensifying, forcing the Ukrainian garrison to rely on unmanned ground vehicles for much of its resupply. Recall that the Russian bombardment of supply lines into Kostiantynivka forced that city's garrison to switch to robotic resupply, too. The switch was a harbinger of the eventual Ukrainian retreat from Kostiantynivka in recent weeks.

But the Russians aren't the only ones attacking the enemy's supply lines. This spring, at the urging of sacked former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukrainian drone units intensified their strikes on Russian trucks, trains, and ships hauling supplies to front-line regiments and brigades.

Logistics squeeze

The Ukrainian counterlogistics "middle strikes" have been most successful in southern Ukraine, where Russian supply lines are longest, most exposed, and most fragile. But they're having an effect in eastern Ukraine, too.

Just not very quickly. Russian logistics in the east "are hit very hard," Molin observed, "but it's obviously not enough to slow the momentum." For now.

But there's a silver lining inside the storm clouds gathering over Lyman and Sloviansk. As recently as late last year, Russian commanders had planned to bypass Lyman from the north and south in order to form what mapper Vitaly called a "western claw"—one that could crush Lyman and then reach for Sloviansk as early as this year.

The stout Ukrainian defense of Lyman, coupled with targeted Ukrainian counterattacks north of the city, broke the claw. Now the Russians need to build a new one, and hope for a fresh opportunity to assault Sloviansk next year. Kramatorsk would be next.

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All that is to say, Ukrainian defenders in and around Lyman have bought time—time that Ukrainian drone units could use to escalate their counterlogistics campaign and weaken the grip of the new Russian claw forming around the city. Whether they can strike hard enough, and often enough, along the supply lines threading toward Siversk and the Lyman front to foil the Russians' 2027 plans is one of the most pressing questions of the war's 53rd month.

The drones can't stop the Russian advance on Lyman. But they can make it so slow, and so costly, that Sloviansk stays free into 2027 and beyond. On the evidence so far, that's the likeliest outcome.

Four months after Euromaidan Press first documented the drone siege of occupied Oleshky and neighboring communities, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War have independently confirmed the humanitarian crisis, major international outlets covered it, and the Pope has been informed. Yet interviews with residents, volunteers, and local officials indicate that conditions continue to deteriorate, with thousands of civilians trapped without food, medical care, or a safe way to leave.

International reports confirm the humanitarian catastrophe

Reports published by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and the Institute for the Study of War in late June and July 2026 point to a worsening humanitarian crisis in Russian-occupied Oleshky, where civilians face starvation as they remain trapped by drone attacks, landmines, and restrictions on movement.

On 25 June, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) called the situation in Oleshky and neighboring territories "desperate." Continuous first-person-view (FPV) drone attacks and extensive mine contamination have severely restricted the delivery of food, medical assistance and evacuations. Ukrainian authorities estimate that up to 6,000 civilians, including more than 180 children, remain in the occupied communities.

The mission documented at least 29 civilians killed and 54 injured in Oleshky and Hola Prystan in 2026 alone, most of them in attacks involving short-range drones.

"Frequent attacks by short-range drones and the presence of landmines are having devastating consequences for thousands of people in these communities," said Danielle Bell, Head of HRMMU. "People can't get out, food can't get in, and sick and injured are not getting the medical assistance they need."

HRMMU called for a local ceasefire to allow evacuations and the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Human Rights Watch reached similar conclusions. The organization documented severe shortages of food and medical care, the collapse of basic services, and constant danger from drones and landmines. Former residents said there was no organized evacuation route and that those leaving the occupied town had to pass through Russian military checkpoints before traveling through Russia and Belarus to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Men who want to escape face a further trap: leaving in practice requires Russian travel documents, and applying for them, HRW found, funnels men straight to a military enlistment office. Compelling civilians in occupied territory to serve in the occupying power's forces is a war crime, the organization noted.

Human Rights Watch could not determine responsibility for individual drone strikes or the emplacement of specific mines in the area. The organization noted that Oleshky sits on the front line and has been subjected to sustained attacks by Ukrainian forces as well, and that it found credible indications Ukrainian forces may have used drones and mines on roads around the town. It said civilians wishing to leave are entitled to safe passage under international humanitarian law.

According to HRW, Russia, as the occupying power, is responsible for ensuring access to food, medical care, and humanitarian assistance.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that Russia is effectively blockading occupied Oleshky while failing to meet its obligations under international humanitarian law as an occupying power. The report mentioned that "the Russian military command deployed a detachment of penal recruits to Oleshky in early July, resulting in widespread abuses against the civilian population, including sexual assaults committed against women and minors."

On 15 July, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) reported that conditions "remain especially dire in the Russian-occupied frontline areas of Kherson region."

As of May 2026, around 6,000 residents, including approximately 200 children, remained in and around Oleshky and Hola Prystan, where witnesses described towns transformed into a combat zone. ODIHR also received accounts that Russian forces prevented residents from leaving Oleshky and used civilians to shield military positions.

The crisis in Oleshky and the surrounding areas has received growing attention in international media. The Washington Post described Oleshky as a town being slowly strangled under occupation, citing accounts from recently evacuated residents, and called the situation "unbelievably awful." Le Monde published a detailed report on the suffering of the civilians. The Times' dispatch is called Four years of horror in Ukraine's 'forgotten Bucha.'

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

Houses damaged by drones and artillery, Oleshky. July 2026. Photos provided by Ksenia Arkhipova.

On 16 July, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha raised the humanitarian situation in Oleshky and Hola Prystan during a meeting in Kyiv with the Vatican representative, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, stressing the urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate thousands of civilians. The same day, at a Vatican meeting of Nobel laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk spoke about Russia's drone attacks on civilians in the Kherson region.

While the information blockade is broken, the siege continues.

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Reports from the ground

"Only one ambulance was able to leave Oleshky and come back since May 26," said Ksenia Arkhipova, the volunteer from Oleshky who helps to organize evacuation and speaks to the locals despite the problems with communication. "That's it. There is no food."

Arkhipova spoke to Euromaidan Press over the phone from her home in Ukrainian-controlled territory. According to her contacts in the occupied territories, the situation in the nearby villages has deteriorated dramatically. Civilians are reportedly killed while attempting to leave to buy food or bottled gas. Residents describe drones overhead that make leaving basements next to impossible.

These reports are confirmed by Oleshky Military Administration head Tetyana Hasanenko, also living in exile. She said that roads leading from villages farther from the Dnipro River, including Radensk, Chelburda, and Kostohryzove, have also become increasingly dangerous.

In Oleshky, the terror campaign is ongoing.

Three former residents speaking to their relatives have confirmed to Euromaidan Press that the newly arrived Russian military personnel are former convicts who loot and rob residents of the last food.

V., who recently escaped Oleshky and spoke to Euromaidan Press on the conditions of anonymity, said one man who lived alone was tortured to death in his basement; his neighbors found the body and managed to bury it. Others were beaten, and there are accounts of sexual violence, according to V.

The accounts were confirmed by Kherson's popular Telegram channel Kherson: Non Fake.

Posts appearing in the Oleshky community groups mentioned the robbery by former convicts. One post sought help for a dog "dying of hunger." The dog owner, who shared all the food with the pet, pleaded for evacuation.

"Now there is nothing left for people to eat," the post read.

According to Hasanenko, residents are on the brink of starvation. She described conditions in Oleshky as "hell on earth." She said the town's morgue had long been destroyed, around 100 bodies remained in the basement of the hospital for months because they could not be buried, and occupying authorities were preventing families from recovering the dead.

The reports point to the same conclusion: an urgent need for a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to evacuate safely and humanitarian aid to reach those who remain.

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The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before 8 July is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine's tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service's Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

"Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated 'detained' several violators," the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It's unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

It's possible the column was trying to reach the Donetsk Ring Road in order to turn west toward Toretske or east toward Kostiantynivka. Russian forces are attacking in both directions, aiming to break through Ukrainian defenses to open a path, any path, toward the twin free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, 22 km north of Kostiantynivka.

Left or right?

Whether the Russians planned on investing those vehicles in a direct assault in either direction is anyone's guess. It's possible the column was merely transporting infantry closer to the gray zone, sparing them a long foot march ahead of a dangerous foot assault.

But it's also possible that, yes, the Russians meant to send the trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles across the gray zone. Vehicular assaults are rare these days, but they still happen from time to time. They almost never succeed. There are just too many drones over and behind the gray zone.

Indeed, the vehicular kill zone is getting wider by the day as Ukraine deploys more and more drones for strikes on Russian supply lines at depths up to 200 km. The Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign that kicked off this spring has struck potentially thousands of Russian trucks as well as trains, bridges, and, more recently, cargo ships plying the Sea of Azov and Black Sea hauling critical war supplies.

The Russians are now adding anti-drone cages to some trucks and guarding the most important convoys and supply routes with gun-armed air defense teams. More convoys are taking back roads, hoping to escape the attention of the ever-present drones.

But these measures aren't working as more Ukrainian drones take flight, including $6,000 AI-assisted fixed-wing models and $500 first-person-view quadcopters with detachable wings for greater range. Scrutinizing official videos for evidence of drone strikes, mapper Clément Molin tallied 600 destroyed or damaged Russian cargo trucks in June and another 240 in just the first week of July.

Importantly, Molin only counted confirmed strikes. There are surely many others that don't leave behind clear, public video evidence.

The pace of strikes is increasing even as the Russians add anti-drone protections. There were 20 hits on Russian trucks every day in June, on average, and 34 hits every day in July. The strike near the Donetsk Ring Road occurred too late to be included in Molin's count. When he adds it, the daily average will be higher still.

All that is to say, more of occupied Ukraine is becoming steadily more hostile to Russian vehicles. Knowing that, why would the Russians line up 50 vehicles so close to the gray zone? On the evidence near Malynivka, they no longer have a good answer.

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Ukrainian drones are wreaking havoc on Russian ships sailing the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But the Russians are waging their own war on shipping, sortieing the latest Geran drones to strike grain ships in Ukrainian ports.

The Geran-4 Seeker drones pummeling Ukrainian ports combine jet propulsion, mesh radio control, and machine-vision targeting run off a Raspberry Pi—the same $50-class hobbyist computer that schoolchildren use to build robots. They're the best one-way attack drones in the Russian inventory, and cause for concern in Kyiv as the dueling Ukrainian and Russian countershipping campaigns escalate.

On or just before 12 July, Geran-4s penetrated Ukrainian air defenses and targeted ships in the port of Chornomorsk, 20 km south of the larger port in Odesa in southern Ukraine.

Chornomorsk is one of three ports carrying the bulk of Ukraine's grain to market. Egypt, Algeria and Indonesia bought 62% of Ukraine's wheat last season—Egypt alone took more than a quarter of it. The ship the Geran-4s went for was carrying somebody's bread.

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This grain is vital to the Ukrainian economy and to the populations of food-poor countries. It's also a top target in Russia's ongoing terror campaign. The Geran-4s that reached Chornomorsk in recent days struck at least two grain ships with warheads weighing as much as 90 kg.

It's unclear how much damage the Geran-4s inflicted. What is clear is the difference in scale between the two campaigns. Since 6 July, Ukrainian one-way attack drones have struck 105 vessels belonging to Russia's unregistered "shadow fleet" on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

The shadow fleet hauls critical war supplies including fuel to Russian forces in occupied southern Ukraine, and also carries commercial goods—again including fuel—out of the Black Sea. Ukraine launched its countershipping campaign eight days ago, and has been striking the fleet at a rate of better than a dozen vessels a day since.

Different campaigns

The difference in scale is partially attributable to the Ukrainian command and control advantage. Ukraine still has access to Starlink satellite terminals. Russia doesn't. To navigate to a Ukrainian port through intensive Ukrainian electronic warfare, Russian drones need redundant communications and terminal autonomy.

The 3.5-m Geran-4 has both, thanks to its mesh radio modem—which links to other drones to form a resilient control network—and the Raspberry Pi microcomputer running machine-vision software. The operator picks out the ship and locks the drone onto it. From there the Raspberry Pi flies the attack, holding the lock through the jamming that would otherwise break the operator's radio link in the last seconds.

"Seeker is controlled by an operator via a radio mesh modem, but it can be locked onto a target and handed over to its machine-learning algorithms to complete an attack in the presence of EW jamming," Canadian drone expert Roy noted.

Ships aren't the only targets in the Geran-4s' crosshairs. The jet-propelled drones also struck two Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters on the ground at Voznesensk airfield in southern Ukraine on or just before 27 June. Where older, propeller-driven Gerans cruise at just 340 km/hr, the jet-propelled Geran-4 cruises at 500 km/hr or faster. The newer, faster drone outpaces many Ukrainian interceptor drones, making it harder to take down by kinetic means.

That doesn't mean the Ukrainians are powerless to stop Geran-4s from striking grain ships in Ukrainian ports. Faster interceptor drones are coming. In the meantime, ports would benefit from additional guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Longer-term, the same Ukrainian deep-strike forces that are chasing down Russian ships are also targeting the factories deep inside Russia that build the components for munitions including the Gerans. Hit enough factories frequently enough with sufficiently powerful missiles or drones, and the Russians won't be able to build enough Gerans to sustain intensive attacks.

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Ukrainian drones hit 14 more Russian vessels — 10 tankers and four ferries — overnight on 12 July in the Sea of Azov, Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi reported. The strikes cap a week in which Ukraine hit 90 ships serving Russia's continued occupation of Crimea and the fuel trade in the Black Sea region. Moscow, a week into the losses, has shown no visible attempt to defend its commercial shadow fleet.

One vessel every 112 minutes 

This morning, Brovdi wrote:

"14 vessels on the night of 12 July: 10 tankers and 4 ferries," the commander said, adding that this puts the week of 6–12 July at 90 units of Russia's shadow fleet hunted down by the "birds" of SBS. 

That works out to one Russian tanker, tug, dry cargo carrier, or special vessel struck every 112 minutes of the week. 

"Moscow will fall," the commander added.

His post carries video of the strikes:

Among the identifiable targets are the ferries Mariya, Yeysk, and Sky One — the latter hit in the port of occupied Kerch by pilots of the 413th Raid Regiment — plus an unnamed ferry used for transport across the Kerch Strait.

The SBS's live scoreboard currently shows 14 new strikes on Russian shipping. The tally can move in either direction during the day — up or down — as internal reports get verified. The total of Russian ships hit in July now stands at 91.

NASA FIRMS satellite data shows fires in the usual location — the anchorage north of occupied Kerch.

Small tankers, double duty

The shadow fleet tankers under attack are not blue-water, ocean-going ships. They are smaller—yet mostly also sanctioned—vessels built for Russia's internal waterways, sized to squeeze through the Volga-Don Canal. Russia has moved them en masse to the Azov and Black seas for two jobs: pumping export fuel at sea into ocean-going shadow-fleet tankers sailing with trackers switched off, and supplying occupied Crimea.

Damaging them en masse kills two birds with one stone. Each disabled tanker cuts the volume of Russian oil exports at the source and tightens the noose around the occupied peninsula. And beyond the material damage sits the sheer shame: shipping disabled in such quantities has not been seen since World War II.

Disable, don't sink

Madyar's videos show the method. Ukrainian drones consistently go for the ships' superstructure and bridge, or sometimes the propulsion section at the stern. The goal appears to be to render the vessels uncontrollable rather than send them under.

Sinking would demand more drones per ship — and would cause an ecological disaster in the shallow Sea of Azov. Moreover, the tugs that come to evacuate the ships-turned-barges become the next targets.

Russia can't fight back

About a week into the campaign against its shipping, Russia has shown no sign of trying to protect the vessels — no warplanes or helicopters, no navy ships, not even onboard firearms. Some ships display metal bars rigged in front of the bridge, a passive, improvised anti-drone screen that is useless against the powerful FP-1 and FP-2 strike drones. 

Moscow's only visible reaction has been retreat: it halted shipping through the Don-Azov canal and closed the Kerch Strait after the tanker strikes — pulling its disabled vessels off the water instead of defending them.

The pace shows why. Just the night before, the tally was staggering: "28 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet hunted down on the night of 11 July in the Azov Sea by the Birds of SBS," Madyar wrote yesterday: 

And the ships were only part of that night's work — the SBS also hit nine energy nodes in the occupied territories, the Saky thermal power plant, a training ground, a special communications node, and what the commander called an enemy lair in Horlivka, Donetsk Oblast.

A basic first-person-view attack drone might range just 19 km or so before its battery runs out. Certain pricier FPVs with denser batteries and lighter construction can fly as far as 70 km before they, too, run out of power.

But Ukraine's drone developers keep innovating. And now there's an FPV that ranges a staggering 110 km. Six times the distance of a basic model.

The distance is the headline. The price is the point. Extending inexpensive FPVs out to 110 km lowers the cost of drone strikes across the logistical zone stretching as far as 200 km behind the disputed gray zone. Before, these "middle strikes" required a fixed-wing attack drone costing thousands of dollars. Now a middle strike is possible with an FPV costing perhaps a tenth as much.

Cheaper middle strikes mean more middle strikes, and more pressure on Russian logistics. Drone raids targeting Russian supply lines have recently helped slow, if not entirely halt, Russian advances as Russia's wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 53rd month.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a representative of Ukrainian defense firm The Fourth Law, revealed the 110-km FPV strike on Friday. "Wow!" Azhnyuk wrote. "A new FPV strike record." The previous marks, set in late May, were 102 km and 103 km.

The FPV, flown by the Ukrainian 5th Border Guard Detachment, was a 38-cm quadcopter from Ukrainian manufacturer Vyriy, and it struck Russian logistics.

The record comes at an awkward moment for the manufacturer. Ukraine's State Bureau of Investigations raided Vyriy on 7 July, days before the strike, after a media outlet owned by Vyriy's CEO, Oleksii Babenko, published an investigation of alleged corruption and mismanagement inside the Ukrainian 425th Separate Assault Regiment.

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Contents

• CEO of one of Ukraine’s biggest drone makers just got raided. He also owns outlet that exposed 25 non-combat deaths at military unit
  1. FPV upgrades
  2. A Cold War submarine hunter is Ukraine’s newest Shahed killer
  3. Russia just copied Ukraine’s cleverest drone hunter
  4. Some Ukrainian bomber drones aren’t carrying bombs anymore. They’re carrying robots.

CEO of one of Ukraine’s biggest drone makers just got raided. He also owns outlet that exposed 25 non-combat deaths at military unit

FPV upgrades

According to Azhnyuk, the 15-inch drone boasted numerous upgrades:

But even those range-extending enhancements probably weren't sufficient to take an FPV out to 110 km. At that distance, the drone likely needed a major aerodynamic boost—and that can really only come from an add-on wing. Azhnyuk's list of upgrades doesn't mention one, so the wing remains an inference rather than a confirmed feature of this particular flight.

Late last year, Russian and Ukrainian developers got serious about adding wings or ducts to their quadcopters. The ducted models don't seem to have caught on. The winged models work best.

Haye Kesteloo at DroneXl explained the physics. "Multicopters burn most of their energy just staying airborne, because spinning rotors generate lift the hard way."

A wing produces lift for free once the aircraft is moving, which is why fixed-wing designs have always dominated long-range strike work. The winged FPV grafts that efficiency onto a quadcopter: the motors mostly handle forward propulsion during the long cruise, and a release mechanism drops the wing near the target so the drone recovers full quadcopter agility for the final attack run.

"The winged-quadcopter approach is the attempt to get fixed-wing reach without giving up the multicopter's close-in lethality," Kesteloo concluded.

But the cost is the main benefit. With an inexpensive bolt-on wing, a $500 FPV can now do the job of a $5,000 fixed-wing drone, and strike targets more than 100 km away.

The town of Velyka Novosilka, in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, is a major hub for supplies flowing east to west to Russian forces fighting in southeastern Ukraine.

The village of Komar, 14 km to the north, anchors Russian defenses along the road threading south toward Velyka Novosilka.

All that is to say, if Ukrainian forces can capture Komar, they can squeeze the supply lines through Velyka Novosilka, and by extension squeeze Russian regiments and brigades all along the southeastern front line.

And that's why, for months now, Ukrainian forces have been quietly probing for gaps in Russian defenses around Komar. Borrowing infiltration tactics from the Russians, the Ukrainians have been slipping forces across the wide, disputed gray zone, aiming to consolidate enough troops in key positions to nudge the gray zone far enough to the southeast to put Komar in play.

That won't win the wider war, however. Russia might be losing. But it hasn't lost.

The problem for the Ukrainians in the sector near Komar is the Mokri Yaly River, which flows around Komar and forms a natural barrier. The Ukrainians have succeeded in expanding the gray zone, but they haven't succeeded in capturing Komar. Yet. "For now, Komar is 100% Russian controlled," mapper Clément Molin noted.

But that doesn't mean the Russians are winning this battle, or the Ukrainians are losing it. In months of hard fighting, a mix of Ukrainian mechanized, air assault and marine brigades have crossed the Vovcha River, 13 km north of Komar and the Mokri Yaly River, and extended the zone of clear Ukrainian control in the direction of Komar and Velyka Novosilka.

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That is to say, the Ukrainians have the momentum in the fight over supply lines in the southeast. It's just one of several axes where Ukrainian forces have the edge on the ground. Russian forces have the edge along other axes, but if you're wondering why overall monthly Russian gains have decreased to nearly zero in recent months, it's because of battles like that for Komar.

Yes, the Russians are marching through the ruins of Kostiantynivka, 90 km to the northeast, but the Ukrainians are successfully counterattacking elsewhere, resulting in a near zeroing out of Russian advances as the wider war grinds through its 53rd month.

How the Ukrainians have managed to turn the tables on the Russians in certain sectors is no secret. Ukraine has the advantage in the air over the gray zone and also over the logistical zone stretching 200 km behind the gray zone.

Ukrainian drones are hounding Russian supply convoys, throttling the flow of supplies to front-line units and weakening them before they can even being organizing an attack or defense.

Meanwhile, Russia's own drones sometimes struggle to even take flight owing to gaps in Russian command and control resulting from billionaire Elon Musk's war-changing decision, back in February, to throttle Russia's thousands of smuggled and stolen Starlink satellite terminals.

The air war shapes the ground war. And as long as Ukraine controls the air over and near the gray zone, it can find times and places to counterattack along the gray zone, even though Russian troops still outnumber Ukrainian troops in most sectors. "Middle-strike capabilities doing exactly what they were built for," the Ukrainian defense ministry boasted.

Stalemate

In nearly zeroing out Russian gains, Ukrainian troops have achieved a virtual stalemate in the wider war. Whether the stalemate lasts is anyone's guess, but for now it counts as a kind of victory for Ukraine.

Yes, liberating large swathes of Ukraine would be more desirable in Kyiv. But merely halting the Russians' overall progress represents a major turnaround for the Ukrainians, who as recently as last fall were losing hundreds of square km a month to the advancing Russians.

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To achieve any of its strategic aims in Ukraine, up to and including regime change in Kyiv, Russia must advance. By contrast, Ukraine's own main aim is to survive as an independent state. By those standards, Ukraine has the edge.

To be clear, the war is far from over. "There is a fundamental difference between saying Russia has lost and saying Russia is currently losing," analyst Joni Askola stressed. "Factually, Russia is losing."

It'll take much more than a few modest Ukrainian counterattacks to turn "Russia is losing" into "Russia has lost," however. The Russians still have more infantry and more ballistic missiles. The Ukrainians still have too few infantry and too few missiles that can intercept the ballistics.

And so, despite Ukraine's improving fortunes, the war will grind on. Probably for a long time.

The Ukrainian air force shot down a Russian air force Sukhoi Su-35 fighter over eastern Ukraine on Wednesday. If unofficial Russian sources are to be believed, the Ukrainians sprang an elaborate trap to take down the twin-engine, supersonic Su-35, which is arguably the best fighter type in Russian service.

Russian channels claimed three Ukrainian air force Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters drew the Su-35 into an ambush involving a Ukrainian air force Patriot surface-to-air missile battery on the ground. The Russian pilot reportedly ejected and was rescued.

It's unclear from Russian claims whether the F-16s or the Patriot ultimately shot down the Su-35. Regardless, the Ukrainians' teamwork is impressive. Both the F-16 and the Patriot suffer serious limitations in battle with Russian jets.

The F-16's missiles and radars lack the range to match the best Russian missiles and radars. The Patriot is an effective system, but the Ukrainians have far too few missiles to shoot at every possible target.

Together, however, F-16s and Patriots can win. One may detect while the other shoots. Or the fighters may distract an aerial target while the battery on the ground launches a missile.

Russian sources begrudgingly confirmed the Ukrainian air force's claim that it took out an Su-35. The Ukrainians "actually put up a decent fight today," The Voivode Reports conceded.

According to The Voivode Reports and another Russian channel, Fighterbomber, one F-16 flew low toward Russian positions, simulating the flight profile for jets attacking with precision glide bombs. Two more F-16s flew higher, ready to fling AIM-120 radar-guided missiles at any Russian fighters attempting to intercept the glide bomber.

Clever tactics

While it's now normal for F-16s to escort friendly glide bombers, what happened on Wednesday was different. The F-16s flying top cover had help. "A Patriot system was used to provide target illumination from the ground," The Voivode Reports claimed.

The F-16s have their own on-board radars, of course, in the form of the APG-66 with an 83-km range. But the AN/MPQ-53 and AN/MPQ-65 radars associated with the ground-based Patriot system range around twice as far.

According to the Russian channel, the Ukrainians hauled their Patriot battery to within 60 km of the disputed gray zone, extending the system's detection range well into Russian-controlled territory. With the assist from the Patriot, the F-16 pilots could see the Russian pilot coming from farther away—and possibly take a shot at the Russian before he could take his own, most likely with an R-77 radar-guided missile.

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It's also possible the Patriot battery itself swatted the Su-35 as the Russian jet was tangling with the three F-16s. In either case, the Ukrainians had the edge. "Unfortunately, we acted in a stereotypical way, but the Ukrainians didn't," Fighterbomber lamented.

The Russian air force still has more than 100 Su-35s plus hundreds of other fighters. The Ukrainian air force has far fewer fighters, although more—including modern, ex-Swedish JAS-39 Gripens—are on the way. So the air war over Ukraine is still a tossup.

But the overall numbers don't always determine the winner in a particular aerial clash. Sometimes clever tactics make all the difference.

Around seven Ukrainian drones motored more than 2,500 km on Monday to strike, for the first time, a refinery in Omsk in southwestern Siberia. It was one of the deepest Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian soil in the 53 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine—the first time the war had reached beyond the Ural Mountains to a Siberian plant.

The Omsk refinery accounts for roughly 10% of all Russian oil refining and, by various estimates, more than half of the Siberian Federal District's motor fuel, making it one of the country's most valuable. The daytime raid damaged two distillation units at the sprawling facility that process a combined 50,000 tons of oil every day. On Tuesday, the Omsk facility suspended sales on the Saint Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange.

It was a powerful blow against the Russian economy. And it was all thanks to a new Ukrainian drone type: the Fire Point FP-1 Extended Range. The new drone ranges a startling 3,400 km, according to Fire Point designer Denys Shtilerman. That's more than three times as far as the original FP-1 model.

Eagle-eyed observers, scrutinizing video of the Monday strike, quickly spotted the key difference between the FP-1(ER) and the original FP-1.

The FP-1(ER) has larger wings. "The wings are longer and shaped differently than the previous model ... and reportedly hold extra fuel tanks," Canadian drone expert Roy noted.

That bigger wing likely adds to the drone's $50,000 unit price in its basic configuration. But it's well worth the cost. Ukraine does possess other deep-strike munitions with similar range, including the Fire Point FP-5 cruise missile, but those are probably much more expensive than the FP-1(ER).

Ukrainian forces might be able to buy several FP-1(ER)s for the cost of one $500,000 FP-5. Fire Point claims it produces 300 FP-1s and similar FP-2s every day.

The cheap, low-flying FP-1(ER) got through where the pricier, higher-flying FP-5 recently could not. On 4 July, Russian forces sortied a rare Beriev A-50U radar plane, spotted a clutch of FP-5s streaking toward targets deep in Russia, and shot them all down.

An A-50U and a Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter reportedly hunted for the Omsk-bound drones, too. It was a special and, on paper, formidable aerial defense. "This is the first instance I have seen of both platforms present in the same location," wrote Michael Bohnert, an analyst with RAND in California. But the drones got through anyway.

Early warning

The Russians likely had ample warning the drones were coming. "The FP-1 drones are slow and would have taken hours to reach Omsk," Bohnert pointed out. "Unless A-50 and Su-57 aircraft were overhead 24/7 (incredibly unlikely given how few), it means these FP-1 would have been tracked for several hours to enable aircraft to get airborne."

The tiny drones apparently flew low enough to disappear on radar screens. To all but the very best radars, low-flying aircraft are indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. The A-50U and Su-57 themselves flew lower than usual in a bid to get a lock on the FP-1(ER)s, but even that didn't work. "To fly this low highlights how difficult these drones must be to detect," Bohnert wrote.

The FP-1(ER)'s new wings are evident in videos from Omsk, but other aspects of its design remain a closely held secret. Early FP-1s suffered from a lack of explosive firepower owing to their anemic 60-kg warheads. Fire Point recently tweaked the FP-1 to accommodate a 105-kg warhead.

It's not clear how heavy the FP-1(ER)'s warhead is, but the damage at Omsk points to the 105-kg version. Adding explosive payload tends to weigh on a drone's range, but the bigger wing and its more capacious built-in fuel tanks clearly compensate for the added warhead weight, and then some.

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The other mystery is the FP-1(ER)'s guidance. It's possible that Fire Point drones and missiles combine inertial and satellite guidance. But the satellites can be jammed, and self-contained inertial systems tend to lose accuracy over time and distance.

That the FP-1(ER) can fly thousands of kilometers and still accurately strike a pinpoint target speaks to the increasing sophistication of Ukrainian drones and missiles. The FP-5 has also grown steadily more accurate as Fire Point refines it. The FP-1(ER) may benefit from the same work.

Refineries are tough targets, and the Russians work hard to repair them after drone and missile strikes. The Omsk refinery may be back in business soon. But the Monday raid is unlikely to be a one-off.

Ukraine now has a low-cost deep-strike drone that can fly low enough to evade the best Russian air defenses. There's every reason to believe the Ukrainians will hit Omsk again. And again. And again.

Russia has just a few Beriev A-50U radar early warning planes left. But those rare aircraft are still busy helping Russian air defenses detect and destroy Ukrainian missiles ranging deep inside Russia to strike strategic industries.

The four-engine A-50Us with their top-mounted radars may be the key to Russia's deep air defense. But that unique capability cuts both ways.

The same Ukrainian deep strike forces that the A-50U crews are working to stop are also hunting the lumbering radar planes on the ground at their bases inside Russia. And once the A-50Us are all gone, there's nothing to replace them—and Russian air defenses will lose their best eyes in the sky. If and when that happens, more Ukrainians missiles will probably get through.

On 4 July, the Ukrainian armed forces reportedly fired at least five Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles at targets deep inside Russia. The six-ton missiles are among the heaviest and farthest-ranging Ukrainian deep strike weapons.

After many months of steady improvement by the engineers at Fire Point, the FP-5s are now reliably striking Russian targets with their 1,150-kg warheads. On 30 June, footage circulated depicting two FP-5s slamming into the Titan-Barrikady missile plant in Volgograd, in southern Russia 500 km from the front line in Ukraine.

And on 10 June, five Flamingos targeted the VNIIR-Progress defense electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia 900 km from the front line. Two of the missiles struck the plant, punching right through anti-drone protections and inflicting major blast and fire damage.

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It seemed the five FP-5s that took flight on 4 July were on track to hit something in Votkinsk, in western Russia 1,400 km from the front line.

But the Russian air force intervened. FP-5s sneak past Russian air defenses by flying along river valleys and other natural obstructions that can shield them from detection by radar. But on 4 July, the Russians positioned an A-50U and its powerful radar overhead of the Ukrainian missiles' flight paths.

Obstructions on the ground no longer offered any protection as the munitions motored toward Votkinsk. The Russians shot down all five of the $500,000 Flamingos.

The A-50U and its 15 crew were the key to the successful defense, according to Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the RAND think tank in California. "Its radar, unobstructed by the curvature of the Earth, was able to detect Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles from far away and defeat them," Bohnert explained.

But the Russians shouldn't celebrate quite yet. "This employment is likely exploitable," Bohnert warned.

Running out of A-50Us

According to Bohnert, it takes four A-50Us to keep one of the planes on station around the clock. That's because one plane will be on duty, another will be returning from duty, a third will be on its way to relieve the on-duty plane and a fourth will be undergoing maintenance on the ground. Add three more A-50Us and "you can almost keep two up 24/7," Bohnert concluded.

The problem for the Russians is that they may have just five active A-50Us. And there's no replacement radar plane in active development after the Kremlin apparently suspended work on the new Beriev A-100.

Russia went to war in February 2022 with potentially seven active A-50Us. In a series of attacks going back three years, the Ukrainians may have hit more than half of them. At least two are total write-offs.

The Ukrainians are steadily attriting the radar planes. And the Russians aren't moving fast enough to develop and build new ones. There could come a time, and soon, when the Russian air force won't have enough A-50Us to maintain a long patrol over the likeliest routes for Ukrainian missiles traveling deep into Russia.

If and when that happens, even more of the missiles will be able to reach their targets.

Mariam Lambert has received threats not only against herself, but against her husband and children as well. All because she helps bring home Ukrainians who were stolen by Russia.

Together with her foundation "Emil," she has already brought home 50 Ukrainian children. Yet the fate of adults with disabilities taken from psychoneurological boarding institutions in occupied territory remains unknown, even to those who work on this every day.

Lambert names at least four reasons why Russia is in no hurry to release them, and none of them have anything to do with the well-being of the children. 

Among them: sexual crimes, using them (as slave work, basically) to assemble drones, fraud schemes involving disability payments, and a desire to cause pain to Ukraine. The foundation has documented cases where people with disabilities disappeared while under occupation, and one of them was found dead shortly after receiving an apartment from the state. People with disabilities, like children, are often vulnerable to various forms of manipulation.

The foundation also explains that by not releasing them from occupation, the invaders exert psychological pressure on Ukrainians in order to break their will to resist.

One mother's wait

Anna is one of the people the foundation supports. For five years, she has been searching for her son Anton, taken from the Oleshky boarding institution, without a single confirmed answer as to whether he is alive.

"Just give me some kind of documentary proof that my son is alive," says Anna, mother of Anton, who was taken from the Oleshky boarding institution back in February 2022.

She is one of those whom the "Emil" foundation has been helping for several years now. Anna looks like a strong woman fighting for justice, but the moment the conversation turns to her son, tears appear in her eyes, and her gaze reveals an exhaustion she can't hide.

We talked with her about her son, whose life depends on a device implanted in his head, and about an image that shows something has gone wrong.

Who were you before you became this child's mother?

Anton was a very long-awaited child, because I'd had a miscarriage before. During the pregnancy, I wanted to be a good wife and daughter-in-law to my mother-in-law. I was 19. Instead of just resting when I was hospitalized to preserve the pregnancy, I would get up and go home, because I had to be good.

It happened to be Easter, and my husband and I argued. I was crying, and then I felt my water break. That was at 34 weeks. I didn't carry to term by a month.

Tell us about Anton. What was he like, and how did he end up in Oleshky boarding institution?

Anton was already an adult, 18 or older, when he was taken. Under Ukrainian law, he isn't a child, but essentially, he has the same level of mental capacity as one.

Until he was 14, he was raised in the family. He had a birth injury that led to a neuroinfection, causing fluid to build up inside his skull, a condition known as hydrocephalus. To drain that fluid and relieve the pressure, doctors installed two shunts, thin tubes, into the ventricles of his brain. Then he started school, but he suffered several leg fractures, so he spent most of his time in a wheelchair. He's heavy, and I injured my back twice lifting him. He was constantly undergoing anticonvulsant therapy. Plus, I have a daughter. When I was working with coal briquettes, he used to come with me.

I realized I simply couldn't manage on my own. Anton needed specialists nearby, educational services, and socialization. So the Oleshky institution was ideal and only 15 minutes away by car.

How did war begin for you and for Anton?

During the war, Oleshky, located on the left bank of Kherson, was occupied literally in the first days of the war. By March, fighting was already happening at the Antonivka Bridge, and it was bombed. Fighting continued constantly.

Honestly, I'll tell you, when the war started, for the first three days I thought it was some kind of joke. This could not be happening.

What was Anton like at home, day to day? How did he communicate with family?

He recognized me. His emotional development was appropriate for his age, but his self-care skills were at the level of a 2 to 3-year-old. He knew everyone: mom, dad, grandmothers, sisters, and brothers. He could name everyone from a photograph. But Anton couldn't read or write. He called me mom. He communicated very clearly and formulated his thoughts correctly. He understood jokes.

What about his health? What examinations and treatment did he need?

We were hospitalized every three months, and a neurosurgeon checked how the shunts in his head were functioning. We always did an MRI or CT scan of the brain. A neurologist was mandatory, along with massage therapy and physical therapy, and a gastroenterologist was mandatory too, because sitting so much gave him intestinal problems. So I have a lot of questions about his current condition.

His favorite food was meat, salted pork fat, and onion. We used to joke that he could eat a whole onion like it was an apple.

How did he adjust to life at institution? Was it hard to leave him there?

When I brought him back from the home, he never had tantrums. He would greet everyone and laugh. In the first month, I was told not to take him out so he could adjust.

During those months, I made surprise inspection visits: I would show up, watch quietly, and listen. I needed to be sure he was doing well there.

We would take him out on weekends, holidays, and during the summer, to the sea or the river. If I couldn't manage it, his grandparents would pick him up in their own car.

How did Anton get along with people at the Oleshky institution?

He made friends very easily. He could drive the caregivers crazy, but then immediately say, "You're my good one, I love you." But when his head hurt, he'd get on everyone's nerves. On my hard days, he would cuddle up to me, hug me, and comfort me.

What was institution itself like overall?

The Oleshky institution was actually good because it took an individual approach to each resident. The caregivers didn't just sit them in a corner or sedate them with medication. They kept each person occupied according to their abilities. There was friendship among the residents, too, and love.

When did you last see Anton?

The last time I saw Anton was before New Year's in 2021, during COVID. At that time, residents couldn't be taken out due to quarantine.

If I saw him now, the first thing I'd do is hug him and look into his eyes to understand what he's feeling.

You said you learned to recognize the smallest changes in him. What do you mean?

I learned to notice microexpressions, tiny changes. He had a very high pain tolerance. But I could tell when something hurt him, even when people around him didn't notice. When he started saying or screaming that something hurt, that meant an ordinary person would already be dying from pain shock. That's how much he could endure.

Is there something you'd want him to know right now?

I would really want him to be constantly told that he has a mother who loves him and is waiting for him.

What has Anton taught you?

It was he who opened up the world to me. Thanks to him, I got an education. Thanks to him, I left Kherson Oblast for the first time. That is, he needed treatment, so I traveled.

Thanks to him, I became the head of a public organization that supports families raising children with disabilities. We ran major projects on a city-wide scale in Kherson.

Thanks to Anton, I got a second degree, in psychology, because I wanted to understand, to figure out what was going on and how. Anton taught me to see the person, not the disability. He taught my daughter to be empathetic.

They grew up almost like twins. There's a year and seven months between them. When she started walking, he started walking too. When she started talking, he followed, talking too. She also picked up that trait of not seeing disability in people. We see so many traumatized veterans now, and she knows how to find an approach that works with almost anyone.

She knows how to care for someone without overstepping boundaries. She knows when to help and when to step back, so as not to do someone a disservice.

We went everywhere together. We traveled together everywhere.

I mean, I'd drive, my husband would be off on work trips, and I was constantly with the kids, both of them, going everywhere. We went to cafés together, to the sea together, on trips together, absolutely everywhere together.

Thanks to him, I now travel to India. I know that's not okay to say, but if we're talking about what Anton has done for me, it's thanks to him. I've been to India. I spoke at a rally in the Netherlands and was featured in international media. We've worked with Reuters and the Guardian; there were conferences there, too.

What do you think needs to happen for child like Anton to come back?

Someone needs to do it, a man or a woman, I don't know. But that person will hear and find the right lever to pull. By speaking publicly, I'm doing it for the sake of one person who could influence Anton's return. Because I have no documentary confirmation at all of where he is, what's happening to him, or how he is. There are only guesses.

Why do you think Russians aren't returning all children?

I think it's about some fraud involving disability payments. You can't put them in the army to fight. Maybe they're given housing or some certificates.

I think at the startб there was an element of propaganda, that they "saved" these children and adults from shelling. They took them, so to speak, out of "dangerous" Oleshky and moved them to "safe" Skadovsk. At first, that's really how it was, and that's even how they presented it.

What are you doing right now to try to bring your child back?

I'm working with the Emil foundations. We're constantly in contact with them. They conduct their own independent investigations.

I've written to our Ombudsman twice already. My first appeal was to Darya Herasymchuk. But she said at the time that it wasn't within her competence, since he was already an adult. 

What's most absurd thing you've had to do while searching for your child?

The most dangerous thing I did was write to all my contacts from Oleshky. I understood at the time that I could be putting them in danger, because they were in occupied territory and could get in trouble for having ties to Ukraine. I gave out my own contact information and sent out messages like that. Those actions could have hurt me, too, but at the time, it seemed like the best thing to do, to find out anything at all.

What's something people say to you, thinking it's support, but it actually isn't?

People have told me it's my own fault, that I'm the one who put Anton in the institution. Also, the phrase "hang in there, everything will be fine" really irritates me. I always say, either help or just be quiet, don't get involved. If you know of any ways or contacts that could be useful, please point me to them. If I had tried to get Anton out of occupied territory myself, both of us could already have ended up shot in the head.

I really want to see a video or photo of Anton. Just give me some documentary proof that my son is alive and that it's really him.

Wherever he is, he needs to be under medical supervision. He has a condition that requires constant monitoring.

If his pressure rises, fluid builds up on the left side. Ideally, he'd need to have the shunt in his brain replaced and a different pump installed. That operation could lead to unknown consequences. We used to manage him with diuretics. In the last photos I saw from the occupation, his left eye was already rolled back, one of the markers of elevated pressure.

What surprises you about yourself? What has changed in you since he disappeared?

Feelings of pity, resentment, and injustice have transformed into anger. The inaction of both the Ukrainian and Russian authorities angers me. 

There were soldiers stationed on the grounds of the institution. They set up command posts there. That's exactly the kind of thing they do, hiding behind children because they knew that as long as the children were there, Ukraine wouldn't strike.

The facility was fully adapted for living, with laundries and elevators, because it was genuinely designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. It was very convenient for them. As long as the children were there, that whole area wasn't shelled by Ukrainian forces at all.

The Russians took the caregivers with them. Some were taken by force, and some went along with the occupation voluntarily. You don't really argue with someone holding a gun. Some of them, as far as I know, were taken to Penza.

I understand Anton was taken away in February. How was he transported, and in what condition?

Once he stumbled and fell. He started having seizures. I immediately said, "Girls, he's broken his leg." They said, "No, we checked, we don't see anything." We went to the Oleshky hospital. They didn't see anything there either. But I could just tell that something wasn't right. We went to another hospital, and it turned out a small bone had actually cracked. He also needed to take calcium along with a medication that helps it be absorbed, as well as anticonvulsants. He also couldn't take medications containing caffeine.

I have two thoughts that fight with each other: I understand I really want him to be alive. But on the other hand, I understand that if he's suffering, maybe it would be better if he weren't alive.

What would you want Ukrainian authorities to do?

I want them to send inquiries directly to these institutions. In my second appeal, I wrote explicitly where, according to my information, Anton might be. I asked them to make an official request there, because they have resources hundreds of times greater than mine.

So I speak with anyone who offers me an interview. I think that maybe I won't get through by quality, but perhaps by sheer quantity, that I'll become such a familiar face to them that they'll give me some information just to get me to stop.

The Ukrainian side hasn't given me any updates at all.

Does Ukrainian government give you any feedback at all?

None at all. It's occupied territory. There's no way I can get in there myself. The state has far greater resources to use different channels. The last time I contacted the Ombudsman's office was two months ago.

The first visit to the Ombudsman's office was chaotic and produced no results.

I was invited to come in person after a phone call from a "hotline," and was promised that a power of attorney would be arranged for a third party to negotiate my son's return. But once there, it turned out the staff member handling my case had already quit, and the other employees were "out in the field." I received no concrete help at all, just bureaucratic confusion.

Then I filed an appeal with specific information from the Emil Foundation, obtained through Sashko Danylchuk, a former prisoner of war who had seen her son Anton. In that appeal, I asked them to officially verify this information and confirm whether my son is alive or not.

The result of that second appeal was complete silence. I never received any response, confirmation, or denial of the information from official authorities.

As a result, as a private individual, I'm essentially left completely alone in the search for my son, without any institutional support, and without confirmation or denial of the information I only receive through public foundations.

It's now the fifth year, and I still cannot get confirmation on whether Anton is alive.

Why do you think they're staying silent? Is it just disorganized work?

My view is that from the very beginning, the work has simply been organized incorrectly for cases like the one at the Oleshky institution. Right now, each case is handled separately, but there should be a single collective complaint covering the entire institution. What's happening now is that my child was taken from me, and I'm left to search for him myself.

Russian forces fell back in June.

Yes, the Russians drove deep into the city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, their biggest gain of the year. Russian forces are "beginning to take control of several districts in eastern Kostiantynivka," logging Moscow's "first strategic victory of the year," according to mapper and analyst Clément Molin—though fighting is sure to continue.

But in other key sectors south and north of Kostiantynivka, the Russians lost ground. Russia advanced into some 30 sq km across the front in June, ISW calculated—but once Ukrainian counterattacks are subtracted, the month came out negative. Russian forces ended June with a net loss of around 40 sq km of Ukrainian soil, according to analyst Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting.

The Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState framed the same trend a different way. Russia's occupied area grew by 84 sq km in June, the group assessed—but set against what Ukrainian forces clawed back over the month, the balance tipped negative for the Russians. "In May, we took two steps forward. In June, it's one step forward and one step back," DeepState wrote. Russian assault actions actually rose 4.4% over the month, the group noted, even as those assaults bought less ground. The Russians did log gains in the second half of June around Kostiantynivka, Dobropillia, and Huliaipole.

The reasons are myriad. Ukrainian drones are better and more numerous than ever. Ukrainian fortifications are deeper and denser than ever. And Ukrainian forces are hitting Russian logistics in the middle zone between the disputed gray zone and Russia proper with greater intensity than ever, weakening Russian regiments before they can even organize an assault.

The Ukrainian advantages now outweigh the Russian advantages in traditional firepower and, most notably, manpower. Russian troops have outnumbered Ukrainian troops by as much as 8:1 in the Pokrovsk sector, Zelenskyy has said. Yet Ukraine is inflicting far heavier losses than it takes: Russian casualties are running roughly eight times Ukrainian ones, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Russia has lost the military initiative in Ukraine as costs continue to mount," the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded.

May points the same way. Russia advanced into around 40 sq km that month but lost control of some 280 sq km, the Institute for the Study of War calculated—a net loss. Ukraine's own Militarnyi, citing defense sources, put the gap even wider, and a source tied to Ukrainian military intelligence called May the first month since 2023 in which Russia lost more ground than it took. DeepState is the outlier, scoring a small May gain. Muzyka logged roughly 25 sq km for Russia but cautioned the real figure may have been negative.

But most sources agree the Russians lost ground in April and March after registering a modest overall advance in February. Russia has probably fallen back in three of the last five months.

Zooming in

Narrowing the frame changes the outlook. "Russian forces took control of some neighborhoods inside Kostiantynivka and advanced near Sloviansk," 34 km north of Kostiantynivka, Molin noted. But "this initial victory—achieved in the summer—does not appear to offer any prospect of a second victory within the year," he added.

That's because it takes maximal effort over many months by the 700,000-strong Russian army of occupation to achieve a single meaningful gain.

Having ground into the ruins of some small city at the cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives, the Russians are exhausted in victory. And they sit in the ruins of Pokrovsk or Myrnohrad or Kostiantynivka eyeing tens of kilometers of mined, fortified, drone-patrolled open terrain stretching between them and the next major objective.

In the case of the Russian survivors in the east, the objective is the free twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. There are two approaches: one from the south through Kostiantynivka. Another from the east through Lyman, 14 km northeast of Sloviansk.

Explore further

Russia is losing ground for the first time in 27 months. Ukraine’s drones might be why.

If the Russians in Kostiantynivka are spent, could the Russians laying siege to Lyman break through and march on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

Probably not. Sensing weakness along the flanks of the Russian force just north of Lyman, Ukrainian forces counterattacked this spring. The counterattacks are "preventing Russian forces from establishing staging positions for attacks against Ukrainian [supply lines] between Lyman and Sloviansk," Muzyka wrote, "and thereby disrupting efforts to envelop the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk agglomeration from the north."

Meanwhile in the southeast, counterattacking Ukrainian forces have stabilized the front line after a period of rapid Russian advances last year.

The Russians aim to capture Zaporizhzhia city, 69 km west of the southeastern front line, but "it is evident they have failed to maintain the same rate of progress seen in the latter half of 2025," Molin observed. "Frequent and precise Ukrainian drone strikes on access roads are complicating their logistics."

The war is freezing in place. But that doesn't mean it's ending. "Russia continues to fight—a decision that rests firmly with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who has given no public indication he intends to slow down," CSIS warned.

Likewise, "Ukraine also shows no sign of collapsing."

Explore further

After eight months, Kostiantynivka is falling. Why some Ukrainian commanders would rather fight the open fields behind it

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently called Russia's ballistic missiles the country's "last remaining argument in this war," one against which Ukraine "must find sufficient countermeasures." High-flying and extremely fast as they streak toward their targets, ballistic missiles are hard to intercept for all but the best surface-to-air systems such as the American-made Patriot—which is why Zelenskyy keeps pleading with allies for more of them.

For four years, that argument has run one way: Russia fires ballistic missiles Ukraine can rarely stop. It may now cut both ways.

On Tuesday, Russians near Moscow circulated photos of S-300/400 batteries engaging something at high altitude over the capital—too high for a drone or a cruise missile—and Russia's Defense Ministry has since said its air defenses downed a Ukrainian "long-range operational-tactical missile," a ballistic weapon, in the first such admission of the war.

Ukrainian one-way attack drones and cruise missiles don't fly high. Ballistic missiles do. "Due to the missile alert issued for the region, and the high altitude in which the interceptions took place at, it is possible that Ukraine used their experimental FP-9 ballistic missile for the first time ever," AMK Mapping noted.

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Contents

• For two years, Ukraine’s strikes barely scratched Russia’s war factories. Something just changed.
  1. Combat trials
     • Ukraine’s ,000 drone just did what only 0,000 munitions could
     • Ukraine’s ballistic missile may have reached Moscow. The damage wasn’t the point.

For two years, Ukraine’s strikes barely scratched Russia’s war factories. Something just changed.

Back in March, Denys Shtilerman, co-founder of Ukrainian munitions-maker Fire Point, claimed the company's new FP-9 intermediate-range ballistic missile would be ready for deployment by this summer. But Shtilerman insisted it wasn't an FP-9 that targeted Moscow.

There's a second Ukrainian ballistic missile that could reach Moscow, which lies just 450 km from the Ukrainian border: the Sapsan from manufacturer KB Pivdenne.

It's unclear whether the missile, whatever it was, got through Russian defenses and hit anything of value. But the outcome of a possible first ballistic missile strike is less important than the strike itself.

That's because Ukrainian developers tend to rush new munitions into action in order to refine them. They expect the first few uses, or even many uses, to result in little or no meaningful damage to the enemy.

The damage isn't the point. The data is the point.

Combat trials

Fire Point, which also produces Ukraine's best one-way attack drones (FP-1s and FP-2s) and best heavy cruise missiles (FP-5s), is especially fond of combat trials.

Consider that the six-ton, 3,000-km-range FP-5 cruise missile needed a year of combat testing starting in May 2025 before it finally began scoring accurate hits on distant Russian targets and inflicting lasting damage.

The FP-1 and FP-2 drones likewise took months or even years to refine. Fire Point struggled to balance the drones' fuel payload versus warhead payload so that the drones could reach far-away targets while still inflicting real damage.

In the case of the FP-1 and FP-2, that meant adding fuel tanks to the wings to either add to the drone's overall fuel capacity (to maximize range) or free up space and payload for more explosives (to maximize damage). The FP-1 carries more fuel and thus ranges as far as 3,000 km with a warhead probably weighing no more than 100 kg. The FP-2 carries less fuel, limiting it to 200 km or so, but packs a nearly 160-kg warhead.

In the FP-5's case, Fire Point apparently focused on improving the missile's accuracy by tweaking its internal inertial navigation system.

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Ukraine’s ,000 drone just did what only 0,000 munitions could

The FP-9 and Sapsan will need the right balance of propellant and warhead and inertial navigation that can steer it to an accurate strike hundreds of kilometers away. It may take a lot of trial and error to achieve that balance. The sooner the missiles fly toward Moscow, the sooner their developers can perfect them, and begin inflicting real and lasting damage in the city.

And yes, Moscow is the main target. Ukraine's deep strike forces are increasingly focused on the sprawling Russian capital. Mass drone and cruise missile strikes on Moscow on 18 June and again on Tuesday involved hundreds of munitions apiece.

If the Tuesday raid included the first-ever Ukrainian ballistic missile to strike Russian soil, it's probably just the first of many to come. And they should get more accurate and destructive over time.

Explore further

Ukraine’s ballistic missile may have reached Moscow. The damage wasn’t the point.

Ukrainian forces are striking deeper and harder inside Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine, shifting the momentum of the wider war in their favor. One key? Bigger warheads on better drones and missiles.

Two things changed at once. The warheads grew heavy enough to leave damage that lasts, instead of dents a Russian factory could patch in a week. And Ukraine's drones have peeled back the air defenses that used to stop the shooters from arriving. Heavier warheads decide what a strike does once it lands; the thinning air defenses decide whether it gets there at all.

On Saturday, footage circulated depicting two Ukrainian Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles striking the Titan-Barrikady missile plant in Volgograd, in southern Russia 500 km from the Ukraine front line.

Both of the six-ton cruise missiles slammed into the sprawling factory, which produces artillery and mobile launchers for ballistic missiles.

The strike on Titan-Barrikady is just the latest in a chain of Ukrainian deep strikes targeting refineries and defense plants on Russian soil. Perhaps most dramatically, on 10 June five Flamingos targeted the VNIIR-Progress defense electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia 900 km from the front line.

Two of the missiles struck the plant, punching right through anti-drone protections and inflicting major blast and fire damage.

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Ukraine’s ,000 drone just did what only 0,000 munitions could

Ukrainian drones and missiles have been hitting targets inside Russia since early in the 52-month wider war, but the current strikes are different—and the back-to-back Flamingo hits are indicative. The recent strikes are more damaging than ever.

The Flamingo delivers an 1,150-kg warhead as far as 3,000 km. Other Ukrainian munitions travel nearly that far, but none explode with the same force.

There's been a "quiet but meaningful shift in Ukraine's long-range campaign," explained Michael Bohnert, a researcher at California think tank RAND. "Warhead sizes on strike drones have increased significantly." On cruise missiles, too.

Higher impact

"To even any casual observer," Bohnert added, "Ukrainian strikes have been having a higher and higher impact over time."

It is due to many factors, including better planning and the destruction of Russia's missile defenses. A major driver comes from larger warheads. Earlier drone strikes used warheads in the few tens of kilograms of explosives.

While enough to damage a small pipe or other metal object, these lacked the punch to hit through the thicker steel and concrete that are part of factories and other infrastructure. Basically, they could damage a specific target if they hit it but needed a direct strike. Missing by a few feet or hitting on the other side of a wall would cause minimal damage. Repairs could be made quickly.

As Ukrainian drones ranged deeper inside Russia in late 2024 and early 2025, Ukrainian analysis team Frontelligence Insight observed a problem. Drones were hitting refineries and other targets, but causing little lasting damage.

"One contributing factor, as our team has assumed, is the relatively small warhead size of certain Ukrainian drones such as the [An-196] Liutyi," Frontelligence Insight concluded.

The lightweight warheads, weighing just tens of kilograms, were the consequence of a deliberate choice by Ukrainian developers to pack as much fuel as possible into a drone's airframe in order to maximize its range. "Given the long distances these drones must travel, increasing their warhead size would require adjustments to weight, fuel capacity and overall design," Frontelligence Insight noted.

The introduction of the Fire Point FP-2 drone last year was an inflection point. The initial version of the $50,000 FP-2 packed a 105-kg warhead. Fire Point later tweaked the FP-2 to squeeze in a 158-kg warhead. FP-2s now routinely blast hardened Russian targets such as buildings and warships.

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Ukraine is droning Russian ships. The goal: to create supply bottlenecks on land.

And it's not alone. Other newer Ukrainian deep-strike munitions also combine decent range with a heavier warhead. The Behemoth drone packs two separate warheads, one weighing 40 kg and another weighing 35 kg. The bigger warhead blasts a hole in a target. The smaller one explodes inside it.

But the FP-2 and Behemoth still suffer from limited reach: just 200 km and 300 km, respectively. With its jet propulsion, the $500,000 FP-5 cruise missile combines a big warhead with long range.

It took a year of near misses for Fire Point to get the FP-5's self-contained inertial navigation to work properly. But now that it does, the giant missile is blowing up Russian factories at a weekly rate.

Their flight paths into Russia cleared by relentless drone strikes on Russian air defenses, Flamingos can now strike across western Russia. No factory or refinery within 3,000 km of the border is safe. And every strike can now inflict lasting damage.

The Ukrainian air force lost three MiG-29 fighters on or just before 27 June: one in the air and two on the ground.

The air force isn't about to run out of MiGs any time soon. But the losses are a painful reminder that Russia's own fighters still out-shoot Ukraine's fighters. And Ukrainian jets are extremely vulnerable when they're not flying.

Fortunately for the battered Ukrainian air arm, it's about to get new jets that address both vulnerabilities. The Swedish-designed Saab JAS-39 shoots farther than many Russian planes. And it can get off the ground more quickly in order to dodge Russian attacks.

"The JAS-39 is the only fighter in the world for which I am ready to sell my soul," famous Ukrainian fighter pilot Vadym Voroshylov wrote as he began training to fly the Swedish jet. "Even to exchange my only love—the MiG-29."

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Contents

• For three years, Russia glide-bombed Ukraine in escorted pairs. Now Ukraine is glide-bombing Russia the same way.
  1. Extra jets
     • Russia hides its cruise missiles inside drone swarms. A handful of bombers do the rest.
     • The Swedish jets Ukraine could get were built to survive Russia—and that’s the point

For three years, Russia glide-bombed Ukraine in escorted pairs. Now Ukraine is glide-bombing Russia the same way.

The 27 June MiG losses came like a dreadful drumbeat. One of the twin-engine, supersonic fighters crashed during a combat mission over Poltava Oblast in central Ukraine, possibly as the result of a long-range shot by a Russian fighter firing an R-37 missile. The Ukrainian pilot ejected and survived.

Around the same time, Russian drones struck two of the Soviet-vintage MiGs on the ground at Voznesensk airfield in Mykolaiv Oblast in southern Ukraine. The three losses bring to 38 the number of MiG-29s the Ukrainian air force has written off since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022.

The nimble but aging MiGs fly a wide variety of missions. They patrol for Russian drones and cruise missiles. They lob precision glide bombs at Russian positions on the ground. They fire AGM-88 radar-homing missiles at Russian air defenses.

Extra jets

In stark contrast to the limited pool of heavier Sukhoi Su-27 fighters at Ukraine's disposal, the Ukrainians have plenty of MiG-29s. The Soviet air force left around 200 of the jets behind in Ukraine as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Just 36 or so of these planes were in active service with three Ukrainian brigades when Russia attacked in February 2022, meaning Ukraine has now lost more MiG-29s than it had in frontline service that month.

But Ukraine's allies have donated 30 surplus MiG-29s to the war effort. And Ukrainian engineers have restored some derelict MiGs to flightworthy status. Exactly how many Ukrainian MiG-29s are active right now is a closely held secret, but it's probably enough to keep all three brigades at fighting strength.

That doesn't mean the Ukrainian air force is keen to keep losing fighters to Russian missiles and drones, however. The arrival of the first 16 ex-Swedish JAS-39s in Ukraine next year should staunch the bloodletting. The single-engine, supersonic JAS-39, better known as the Gripen, is superior to the MiG-29 in the air and on the ground.

Ukrainian MiG-29s carry R-27 air-to-air missiles that range around 40 km. The best Russian fighters carry R-37 missiles that range more than 200 km. Outranged by tens of kilometers, a Ukrainian MiG pilot can't even shoot back as he dives and maneuvers in a desperate effort to dodge an incoming R-37.

The JAS-39 changes the aerial math, thanks to its 200-km-range Meteor missile—soon to be the first Ukrainian air-to-air missile that can match the Russian R-37. The JAS-39 changes Russia's calculations on the ground, too, because it spends less time there.

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"When the enemy systematically launches combined strikes on airfield infrastructure—Gripen is created for such harsh conditions," Voroshylov wrote.

It might take ground crews 30 minutes or longer to prepare a Soviet-designed jet for takeoff. According to Voroshylov, it takes just 10 minutes to prep a JAS-39.

That 20-minute difference matters. Before preparation, crews can tuck a fighter inside a reinforced shelter or hide it among trees. During preparation, it's harder to hide a fighter. Ground crews need a lot of bulky equipment to pump fuel and load weapons.

A fighter is arguably at its most vulnerable during the phase right before takeoff. The shorter that phase, the smaller the window for Russian drones and missiles to strike. "Minimizing the time spent on preparing the aircraft on the ground will reduce the likelihood of damage while the aircraft is on the ground, and most importantly, will save the personnel involved in preparing the aircraft," Voroshylov explained.

As JAS-39s begin joining MiG-29s in the Ukrainian inventory, the Ukrainian air force should become less vulnerable, overall. That's not to say Ukraine won't lose some of its Swedish jets. But hopefully it will never lose three in one day.

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Kyiv continues the operation to isolate occupied Crimea. Last night, Ukraine struck a railway bridge feeding Russian forces in the peninsula, the General Staff said, while monitors reported drones set a power plant in western Crimea on fire — strikes the country's navy casts as stages of a years-long plan to isolate the territory. The targets stretched from the occupied peninsula to an ammunition depot in Donetsk Oblast. A navy spokesman said the whole effort points to one place: the Kerch Strait crossing.

A bridge near İçki, a depot in the Donbas

The Defense Forces of Ukraine hit a railway bridge near İçki in occupied Crimea, the General Staff said. Russian forces used the crossing to move troops and supplies across the peninsula. The same statement reported a strike on an enemy ammunition depot near Amvrosiivka in Donetsk Oblast. Results of both hits were still being assessed.

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NASA's FIRMS satellite fire data points to the Bulhanak River bridge as the one that burned. The crossing is a separate target from the rail bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Rozdolne, which Ukraine's special forces destroyed earlier. 

The General Staff post also confirmed strikes on Russian oil refineries near Yaroslavl and at Slavyansk-na-Kubani.

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A power plant on fire near Saky

Overnight, drones attacked the Sakska thermal power plant near the western Crimean town of Saky, starting a fire, Militarnyi reported. Locals heard 16 explosions in the area before the flames rose, the monitoring channel Krymsky Veter said. NASA's FIRMS satellite system caught the blaze at around 03:13.

The Sakska plant is one of the key energy sites in western Crimea, with an output of 149.4 megawatts. 

"It all leads to the Crimean Bridge"

Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk said the strikes on Russian logistics are part of a multi-stage operation built over years, not months. He told a national broadcast that the fuel shortages and gas-station queues on the peninsula are not the goal in themselves.

"What we are observing is the next stage of a multi-step operation. Where someone might see emotion — to cut something off here and now — no. This was preceded by a whole set of measures, and it lasted not even months, but years," he said.

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He traced the sequence from the start. First, Ukraine cut the naval logistics, the large landing ships. Then came the large railway ferries that formed the backbone of Crimea's sea supply, and after them the ordinary ferries that could serve the same role. Russian air defenses were destroyed in parallel, and Ukrainian forces struck targets in the so-called land corridor at the same time.

"It all essentially comes down to the so-called Crimean Bridge," Pletenchuk noted, calling the plan's execution "fairly successful." 

The Kerch Strait bridge is the artery Russia built after seizing Crimea and uses to move fuel, ammunition, and troops onto the peninsula and onward to its forces across Ukraine's south.

Don't believe Russian propaganda. There's no reason to believe Russian forces are about to capture the city of Lyman, which anchors Ukrainian defenses 15 km north of Sloviansk, one of the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

The Russians are trying to march on Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk from two directions: the north and the south. To approach from the north, they have to get around or through Lyman. To approach from the south, they must travel 20 km along a mined, drone-patrolled road threading from the ruins of Kostiantynivka toward Kramatorsk.

The Russians have enjoyed some recent success in the south. After a long aerial bombardment and ground siege, they recently infiltrated Kostiantynivka, forcing the city's garrison to pull back in order to avoid encirclement.

But the Russians are no closer to capturing Lyman, despite months of effort. They've been trying to bypass the city to the north, but Ukrainian counterattacks keep blunting and rolling back their advances. Small teams of Russian infantry have fared no better while trying to infiltrate Lyman. They've only succeeded in creating the impression of progress.

Don't buy the impression. Russian infiltrators sneaking into Lyman from a small Russian foothold in the city's eastern outskirts haven't yet succeeded in dislodging Ukrainian troops in most of Lyman. Reports of new Russian lodgements, and Ukrainian counterattacks aimed at clearing out those lodgements, are inaccurate.

Flag ops

Yes, some small teams of Russian infantry have managed to plant a few flags in Lyman recently. But that doesn't mean the flag-planters stayed, or even survived. "Russia never consolidated in any of these areas," AMK Mapping noted.

Misreading the Russian flag operations, some observers invented imaginary Ukrainian operations to explain why the overall pattern of confirmable Ukrainian versus Russian presence in Lyman didn't change even as a few Russian flags briefly popped up.

"Many accounts are inventing a Ukrainian counterattack/clearing operation in Lyman to cover their previous lies/mistakes," mapper Clément Molin explained. "Russian forces never took control of any part of Lyman city and there was no counterattack."

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"The situation has remained the same for weeks, with a very small part of the eastern neighborhoods used for infiltrations," Molin added. "Infiltrations continue all around the city ... which is not a proof of control."

Lyman holds. If anything, the Ukrainian hold on the city is stabilizing as Ukrainian counterattacks north of Lyman squeeze a Russian salient jutting a few kilometers to the west. If the Russians can't eject Lyman's defenders by infiltrating the city, they could partially surround it along its outskirts, putting pressure on the garrison's supply lines and eventually compelling them to retreat.

But not if the attempted encirclement keeps failing.

The combination of Russian encirclement and infiltration led to the belated collapse of Ukrainian defenses in Kostiantynivka, but the same Russian strategy is failing in Lyman. For now. It's not that the strategy isn't a sound one, all things considered. But overall battlefield conditions have changed in ways that came too late to save Kostiantynivka, but may yet save Lyman.

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Namely, Ukrainian forces have radically escalated their drone strikes across the Russian logistical zone stretching 200 km behind the gray zone. New AI-assisted fixed-wing drones and tiny first-person-view quadcopter drones wearing range-extending wings have pummeled Russian supply lines with growing intensity since this spring, knocking out hundreds of Russian cargo trucks and sapping the strength of front-line regiments and brigades before they can even attempt an infiltration or encirclement.

It's not for no reason that, even taking into account Russian advances through the ruins of Kostiantynivka, the overall pace of Russian gains is down to just 30 square km this month. That's around 10% of the territory Russian troops captured in June 2025.

The Russians are slowing down almost everywhere but Kostiantynivka. That includes Lyman, where recent reports of Russian gains were an illusion.

Ukrainian uncrewed ground vehicles are winning fans all around the world, as evidenced by the Eurosatory 2026 arms expo in France, where the latest model of the Ravlyk UGV made a splash. 

The invitation to the biggest arms expo in Europe was already a huge deal for Ukrainian Unmanned Technologies, a small company of 50 people. Then, in quick succession, they licensed the Ravlyk to French construction firm Haulotte, entered negotiations with defense giant KNDS, and were invited to demonstrate their UGV at a French military base in front of reps from a dozen NATO countries, from Europe to North America. 

“It was amazing,” Olexiy Severyn, Commercial Director for Ukrainian Unmanned Technologies said in an interview.

“You won’t believe—six or seven countries were asking for details: this is impressive stuff, we need more information, technical specifications, how to buy from you.” 

The Ravlyk (Ukrainian for “snail”) is a big, heavy-duty mech on six wheels, which can be configured for logistics, attack, or signals roles. It can carry and drag over three metric tons and return to base even after getting three of its wheels blown off—each wheel is actuated by a separate motor. It can mount a variety of weapons, from machine guns to rocket launchers.

This combo of capabilities made Ravlyk the darling of Ukraine’s General Intelligence Directorate (GUR). “When they tried it for the first time, they loved it,” Severyn said, showing several videos of GUR forces using it. “It was love at first sight and they're our best customers as of now.”

UGVs existed before the full-scale war but their use exploded in 2026 as a solution to Ukraine’s chronic personnel shortages and battlefield casualties. According to operator interviews, they are quite effective. Over 50,000 missions were completed as of January; the number of units employing them doubled from 117 to 230. Ukraine plans to procure 50,000 units this year.

The Ravlyk completed 1,500 of those missions. Ukrainian Unmanned Technologies recently signed a deal with the Armed Forces of Ukraine for 500 units and are negotiating for 900 more. The company has joined the DOT-Chain marketplace, and is collaborating with a variety of Ukrainian firms like Ukroboronprom, which installed Amulet anti-tank weapons on the Ravlyk’s frame. 

Now, foreigners want in on the action. Haulotte will produce the Ravlyk under license for civilian applications, while KNDS is eyeing a deal that, among other things, may see Western weapons turret-mounted on the Ukrainian UGV. Defense ministries from Spain, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere, are also curious about what this machine can do for them.

Heavy warhorse of UGVs

The unit’s heavy-duty nature predisposes it well towards its most common role: carrying heavy things on its back, and/or towing them behind in a wagon or sled. 

“When we are talking with artillery guys, they would ask how many shells can you deliver, because they didn’t believe in UGVs,” Severyn said. “They say it’s like 45 kilograms for one shell for the 777 artillery piece. We say well, you can place 10 shells on the Ravlyk directly and you can tow 65 behind it.” 

The unit is also roomy enough to evacuate two casualties on its way back to the rear, he said. Some troops say logistics UGVs are far from ideal for medical evacuation, but they serve in a pinch, and are often the most practical option available to warfighters. Severyn showed a video of the Ravlyk evacuating a wounded GUR officer in 2025—the officer survived.

However, Severyn believes that the platform has “huge potential” outside this role, which is already being explored by putting a variety of systems on its back, like turrets for the Browning 50 caliber machine gun, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and anti-drone weapons. 

“We held a number of meetings with colonels all over Ukraine and we are trying to tell them that they should use it in collaboration with infantry.” The robot can distract the enemy, suppress, or draw fire.  

UGVs like the Ravlyk can also mount antennas and signal repeaters for combined operations and UAVs, cameras for reconnaissance, jammers for electronic warfare, or passive radar systems that cannot be tracked by the enemy. 

Most of these addons are made by different companies, requiring close cooperation to harness the strength of both. However, the codification requirements inherent to the partnerships sometimes get unwieldy, which is why Ukrainian Unmanned Technologies is trying to create their own toppings for the UGV. 

Third gen improvements

The third gen model boasts 25% more battery capacity, with a total operating range of 55 kilometers on a single charge—that number drops to 40 when fully loaded. The wheels are better protected, the battery and the processing unit are more widely spaced for survivability, and the front and rear have more armor. The form factor was slightly changed up as well. 

“We received a kind of funny inquiry from our American friends. They said okay, Ravlyk is good stuff. Can it look a bit sexier?” Severyn said. “So the third gen, it looks sleeker and we used this (to install) additional protection.”

The top speed remains capped to 13 kilometers per hour, as faster speeds run into steering issues when operating at a distance. The Ravlyk has two separate remote controls: those meant to be used up close, and ones that use Starlink to control at a distance of kilometers. 

Due to how military procurement works, the Ravlyk doesn’t come with Starlink built in. However, it has a space specifically designed to slot in a Starlink terminal, which the company provides to units free of charge. 

All these solutions come at a price. The Ravlyk costs 2.5 million hryvnias (about $60,000) per unit. Severyn said commanders regularly ask why they should shell out that amount when UGVs that cost 500,000 hryvnias (about $11,000) are on the market—these tend to be smaller platforms. On the other hand, the recent armed forces contracts suggest that attitudes may be shifting. 

Future plans

With mass adoption of UGVs come mass teething troubles, not just of the machines, but of the entire system. Ukraine is scrambling to build training centers, write the doctrine, and create logistics pipelines for spare parts, UGV operators said in prior interviews. The Ravlyk is caught up in this chaos, affecting how quickly units can get replacement batteries, wheels, inner electronics, and so on. 

“All the guys are asking us: please add a second battery into the package,” Severyn said. Swapping batteries takes very little time in the field but “to buy an additional battery, it’s all the circles of hell, 2-3 times harder than just to buy the unit,” because they have to go through multiple layers of military bureaucracy. 

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“We have to replace wheels for free at our own expense, just so units can get them repaired on time,” he added. “In the improper way it takes one week to bring them back to the front line. In the proper way it takes a month or two months.”

To remedy this, the company is going to launch multiple different packages, from bare bones to ones that come with multiple spare parts. They’re also working to certify the battery as a separate piece of tech, to make it easier to buy on the market. 

In the medium term, they are looking to pounce on the foreign interest by launching international sales, while also expanding sales to the Ukrainian military. Severyn says they also want to help create a UGV marketplace, where soldiers or officers can enter the specs they need and get a list of models. 

And eventually, the company hopes that the Ravlyk, forged in the fires of war, can find civilian applications such as fighting fires.

Last August, the 1st Separate Brigade got 45 km of clear signal across forested terrain with just four handheld G1 Pro radios. Since then, these devices, made by Kyiv-based company Himera, have helped many more units fight complex operations in rough terrain blanketed by Russian jamming, object lessons in the power of mesh networks and Ukrainian engineering. 

Himera builds comms systems that Ukrainian special forces and regular troops can rely on when the exquisite systems don't arrive and the cheap ones can't do the job. Foreign buyers are interested because Himera’s radios are built for an electronic war that’s going global. Recently, orders have spiked, co-founder Misha Rudominski said in an interview. 

Mesh network architecture helps signals survive pervasive EW and difficult terrain, while the light, cheap design that’s delivered quickly is attractive to military procurement officers and operators alike. That’s why Himera sees a bright future for themselves and other Ukrainian radio companies, both in the domestic and international market. 

"What's been happening from the beginning of this year is there are a lot of those kinds of 'aha' moments from the military side," Rudominski said. "They tried it. They see the power of its use in their operations... and they say 'okay, great. Now, we want a lot of it.'”

Invisible war

Ukraine is fighting the war on many fronts. One of the toughest is access to equipment, be it vehicles or comms systems. Some units wait months for radios, of which there are roughly two types. The first is potent, secure, expensive, and takes forever to get in large numbers. The second is much cheaper and easier to get but far less reliable. 

Another front is the battle over the electromagnetic spectrum. Ukraine is the most signal- denied battlefield in the world, with Russia doing everything it can to jam defender communications. One of weapons in this fight is the mesh network, which keeps working if any given node goes down.

These are the challenges that Himera has set out to close with its handheld radios and signal repeaters. In doing so, it has become a top player in the country’s market. 

The company works with various National Guard units, Land Forces, Territorial Defense, Special Operations Forces, and the State Security Service. Himera’s tech has been praised by Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov, who said that “very few Ukrainian teams have managed to design, build, and scale a military electronic device into small-series production.”

Himera’s mainline products include the G1 Pro handheld radio, the B1 autonomous repeater, and the R1 IP repeater, which can connect to internet communication, including satellite terminals like Starlink. This architecture enables “very complex operations by connecting very different troops that are currently being deployed in different parts of the front line.”

"The B1 and R1 is is our infrastructure… They extend connectivity as as deep into the enemy lines as needed," Rudominski said. "The B1s are even deployed from drones, basically dropped into advancing positions on our side or the enemy's side where we're planning to be… so our soldiers have the best connectivity possible."

Foreign interest in Ukrainian innovation

As the drone war proliferates beyond Ukraine, so too do many of its challenges: the Ministry of Defense previously said that other countries see Ukraine as a laboratory of how wars will be fought. 

RAND wrote that “Mastery of the electromagnetic spectrum is now essential for digitalised militaries dependent on sensors, satellites, and networked systems to function effectively under fire.” It’s forcing some Westerners to reexamine their tech, tactics, and procurement.

As such, foreign buyers are increasingly interested in this Himera as well, drawn by battle-tested performance, user-friendly operation, small form factor, potent batteries, quick delivery on orders, and competitive prices. 

Rudominski cited an example of a European buyer that was surprised when Himera said it could deliver a sizable order in three weeks. 

“They're like, ‘oh, three weeks? We meant like three to six months.’ And three to six months being for that international customer is a very quick timeline.” Orders can take years to fulfill for some international defense contractors. 

Last year, US firm Reticulate Micro announced that the G1 Pro was available to the US military. The foreign customers also include the defense ministry of an EU country Rudominski did not disclose for security purposes— they like the lighter weight, smaller dimensions and longer battery life of Ukrainian solutions. The drone war forced Ukrainian companies to learn to squeeze every drop of potential from their batteries and lighten the load of other field equipment as much as they could. 

"Our (foreign) competitors' radio can weigh like a kilogram. I guess ours is like 300 grams," he said. "If you go on a three-day mission, you need to take five, six, maybe up to 10 batteries. And if you're a comms person for a squad, you need to do it four times. So now you have a whole backpack of batteries. It becomes impractical very quickly."

Rudominski said that while Ukraine’s military comms companies are still behind their foreign counterparts in some respects, they are on a much steeper growth curve and may even overtake some international companies in the next few years in functionality, scalability, and competitive pricing. 

Himera capabilities

The Himera system uses standard 256-bit encryption, with an option to add another layer from their partner, Canadian company Quantropi. Every repeater and handheld radio (which can also serve as a repeater) work together to create an area-spanning mesh network. 

This is especially helpful for Ukrainian forces fighting in dense forests, urban environments, or uneven terrain that can interfere with signals.

“So our model of the network and our architecture helps operators there conduct their missions much more efficiently because they now… coordinate better in the areas where they couldn’t before,” Rudominski said.

The devices integrate with situational awareness systems like Ukraine’s Combat Vision, Kropyva and Delta, but also ATAK, which is used by NATO countries. They are working on integration with Danish company Systematic Inc’s SitaWare system. This plus friendly force tracking enables more complex operations with multiple units. 

Himera’s devices act both as a source of information and a data transport layer network, able to relay signals between terminals like tablets, laptops, and smartphones used by soldiers, even when WiFi, LTE or satellite communication is unavailable. 

Russian EW is a formidable foe

EW is a big part of Russian doctrine, from strategic jammer Murmansk-BN that reaches across hundreds of kilometers to platforms like the Krasukha-4 broadband jammer, the R-330Zh Zhitel VHF and UHF jammer, Pole-21 GPS suppressor, as well as drone-mounted solutions. 

Russians are also moving towards smaller, less powerful, more numerous and spread-out solutions that can’t be destroyed as easily. Across the front, nearly every vehicle carries mounted jamming systems and infantry are setting up these systems where they can.

Fighting against these overlapping systems is an unending climb of trying to outthink the enemy. As Military Machine wrote: “physics favors the jammer, a jammer close to the drone will always overpower a transmitter kilometers away, because signal strength decreases with the square of the distance.”

Ukrainians tried to solve this in multiple ways: adopting fiber optic drones for close range, AI-enhanced autonomy, and mesh networks. In a prior interview, Mykyta Puz, a technology liaison with the Azov Corps, said that Ukraine needs  “really scalable, robust mesh systems designed for battlefield use.” Himera’s approach aligns with this demand. 

“We figured out that there is no one all-powerful solution. Everything can be jammed, everything can be detected, everything can be intercepted,” Rudominski said.

“It's not about making it impossible. It's about making it very hard and very complicated and very expensive. So your enemy decides to dedicate resources to something else.”

Scaling depends on international supply chains, which are not always reliable and the impact magnifies the more a company grows. But Rudominski said that so far, the company has always been able to deliver orders on time, due to the work of the team. 

As Ukraine fights on and other countries try to build up their militaries in the current geopolitical climate, Rudominski believes that there is ample room for Ukrainian comms companies, including his own, to thrive.

“We build things smartly,” he said. “Ukraine's never asking for the best. Ukraine is asking for what is perfectly fit for this task and then a lot of it.”

Aiming to expand their foothold along Ukraine's northern border and, in the process, tie down Ukrainian brigades that could be useful elsewhere, Russian troops have been trying to cross the Vovcha River, which threads west through the town of Vovchans'k just a few kilometers south of the border in Kharkiv Oblast.

But there's a problem for the Russians. In the 52 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, every single nearby bridge across the Vovcha River has been destroyed by air strikes, shelling or sabotage.

Desperate to get across, the Russians are deploying a bewildering array of improvised bridging vehicles. Desperate to stop them, the Ukrainians are relentlessly hunting those do-it-yourself assault bridges. Usually with drones.

The most recent case of drone-on-bridge action took place on or just before Tuesday, when a drone team from the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine spotted and struck a Russian MT-LB armored tractor wearing what appears to be part of a folding span borrowed from a TMM-3 truck-based bridging system.

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The bridge components of the TMM-3 are fairly abundant in Russian stockpiles, so the Russians have been piling them onto all sorts of vehicles in order to produce DIY assault bridges. The idea, it seems, is for the crew to drive the vehicle straight into the Vovcha River and then bail out, leaving the vehicle in the water as a link in an improvised bridge.

The border guards aren't the only ones hunting these assault bridges. The Ukrainian army's 57th Motorized Brigade has also spotted and droned several assault bridges north of the Vovcha River since this spring, when the Russians stepped up their attempted infiltrations in the area.

Many of the bridging vehicles were based on trucks rather than MT-LBs. Last year, Russian paratroopers created their own DIY bridging vehicle by fitting wooden platforms to BTR-D armored vehicles. These and other improvised assault bridges evoke a class of engineering vehicle from World War II.

During that war, some armies (the British Army, in particular) bolted metal spans to the top of tank chassis and used the resulting "funnies" to rapidly erect bridges across vehicle-halting gaps on the battlefield.

Counterbridge campaigns

The strikes on assault bridges trying to span the Vovcha River haven't prevented the Russians from gaining a foothold on the far bank as far south as central Vovchans'k. But the strikes have complicated and slowed the Russians' effort to expand that bridgehead and infiltrate farther to the south.

In that sense, the drone strikes on the Russian's mobile bridges in the north are a kind of tactical corollary to the Ukrainians' strategic counterbridge campaign in the south. Ukrainian forces are systematically droning and bombing bridges connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to occupied southern Ukraine as well as to southern Russia.

The Ukrainians' aim: to turn Crimea into a hard-to-reach island, transforming it from a Russian bastion to a sinkhole that swallows Russian resources.

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By contrast, the Kharkiv counterbridge effort is a defensive one for Ukrainian forces. From the Russian perspective, the two campaigns have one thing in common. Both place heavy stress on Russian engineering units and their mobile bridges. Not just the metal TMM-3 spans, but also floating metal pontoons that are delivered by truck but maneuvered into place by boats.

The Russians engineers have the same problem along both fronts. That is, their bridges and the vehicles handling them are big fat targets for Ukrainian drones.

Last fall, the Russian Center Group of Forces laid siege to Kostiantynivka, a city with a pre-war population of 67,000 in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.

Eight months later, the city is on the verge of falling to Russian infiltrators. "We are nearing the end of the battle for the city, the fall of which could be staggered until mid-summer," mapper and analyst Clément Molin wrote a week ago.

"This is Russia's first strategic victory of the year," Molin added. And a welcome one in Moscow.

That's because 2026 has been a hard year for Russia. Overall, Russian advances in Ukraine have practically ground to a halt in recent months. Russian forces' daily rate of advance was 13.2 square km per day in 2025, but just 2.9 square km per day in the first four months of 2026, according to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

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Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones and missiles are striking harder and deeper across occupied territories and into Russia itself. In March, for the first time, Ukraine launched more one-way attack drones at Russia and occupied territories (7,500) than Russia launched one-way attack drones at Ukraine (6,500).

"The character of the war is shifting in favor of Ukrainian forces, at least for now," ISW noted.

But that hasn't saved Kostiantynivka, where the Russians have long held a significant manpower advantage, and where the terrain is unforgiving to the defender.

Long siege

In preparation for the coming siege of Kostiantynivka, the Russian air force began bombing the city with thousands of KAB precision glide bombs every month. Russian drones turned the main road into town from the northwest into a kill zone, eventually forcing the Ukrainian garrison to get supplies almost entirely via aerial drones and ground robots.

But troops rotating into and out of positions in Kostiantynivka still had to brave Russian bombs, drones, mines, and artillery. Holding Kostiantynivka isn't as costly for Ukraine as capturing Kostiantynivka is for Russia, but Russia can spare the manpower. Ukraine can't.

As the Ukrainian garrison's supply lines frayed, the Russians closed in on Kostiantynivka through the spring and then, this summer, began infiltrating the city in small teams, traveling on foot in hopes of avoiding Ukrainian air power.

Once the Russians were entrenched in Chervone District in southern Kostiantynivka, the city's fate was all but sealed. "From here, small groups of Russian infiltrators are able to accumulate and spread outwards, deeper into the city," AMK Mapping noted.

In early June, Ukrainian troops began pulling back in order to avoid encirclement. "The city is already treated as lost," some Ukrainian soldiers wrote apparently in early June. Ukrainian forces still control the very northern outskirts of Kostiantynivka, but the southern outskirts are firmly under Russian control, and the central part of the city is a chaotic gray zone.

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Kostiantynivka is, by now, largely devoid of civilians. Its value lies in what it protects. For months after the fall of nearby Myrnohrad and Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka complicated Russian efforts to march on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last big free cities in Donetsk Oblast.

Now the ruined Kostiantynivka no longer fulfills that purpose. But it may not need to. Cities are good for infantry-based defense, but open fields (where there's nowhere to hide) are good for drone-based defenses. Now that Ukraine has pivoted to a drone-centric defensive strategy, some commanders actually prefer to fight out in the open rather than fortifying inside cities.

It's still a long march for Russian troops hoping to lay siege to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk from the south: 16 km as the crow flies. How much Kostiantynivka's fall actually matters in the long term depends on how effectively the Ukrainians can defend those 16 km.

Given the slowdown in Russian advances, friends of a free Ukraine eagerly anticipate the day Russian advances effectively halt. ISW explained it "has long argued that Putin's theory of victory assumes that Russian forces will be able to win an attritional war, provided that Russian forces continue gradual creeping advances indefinitely."

"Ukraine's complete halting of Russian advances would invalidate Putin's theory of victory and impose difficult decisions on the Kremlin," ISW added.

The long battle for Kostiantynivka was an opportunity to stop the Russians cold. But that opportunity is now lost for the Ukrainians. A new opportunity to stop the Russians awaits just north of the city.

Drones have been highly effective in dismantling Russian logistics at middle ranges. But most mid-strike drones have payloads between 5 kg like the Hornet and 75 kg like the Behemot. There are big boys like the FP-2, which can carry a 200 kg warhead over 300 km, but they’re better spent on deeper targets.

Sometimes the mission calls for planting 250 kg of explosives into a hardened target in the near-rear. Drones can wound a fortified bunker or a reinforced command post but it takes a bigger boom to obliterate them. 

This is where glide bombs come in and now Ukraine no longer has to be held back by limited Western supplies. The new Vyrivniuvach (“Equalizer” or “Leveler”) has entered serial production, developer DG Industries told Defense Archives writer Jeff2146 at the Eurosatory 2026 defense expo in France. Ukrainian company BlueBird Tech is working on its own glide bomb. 

Ukraine’s drones and manned airstrikes actually have a symbiotic relationship. Unmanned systems have severely degraded Russian air defenses that threaten warplanes, opening more gaps for them to strike.

“Now that the Russians have significantly reduced the number of S-400 and S-300 systems, and we've acquired systems and units that can detect a missile in advance and promptly command the pilot to perform the appropriate maneuver, the opportunity has arisen to use such systems,” said Kostyantyn Kryvolap, a former aviation test engineer at the Antonov Design Bureau. “And the country has begun to use them. That's the whole idea.”

The bombs should help expand Ukraine's air interdiction campaign by giving them a harder-hitting option, the Institute for the Study of War predicted. It will also give the Russians a taste of their own medicine—they have been dropping thousands of glide bombs per month, wreaking havoc on frontline positions and urban centers alike.

On the other hand, the destruction of Russian command posts, deployment sites, and logistics hubs is pushing them farther and farther into the rear, ironically leaving fewer juicy targets for glide bombs. That is unless the pilots are willing to put themselves in greater risk by flying high or going deeper into enemy territory.

"If you're dropping something at a distance of 35-50 km, you have to search very hard for a suitable target," Kryvolap said. "Right now, the kill zone is getting to be 60 km. Right now, real targets are at least 100 km away."

Leveling the playing field and Russian targets

Russia is infamous for its glide bomb barrages that Ukrainians have struggled to deal with. However, Ukrainian bombers are also putting in the work.  

Just days ago, Ukrainian MiG-29s blasted a base with two French AASM HAMMER glide bombs, demolishing a building reportedly filled with Russian personnel. In April, Ukrainian planes hit a UAV storage site at Donetsk Airport, flying close enough to drop GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs. 

Until recently, Ukraine relied on Western partners for these capabilities, like the HAMMERs or the American JDAM-ER kits that convert dumb bombs into precision guided munitions. Now, Ukraine can make its own kit, compatible with most bombs, at reportedly a third of the JDAM-ER’s $21,000 price tag.

Anton Zemlyanyi, a senior researcher with the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, called it “an extremely important stage in the Ukrainian defense industry—Ukraine is focusing on its own combat needs and independently seeking solutions to problems without relying on military assistance from partners.”

The irony of range

Glide bombs can travel dozens of kilometers, with the HAMMER and the JDAM-ER having reported ranges of over 70 km. DG Industries claims that the Vyrivniuvach can go 130 km, which on paper is a major upgrade if accurate. 

In practice, however, no glide bomb is likely to fly that far in Ukraine. Military analysts put the real maximum between 60 and 90 km and even those are likely to be exceptions rather than the rule. Defense Express estimates the practical range at 40 km. 

To get maximum range on a glide bomb, a pilot has to fly very high, which makes them an easier target for more plentiful Russian aviation or remaining ground-based air defenses. Ukrainian planes frequently fly low to the ground before pulling up sharply to release the payload: what’s called toss bombing in the West and doing a “girka” in Ukraine. 

Alternatively, they can fly closer to their targets, pull a girka, release the bombs, then get out of dodge. Getting close is also risky.  

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Ukraine’s air force is “quite careful about the issue of saving lives and our equipment, saving the lives of our pilots and our equipment,” Kryvolap said. This makes sense, as the air force is quite small compared to Russia’s and every plane, Soviet or Western, is a precious resource that cannot easily be replaced. Ditto for experienced pilots. 

Since the start of the war, the country has lost 116 aircraft, according to the Oryx/Valka Online OSINT loss tracker. 

Erosion of Russian air defenses

Still, the air force may have the cause to be more daring for some missions, given the sorry state of Russian air defense. 

From June 2025 to early March, Ukraine conducted 492 strikes against air defense infrastructure and 433 more against anti-access/area denial assets, an analysis by Tochnyi.info reported. 

They haven’t slowed down since. Between March and May, Ukraine’s General Staff reported 24 radar systems damaged in Crimea alone. In April, 25 air defenses were hit, including radars, Tor, Buk, Osa, and Pantsir systems, as well as pieces of S-400 and S-300V systems. 

Meanwhile, after the latest mass strike on Moscow, Russia is setting up S-300 and S-400 installations in the capital, the Moscow Times reported. This means that fewer of these systems will be available to protect the sky in occupied territories.

Callsign Churchill, a company commander with the 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment “Raid” told Euromaidan Press that in some areas, the Russians are “losing the concept of layered air defense” as layers get picked off, creating blind spots. This makes the sky a little less deadly for planes. 

The biggest threats to aircraft are S-400 air defense systems, which have reported ranges up to 400 km, though they are more likely to engage aircraft at up to 200 km, Kryvolap said. S-300s come in all kinds of variants and upgrades, but many can also threaten aircraft at far greater ranges than any glide bomb. 

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The relative prevalence of these systems earlier during the war made the Ukrainian air force more reluctant to deploy aircraft on bombing missions where they could be shot down. 

However, Ukrainian forces have been continually destroying these systems. There are dozens of reports on successful strikes on S-400 and S-300 missile systems and their radar. 

This dynamic is an enabler for the use of Ukrainian glide bombs, experts said.  

“Ukraine actively uses such weapons to strike enemy ground targets, especially given the lower conditions and level of countermeasures from the Russians,” Zemlyanyi said.

However, he cautioned not to overstate this trend. Russia has aviation of its own. “In conditions when both sides have operational front-line fighter aircraft… the use of aircraft for bombing is significantly complicated.”

Does Ukraine have enough planes to make it count?

Glide bombs are not just limited by Russian air defenses and fighters but by the number of aircraft Ukraine has, which is a fraction of Moscow’s. Based on open-source information, Ukraine’s air forces are focused on hitting Russian ground targets, though the jets dropping the bombs have to be screened from Russian aircraft by their fellow fliers. 

The number of military jets Ukraine has is classified. TWZ reported that Kyiv entered the full-scale war with around 50 of its most prolific Soviet jet, the MiG-29 and 36 have been destroyed as of the start of June, according to Oryx.

Supplies were topped up by allies, with 14 transfers from Poland and 13 from Slovakia, though a portion of the above were to be used for parts. MiG-29s with Azerbaijani camo have been observed flying in Ukraine, though the number of Azerbaijani jets has not been reported.

Other planes that can use homegrown glide bombs include Su-24s and Su-27s. It’s not clear how many Ukraine has now, but Oryx confirmed 21 losses for Su-24Ms and 20 Su-27s. Su-27s are critically endangered as no ally can replace them. 

What allies can do is give Ukraine more Western jets. After four recorded combat losses, Ukraine reportedly has up to 39 foreign F-16s in service, out of a total of 79 pledged. France transferred a handful of Mirage fighters to Ukraine as well. Both F-16s and Mirages were seen conducting what look like air-to-ground operations.  

Meanwhile, Sweden announced the transfer of 16 Gripen JAS 39C/D by 2027 and the sale of 22 Gripen JAS 39E by 2030.

The Vyrivniuvach can reportedly be adapted to Western planes, though this will require additional certification. “So there should be no problems with the carriers of this bomb,” Zemlyanyi said.

The Ukrainian air force is borrowing a key tactic from the Russian air force. A tactic that could become a lot more effective once the Ukrainian air arm begins deploying its new Swedish-made Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighters.

Ukrainian warplanes are now attacking in pairs, according to the Telegram channel The Commander Speaks, which appears to have close ties to the Russian air force.

One of the jets will fly low with a payload of precision glide bombs, aiming to bombard Russian forces in or near the gray zone. A second jet will fly nearby, but higher. Its job is to protect the bomber by flinging an air-to-air missile at any Russian jet that tries to intervene in the bombing.

"The tactics remain the same," The Commander Speaks wrote. "A single aircraft approaches aggressively, pulls up into a climb and releases its payload." This low-to-high flight profile is typical of both Russian and Ukrainian jets trying to avoid enemy air defenses during ingress while still maximizing the kinetic energy, and thus range and impact, of their satellite-guided glide bombs at the moment of release.

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Contents

• Ukraine will receive “long arm” against Russian aircraft battering front positions with glide bombs
  1. Best escort
     • Sweden announced transfer of 16 Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine by 2030
     • The Swedish jets Ukraine could get were built to survive Russia—and that’s the point

Ukraine will receive “long arm” against Russian aircraft battering front positions with glide bombs

When a low-flying plane suddenly climbs higher, it's easier to detect and intercept. That's when the enemy's defensive air patrols might open fire at the climbing plane.

But the Ukrainians keep a surprise at the ready: "a second aircraft—usually a [Lockheed Martin] F-16—staying at a distance," according to The Commander Speaks. The second plane will fire an air-to-air missile, an AIM-120 in the case of the American-designed F-16.

The missile may not shoot down the incoming Russian Sukhoi Su-35 or Su-30, but it might force the Russian plane to take evasive action and break off its attempted interception of the Ukrainian jet that just lobbed its glide bombs.

Best escort

With its modern radar, effective electronic warfare equipment, and AIM-120 missiles ranging from around 75 km in older versions to as much as 160 km in the newer AIM-120C-8 Ukraine now fields, the F-16 is the best Ukrainian type for flying top cover. But it's not the only type. The Commander Speaks claimed the Ukrainians will mix and match other warplane types in their low-high pairings, including a Sukhoi Su-27 covering a Mikoyan MiG-29 with an old Soviet R-27 missile, or even an Su-27 covering an Su-27 with an R-27.

The evading Russian plane might get off a hasty shot with an R-37 or R-77 missile, but the Ukrainians are usually already speeding away, and tracking the Russian missile the whole time. The Ukrainians "have decent situational awareness," The Commander Speaks explained. "As soon as our fighters launch, they immediately abort their mission and flee the battlefield."

If the tactic sounds familiar, it's because it's been in the Russian manual since early in Russia's wider war on Ukraine. A Sukhoi Su-30 or Sukhoi Su-34 will lob KAB glide bombs while an Su-35 or Su-30 flies top cover.

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Sweden announced transfer of 16 Gripen fighter jets to Ukraine by 2030

It's that tactic that helps the Russians pummel the Ukrainian side of the gray zone with thousands of KABs every month. Now that the Ukrainians are getting more glide bombs of their own, including American, French, and (soon) Ukrainian models, they're flying more glide bombing sorties. And protecting them the same way the Russians do.

The Russian air force still has more bombs and more planes, so there isn't yet aerial parity over the gray zone. But that could change as the Ukrainian air force prepares to take delivery of the first 16 Gripens from Sweden.

One of the Gripen's greatest assets is its Meteor air-to-air missile, which thanks to its ramjet propulsion ranges as far as 200 km. The Meteor outdistances the R-27, edges out the newest AIM-120, and matches the R-77. It still falls short of the 300-km R-37, but that's still a major improvement for the Ukrainian air force as it fights to meet the Russian air force bomb for bomb, missile for missile.

Once Gripens are escorting the glide bombers, the missiles will be coming at the Russians from farther away.

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The Swedish jets Ukraine could get were built to survive Russia—and that’s the point