Ukraine

Russia’s FSB accused the woman, found with a bomb in her backpack, of taking part in a plot hatched by Ukraine.

Russian authorities say they have thwarted a Ukraine-linked bomb plot against security services and arrested a German woman found with a makeshift bomb in her backpack.

Russia’s FSB security agency said the unnamed woman was detained on Monday in the southern city of Pyatigorsk.

In a statement cited by Russia’s state-run TASS news agency, the FSB said it had “prevented a terrorist attack planned by the Kyiv regime against a law enforcement facility in the Stavropol region, involving a German citizen born in 1969”.

It said the woman had been recruited by a citizen from a Central Asian country, who was working on orders from Ukraine. That man was found and arrested near the targeted site.

According to the FSB, the device contained an explosive charge equivalent to 1.5kg (3 pounds) of TNT and was intended to be detonated remotely. The agency said the blast was ultimately prevented by electronic jamming.

Video of the purported arrest published by Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency showed armed Russian security agents approach the woman as she was face down in a car park.

Another video showed masked plainclothes agents pulling a man into a station, followed by a controlled explosion of the backpack.

Russia’s previous allegations

Russia has arrested dozens of people throughout the four-year war, mostly its own citizens, on allegations of working for Ukraine to carry out sabotage attacks.

Russia has previously accused Ukraine of working with Islamic fundamentalists to carry out attacks inside Russia, without providing evidence.

Officials initially alleged that the perpetrators of a 2024 massacre at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow that killed 150 people were ISIL (ISIS) members in coordination with Ukraine.

ISIL claimed responsibility for that attack, making no reference of any Ukrainian involvement, for which no evidence was presented by Moscow and which Kyiv denies.

Ukraine’s military intelligence says it struck two large landing ships in Sevastopol Bay in Russian-occupied Crimea.

Ukraine and Russia have attacked each other overnight, with Ukrainian drones striking Russian assets in Black Sea ports and Russia hitting several regions across Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv.

Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit claimed attacks on two Russian landing ⁠ships and a radar station in Sevastopol Bay in Russian-occupied Crimea. It says the $150m vessels were successfully hit and radar equipment destroyed.

In Russia, Ukrainian drones targeted the port of Tuapse, killing at least one person, injuring another and damaging transport infrastructure, according to regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev.

The strike was the second on the port in three days, hours after a fire from a previous attack was extinguished.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said air defences destroyed 112 Ukrainian drones overnight.

Ukraine reported a series of Russian attacks on Ukrainian territory overnight, including in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Sumy and Zaporizhia regions.

Drones hit a car in the city of Putyvl in Ukraine’s border region of Sumy, injuring three women, as well as two homes in Kyiv’s Brovary district, damaging them and injuring one person, according to Ukrainian officials.

“Tonight, the enemy is again attacking the Kyiv region with drones. Under the sights are peaceful people, homes,” said Kyiv regional military administration head Mykola Kalashnyk.

Russian attacks also damaged railway infrastructure in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

Over the past 24 hours, Russian attacks in the Kherson region killed one person and injured seven, while injuring four others in the Zaporizhia region, Ukrainian officials said.

Moscow’s forces have hit civilian areas almost daily since the all-out invasion of its neighbour more than four years ago, with the regular assaults occasionally punctuated by massive attacks.

More than 15,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in the strikes, according to the United Nations.

There have been several rounds of United States-brokered negotiations in recent months, but they have failed to reach an agreement to stop the fighting, with the process further stalled since the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran.

Even before the war on Iran, progress towards a peace deal in Ukraine had been slow, due to differences over territorial issues.

Ukraine has proposed freezing the conflict along current front lines. Russia rejects that, saying it wants the whole of the Donetsk region, despite it being partly controlled by Ukraine – a demand Kyiv says is unacceptable.

The attacker has been identified as a “58-year-old Moscow man”, but no motive has been established.

A gunman who killed at least six people in Kyiv and took hostages has been shot dead by Ukrainian police, officials said.

The attack occurred on Saturday in the capital’s Holosiivskyi district, where the assailant opened fire on civilians in the street before barricading himself inside a nearby supermarket, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.

Special tactical police units stormed the supermarket after roughly 40 minutes of failed negotiations, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on Telegram. The gunman shot at police officers during the standoff.

“We tried to persuade him, knowing that there was likely a wounded person inside,” Klymenko told The Associated Press news agency. “We even offered to bring in tourniquets to stop the bleeding, but he did not respond.”

Ultimately, authorities were given the order to “neutralise” the attacker, he said.

At least 10 others were hospitalised, including one child, and four hostages were rescued, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X.

Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said the attacker was a 58-year-old born in Moscow.

Klymenko said the man was carrying a legally registered gun and had approached licensing authorities as recently as December 2025 to renew his weapons permit, submitting a valid medical certificate at the time. He added that investigators would determine which medical institution issued the document.

Zelenskyy offered his condolences to the families of the victims, saying he had instructed officials to make all verified information publicly available. “We expect a swift investigation,” he wrote.

The Army’s top official pointed to low-cost interceptor drones first sent to Ukraine as one defense against Iranian barrages of Shahed-136 one-way attack munitions. During Congressional testimony on Thursday, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll lauded the Merops interceptor and the process to get it quickly into the hands of troops in the Middle East.

The Merops is a small, relatively inexpensive drone built specifically to zip through the skies and intercept long-range one-way attack drones. As we have previously reported, Ukraine has been using several locally produced drones, as well as Merops, to counter Russian Shaheds successfully for some time now, proving-out the concept.

“When the conflict kicked off, within about eight days, we were able to purchase…13,000 Merops, which are incredible,” Driscoll exclaimed. “They’re about $15,000 a piece right now. We think as they scale, they’ll get less than [$10,000] and we’re able to take Shaheds down that cost $30,000 to $50,000, which is amazing because that puts us on the right end of the cost curve, and we will make that trade all day long.”

The U.S. has its own interceptors that have been in service for years, such as Raytheon’s Coyote, but they cost roughly 10 times more.

A new system to identify and take down Russian drones is deployed to NATO’s eastern flank

In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Driscoll said that larger orders could drive that to $3,000 to $5,000 per interceptor. Given the success in Ukraine, it is likely that the Pentagon and other customers would see far less risk when it comes to ordering large numbers.

As we noted in a story last month, the Pentagon sent thousands of these drone interceptors to the Middle East. Iranian strikes on U.S. military facilities killed U.S. troops and caused damage to bases and equipment. Driscoll did not offer more specifics about how often they were used, how many Shaheds they downed or exactly where they were deployed.

Merops was “developed as part of the US-backed Project Eagle initiative, which includes contributions from Swift Beat, a company associated with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt,” according to the Ukraine Defense Tech Community (DTC), a marketplace for modern weaponry. “The system is built around Surveyor drones, which act as airborne interceptors capable of destroying enemy UAVs mid-flight.”

Each Merops unit “includes a command station, launch platforms, and a fleet of Surveyor drones,” DTC explained. “These interceptors can operate autonomously or be remotely piloted and are equipped with onboard sensors for target tracking.”

While full technical specifications remain undisclosed, they can reportedly reach speeds of over 280 km/h (175 mph). “The platform is considered fast enough to intercept jet-powered drones such as the Russian Geran-3, which can exceed 300 km/h,” DTC pointed out.

The interceptor can carry an explosive warhead and destroys targets either through a direct collision or a proximity detonation.

Driscoll said the ability to field Merops so quickly is because the Army streamlined its acquisition process.

“Fundamentally, one of the core problems was our own bureaucracy, our own infrastructure, our own decision-making organizations had decayed from any sort of speed and rationality,” he testified. “The reason we’ve been able to move fast since the conflict in Iran started is because of work 10, 12, 14 months ago to reorganize our acquisitions department.”

“And practically,” he added, “what that did is it took us from a 16-step decision-making process – where each of the bodies along those 16 steps could veto it and start it back over, and it could take two to seven years to purchase something.”

“We put everybody into a group who could make decisions on the fly,” the secretary noted. “And so a lot of the things the Army has worked on in the previous year are paying dividends as we try to make decisions quickly.”

You can watch Driscoll’s testimony on Merops at the 36-minute mark of the video below.

Budget Hearing – The United States Army

In Ukraine, Merops has proven to be a far cheaper alternative to munitions like Patriot interceptors and even far less advanced missiles for downing Shahed drones which have caused widespread destruction across that country. While these drones have neither the payload nor range of the far more expensive Patriot munitions, they can be deployed in great numbers giving them the ability to cover larger geographical areas. That helps keep the magazine depth of more sophisticated effectors from being quickly depleted and turns the disastrous ‘exchange ratio’ between cost of target versus effector on its head. In many cases, these systems would still need to be part of a layered defense, especially when used as point defense at high value installations and infrastructure.

Now that these weapons have helped save American lives and equipment, Merops success means we will likely be seeing more low-cost drone interceptors like it in the future.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com