Ukraine

Aug. 24 (UPI) — On his first visit to Ukraine as British Prime Minister Andy Burnham promised Monday to share Anglo-French long-range cruise missile technology with Kyiv in its fight with Russia, saying Britain would stand with Ukraine until there was “a just and lasting peace.”

Burnham said European defense contractor MBDA would be authorized to declassify blueprints for the parts of the Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles that are made by Britain to help Ukraine build its own version of the weapon that Britain has for the past three years been giving to Kyiv.

The Storm Shadow enables Ukrainian forces to hit targets 150 miles inside Russia.

Burnham said Britain would join forces with France to build production plants in Ukraine following a similar pledge of help by President Emmanuel Macron, who also told Zelensky at the weekend that France would supply Kyiv with more anti-missile interceptors in the wake of a series of deadly ballistic missile strikes.

“On Ukraine’s 35th anniversary of independence, the Ukrainian people should be in no doubt: the U.K. is behind you today and for as long as it takes. I am proud of the contribution our country has made to Ukraine and I want the Ukrainian people to hear it directly from me that our support will not waver. After all, Ukraine’s security is our security,” Burnham said in a statement issued Sunday night.

“The friendship between our two countries will long outlast Russia’s illegal war. In both the fight and in the rebuilding to come, we will stand with Ukraine and deliver opportunities for people across both our countries. Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve. We will not back down until there is a just and lasting peace,” said Burnham.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov likened the missile plan to pouring gasoline on relations with Russia and warned Britain over “participating in this war” on Ukraine’s side, saying that the Russian military was actively collecting data to uncover and destroy any missile production sites.

“Britain is methodically and regularly adding fuel to the fire and methodically and regularly plotting to prevent any progress in the peace process,” said Peskov.

Burnham’s high-profile, public backing for Zelensky came as he faces challenges both from nightly Russian ballistic missile strikes and to his authority, amid calls for elections which have been suspended for more than four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

As well joining Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for Independence Day celebrations in Kyiv, Burnham was also scheduled to chair a meeting of the U.K.-France-led Coalition of the Willing for talks on providing more help to Ukraine.

Established in 2025, the focus of the 34 country plus Ukraine partnership is to provide security guarantees in the event a cease-fire agreement is reached, including providing a multinational force to support and monitor it from day 1, though not necessarily in the format of a traditional peace-keeping force.

The stand by Burnham, coincided with a similar pledge from from Brussels, backed up by a multi-billion dollar package of fresh European Union military aid.

“On Ukraine’s Independence Day, we show our unfaltering support. Today, we approved $7.1 billion for the air and missile defense systems, missiles, ammunition and radars that Ukraine urgently needs. Europe stands with you today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a post on X.

The package is in addition to $18.7 billion already approved by the 27-country bloc, $9.7 billion of which has already been provided to Kyiv.

Aug. 23 (UPI) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday rejected calls for wartime elections, saying the move would “destroy the country.”

Under martial law, elections have been suspended since Russia invaded the country in 2022.

Last week, ousted Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called on the president, whose five-year term ended in 2024, to allow Ukrainians to vote again.

Responding to Fedorov for the first time, Zelenky said such a move would split the country.

“I believe that if we want to destroy the country, then during such a war we can move in the selection of elections,” Zelensky told reporters on Saturday.

“I believe that during such a war, elections in general are big risks,” the president added. “Elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine.”

Zelensky said he would consider fresh elections under “specific conditions,” the Guardian reported.

Those conditions include the “participation of the military, in frontline territories, abroad, where millions of our citizens have gone, fleeing the war,” the president said.

Fedorov’s removal as defense minister in July sparked protests across Ukraine. On Tuesday, he said democracy was not a “peacetime luxury.”

“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said. “We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state.

“Therefore, we must find a legal, safe, and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to restore a full democratic process even amidst a prolonged war.”

Responding to Zelensky’s comments on Sunday, Fedorov told the BBC, “Democracy should not be the hostage of Putin.”

Zelensky last discussed open elections in December, after U.S. President Donald Trump accused him of using the war as an excuse to stay in power.

Back then, the Ukrainian president said he would hold elections so long as he could secure help from the United States and other allies to keep citizens safe when they go out to vote.

In early August, a Pentagon official stood in front of reporters and conceded something the department almost never says out loud: the world’s best-funded military cannot out-produce a country under invasion. Travis Metz, deputy director of the Defense Innovation Unit, put a number on it. Ukraine will manufacture six to seven million small first-person-view attack drones this year — roughly 500,000 a month, built in garages, repurposed furniture factories and basements within range of Russian glide bombs. The Pentagon’s own flagship drone program, a $1.1 billion initiative branded Drone Dominance, will have ordered fewer than 200,000 drones, cumulatively, by February 2027. Metz’s response was not defensive. It was aspirational: “I see no reason why we shouldn’t… be the world champions of this as well.” The gap he was describing is not a technology gap. It is a speed gap, and speed is the one metric wartime industry cannot fake.

The instinct is to read this as a story about Ukrainian ingenuity, and it is one. But it is also the epilogue to a specific American failure. In 2023 the Pentagon launched Replicator, a program to field “multiple thousands” of autonomous systems within 24 months to counter China. By its August 2025 deadline it had delivered “hundreds,” not thousands, after burning through roughly $1 billion — undone by drones that were unfinished at selection, software that could not command large numbers of different systems at once, and a Switchblade loitering munition priced above $100,000 a unit. Washington’s answer was not to slow down and fix the model; it was to bring in the Department of Government Efficiency to override procurement rules and reclassify small drones as disposable supplies rather than regulated weapons systems. Meanwhile, Russia’s own Shahed and decoy drone output is reportedly climbing toward several hundred, and by some Ukrainian estimates up to a thousand, units a day. The war that forced Ukraine to mass-produce cheap drones is the same war exposing how slowly America still moves.

Why the gap isn’t about money

Start with unit economics, because they explain most of the gap. A Ukrainian FPV drone can be built for as little as $300 to $500 — an airframe, a camera, a battery and a warhead, assembled by hand and flown once. The Pentagon’s comparable systems have historically cost orders of magnitude more, not because the components are better but because they were designed inside an acquisition culture built for exquisite, low-volume platforms like fighter jets, where every part is sourced, tested and certified over years. Layer onto that a July 2026 rule requiring a “wholly domestic” supply chain — no Chinese-made motors, no Chinese battery packs — and the honest tension becomes visible: the policy meant to make American drone production more secure is, in the near term, also what makes it slower and more expensive to scale. Metz’s own explanation was blunt: it is “much harder to get from zero to 200,000” than to expand an existing line. Ukraine skipped that problem by never centralizing production in the first place — thousands of small, dispersed workshops that are individually replaceable and collectively enormous.

The deeper obstacle is not money but structure. Replicator had no dedicated budget line, was bounced between the Defense Innovation Unit and a newly created Defense Autonomous Warfare Group under Special Operations Command, and repeatedly selected systems that existed as concepts rather than finished products, in a rush to hit an artificial 24-month deadline. Congress, by its own research service’s account, has struggled to get basic cost and capability data out of the program. This is what forced DOGE’s intervention: not a shortage of appropriated dollars, but a procurement system engineered for careful, low-volume exquisiteness trying to behave like a wartime factory floor, and failing at both.

The strongest objection to treating this as a straightforward American failure is that the comparison is not apples to apples. Ukraine’s FPVs are disposable, short-range and built for a static front line; American planners are chasing autonomy, jamming resistance and long-range swarm coordination for a Pacific theatre defined by vast distances rather than trench lines, and that ambition costs more and takes longer to get right. That is a fair distinction — but it does not rescue the record. Years and a billion dollars into that more ambitious bet, the Pentagon still lacks software able to command mixed fleets of different drones, while Ukrainian manufacturers are already fielding AI-assisted terminal guidance on sub-$500 airframes, refined through thousands of real combat sorties a month. The ambition gap did not produce a capability lead. It produced the same failure as the cost gap: exquisite requirements colliding with a timeline the requirements were never built to meet.

Which is why the Pentagon’s actual fix looks nothing like a bigger budget. Six Ukrainian manufacturers, including F-Drones and General Cherry, are now required to form joint ventures with American companies — near Toledo, Ohio, and in New Hampshire — as a condition of future Pentagon orders. Washington is not just buying drones. It is importing the production model, and with it the tacit admission that the expertise now runs the other way.

Three ways this goes

What happens next depends on whether the joint-venture model actually transplants Ukraine’s manufacturing tempo onto US soil, or just its branding.

Base case (roughly 50 percent probability). The Ohio and New Hampshire joint ventures scale gradually. By 2027–28, US-based output climbs into the low hundreds of thousands annually — a real improvement, but still an order of magnitude below Ukraine’s current pace, held back by the domestic-sourcing rule’s cost premium. The program becomes a credible proof of concept for a future Indo-Pacific contingency rather than a fix for any current shortfall, and “Drone Dominance” quietly redefines success downward to match what it can actually deliver.

Downside case. The DOGE-driven bypass of standard testing repeats Replicator’s failure mode at greater scale: units purchased without adequate vetting turn out unreliable in the field, a GAO or inspector-general report documents it, and Congress reimposes the very procurement safeguards that were just stripped away. Combined with a Chinese-component ban that keeps unit costs well above Ukrainian levels, US output stalls again, and the gap that Metz conceded in August widens rather than closes by the time it next matters.

Upside case. The joint-venture model works as intended — not just as a purchasing arrangement but as a transplant of Ukrainian manufacturing culture, its dispersed micro-factories, rapid iteration and tolerance for combat-tested imperfection, into the American industrial base. That model, proven on drones, becomes the template for how Washington arms the next partner already fighting a war, whether Taiwan or a Baltic state: not a slow pipeline of finished stockpiles shipped from the continental United States, but manufacturing capability transplanted onto the partner’s own soil, and now, in this instance, onto America’s.

The takeaway

So: what does the mismatch reveal? Not that Ukraine builds better drones — the Pentagon never disputed that its own designs, on paper, are more capable. It reveals that capability on paper is not the same as capability in time, and that the American defense-industrial base, even backed by an executive order, a billion-dollar program and a DOGE override of its own rules, still cannot mobilize at wartime tempo on its own. The fix Washington has actually reached for is not more money. It is outsourcing the missing ingredient — speed — to the one partner that has been forced to master it under fire. That is the real admission, and it may be the more durable one: the next time the United States arms a country fighting a live war, it may look less like supplying an ally and more like apprenticing to one.

Watch for: whether the Ohio and New Hampshire joint-venture lines are shipping US-assembled drones at anything close to Ukrainian unit costs by the next Gauntlet test cycle at Fort Carson. If the “wholly domestic” sourcing rule keeps American-made units several multiples more expensive than their Ukrainian counterparts, the joint ventures will have transferred the branding of Ukraine’s drone war without transferring its speed.

Ukrainians have observed a national holiday meant to instil patriotism during the fifth year of their war against Russia.

On Ukrainian National Flag Day on Sunday, participants raised the flag, observed a minute of silence for those killed in the war, sang the Ukrainian national anthem and listened to patriotic and folk songs performed by a military orchestra.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended ceremonies in the capital, Kyiv.

Addressing military personnel, Zelenskyy said the flag “symbolises what is most precious” to the thousands of soldiers defending “our entire Ukraine”.

Ukraine’s National Flag Day was established as a national holiday on August 23, 2004, one day before its Independence Day.

In another effort to advance robotic warfare, Ukraine is working to turn Soviet-era BRDM-2 armored reconnaissance vehicles into remotely controlled systems. The move comes as uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) are playing an increasing role on both sides of the conflict as movement along the front lines has been highly contested by the ubiquity of aerial drones.

This is one of the latest efforts by the Central Innovation Activities Directorate of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to help provide weaponry that will keep troops out of harm’s way, the head of that unit told the Ukrainian Ukrinform news outlet on Friday. Ukraine is using UGVs mainly for logistics and casualty evacuation, but they are also increasingly engaging in ground combat as well air defense.

Col. Vladyslav Voloshyn said work is currently underway “to enable remote control of the vehicle from a distance of up to 1,000 km. In addition, the BRDM-2 is planned to be fitted with a powerful foreign-made diesel engine, with General Motors and Mercedes engines among those being considered, replacing the Soviet-made GAZ gasoline engine. An automatic transmission is also planned.”

“The platform will have expanded capabilities for integrating a remotely controlled combat module equipped with an automatic weapon of at least 12.7 mm caliber,” Voloshyn explained. “This is expected to enhance the capabilities of Ukrainian units and their effectiveness in carrying out combat missions while helping preserve the lives of service members.”

The directorate is also installing additional mine protection for the vehicle’s hull bottom, tubeless high-mobility tires, a backup remote-control system inside the hull, and anti-fragmentation protection, the colonel added. Equipped this way, the vehicles would likely be used to assault front line Russian positions where troops can’t go on foot or as a remote option to provide fire control and support Ukraine’s often porous front line defenses. Uncrewed ground vehicles have also been used heavily in medical evacuations and general logistics to the front lines.

Unlike having to build a totally new vehicle, this project aims to take advantage of the large supply of BRDM-2s Ukraine has in storage, Voloshyn added.

Ukrainian BRDM-2 Armored Vehicle Conducts Indirect Fire #warinukraine

The vehicles will be equipped with day/night cameras to assist with guidance and will be remotely controlled from beyond line-of-sight. A vehicle this size would be able to more easily accommodate robust satellite links for that kind of operation. Beyond these features, the colonel provided few details about how the vehicles would be operated.

The head of Ukraine’s Brave1 defense technology hub previously provided some insights about how this works for purpose-built UGVs.

“I can tell you that combat UGVs without artificial intelligence do not work at appropriate effectiveness,” Brave1 CEO Andrii Hrytseniuk told us in May in a discussion about Ukraine’s burgeoning UGV industry. “All combat turrets that we are using have elements of artificial intelligence, and it allows them to be as effective as they are.”

The UGVs use machine vision for “object recognition, identification, classification, tracking and providing recommendations for the operator on what to do,” he added.

These systems communicate through Ukraine’s Delta command and control system, the Brave1 CEO noted.

Without the Delta system, “all these advanced technologies on the battlefield will not be working,” Hrytseniuk suggested. “The Delta command and control system, which is number one in the world, is absolutely crucial. And this is for all our drones, multi-domain operations, everything.”

War in Ukraine: An advanced digital map. The Delta system #shorts #warinukraine #united24media

The Ukrainian company ArmSpetsTekhnolohiya unveiled the BRDM-2M in June during the Defense Builder Accelerator Demo Day. Now the directorate is preparing this system for deployment to the front lines, Voloshyn stated without providing timelines. If it does turn out to be a viable option, it will join tens of thousands of other Ukrainian UGVs on the battlefield.

The Latest

On the battlefield, both sides are making small advances, however, the front lines are largely static. Here are some key takeaways from the latest Institute for the Study of War analysis. 

• Sumy: Russian forces recently advanced in northern Sumy Oblast. 

• Kharkiv: Russian forces continued offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast on August 19 and 20 but did not advance as Ukrainian forces counterattacked. However, Russian forces are reportedly intensifying strikes in the Kupyansk direction, likely in preparation for future ground attacks.

• Donetsk: Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kostyantynivka-Druzhkivka tactical area on August 19 and 20 but did not make confirmed advances. Ukrainian forces recently advanced south of Dobropillya while Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Pokrovsk.

• Zaporizhzhia: Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Hulyaipole direction and western Zaporizhzhia Oblast on August 19 and 20 but did not advance.

• Kherson: Neither Russian nor Ukrainian sources reported ground activity in the Kherson direction on August 20.

In an update to a story we reported earlier this month, North Korea is reportedly sending KN-30 missiles, also known as the Hwasong-11C, to Russia.

“Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) confirmed on August 20 that North Korea transferred around 50 KN-23, KN-24, and KN-30 (Hwasong-11C) ballistic missiles to Russia as of July 2026,” the Institute for the Study of War reported on Thursday, citing Ukrainian media.

The KN-30 is an enlarged derivative of the original Hwasong-11 and designed to carry larger warheads. North Korea has previously said it has tested subvariants of the Da/C type with 2.5-ton and 4.5-ton conventional high-explosive warheads, and that it can also be fitted with a nuclear warhead.

ISW says Russia deployed six KN-30 heavy North Korean missile launchers near Ukraine’s border, enough for up to 120 launches. From Voronezh region, they could potentially reach Kyiv and the Sumy, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.… pic.twitter.com/im4b3bRWPn

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) August 21, 2026

North Korea has also sent a new wave of about 8,500 North Korean troops to Russia, CNN reported. This includes “a drone unit that could attack targets inside Ukraine,” the network stated, citing Major General Vadym Skibitskyi, Deputy Head of Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (GUR).

Thousands of North Korean engineers and bomb disposal experts are mostly dispersed across Kursk Oblast, Skibitskyi stated. The North Korean forces deployed in Russia also include 400 drone operators. Many gained previous experience fighting against Ukraine. Their drones are likely to be used both for reconnaissance and attacks on Ukraine, CNN noted.

Around 25,000 North Koreans have so far either been part of the forces deployed in Russia or passed through the Russian armed forces, the GUR leader added. He said that Russia could request up to 50,000 more troops during a meeting between Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in September.

BREAKING:

North Korea has deployed 8,500 more troops to Russia, including 400 drone operators, according to Ukrainian intelligence.

The drone unit is expected to conduct reconnaissance and strikes against targets in Ukraine, while 1,000 engineers and sappers will reinforce… pic.twitter.com/qr2qlsvLlc

— Current Report (@Currentreport1) August 21, 2026

Ukrainian officials have made it clear that they cannot defend against Russian ballistic missiles because they are out of Patriot missile interceptors. In the latest bid to offset that and hit missiles before they can be launched, Ukraine is seeking help from Elon Musk, the Financial Times reported.

“Ukraine is seeking approval to use Starlink-equipped drones against ballistic missile launchers up to 200km inside Russia,” the publication reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Such a move, if approved, would provide Ukrainian drones with beyond line-of-sight connectivity and resistance to jamming, increasing their ability to strike deeper into Russia against dynamic targets, giving them the ability to hunt for missiles deep inside Russia and strike them when they are found. This use of Starlink helped Ukraine with its mid-range strikes against Russian logistics.

The introduction of Starlink to the battlefield in Ukraine has revolutionized how war is waged, giving users high bandwidth, relatively secure communications basically anywhere, all in a small, off-the-shelf package. This has impacted everything from high-level command and control, to basic communications and data exchange between troops across the entire battlespace. The antennas have also been reduced in size enough so that they can now fit onto relatively small one way-attack drones.

There is a major catch, however, in any bid to use Starlink in offensive weapons beyond how it is currently employed. While he wouldn’t sign off on similar requests in the past, Musk is now allowing Ukraine to use Starlink to hit targets deep behind enemy lines and, apparently, ships in the the Sea of Azov as well, though we don’t know for sure.

Musk would need to sign off on the kinds of strikes deep into Russia that Ukraine is currently seeking. While his Starlink service is helping Ukraine now, he also shut it off earlier in the war during Ukrainian attacks on Crimea, fearing there could be a nuclear response from Moscow.

Complicating matters, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently fired defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who was Ukraine’s most direct connection to Musk.

TWZ cannot independently confirm FT’s reporting. We’ve reached out to SpaceX, Musk’s company providing Starlink service, for clarification.

Russia attacked a shopping mall in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih. The attack killed at least 14 and wounded more than 100 others, the Ukrainian president stated on X.

A rescue operation is currently underway in Kryvyi Rih following a strike on a shopping mall. There are many casualties. As of now, 14 people have been reported killed. My condolences to their families and loved ones. More than 100 people have been injured, among them 11… pic.twitter.com/gX2kL1LZnd

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 21, 2026

“The attack drones struck in two waves – half an hour after the first hit and the fire, there was a second strike targeting the emergency responders,” Zelensky stated on earlier on X. “Attacks like these are nothing less than terrorist acts. And the world must respond to them accordingly – with real pressure on the aggressor. For peace to be possible, Russia must face real accountability.”

This Friday afternoon, Russian forces bombed a busy shopping mall in the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih.

The initial drone strike and a follow-up double tap targeting first responders killed at least 14 Ukrainians and wounded over 100, including 11 children. pic.twitter.com/apT6hFHMUV

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) August 21, 2026

Russia also struck the Tabaky crossing at the Ukraine-Moldova border.

“The attack damaged buildings and structures at the crossing, and fires broke out at the site,” according to Ukrainian border guards. “Traffic through the Tabaky crossing is currently suspended. Vehicles are being redirected to other border crossing points.”

Last night, Russian forces carried out drone strikes on the “Tabaky” international border crossing linking Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast with Moldova.

As a result of the attack, the buildings and structures of the checkpoint were damaged. The traffic through the checkpoint has been… pic.twitter.com/BBBMO6HFBG

— Status-6 (War & Military News) (@Archer83Able) August 21, 2026

For its part, Ukraine is continuing its long-range strike campaign against Russian energy and military targets. This campaign has severely crippled Russia’s oil infrastructure in particular, causing widespread domestic gasoline shortages and a drastic reduction in oil exports.

“Last night, our deep strikes hit an oil refinery in Perm, more than 1,600 kilometers from the border, and the Marinovka military air base in the Volgograd region,” Zelensky claimed. “There are also results in the Black Sea.”

“We also have confirmed results from previous strikes: a Russian Su-34 aircraft was damaged at the Akhtubinsk air base, about 600 kilometers from the front line,” the Ukrainian leader added. “And in Primorsko-Akhtarsk, nearly 180 kilometers away, a facility used for storing, preparing, and launching attack drones that the Russians use to strike our people was hit.”

TWZ cannot independently verify these claims.

We continue, through our long-range sanctions, to bring the consequences of the war back to where it came from.

Last night, our deep strikes hit an oil refinery in Perm, more than 1,600 kilometers from the border, and the Marinovka military air base in the Volgograd region.… pic.twitter.com/EhQ518kUZp

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 21, 2026

Ukraine’s campaign against Russian air defenses continues as well.

A Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile system (SAM) was located and destroyed, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry (MoD) claimed on X.

Russian air defense keeps going up in flames.

The 15th Brigade “Black Forest” found and destroyed an S-300 transporter-loader loaded with missiles. The missiles detonated, completely burning out the launcher. pic.twitter.com/TQl3t8BsYl

— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) August 21, 2026

Video emerged on social media showing a Ukrainian MiG-29 chasing a Russian Shahed drone, which eventually crashed apparently without being fired on. Based on the quality of the video and the distance from which it was shot, it is hard to say exactly what caused the drone to crash.

Russia has introduced a new method of attack. It involves using a drone that lies in wait until a microphone picks up the sound of a passing vehicle and activates the weapon.

Ukraine’s mid-range strike drone campaign against Russian logistics, especially fuel trucks, has relied heavily on AI for terminal guidance and target recognition. Now Russia is supposedly testing a new method of trying to defend against those strikes.

Russian forces have reportedly fitted a UAZ-452 “Bukhanka” vehicle with mirrored panels as a potential countermeasure against drones using optical or AI-assisted guidance.

The improvised modification, which makes the van look like a rolling disco, appears intended to interfere with the drone’s ability to visually identify and track the vehicle by altering its appearance and creating reflections. However, whether this works is not known.

Russian forces have reportedly fitted a UAZ-452 “Bukhanka” vehicle with mirrored panels as a potential countermeasure against drones using optical or AI-assisted guidance.

The improvised modification appears intended to interfere with the drone’s ability to visually identify and… pic.twitter.com/hbAafR5ZJb

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) August 14, 2026

Earlier in this piece, we touched on Ukraine’s Delta battle management system. It turns out the country’s SBU state security service arrested a commander of a National Guard special purpose group for giving Russia access to his Delta account in return for $1,000 in cryptocurrency, a serious security breach.

The SBU arrested an officer who was serving as a commander of a special purpose group in Ukraine’s National Guard for serving as an agent of Russia’s GRU since July. According to law enforcement, for $1,000 in cryptocurrency, he gave the GRU access to his personal account on… pic.twitter.com/YJkhykn234

— Rob Lee (@RALee85) August 21, 2026

That’s it for now. We’ll update this again at a later date.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

Dramatic footage verified by the BBC shows the second drone hitting the already burning shopping centre in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia’s military has not commented.

Another 130 people – including 23 children – were injured in the attack on city’s biggest mall. More people are also reported to be trapped in the rubble.

Early on Saturday Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said the death toll had reached 16 after another body was retrieved from the rubble.

There are still nine people – including two children – reportedly missing in the shopping centre, Hanzha said on Telegram.

Earlier on Friday, Hanzha said that of the 130 people injured, 29 were in a serious condition. There are fears the death toll could rise further.

Rescue teams from four other Ukrainian regions are being urgently deployed to help search for survivors.

Kryvyi Rih Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul said the Russian drones were flying at “extremely low altitudes”, describing the attackers as “animals”.

“There are missing people who are not responding to calls,” the mayor added.

In Kyiv, the city’s military administration said a fire had broke out in a warehouse in the capital’s Darnytskyi district early on Saturday.

“According to preliminary information, unfortunately, there is one person dead and several injured,” the administration said on Telegram.

In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, a Russian drone strike had killed at least one man and injured four people, according to Ivan Fedorov, the head of the regional military administration.

Russian ballistic missile attacks have begun to cause record civilian deaths in Ukrainian cities without any Patriot interceptors to stop them, but Ukraine’s long-range strikes have destroyed Russian fuel supplies.

With the Russian economy struggling, a top expert warned that social unrest could unfold in a matter of time – and consequently lost his job.

On Tuesday, Russian missiles killed at least 10 people in Pechenihy, a town 40km (25 miles) east of Ukraine’s northern city of Kharkiv. On Thursday, they killed 15 people in Kyiv, three in the western city of Zhytomyr and injured 40 at a border crossing between Odesa and Moldova.

Russia said it was targeting weapons manufacturing sites in Kyiv, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces struck 30 residential buildings, a school and a children’s hospital.

The United Nations said Russia killed a record 437 people in July and injured 2,610, surpassing its previous record in June by 30 percent.

Civilian casualties have continued in August, because Ukraine has run out of Patriot interceptors and has been unable to stop incoming ballistic missile attacks since the beginning of the month.

As Zelenskyy pointed out, Ukraine’s interception rate of cruise missiles and drones is still in the 90-percent range. But Russia is doubling down on the use of ballistic missiles and has brought in an additional 50 North Korean weapons, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.

Ukraine strikes back

Since June 25, Ukraine has launched a campaign of mid-range strikes to disrupt Russian logistics and has harassed fuel and ammunition supplies so effectively that it has made 233sq km (90 square miles) of territorial gains this year.

By August 16, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces announced it had put 228 supply ships out of action in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, as well as destroying 243 power stations, electricity substations and gas distribution nodes in Crimea.

They have also been striking relay antennas used to guide Russian drones and radar stations that detect Ukrainian counterstrikes. On August 20, Ukraine struck drone launch sites in Donetsk City and Primorsko-Akhtarsk on the Sea of Azov, as well as a fuel terminal in the Kerch Strait used to supply Crimea.

Ukraine’s long-range strikes have served a different purpose – to undermine the Russian economy’s ability to fund its war.

On August 15, Ukraine managed to fly two of its Flamingo cruise missiles into the Progress Rocket and Space Centre, 800km (500 miles) east of Moscow, despite Russia’s use of four A-50 early warning aircraft and its reported downing of 822 Ukrainian drones that day.

Ukraine said it hit an engine assembly workshop for Soyuz rockets, causing a fire covering half a hectare.

Russia is using Soyuz to launch satellites for its Rassvet constellation to replace dependence on the US Starlink system, after Ukraine managed to cut Russian access to Starlink on February 1 . Russia needs satellites to increase the speed and precision of its counter-battery fire on Ukrainian positions. Its loss of that capacity has been partly responsible for Ukrainian gains this year.

“One Soyuz-2.1b launch vehicle can put 20 satellites into orbit,” said Ukrainian electronics expert Serhiy Beskrestnov. “To create a basic satellite constellation in orbit, Russia needs to carry out 12-15 launches.”

The following day, Ukraine set ablaze a 25-hectare warehouse belonging to the Wildberries online retail chain, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, and said it had destroyed seven out of Wildberries’ ten largest logistical hubs.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on July 28 that the Kremlin was monitoring the damage to Wildberries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin implied on Thursday that he might provide government funds for Wildberries to rebuild, saying “logistics and warehousing capacity certainly needs to be restored, including with government support”.

Ukraine has also succeeded in destroying Russian oil refineries and starving its economy of petrol

It has recently struck the Ust-Luga refinery, the Taneco refinery in Tatarstan and the Perm refinery, 1,500km (930 miles) from its borders.

Similar strikes this year have so reduced petrol supply in Russia. The Izvestia newspaper reported that only 28 percent of petrol stations across the country could supply fuel this week, citing mobile app GdeBENZ, which monitors real-time fuel availability.

Izvestia said only five petrol stations in Moscow were selling high-octane AI-98 fuel. Russians posted video of Rosgvardia police units sitting outside petrol stations to avert some of the fights involving motorists in recent months.

Deputy Prime Minister, Alexander Novak, said lower-grade fuel was being supplied to ease market tensions, and confirmed that Russia is now importing refined fuel for the domestic market.

“We expect a number of oil refineries to complete maintenance work soon and the situation to improve significantly,” Novak told Vesti journalist Pavel Zarubin, but that may be wishful thinking. Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest refineries not once but repeatedly. On Wednesday [August 19 ], it struck a refining unit at Ufa, which was undergoing repairs from a previous strike. It is 1,300km (810 miles) from Ukraine.

Ukraine also struck significant military targets during the week, including the Kamenyy Kombinat plant in Rostov, which makes solid rocket fuel for missiles, and the Savasleika airfield, from where MiG fighters armed with Kh-47M2 ballistic missiles take -off.

Russian economy in trouble

Some Russian economists have begun to warn of impending social and political upheaval as a result of the slowing economy.

Andrey Klepach, chief economist at Vnesheconombank, a state bank that finances the Kremlin’s national projects, warned on August 18 that, “Losses from Ukrainian military strikes … are already becoming a significant macroeconomic barrier to Russian economic growth.

“I believe Russia won’t collapse, but I’m almost certain we’ll reach a social crisis.”

He was removed from his post after making the comments during a discussion at the Moscow Exchange’s Nikitsky Club.

Russians are withdrawing savings in increasing amounts, reported The Washington Post. While businesses are increasing “voluntary” donations to the state defence budget, in addition to having to pay for their own air defences, putting further strain on the economy.

At a meeting of the Council for Strategic Development and National Projects this week, Putin acknowledged that Ukraine’s strikes are “certainly” causing damage, adding that “overall economic performance is modest but positive”.

That damage took financial form in the $1.18bn Putin newly released to aid regional budgets, in addition to previous financial assistance. Some $52m of that was destined for Crimea.

Ukraine’s defence ministry estimated that every dollar spent on drone strikes caused five times that amount in costs to the Russian economy.

Police allege Australian-Russian citizen joined Ukrainian military seeking to send information to Russian intelligence.

Australian police have charged a dual Russian-Australian citizen for trying to pass Ukrainian military information to people he believed were linked to Russian intelligence.

The 27-year-old man was due ⁠to appear in court in Brisbane on Friday on charges of foreign interference.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told a news conference that the suspect travelled to Russia for training in October 2024. He then returned to Australia but “maintained contact” with individuals he believed were linked to Moscow’s intelligence services.

The police allege the man enlisted in the Ukrainian military in May 2025, ‌where he “gained access to information relating to their military personnel, units and locations”.

Barrett said he shared the information obtained in Ukraine with “individuals he believed were acting on behalf of Russian intelligence services”, putting the safety of Ukrainian military staff at risk.

“We don’t want Australia to become a safe haven for people who are undertaking foreign interference on behalf of other countries,” the commissioner said.

The identity of the suspect, who is unemployed, has not been revealed. Police said there was no indication he had received military training in Australia. Search warrants have been executed, they added, noting the possibility of further arrests related to the case.

Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation spy agency conducted the investigation.

“This case should put regimes perpetrating foreign interference on notice: we have zero tolerance,” ASIO Deputy Director-General Claire McGuinness said.

Russia’s embassy in Australia said it had no knowledge of the case.

“At this stage, no official requests or notifications have been received by the Embassy or the Consulate General in Sydney, either from the Australian authorities or from the individual concerned,” the embassy said in an email to the AFP news agency. “We are currently using the available channels and resources to establish the circumstances of the case.”

Russia arrests Ukrainian operatives

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have arrested nine people and charged them with working for Ukrainian intelligence, state media reported on Friday.

The TASS media agency said eight of the suspects were found to have 35 drones, equipped with explosives smuggled from the European Union, and planned ‌to attack a strategic defence enterprise in the Moscow region.

Separately, a foreign ⁠national was detained close to the Norwegian border. The FSB security service said that the man – whose nationality it did not reveal – had been arrested for trying to launch a surveillance drone over Moscow to help Ukrainian intelligence plot an attack on the Russian capital.

The FSB said it had detained the individual as he was trying to flee to Norway on foot.

On July 23, Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians that Raytheon wanted to help produce Patriot interceptors on Ukrainian-linked lines. Five days later, Lockheed Martin signed a second license, this one for the PAC-3 MSE — the hit-to-kill missile that has spent three years picking Russian ballistic warheads out of the sky over Kyiv. For a moment it looked like a watershed: the United States handing a country still absorbing nightly missile and drone barrages the blueprint to build its own air defense. Then, within days, the story came apart in public. US Ambassador Matthew Whitaker said Washington would not allow Ukraine to build PAC-3s at all. Donald Trump called the technology transfer “a hard thing to give away.” NATO’s own envoy said no agreement would close before winter. Something had clearly been decided. Nobody could agree on what.

The Patriot system is the closest thing the West has to a proven shield against ballistic missiles, and it is scarce almost everywhere it is needed. Roughly twenty countries now compete for a production line that turns out about 650 PAC-3 MSE interceptors a year worldwide — Lockheed Martin’s entire global output, shared among Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Gulf states and the US Army’s own depleted stocks. Russia, meanwhile, has been firing 55 to 60 Iskander ballistic missiles a month at Ukraine alone, before counting the nightly Shahed drone waves that push crews to expend scarce interceptors on cheaper threats out of necessity. The Pentagon has spent much of the past two years quietly rationing Patriot allocations across allies, reportedly diverting orders meant for Taiwan and Ukraine to replenish American stockpiles. Against that backdrop, “Ukraine will build its own Patriots” is not primarily a sovereignty story. It is a story about whether the system that makes Patriots for everyone else can keep up at all.

What the deal actually requires

Start with what was actually signed, because the headlines overstate it. Raytheon’s license covers the PAC-2 GEM-T, an older blast-fragmentation interceptor effective against aircraft and cruise missiles. Lockheed Martin’s covers the PAC-3 MSE, the missile that actually stops Iskanders and Kinzhals. Neither license includes the radar, the fire-control system or the launchers; those still come from existing Patriot batteries. And neither company has committed to building these missiles on Ukrainian soil in the near term. Reporting from Reuters and Ukrainian officials both point to Germany, which already runs its own PAC-2 line, as the likely first production site, with capacity shifting to Ukraine only “after the war ends.” What was announced in July, in other words, is not a factory. It is paperwork that keeps a door open.

Even so, the paperwork matters, because of what it concedes. Every PAC-3 MSE round carries a 24-month production lead time for the missile itself and 30 months for its solid rocket motor. Boeing manufactures every active radar seeker that guides it from a single facility in Alabama, capped at 650 to 700 units a year — a bottleneck no amount of Ukrainian factory floor changes. Aerojet Rocketdyne is the sole source for the motor. These are not obstacles a co-production agreement dissolves; they are structural limits on how fast the United States can arm anyone, Ukraine included. A government does not open its most tightly export-controlled missile program to a country still under nightly bombardment unless it has concluded that the existing pipeline, working alone, cannot meet demand. That is the admission buried in the announcement: not that Ukraine’s industrial base is ready, but that Lockheed’s and Raytheon’s are strained, and Washington needs help from a country it would ordinarily be supplying, not licensing.

The contradictions among American officials sharpen the point rather than undermine it. Whitaker’s flat denial that Ukraine would ever build PAC-3s, arriving days after Zelensky announced the license, is not really about Ukraine’s trustworthiness. A Republican congressional official close to the process gave the more candid version: the manufacturers are less worried about Ukraine leaking American technology to Moscow than about Ukraine improving on it and producing it “at scale, faster and for much less money.” That fear has a track record behind it. Fire Point’s Flamingo cruise missile, built in Ukraine during the war, reportedly costs around $600,000 — roughly a sixth of a Tomahawk and a fraction of a $2 million PAC-3 ACE round — while Ukraine’s home-grown Freyja interceptor is priced at roughly a fifth of the Patriot missile it is meant to substitute for. A country that has spent three years learning to manufacture air defense under fire, at a fraction of Western unit costs, is not the industrial partner a legacy prime wants loose inside its own supply chain. The reluctance is commercial before it is strategic.

The strongest objection to this reading is that Kyiv already produces a large share of its own weapons, so extending that into Patriots is a natural next step rather than a crisis signal. Zelensky puts the domestically produced share of Ukraine’s frontline weapons at close to 60 percent, up from roughly 40 percent a year earlier — drones, the Bohdana howitzer, the Neptune and Flamingo missiles. That is true, and it matters. But those are systems Ukraine designed and built from scratch under wartime pressure, with no legacy export-control regime standing in the way. Patriot is different: it is Washington’s most sensitive interceptor program, run by companies that have spent decades keeping production onshore for precisely the security reasons Whitaker cited. Handing over any piece of it, even nominally, to a country under active bombardment breaks with everything the export-control system was built to prevent. That the United States is doing it anyway — however slowly, however contested internally — says less about confidence in Ukraine than about how thin the interceptor pipeline has become.

Three ways this goes

What happens next depends on which of the deal’s obstacles proves harder to move: engineering or politics.

Base case (our estimate: roughly 55 percent probability). The license survives, but production stays offshore. Germany’s existing PAC-2 line absorbs the first Ukrainian-linked output sometime in 2027; Lockheed and Raytheon leave the seeker and motor bottlenecks unresolved; and Zelensky’s own target of “production capability by the end of 2026” slips the way most Patriot-related deadlines have slipped since 2022. The deal functions mainly as a signal — to Moscow, to Congress, to the manufacturers themselves — that the West is willing to widen its supplier base, without actually widening it before the war’s most dangerous phase has passed.

Downside case. Export-control friction, not battlefield risk, kills momentum outright. Boeing declines to license seeker technology, Congress balks at formally notifying an ITAR transfer into an active conflict zone, and the agreement quietly becomes what several earlier Patriot-adjacent announcements already have: a signed memorandum with no factory behind it. Unable to close its ballistic-missile gap through licensed production, Ukraine leans harder into Flamingo and Freyja — cheap and available, but not full substitutes for hit-to-kill interception. Iskander and Kinzhal strikes on Ukrainian cities continue at close to current tempo through 2027.

Upside case. Ukraine’s wartime manufacturing culture forces the restructuring the primes have been resisting. Facing a credible cheaper competitor, Lockheed and Raytheon accelerate second-sourcing of seekers and motors — the actual chokepoints — to defend market share rather than out of goodwill toward Kyiv. Patriot output rises for every operator, not only Ukraine, and Kyiv becomes the proving ground for a lower-cost interceptor variant that outlives the war. This is the scenario in which an admission of scarcity turns into a fix for it — plausible, but it requires the manufacturers to treat competition, not politics, as the threat that finally moves them.

The takeaway

So: is licensing Patriot production to a country under bombardment an admission? Yes — but not the one the announcements were built to convey. It does not say Ukraine’s industrial base has arrived. It says the American one has not kept pace with a war of attrition it did not plan for, and that Washington is now willing to test its most sensitive export controls against the same scarcity that has Israel, Taiwan and its own Army competing for the same missiles.

Watch for: whether groundbreaking on a German or Polish production line actually begins before the end of 2026 — Zelensky’s own deadline for “technical capability.” If it hasn’t started by then, treat every subsequent announcement as the political theatre this one increasingly resembles: a scarcity confession dressed up as an industrial handshake.

Russia’s Defence Ministry says 453 Ukrainian drones were downed overnight in various regions.

At least five people have been killed and 11 others injured in Russian attacks on Ukraine, authorities said.

A Russian drone attack on a bus in the front-line city of Kherson killed at least four people and wounded four others on Wednesday, Kherson regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said.

The attack took place at about 8:50am local time (05:50 GMT), and all the casualties were bus passengers.

In a post on the Telegram app, Prokudin said the wounded had been taken to hospital.

He posted blurred photos of a yellow bus with bloodied steps and shattered windows.

Russian forces regularly strike Kherson, which was under Moscow’s control from March to November 2022 – the initial months of the war – with drones, in what Ukraine says is the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Earlier this month, Ukraine accused Russia of chasing a man in a street market in Kherson with a remotely piloted FPV drone, calling it a “safari” targeting civilians.

The city had a population of about 280,000 before the war began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russian forces, repelled from the city by a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the last quarter of 2022, are now positioned on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, which flows past Kherson.

There has been an uptick in civilian deaths in the conflict throughout this year, the United Nations has reported, with 437 civilians killed in Ukraine last month alone, the highest monthly toll since May 2022.

Russian authorities reported 79 civilians killed in Ukrainian attacks in July, up from the previous month.

The four-and-a-half-year war continues to grind on, as United States-backed talks aimed at ending the conflict remain stalled.

In a separate Russian attack, one person was killed and seven others injured in Ukraine’s southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, according to regional Governor Ivan Fedorov.

Russian drones struck the regional capital, damaging both residential and nonresidential buildings and causing a fire.

Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a cargo vessel in the Black Sea near the Ukrainian port of Odesa, Russian news agency Interfax reported, citing the Ministry of Defence.

The vessel was carrying military cargo, the ministry said.

It said Russia’s air defence brought down 453 Ukrainian drones overnight in various regions.

At the same time, Russian authorities were rushing to put out a small fire after a drone fell in an industrial area in the city of Ufa in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, the republic’s head Radiy Khabirov said on Telegram.

Khabirov added that a drone hit an apartment building and a few cars in Ufa, an oil refining hub, injuring one person.

Concern over the security of Europe’s largest nuclear plant has been rife since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine nearly five years ago.

A drone strike close to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in occupied southeastern Ukraine has killed one nuclear specialist and wounded 17, according to Russian reports.

Moscow asserted on Tuesday that the drone was launched by Ukraine. The security of Europe’s biggest nuclear plant has provoked significant global concern amid the full-scale war on Ukraine that Russia launched in February 2022.

Most of those injured by the strike were employees of the plant, according to a Telegram update by the Russian management of the nuclear facility. It asserted that the attack constituted one of the most serious incidents in the plant’s history.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) earlier confirmed reports that the strike hit staff members at a bus stop.

“No nuclear safety or security damage was reported,” the IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said on social media.

However, it called “on military commanders responsible for these actions as well as all others aiming on nuclear power plants and/or their staff to put an immediate stop to these unacceptable actions”, citing the “great risks to nuclear safety”.

The Zaporizhzhia plant was seized by Russian forces a month after Moscow launched its invasion. The facility has been under Russian management since.

The safety of the plant – and the potential consequences of a hit amid the hostilities – have been a concern since the start of the war.

Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors can produce nearly six gigawatts of electricity, and the plant was crucial to supplying power to Ukraine’s national grid. All of the reactors have been shut down since Russia captured the plant, but a strike could cause damage and potentially cause serious leaks of radioactive material.

Tuesday’s strike came ahead of a scheduled visit by IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi to assess nuclear safety. It’s not clear if that visit will still take place.

A Russian strike on a thermal power plant was reported in central Ukraine a few hours later, forcing a halt to operations, according to DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy provider and the company that operates the plant.

No casualties were reported, but DTEK stated on social media that the attack caused “significant damage to equipment”.

Russia has attacked the company’s thermal plants 230 times since the start of the war, according to DTEK’s Telegram channel, as it wages a campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Aug. 18 (UPI) — Russia is warning Britain that there will be “consequences” following reports that Ukraine has struck within Russian territory with drones provided by London and made by British companies.

In a statement Tuesday, the Embassy of Russia to the United Kingdom accused London of escalating Russia’s war against Ukraine by providing the weaponry, while chastising it for “hypocritically professing a desire for peace.”

“London’s actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer,” the embassy said.

“The deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support of Kiev’s terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay.”

Britain has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine’s defense against Russia, which invaded its eastern neighbor in February 2022, launching the four-year war.

According to a July factsheet from the British government, London has committed more than $33 billion to Ukraine, including more than $21.6 billion in military assistance.

Britain has for years been focused on supplying Ukraine with drones, which have proved effective in Kyiv’s defense against the Kremlin. In April, its Ministry of Defense announced it would deliver at least 120,000 drones to Ukraine by the end of this year, a number it increased to 150,000 in June.

The threat from the embassy follows reports stating drones built by British companies were being used by Ukraine to hit targets within the borders of Russia, resulting in more than $47.3 billion in damages.

In response to the embassy, Britain’s Ministry of Defense told BBC News in a statement that London stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Kyiv.

“Russia should be in no doubt about the resolve of this government to stand against Russian aggression, in Ukraine and against the UK and our allies,” the ministry spokesperson said.

The attacks injured at least three people, including a girl, and damaged a Wildberries warehouse, Russian officials say.

Russian officials have reported more than 620 overnight drones targeting Moscow, in what appears to be one of Ukraine’s largest attacks on the Russian capital in years.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Russian defences shot down 180 drones over the capital region between Monday evening and ‌5am (02:00 GMT) on Tuesday. He said 17 more drones were shot down en route to the capital later.

Russia’s state-run news agency TASS described the barrage as the largest drone attack on Moscow in the past two years.

The drone attack wounded three people, including a 10-year-old girl, Moscow region’s Governor Andrey Vorobyov said on Telegram. He said the “most serious consequences” were reported in the Pavlovsky Posad district, where a house burned down. Several more homes and a guesthouse were damaged in Bogorodsky district, he added.

A warehouse east of Moscow belonging to e-commerce giant Wildberries was damaged in Tuesday’s drone assault. In a statement, the company said its logistics complex sustained “minor damage” after “debris hit the wall of the building”.

Ukraine has struck multiple Wildberries warehouses in recent weeks, saying the company supplies components for Russian drones.

Five injured in Ukraine’s Kharkiv

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force reported shooting down or suppressing 111 of 147 “enemy” drone attacks overnight.

Kharkiv’s regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said five people, including a nine-year-old boy, were injured in an overnight Russian attack on the city of Izyum.

Russian drones also sparked fires and damaged buildings in Kyiv region’s Brovary city, including an office building and warehouses, said Mayor Ihor Sapozhko.

With front-line fighting at a near standstill and talks frozen, Ukraine and Russia have significantly stepped up long-distance attacks, pushing the civilian death toll to its highest levels since the war’s first months in 2022.

In July alone, 437 civilians were killed in Ukraine, the highest monthly toll since May 2022, according to a United Nations tally.

Russian authorities reported 79 civilians killed in Ukrainian attacks in July, up from the previous month.

Romania’s Defence Ministry didn’t specify the origin of the drone but has previously blamed Russia for similar incidents.

Russian strikes on Ukraine have killed at least one person and wounded seven more while a Spanish jet has shot down a drone that entered Romanian airspace.

A woman was killed and six others wounded in a missile and drone attack on Kryvyi Rig, the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the region’s governor said early on Sunday.

Authorities in the Ukrainian capital also said Kyiv was “under ballistic missile attack” late on Saturday, with one person wounded and fires sparked at non-residential sites in the Obolonsky and Holosiivskyi districts.

Separately, Romania’s Defence Ministry reported on Sunday that a Spanish F-18 fighter jet pilot on a NATO air policing mission to Romania had shot down a drone illegally breaching its national airspace.

It is the fourth drone shot down in Romania this year.

Romania’s Defence Ministry did not specify the origin of ‌the ‌drone.

In July, a Romanian jet shot down a suspected Russian drone, and in May a stray drone injured two people in the Romanian city of Galati when it collided with a building.

Romania shares a 634km (394-mile) border with Ukraine and has repeatedly seen Russian drones breaching its airspace as Moscow escalates its bombing campaign against Ukrainian civilian and military infrastructure.

Escalating long-range strikes

Russia has maintained near-daily missile and drone strikes across Ukraine since launching its full-scale invasion in early 2022, with areas far from the front lines frequently coming under attack.

The war’s impact has also spread to key regional shipping lanes, with reports of mines and unmanned sea drones found floating in the Black Sea.

Civilian casualties in Ukraine hit their highest level since 2022 this July, with at least 437 killed and 2,610 injured, according to the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission.

Meanwhile, in Russia on Sunday, authorities reported a large-scale drone incursion from the Ukrainians.

Moscow officials said they had downed more than 100 drones heading towards the capital overnight.

Emergency services were deployed to sites where debris fell, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, adding that three people were wounded.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted military, industrial and logistical facilities deep inside Russia, arguing its strikes are a response to Moscow’s ongoing bombardment of Ukrainian towns and infrastructure.

Kyiv targets Baltic oil hub and warehouse near Moscow with drones, as regional alerts prompt security measures in Latvia and Finland.

Russia says its forces have struck a railway station at the Ukrainian Danube port of Izmail and two vessels near Mykolaiv, as Ukrainian drones hit targets inside Russia, including a Baltic oil export hub and a warehouse near Moscow.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said on Friday that the railway station in Izmail was being used to load, store, and transport military cargo and fuel for Ukraine’s armed forces, according to state news agency TASS.

The ministry added that Russian forces struck two tugboats off the coast of Mykolaiv that it claimed were escorting cargo vessels carrying weapons to Ukrainian ports.

The developments follow Russian attacks a day earlier that damaged port infrastructure and caused power cuts in Izmail, a vital export hub on the Danube River near the Romanian border.

Ukrainian drones target Ust-Luga and Tver

Meanwhile, Russian authorities said a Ukrainian drone attack triggered a fire at Ust-Luga, a major Baltic Sea oil export port in the Leningrad region.

Regional Governor Alexander Drozdenko said the fire had been brought under control and cleared with no casualties reported. He added that more than 50 drones had been shot down overnight in the region surrounding St Petersburg.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russian refineries, ports, and energy infrastructure to raise the economic cost of Moscow’s war effort. More than a dozen major Russian refineries have been hit, contributing to domestic fuel shortages.

Further south, the governor of Russia’s Tver region said drone debris damaged a warehouse wall belonging to online retailer Wildberries northwest of Moscow. No injuries were reported. Wildberries facilities have been hit more than 20 times over the past month.

Due to the drone activity, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsia, temporarily restricted flights at all Moscow-area airports to ensure flight safety, according to TASS.

The overnight drone activity also prompted defensive measures elsewhere in the Baltic region.

Latvia’s armed forces said fighter jets shot down a drone that entered its airspace. Meanwhile, Finland temporarily restricted maritime movement in parts of the Baltic Sea as a precaution against potential drone incidents.

Ukraine has reported an acute shortage of Patriot interceptors since the US went to war with Iran in February.

Russian forces have struck Ukraine’s Izmail port in southern Odesa, setting off a fire, authorities said, a day after Kyiv pounded Russia’s Novorossiysk port.

In a statement on the Telegram app early on Thursday, the Izmail Regional State Administration said Russian forces struck “port infrastructure”, causing damage and a fire.

It said emergency personnel were at the scene to extinguish it.

Izmail, close to the Romanian border, is home to Ukraine’s largest Danube port, handling grain and other commodities.

The attacks came as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN that the country needs 5 percent of the United States’s Patriot interceptor missiles to get through the winter and 10 percent to destroy all of Russia’s ballistic projectiles.

Russia has recently been firing barrages at the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, roughly once a week, killing civilians and damaging or destroying homes.

In one attack, Ukraine failed to intercept any of the 28 ballistic missiles launched at it.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine this year “had two and a half times less interceptors than we had in 2025”.

“Russia has two times more ballistic missiles per month than they had before,” he said. “This year, I’m asking American partners to sell me 5 percent of missiles [that] they have in their stocks.”

“If they sell us 5 percent, we will go through the winter and save people’s lives,” he added. “If they can sell us 10 percent, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles. I have 1 percent.”

Ukraine has reported an acute shortage of Patriot interceptors since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, diverting supplies of the advanced systems.

Ballistic missiles are much harder to intercept than cruise missiles or drones because they move faster and follow steep trajectories.

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s air force said it would stop publishing detailed figures on Russian ballistic missile strikes as Ukrainian forces struggle to intercept Russia’s heightened attacks.

The restrictions concern “the number of targets launched, shot down, suppressed or those that failed to reach their targets,” air force communications chief Yurii Ihnat said on Facebook. Real-time warnings would continue unchanged, he added, and the air force would keep providing generalised figures on Russian missile launches.

Last month, Russia fired more than 450 missiles at Ukraine, nearly 200 of them on ballistic trajectories.

Asked if the US had responded to his requests, Zelenskyy said he hopes that he gets the interceptors.

“From 1 percent to 5 percent, I have some months and millions [of] phone calls and anything else,” he said. “I do some things which I can’t even share. It doesn’t mean that it’s out of the law. But I can’t speak about it.”

If European states seize vessels with Russian cargo, Moscow will respond in kind ‘wherever necessary’, says Putin.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has threatened to seize European vessels if European states follow through on plans to seize more commercial ships with Russian cargo.

Putin delivered the warning on Wednesday while on board a Russian cruiser off the Pacific island of Sakhalin, where Russia’s navy was conducting a drill. He said Russia would be ready to carry out its own seizures “wherever we deem it necessary and appropriate,” according to Russia’s TASS news agency.

The statement comes after several European countries intercepted ships suspected of being part of Moscow’s so-called “shadow fleet”, carrying Russian oil in contravention of European sanctions.

New sanctions passed last month permit European Union members to sell the oil or any other cargo seized from the ships.

Putin appeared to reference the sanctions, saying some countries are trying to “restrict the movement of vessels belonging to our economic operators” and recently “came up with the idea of possibly seizing our ships and selling off property stolen from us”.

“If these plans are put into practice, we will have to respond in kind,” Putin said in comments carried by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency, calling the moves “piracy and robbery”.

He said “relevant instructions” had already been delivered to Russia’s Ministry of Defence and Pacific Fleet, the naval fleet responsible for Russia’s maritime military interests in the Pacific.

NATO ‘making inroads in Asia Pacific’

Putin also accused the NATO military alliance of making inroads into the Asia Pacific region and heightening tension in the Arctic. “NATO is making inroads into the ‌region, new military-political blocs are being formed, and new weapons systems that pose a threat to Russia are ‌being deployed or are slated for deployment,” the Russian leader said.

Russia’s naval exercises in the West Pacific come a week before joint US-South Korean war games, designed to simulate a possible invasion from North Korea.

Tensions are high in the region amid accusations from Kyiv and Seoul that Pyongyang and Moscow are further intensifying their military cooperation.

On Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of using North Korean missiles in a deadly air raid across Ukraine. A day earlier, he had warned that Moscow was receiving more ballistic projectiles and troops from its ally Pyongyang, a development he said posed dangers not only for Ukraine but for countries in East Asia.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has already sent thousands of troops and plentiful supplies of weapons to support Putin’s four-year invasion.