Missile War Monitor: two economies being taken apart, target by target

Ukraine goes after Russian refineries and warehouses. Russia goes after Ukrainian power and shops. A ledger of what has been hit since June, and how little of it is being stopped. / bne IntelliNews

By Ben Aris in Berlin August 27, 2026

Two target sets now define this war, and neither of them is military. Ukraine hits Russian oil refineries and the warehouses of its two big online retailers. Russia hits Ukraine's power system and its shops. Both sides describe the other's campaign as terrorism and their own as a legitimate military targets.

On the Russian side the refinery campaign has moved from raids that cost a plant a few days of repairs, to outages that last weeks. Ufa, Nizhnekamsk, Perm, Novokuybyshevsk, Afipsky, Novoshakhtinsk, Volgograd and now Kstovo have all been hit since mid-August, and the whole of Lukoil's major domestic refining is currently shut. Petrol, diesel and jet fuel exports are banned, motor oil prices are up 40%, a second wave of the fuel crisis is building and July crude output was the lowest in six years.

The retail campaign is the more expensive one. Between July 18 and August 24, the warehouse war got underway and drones hit 15 Wildberries logistics sites totalling about 1.8mn square metres, roughly a third of the company's entire warehouse estate, Kommersant calculates. Ozon has since been added to the target list, and its shares fell 28% in the last week.

Sellers on the two platforms now put their combined losses above RUB600bn ($7.1bn). Data Insight puts lost stock alone at between RUB517bn ($6.1bn) and RUB580bn ($6.9bn) for Wildberries sellers, and between RUB88.5bn ($1.05bn) and RUB107bn ($1.27bn) for Ozon's. Rebuilding the destroyed warehouses would cost a further RUB186bn ($2.2bn) to RUB344bn ($4.1bn) and RUB30bn ($356mn) to RUB62.5bn ($742mn) respectively.

On the Ukrainian side the power system is the constant target and the shops are the newer one. The Kryvyi Rih thermal power station can no longer generate at all after an August 18 strike; 90,000 customers lost supply in Kyiv on August 20; Kernel, the country's largest grain exporter, says it has lost about half its own generation. Two Epicentr megastores were hit in Odesa on August 24, three retail chains' Kyiv warehouses on August 20, and the largest shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih on August 21, killing 16 people.

Interception rates for the week of 18-25 August 2026. The Ukrainian Air Force stopped publishing its ballistic and hypersonic counts during August, which is why its weekly missile figure is partial and the open-source total is higher. Source: IntelliNews, based on publicly available sources.

Drones are still being shot down at better than four in five. Missiles are not, and against the ballistic and hypersonic weapons that carry the heaviest warheads the rate on August 20 was zero out of 23, with only two Patriot interceptors fired in the capital's defence. That is not a failure of the system but the absence of ammunition for it, and it is the reason the interceptor shortage has become the single most consequential number in the war.

Russia's own claims run the other way and are not credible as counts: its defence ministry says it neutralised 1,671 fixed-wing drones in the 24 hours to August 18 and 1,504 on August 20. It also says it shot down all eight to 11 Flamingo cruise missiles Ukraine fired on August 24.

Major strikes & targets

Strikes on economic infrastructure since 1 June 2026. Compiled by IntelliNews based on publicly available sources, including our own reporting and the Centre for Eastern Studies' war reports. Dates are of the strike where known and of first report otherwise; the list is of significant strikes on economic targets and is not exhaustive.

The pattern in the dates is a conversation. The Tambov warehouse strike of July 18 killed seven people and was followed the next day by the heaviest Russian bombardment of the war to that point. The Novorossiysk grain terminals went down in mid-August; the Odesa ports and the Danube crossings were hit through the rest of the month. Each side is now answering the other inside 48 hours, and both are aiming at the part of the other's economy that generates foreign currency.

Neither campaign is winning in the sense either government uses the word. Russia's refining is being removed faster than it can be rebuilt and its crude cannot be exported instead, because the ports and the tankers are being hit too. Ukraine's grain cannot leave and its power stations cannot be replaced before winter. The monitor exists to keep count of a process that has no obvious stopping point.

Russia Steps Up Multi-Front Pressure On Ukraine With Drones, Decoys, Missiles, And North Korean Forces – Analysis


Drone factory in Russian Republic of Tatarstan. Photo Credit: 

Screenshot of Russian media

August 27, 2026
Hudson Institute
By Can Kasapoğlu

Key Takeaways:

Russia is intensifying mixed-vector pressure on Ukraine with large Shahed/Gerbera drone salvos, missiles, and decoys—including repeated strikes on Ukraine–Moldova border crossings—while North Korean personnel and drone/missile units expand Moscow’s capacity.

Ground fighting remains heavy, with more than 200 daily engagements focused on Kostiantynivka, Pokrovsk, and other eastern axes.

The UK authorized release of classified Storm Shadow/SCALP data so France and Ukraine can set up local assembly, shifting support toward Ukrainian production capacity; Moscow has already threatened UK arms factories in response.

1. Battlefield Assessment

Long-range salvos enabled by missile and drone warfare continued to shape the war. Overnight on August 25, a Russian Shahed drone struck the Vynohradivka international road crossing between Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast and Moldova. The strike damaged infrastructure, temporarily closing the checkpoint and redirecting traffic elsewhere.

The strike was Russia’s third attack in two weeks on a Ukraine–Moldova border crossing. This pattern suggests a coordinated Kremlin campaign rather than a series of isolated strikes. Moscow is likely targeting the connective tissue of Europe’s eastern frontier.

On the night of August 24–25, Russia also attacked Ukraine with 150 Shahed-Gerbera loitering munitions. Moscow launched Iskander-M and Kh-31 missiles, as well as Parodiya decoy drones, including jet-powered variants. Ukrainian aircraft, missile and electronic-warfare units, interceptor drones, and mobile teams neutralized 124 unmanned aerial vehicles involved in the attacks. Nonetheless, Russia struck 17 locations in Ukraine.

The barrage illustrated how Russia has organized its concept of operations around mixed-vector pressure designed to exhaust Ukraine’s layered defenses. In May 2026, Ukrainian intelligence services estimated that Russia intended for half of its Shahed drone-warfare deterrent to be jet-powered variants of the loitering munition. Russian planners aimed to produce 500 such jet-powered drones per month and launch 60,000 long-range attack drones and 50,000 decoy drones over the course of a year. Ukraine’s recently unveiled jet-powered Alexa Spatium interceptor is one part of Kyiv’s answer to Russia’s strategy.

Additionally, North Korea’s role in Russia’s war continued to expand into the robotic warfare domain. Major General Vadym Skibitskyi, the deputy head of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (GUR), reported that the Kremlin has deployed 8,500 North Korean personnel in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, including 400 drone operators assigned to reconnaissance and attack missions. A North Korean missile unit in Russia’s Voronezh Oblast could field six launchers and 120 ballistic missiles, supplementing the KN-23 and KN-24 missiles Pyongyang has already delivered.

The land-warfare segment of the conflict remained consistent with recent patterns. Combat activity remained elevated. Officials reported more than 200 tactical engagements daily. Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk bore the brunt of the fighting. The axes of Lyman, Sloviansk, Kupiansk, and Huliaipole also remained highly active.

2. Ukraine’s Storm Shadow Moment

On August 24, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham made a major announcement in Kyiv. He revealed that the United Kingdom had authorizedMBDA, a European multinational corporation that specializes in the design and production of missiles, to release classified data on the Storm Shadow/SCALP components. The decision enables France and Ukraine to establish local assembly lines to produce the missile, which to date has been produced primarily in the UK.

The UK first supplied Ukraine with the munition in 2023 and replenished its stocks in 2025. Storm Shadow, the UK variant of the joint Anglo-French cruise missile, has enabled Kyiv to strike command centers, air-defense positions, shipyards, logistics nodes, and hardened infrastructure beyond the front lines. Burnham’s announcement shifts British support for Ukraine from weapons transfers toward giving Kyiv greater control over its own strike capacity. The ability to manufacture the missile locally could reduce Ukraine’s dependence on European inventories and allow production to reflect Kyiv’s own adaptations and targeting priorities.

Moscow recognized the importance of Burnham’s announcement: Kremlin adviser Andrei Fedorov threatened British arms factories with “semi-military” attacks by “unknown sources.” This cryptic comment signaled Moscow’s potential willingness to expand the Ukraine conflict into Europe’s industrial rear through familiar methods of obscuring attribution, testing allied resolve, and raising the costs of supporting Kyiv. Russian strikes on UK manufacturing nodes could create production bottlenecks affecting engines, seekers, guidance systems, warheads, certification, financing, and launch aircraft.


Nonetheless, Russian threats only highlight the importance of the Storm Shadow/SCALP missile. MBDA describes the weapon as an air-launched deep-strike system for high-value fixed targets, including hardened bunkers and infrastructure. The missile operates in all weather, day or night, and combines inertial navigation, Global Positioning System capabilities, terrain referencing, low-altitude flight, and infrared image matching.

The munition provides Ukraine with precision, penetration, and survivability while allowing Kyiv to keep its launch aircraft beyond the reach of Russian air defenses. The missile’s dual-stage warhead can defeat hardened targets. Its principal limitation is that it is optimized for pre-planned fixed targets rather than mobile battlefield hunting. Regardless, domestic production of Storm Shadow/SCALP, previously available only in limited quantities, would allow Ukraine to sustain pressure on Russia’s operational depth.

3. What to Monitor in the Coming Weeks

Russia may intensify its shadow war against the UK in response to the transfer of Storm Shadow technology. Russian retaliation could include cyber intrusions, surveillance of MBDA-linked facilities, arson and sabotage carried out by criminal proxies, disruption of defense logistics, and attempted assassinations of senior British political, military, intelligence, or defense industry officials.

About the author: 

Can Kasapoğlu is a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. His work at Hudson focuses on political-military affairs in the Middle East, North Africa, and former Soviet regions. He specializes in open-source defense intelligence, geopolitical assessments, international weapons market trends, as well as emerging defense technologies and related concepts of operations.

Source: This article was published by the Hudson Institute

About Hudson Institute
Hudson Institute is a nonpartisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom.
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Sloviansk is declared a combat zone as Ukraine's air defence stops firing back

Not one of 23 ballistic and hypersonic missiles aimed at Kyiv on August 20 was shot down, and only two Patriot interceptors were launched. Zelenskiy puts the defence funding gap at $27bn. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 27, 2026

Sloviansk, the anchor of Ukraine's Donbas fortress belt, has been designated an active combat zone by its own regional authorities.

The Donetsk Regional Military Administration made the designation on August 21, according to the Sloviansk has become a combat zone war report published on August 25 by Warsaw's Centre for Eastern Studies, or OSW.

It followed a heavy bombardment of Sloviansk and neighbouring Kramatorsk the day before, which killed one person and injured 24, and Russian troops pushing into the town of Mykolaivka, where the Sloviansk thermal power station sits idle.

The declaration is important after Kostiantynivka fell to the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) earlier this month – the first of the three so-called Donbas Fortress cites to be captured by Russia. Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are the other two cities.

The change of status for Sloviansk triggers a mandatory evacuation planning (including monetary compensation for residents), for the withdrawal of civil services and for the emergency legal regime that has preceded the loss of every large Ukrainian town since Bakhmut. Kyiv has spent two and a half years insisting the fortress belt would hold, but the defences of the strategic important cities appear to be crumbling.

The shape of the attack

Russian forces have made further gains on a broad front east of both cities but cannot yet close the pocket from the north, where Ukrainian counterattacks around Lyman are working, OSW said.

Four lines of pressure have taken shape: from the east towards Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, from the south-east and south-west towards Druzhkivka, from the south and east towards Dobropillia, and from the north and east through Lyman. Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups have entered Dobropillia itself.

Increased volumes of drone around these towns have moved the frontline. FPV drones attacking Dobropillia and its surroundings have reached 1,200 a day, and those hitting Druzhkivka and its supply routes 1,500 to 2,000 a day, according to Ukrainian sources cited in the report. At that density the roads into a defended town stop working before the town does.

In Zaporizhzhia region the fighting is around Orikhiv, where Ukrainian counterattacks have pushed Russian infiltrators back out of the eastern districts, though the Russians have advanced to the north-east and, by some accounts, crossed the Verkhnia Tersa river.

UKRAINE SOLD OUT

Trump's CIA chief secretly jets to Moscow — as Kremlin denies US talks underway

Matthew Chapman
August 25, 2026 

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump and John Ratcliffe, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), speak as they depart after a Cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/Pool

CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly slipped into Moscow on a secret trip Tuesday, marking the highest-level visit by a Trump administration official to Russia since January — even as the Kremlin insists no such meeting is happening at all.

CBS News and Axios both reported Ratcliffe's presence in the Russian capital, citing sources familiar with the situation, though neither outlet identified who he was meeting or what was discussed. Meanwhile, according to Al Jazeera, flight-tracking data showed a U.S. military C-17 departing Riga, Latvia early Tuesday morning and landing in Moscow roughly 74 minutes later, before departing again later in the day.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov flatly denied anything was underway, saying, "No, there are no such plans." When pressed specifically about reports of the U.S. military plane landing in Moscow, Peskov claimed he had "no such information."

But Axios reported that Washington gave Ukraine advance notice of the senior delegation's trip and asked Kyiv to hold off on strikes until the group left Russian territory.

The visit comes as U.S.-brokered talks to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine remain stalled, though Moscow did free a former U.S. Marine detained since 2022 earlier this month, reportedly over health concerns.

Ratcliffe has quietly played a central role in several high-profile prisoner swaps between Washington and Moscow since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, including the release of dual national Ksenia Karelina last year. If confirmed, his reported Moscow trip would be the first by a sitting CIA director since William Burns traveled there in 2021.

The CIA declined to comment on the reports

CIA chief flies into Moscow as Ukraine holds drones fire for three days

Washington asked Kyiv to stop hitting Moscow and St Petersburg from August 24 to 26 because it did not trust Russian air defences to protect one American aircraft. Kyiv agreed.

 / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 26, 2026

CIA director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced visit to Moscow on August 25 spending seven hours in Moscow in talks with the Kremlin before flying out again the same day, sparking a torrent of speculation on the subject matter of the meeting.

The US admitted that it had asked Ukraine to hold off on attacking the Russian capital for three days ahead of the meeting so that his plane could land – a requestion Kyiv reported adhered to.

A US Air Force C-17 Globemaster that had left Joint Base Andrews and stopped at Riga on August 23 touched down at Vnukovo airport at about 10:00 local time and was gone by half past five. In between, video circulated on Telegram of a motorcade carrying US diplomatic plates moving along Novy Arbat towards the Kremlin. Little else is known about who Ratcliffe met and what was said, but this is not the first time a CIA chief has flown into Moscow in the midst of a military crisis and had top level talks in search of either a deal, or to deliver a stern warning.

Ratcliffe was confirmed to be aboard the C-17, Axios and CBS News reported, citing people familiar with the trip. It is his first known visit to Russia as director and the first by a senior American official since special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in January as part of the Ukraine ceasefire talks.

Neither government announced the trip ahead of time and neither has explained it. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists he had no information about the aircraft and that no meetings with the US administration were planned that week. He later told the Washington Post the trip was for "contacts between security services” and declined to say more.

Three days of quiet over Moscow

Washington asked Kyiv last week to hold off striking Moscow, St Petersburg and Russia's northern regions between Monday and Wednesday, because of the “visit of a senior American official.” Radcliff was not mentioned by name and Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, says it is still waiting for a debrief from the White House.

"They don't believe in the strength of Putin's air defences," a source told the Kyiv Independent. The pause ran from August 24 to 26 and Kyiv agreed to it.

Ukrainian drones have been reaching Moscow this summer, which is why the request was necessary and why granting it was a concession.

Why he went

No insider account of the purpose emerged before August 25 evening and the press is awash with speculation the next day as to the purpose and content of the meeting. Four theories are in circulation:

A prisoner release or exchange. While the official's identity was still unknown, socialite newscaster Ksenia Sobchak wrote, without citing a source, that the aircraft had come for Charles Zimmerman, a former US sailor sentenced to five years in a penal colony in 2026 for smuggling a rifle he failed to declare at Sochi. Sobchak, citing a source, says Zimmerman petitioned for a pardon over the summer, and the outlet Important Stories noted that Putin signed two classified decrees on August 25 - standard practice for pardons tied to swaps. Ratcliffe personally negotiated the April 2025 release of Ksenia Karelina. Against this theory is that no US official travelled to Moscow to help negotiate a historic prisoner swap completed last August for US journalists Evan Gershkovich or jailed basketball player Brittney Griner, and Zimmerman is a far more obscure prisoner;

A warning delivered to the Kremlin. Russian media pushed this all day, citing the Wall Street Journal. The paper claimed that the US knows that Russia is preparing to test Nato defences with an attack on a Nato member and sent Radcliff to warn the Kremlin off. The Wall Street Journal that the two sides may have discussed a truce over Iran and also drew a parallel with CIA director William Burns, who was in Moscow shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war in 2021 carrying a warning from Joe Biden in 2021; and the paper's own earlier reporting that US intelligence fears Russia may test Nato with a limited operation against a member state. It also claims that Moscow has rehearsed mobilisation procedures in Kaliningrad;

Iran deal. Trump has discussed the war with Putin repeatedly, Washington has just announced economic “D-DAY” sanctions designed to strangle the Iranian economy, and Moscow is one of Tehran's principal military and political partners, if not a large trading one;

A fresh round of Ukraine talks. The least likely of the four. Witkoff and Kushner were meant to go to Kyiv and did not, a TASS source said on Monday the trip had been postponed, Putin had restated on Sunday in the starkest terms that he intends to fight to a victory, and Ratcliffe's reputation as a hawk makes him an odd choice of mediator.

The last time

A CIA director last visited Russia in November 2021, when Burns met Nikolai Patrushev, then secretary of the Security Council, over two days at Biden's request. Russia was massing troops on Ukraine's border for the first time and Burns had come to say Washington knew what was being planned and was preparing a response.

Putin was in Sochi. Burns was received at the Kremlin and allowed to speak to him by phone. Putin did not deny the plans; he set out Russia's grievances against the West and Ukraine instead. Burns left convinced the preparations were real. The invasion came three months later, after an eight-point list of demands from the Russian foreign ministry - no Nato for Ukraine among them - was argued over through January and February 2022 and rejected.

Washington's most pro-Ukraine spy chief

Ratcliffe is not Burns. He has none of the career-diplomat's history with Putin, and Burns had spent three years as ambassador in Moscow in the mid-2000s. What he does have is a reputation as one of the more pro-Ukraine figures in Trump's national security team.

Where Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth began sidelining generals who argued for supporting Kyiv, Ratcliffe pressed for resources to be committed to it, the New York Times has reported. When intelligence sharing was suspended in spring 2025 after the Trump-Zelenskiy falling out, Hegseth cut every link and Ratcliffe insisted on keeping CIA contacts with Ukrainian intelligence open. Agency support helped Kyiv organise the first wave of strikes on Russian refineries in the summer of 2025. And in spring 2026, according to a recent account in The Atlantic, it was Ratcliffe who convinced Trump that Ukraine was winning and therefore worth backing.

The trip that didn't happen

Witkoff and Kushner agreed at the July 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskiy to make their first visit to Kyiv, intended to restart the diplomacy. Ukraine correspondent Christopher Miller reported the agreement for the Financial Times on July 29; Zelenskiy said he expected the envoys within a fortnight and RFE/RL put it in the second half of August. They have yet to announce a date.

The pair have been to Russia repeatedly and Vedomosti reported in early July that a return was imminent. On August 14 Sergei Lavrov said publicly that Putin "is ready to receive them once again - the question is what they will come with", a line deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov repeated a week later. By August 20 the Kremlin said it still had no information on any visit.

The Kyiv trip was cancelled on the morning of August 24, Ukraine's 35th Independence Day, the day the envoys should have been there. No serving senior US official attended the commemorations; only former vice-president Mike Pence. Britain's new prime minister Andy Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and a $9.2bn Norwegian aid pledge filled the space instead making the landing of Radcliff’s C-17 at Vnukovo the following morning poignant.

Backchannels open

The visit is the visible part of backchannel talks between Russia and the US that are ongoing all year. Ratcliffe has kept regular contact with his Russian counterpart, SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin, since taking office in January 2025; the two agreed to "regular contact" between their agencies to "contribute to international stability and security, as well as reduce confrontation in relations between Moscow and Washington", TASS reported at the time. Before that, the last recorded contact between the two services' chiefs was Naryshkin's meeting with Burns in Ankara in November 2022.

Earlier this year private conversations between top Russian officials and the US envoys were leaked in November, showing Witkoff and Kushner talking to Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy adviser, and Kirill Dmitriev, who runs the sovereign wealth fund, about the terms of a peace plan. The Kremlin was widely read as having leaked them itself to drag attention back to the original 27-point peace plan (27PPP) agreed at a Moscow meeting on December 3.

A prisoner released, a statement refused

Those backchannel talks bore fruit only a fortnight ago and suggest that relations between the White House and the Kremlin remain cordial. Robert Gilman, a 32-year-old former US Marine, was released on August 11-12 after four and a half years in Russian custody. He was arrested in Voronezh in January 2022 for kicking a police officer while drunk on a Moscow-Abkhazia train and given four and a half years; later convictions for assaults on prison staff and an investigator pushed the term to 10. His family and human rights groups say those charges were fabricated.

By late June he had been moved from a prison hospital in Voronezh to a civilian psychiatric ward in what was described as a dissociative stupor, unable to move or speak, tube-fed and unresponsive, with his lawyers alleging torture and forced injections. Washington asked for his release in early August and Putin pardoned him. Trump said Russia had freed him "solely on humanitarian grounds" and demanded nothing in return; the State Department confirmed there was no swap and no US concessions. Gilman was one of at least 10 Americans held in Russia.

Read less charitably, an unprompted gift casts Putin as a pragmatist and banks a favour to be called in on Ukraine later.

US President Donald Trump’s attitude to Russia remains confused. While he has threatened new harsh sanctions that would target Moscow, on August 24, the US abstanded in a UN vote to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the occasion of Ukraine’s Independence Day. Fifty countries signed a statement at the UN calling for a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire, but the United States again declined to sign.

"We strongly urge Russia to respond to the calls for a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire and resume talks on a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine," Danish foreign minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said, reading it out. The next morning the CIA's director was in Moscow.

 

Will Ukraine survive another 35 years?

Ukraine celebrates 35 years of independence on August 24. But with a crashing population and battered by a bitter war that shows no sign of ending, will it still be there in another 35 years time? / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By Iuliia Mendel August 23, 2026

On the eve of the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, I find myself wondering whether my country will still exist in another 35 years. Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, the rollback of democracy, a severely damaged market economy, and the degradation of every social system compel me, as a Ukrainian woman, to ask whether Ukraine will survive another 35 years if the status quo remains unchanged.

When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, its population stood at 52mn—larger than neighbouring Poland and twice the combined population of Hungary, the Baltic states, and Belarus. Today the official figure is only 20–25mn and declining rapidly. Last year alone the country officially lost 800,000 people—roughly half a million through death and 300 thousand through emigration—while the birth rate was three times lower than the death rate. This year the trend continues: a quarter of a million new refugees in the first half of the year alone, and births now running four times lower than deaths.

Meanwhile, nearly 12mn residents—more than half the population—are pensioners or people with disabilities. The war is draining the country’s last reserves of strength. On one side is life under constant, brutal Russian attacks; on the other is an economy short of people, without reliable electricity, with outdated healthcare lacking doctors, and with education inaccessible in full to a third of Ukrainian children.

The militarization of the economy—prioritizing weapons production while remaining wholly dependent on Western funding—cannot attract, support, or be accepted by the entire population. The only “value added” seems to be produced in endless social-media posts and videos of explosions inside Russia.

Ukraine’s external debt and poverty keep rising. According to the latest World Bank data, poverty has climbed from 36% to 41%.

That is why Ukraine today stands at a crossroads. One possible path is Finland; the other is Afghanistan.

Finland once lost battles and territory. The defeat was crushing and painful. Yet Finland won its nation and its future.

By contrast, the West today is supporting a strategy of Ukraine’s obvious defeat along Afghan lines. Twenty years of war and a trillion dollars in Western aid produced dependence in Kabul rather than sovereignty, an absence of genuine leadership, tolerance of the corruption that hollowed out Kabul’s institutions, and the censorship deemed necessary for “support.” The result was an Afghan government that, after many years of Western backing, could not stand against the Taliban on its own.

Today’s Western strategies are moving Ukraine down that very same road. Our institutions are buckling under corruption and a self-assured autocracy; our people are fleeing and losing their faith; and Russia keeps advancing. We lose territory and we lose people every single day, without pause—and with them, our chance at a future.

To defend the policies Ukraine is pursuing today is to defend a status quo that is an Afghanistan path for Ukraine and a historical shame for the West. This policy has turned Ukraine into a country without political or economic agency. If nothing changes urgently, the country is unlikely to withstand even a few more years of such a brutal war in its hot phase. There will simply be no one left to defend it.

Have any of the Western experts who defend the current strategies performed even the most basic arithmetic? If Ukraine still has 25mn people under the most optimistic estimates, of whom 12mn are pensioners or disabled and another 5mn are children under 18, then the adult population is at most 7mn—perhaps 9mn if we remain optimists. Among them, half are men. The current strategy therefore assumes that 3.5-4.5mn Ukrainian men must defeat a Russia of more than 140mn people that has 38–42mn men of mobilization age. In other words, an average of 4mn Ukrainians against an average of 40mn Russians.

On top of that, Russia actively recruits soldiers from poorer countries and offers financial incentives for joining the army—$10,000—that Ukrainians can only dream of.

Neither logic, nor history, nor even the film ‘300’ teaches anything to those who, from the comfort of the West, insist on fighting Russia with Ukrainian lives. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians I know and talk to every day oppose this approach.

In 35 years, Ukraine has never developed a coherent political ideology. With only a blurred understanding of liberal and conservative values, the Ukrainian political class operates on pathological populism as its main principle of governance. Yet never has the degradation of politics been as severe as during this war.

The radicalization of society, the promotion of war as the only possible form of existence, militarization, and the artificial elevation of controversial historical figures as a new ideology of the present—all of this divides Ukrainian society and drives many more people to consider leaving. Such artificial constructs may produce interesting profiles in Western liberal media, but they cannot save Ukraine from catastrophe.

Nevertheless, the Ukrainian nation—from Donbas to nationalist Lviv and Volyn’—has always gravitated toward conservative-centrist positions. The family as the foundation of society, the church in its various branches as the foundation of faith, and the acceptance of new cultures, ethnicities, and religions as the foundation of community—these remain the things that unite Ukrainians, together with the shared horrific history in which every family carries terrible stories of the Nazi crimes during WW2 and the Holodomor and repressions engineered by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This common ground could become the factor that unites people around an ideological platform natural to Ukraine—one capable not only of saving the country and its future but of guaranteeing lasting stability.

Ukraine can and should become a frontier between the West and Russia. Extremes have never been popular among Ukrainians, a nation of innovation and agribusiness. A strong pull toward education (in the 2010s more than 80% of Ukrainians held higher-education degrees), innovativeness (it was a Ukrainian who led the first program to launch a human into space), and the agricultural sector (rich black soil, chernozem, covers roughly 60–65% of Ukraine’s total land area and over 65% of its arable land) have long been Ukrainian strengths. Total disregard for human life in war has been Russia’s strength.

Ukraine needs more than territorial compromises to achieve peace. It needs leadership that prioritizes the intellectual possibilities of legal nuances and agreements in order to preserve diplomacy and the strategic chance of recovering territory. Above all, it needs measures that preserve people and enable the realistic return of those who have become refugees. Ukraine needs the restoration of democracy, elections, economic recovery, and hope for the future.

Current strategies do not merely undermine all of this while propping up an unsustainable status quo; they lead Ukraine directly toward military, social, and intellectual collapse.

A future of winter humanitarian crisis, further mass emigration, growing numbers of graves, and widespread societal PTSD is steadily approaching. Strategically, people with conservative ideologies are coming to power in the West—people who do not support this unjustified and brutal war, many of whom understand that it cannot be won militarily. This means that if Ukraine does not take its own future into its hands and build new strategies, it will lose partners as quickly as it is losing people.

Iuliia Mendel is a journalist and Zelenskiy’s former press secretary. She posts on X at @IuliiaMendel.

Zelenskiy marks 35 years of independence asking allies for money and missiles

Ukraine's president used his Independence Day audience with more than 30 visiting leaders to put a $27bn hole in the defence budget and a shortage of Patriot interceptors at the top of the agenda. / bne IntelliNews

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By Ben Aris in Berlin August 24, 2026

Ukraine turned 35 on August 24 and its president spent the occasion asking for two things: money and missiles.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv on August 23 that ballistic missile defence and war funding were Ukraine's "two major challenges". The defence ministry is carrying a budget shortfall of $27bn this year, he said, and Kyiv has asked for 360 interceptors for its US-made Patriot batteries, hoping to end up with 300.

The budget shortfall was borne of necessity rather than bad planning. Under attack by the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR), a decision at the start of this year was made to take what money had come in and spending it all on building the medium- and long-range drone fleet that has been playing havoc on Russia’s supply chains behind the lines and striking Russian oil refineries across the country. But Ukraine’s allies have been tardy in sending subsequent tranches and now the budget is starting to run out of cash. Ukraine spent money earmarked for the second half of the year in the first half. The hole now has to be filled twice over. Of the $27bn, 8bn-10bn is needed in advance simply to arm the army through January 2027 while nearly $20bn covers military salaries and payments to the families of the dead.

It’s more money than the finance ministry was using a month ago, and it lands at the moment Kyiv's European money is moving slowest. Ukraine is waiting on €30bn ($35bn) of EU funds whose release is tied to the Verkhovna Rada passing the enabling legislation - a condition Zelenskiy turned into a pointed request that "the entire parliament, including the opposition" get on with it. "Neither the government nor the opposition has this €30bn, and the money is needed for the defence of the entire country," he said. Kyiv has already asked the West for $101bn over two years to keep the state running.

During the day’s speeches, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered Kyiv a lifeline saying she was going to accelerate the transfer of €6bn of the €90bn EU loan allocation to Kyiv for defence spending to tide the government through the rest of the summer.

Who turned up, and who did not

Leaders of more than 30 countries in the Coalition of the Willing joined the Kyiv meeting on August 24, some in person but most by video link. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha greeted European Council president Antonio Costa, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Luxembourg's Luc Frieden, Moldova's Maia Sandu and Estonia's Alar Karis off the train at Kyiv station; the leaders of Lithuania, Latvia, Denmark, Norway and Finland had arrived the day before.

Washington sent a congratulatory statement and a new charge d'affaires, who began his mission in Kyiv on August 23. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a message saying the United States "is committed to Ukraine's sovereignty and continues to work to support a negotiated settlement", European Pravda reported, citing the State Department. The long-trailed first visit to Ukraine by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner was put off again, blamed on the intensity of Russian strikes on Kyiv, but underscored the lack of interest of the Trump administration in resolving the conflict. Witkoff and Kushner have been in Moscow a dozen times, but have yet to visit the Ukrainian capital.

Former US vice-president Mike Pence went instead - in a private capacity. "Ukraine is winning this War," he told the local TV. "With the right support of America and our Allies, the brave Ukrainian people can achieve a victory for freedom for themselves and the Free World."

Norway used the visit to pledge NOK85bn ($9.2bn) for 2027, matching this year, most of it military and much of it to be spent buying weapons from Ukraine's own defence industry. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told Zelenskiy the money would go to the Nansen Support Programme. "Support and reconstruction of Ukraine are also important for European security," he said.

The election question

The awkward questions came from Ukrainian journalists, not the visitors. Asked about calls for wartime elections that disgruntled ex-Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has demanded last year, Zelenskiy was blunt: "It would be a tsunami for the state and split Ukraine apart. My strategy is to bring the country through to the end of the war, and to preserve an independent and sovereign state."

Fedorov repeated his demand at the weekend elections should be held now and denounced corruption inside the Ukrainian state, saying the president had “questions to answer.”

Zelenskiy did not engage with the corruption charge, saying only that Fedorov had overstepped his role. Fedorov says his dismissal followed a clash with former commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and resistance to his attempts to clean up military procurement.

There is still no workable way to let soldiers near the front, several million Ukrainians abroad and people under occupation, to vote safely, Zelenskiy argued. More recently even some of Fedorov's supporters have backed away from the demand as unworkable. Fedorov has also lost some of his shine, tarred with accusations that his own political ambitions are taking precedence over what is good for the country. A KIIS poll released this month found 57% of Ukrainians want elections only after a peace agreement and a complete end to the fighting. The most recent poll still puts Zelenskiy as front runner with former commander-in-chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi second and Fedorov third, although the order keeps changing and Ukraine’s domestic politics has been thrown into turmoil by a slew of recent scandals.

Ukraine's constitution does not itself ban wartime elections; it extends parliament's mandate under Article 83 until a new Rada meets after martial law ends, and keeps the incumbent president in office under Article 108 until a successor is sworn in. The prohibition comes from the 2015 martial law statute and the 2019 Electoral Code, which suspend all elections - presidential included - while martial law is in force. However, earlier this year the Rada passed amendments which, in theory, clear the way for wartime elections.

Overall in several recent polls, Zelenskiy continues to trail Zaluzhny, Kyrylo Budanov, the former military intelligence chief who now runs the presidential administration, and Fedorov, and leads only the anti-rating poll – a list of politicians voters say they would not back under any circumstances. Another survey has found Ukrainians are more worried about corruption in the presidential administration than about Russian bombs.

Nobody in the office, and nothing on the president

Zelenskiy was pressed on the corruption cases now circling the Bankova, including those involving Iryna Mudra, the former deputy head of the President's Office, who was caught up in a racketeering scandal run out of the president’s office. He said he had learned of the allegations at the same time as everybody else and that what was published was enough to justify dismissing her.

"They take certain steps - we respond to those steps. If it's a minister and there are grounds to dismiss them, then they're dismissed," he said, adding that the heads of the anti-corruption agencies "understand perfectly well that I'm not involved in anything like that. And that matters to me."

The independent anti-corruption organs NABU and SAPO searched premises linked to Mudra and MP Vadym Stolar on August 19. The constitution bars the investigation of a sitting president by NABU, which is why the question keeps returning as a political one rather than a legal one.

Not us on Nord Stream

Zelenskiy also used the Nordic-Baltic Eight meeting to deny Ukrainian involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage, five days after Germany's federal prosecutor announced the arrest in Croatia of Ukrainian national Volodymyr Zhuravliov, who is accused of masterminding the explosion in 2022 that destroyed Europe’s major energy pipeline.

"At a high level, we have discussed this with the German side. They know perfectly well that Ukraine was not behind the execution or the very concept of the execution of the relevant operation," he said, adding that the prosecutor general's office and the foreign ministry were both cooperating and that Ukraine was "absolutely open to joint steps regarding the investigation".

Zhuravliov was picked up while working on a Hollywood film about the sabotage. It is the third attempt to detain him: German investigators sought him in Poland in the summer of 2024, when he crossed back into Ukraine before an arrest warrant could be executed, and again in autumn 2025, when a Polish court declined to extradite him. A second suspect, Serhii Kuznetsov, has been in German custody since last summer.

Missiles and tech transfers

Ukraine has run out of US-made Patriot interceptor ammo, the only weapons in its arsenal capable of stopping Russia’s ballistic missiles. The skies are open and Russia has been able to hit cities across Ukraine all summer with impunity. Zelenskiy has spent months touring capitals looking for stock that does not exist as the US has run out of ammo too.

With nothing to give, allies have started handing over knowledge instead. Washington granted Ukraine the right to make Patriot interceptors missiles in July, though that plan looks more useful for Ukraine's next war than this one. Even that gesture has fallen on stony ground after US manufacturers have reportedly been reluctant to share their technology with Ukraine, afraid it will out produce and undercut their own production. With a heavy Russian winter bombardment looming, Zelenskiy has started to sound increasingly desperate in the last month as he is running out of options.

Burnham arrived in Kyiv on August 24 with a version of the same offer. The UK will allow MBDA to declassify information about British-made components in the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missile, letting Ukraine work towards building its own, and will help France stand up long-range missile assembly lines in the country. "The Ukrainian people should be in no doubt: the United Kingdom stands with you today and for as long as it takes," Burnham said, continuing a tradition started by his predecessor UK former Prime Minister Keir Starmer who signed a “100-year partnership” deal with Ukraine in January 2025.

Moscow will read the new missile supply deals as an escalation, and the timing does not help: Russia has already accused Britain of deliberately escalating the war by allowing strikes with British-made drones on Russian targets and argued that takes the UK from a mere “supplier” to an “active participant” in the war against Russia via its Ukrainian proxy. Russia has recalled its ambassador to London over the weekend without naming a replacement. Berlin is moving the same way, with a €12bn long-range missile arsenal of its own on the drawing board, missiles designed to hit targets deep inside Russian territory.

A declassification notice is not an interceptor, and a French assembly line in Ukraine is a project that won’t appear for years - the same lag that makes the Patriot licence a gesture rather than a solution. What Ukraine has between now and the spring is whatever arrives from allied stocks, plus its own drones, and a defence budget $27bn short.

The war both economies are fighting

The rhetoric is grandiose. The practical consequences of the pledges made in Kyiv during Independence Day are negligible. The talk is running in parallel with an escalation in a brutal tit-for-tat missile war that is escalating steadily. Putin prefixed the celebration with a potent warning the day before in an interview on Russian state TV, saying that Bankova had opened a “Pandora’s box” by attacking Russia’s retail sector with strike on e-commerce logistics of Wildberries and now Ozon, which was struck for the first time on August 21 in a rapidly expanding warehouse war.

Neither side is winning. Ukrainian drones have moved from Russian refineries to Russian retail, hitting Wildberries warehouses through the summer and burning Russia's biggest Ozon warehouse in Orenburg at the weekend, part of a campaign in which both sides are now targeting each other's civilian economy. Russia has responded with a disproportionate retaliation and is attempting to systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail infrastructure piece by piece.

A double-tap drone daytime strike on a shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih at the weekend, Zelenskiy's home town, killed at least 16 people on August 21 and injured 130. Odesa port infrastructure has been hit hard enough that Ukraine’s main grain export terminal has been closed down in a blow that could cost Ukraine 5.3% of GDP by 2027. Even a company as dominant as Nova Poshta, which lifted profits 24% while its depots burned, is now sorting parcels on a decentralised backup system. When the mercury begins to fall, the Russian onslaught is widely expected to intensify.