The Ukrainian capital and its suburbs were hit by a combined missile and drone strike early Monday morning, in what the Russian Defense Ministry called a response to terrorist attacks by Vladimir Zelensky’s government.

The first wave of blasts in Kiev was heard at around 1:30 AM local time, followed by more explosions in multiple waves until 5 AM. Videos shared on social media showed numerous powerful blasts around the Ukrainian capital, some followed by secondary detonations, suggesting that a weapons depot, production facility, or air-defense system had been hit.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it used long-range precision weapons and attack drones to hit Ukrainian military-industrial enterprises, fuel and energy facilities in Kiev and Kiev Region, and military airfield infrastructure across several regions in retaliation for “terrorist attacks” on civilian infrastructure inside Russia.

Officials in Kiev reported damage at multiple locations, claiming that most of them were “civilian infrastructure,” and circulated photos and videos of several damaged buildings, including one partially collapsed residential building. The head of the local military administration, Timur Tkachenko, said at least nine people were killed and dozens injured.

The exact locations and types of facilities hit are difficult to verify, as Ukrainian authorities tightly restrict information about strike sites and penalize those who share footage of impacts, except when civilian infrastructure is affected.

Moscow previously pledged to conduct “systematic and consistent strikes” on Kiev’s military installations in retaliation for deadly “terrorist attacks.” Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov said on Friday that the recent campaign against Ukraine’s defense industry has already significantly degraded Kiev’s ability to produce long-range weapons.

Moscow announced the liberation of the city on Friday following weeks of intensive combat in the area, with Russian President Vladimir Putin calling it the “key” to liberating the rest of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Putin also warned Kiev and its “instigators” that any further “terrorist” PR stunts would only lead to the loss of more territory, forcing the Russian military to push Ukrainian forces farther from Russia’s borders in Sumy, Kharkov, and Dnepropetrovsk regions to establish a wider “security zone” and protect civilians.

Several key players from the HK Kremenchuk hockey club, including Ukrainian national team goalkeeper Eduard Zakharchenko and club forward Yegor Bezugly, have reportedly been press-ganged into the army, according to a former teammate.

Kiev’s recruitment drive has grown more forceful as it has had to rely on mandatory mobilization to replenish troops amid battlefield losses, mass desertions, draft dodging, and setbacks on the front lines, including the recent loss of the fortified stronghold of Konstantinovka in the northwest of Donbass.

The new incident was first reported by former Ukrainian national team netminder Artur Ogandzhanyan. A conscription crew came to HK Kremenchuk’s home rink, Iceberg, and took the men away, he said on his Telegram channel on Friday. In total, four men from the hockey club were conscripted, Ogandzhanyan said in an update on Sunday.

This is not the first time Kiev’s draft officers have forcibly conscripted top Ukrainian athletes.

Last November, former Dynamo Kiev midfielder Denis Garmash was reportedly forcibly mobilized in Kiev. In October, former Dynamo player Artur Rudko was detained while trying to leave the country via Odessa Region and conscripted.

Ukrainian press gangs have increasingly used violent methods to kidnap men, often taking them off the street and from their homes, in what has been nationally dubbed “busification.”

Moscow has accused Kiev and its Western backers of being willing to wage war against Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” while Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Kiev is catching men “like dogs on the street.”

Ukrainian drone strikes on Crimea over the weekend have left at least two dead, regional Governor Sergey Aksyonov said on Sunday.

An overnight drone strike on the northern part of the Russian peninsula killed one person and injured two others, Aksyonov said in a statement, adding that one of the survivors remains in serious condition.

A day earlier, a separate drone raid killed one civilian and wounded two others, including a 10-year-old child, he said.

At least 71 Ukrainian drones were intercepted above Crimea and the Belgorod, Bryansk, and Rostov regions overnight on Sunday, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Russia’s military reported nearly 400 interceptions over the country the previous day, as Ukraine escalated its long-range UAV attacks on Russian infrastructure, targeting oil refineries and logistics facilities amid battlefield setbacks.

Kiev has also increased strikes on purely civilian targets in recent months, including museums, ambulances and buses.

Ukrainian strikes have killed 21 children and wounded 183 others in the past three months, the highest figure since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, according to Rodion Miroshnik, who leads the Russian Foreign Ministry mission responsible for tracking Kiev’s war crimes.

Overall, Ukraine has killed 422 civilians, and wounded 2,618 others in the second quarter of this year, he said in a virtual meeting on Friday.

Russian Pacific Fleet warships have arrived in the Chinese port of Qingdao for annual joint naval drills, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said on Sunday.

The two navies, supported by aviation, will conduct search-and-rescue operations, anti-submarine and air defense drills, and live-fire artillery exercises, the ministry said.

Video released by the ministry shows a detachment of Russian Pacific Fleet vessels arriving at the port. It also captures the official welcoming ceremony, where sailors from both countries exchange handshakes as children present flowers to the visiting crews.

China’s Ministry of National Defense said Sunday that the exercise is part of the annual cooperation plan between the two militaries and is aimed at jointly addressing security challenges and maintaining regional peace and stability. It added that some forces from both sides would conduct a joint maritime patrol in parts of the Pacific Ocean following the drills.

The drills come as Russia and China continue to expand military cooperation alongside closer political and economic ties.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing. During the visit, the parties signed over 40 cooperation agreements in areas including trade, technology, and media exchanges.

Putin said Russia-China relations had reached an unprecedented level, describing them as a model of a genuine comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation. Xi said that the ties had reached “the highest level in history.” The two sides also agreed to extend a friendship treaty first signed in 2001.

Kiev has refused to accept the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers who died in the fighting over Konstantinovka – a key Donbass stronghold liberated earlier this week – the Russian Defense Ministry has said.

Moscow has offered a humanitarian pause to ensure the remains of the dead could be handed over to relatives and buried properly, it added.

The Defense Ministry made its proposal on Saturday through the existing security service channels, it said in a statement on Telegram. The Ukrainian military was asked to halt the shelling of Konstantinova between 12:00 noon and 6:00 PM (Mocow time) on Monday to make the handover possible and inform the Russian command about their decision in advance.

“The Ukrainian side has rejected this proposal,” the Russian ministry said on Sunday.
“The Kiev regime has done absolutely nothing so that the bodies of dead Ukrainian servicemen could be buried properly by their relatives,” the statement added, calling it “yet another” demonstration of the Ukrainian authorities treating soldiers as “cannon fodder.” 

Kiev has been accused of deliberately obstructing the return of the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in the past. Last year, the governor of Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, Evgeny Balitsky, published nearly 100 names of dead Ukrainian soldiers he said had been disowned by Kiev. The documents published by the official also contained their ID and places of death.

Balitsky also accused Kiev of trying to conceal the scale of the Ukrainian losses and avoid paying compensation to the fallen soldiers’ families at the time.

The latest development comes days after the Russian military reported the full liberation of Konstantinovka. The strategic Donbass city was taken after weeks of intense fighting. According to Russian Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy, the Ukrainian military lost around 13,500 troops in the battle.

The recent liberation of Konstantinovka – a key Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass – could pave the way for Russian forces to take control of the entire region in short order, former Pentagon security policy analyst Michael Maloof has told RT.

The Russian military announced on Friday that its troops had seized the heavily fortified Ukrainian stronghold, which is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk-Konstantinovka agglomeration in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Speaking to RT on Saturday, Maloof described the liberation of Konstantinovka as a “very significant development” in that “it opens up the way, it breaks a logjam, if you will, for Russian troops now to basically take over all of the Donbass and to expand.”

“They’re not going to have much to bargain with. I think that’s basically what it’s getting down to. Their armed forces are in retreat. They don’t have the manpower. They can’t recruit fast enough. They can’t even train them. And now, basically, the Russian army is going to become a steamroller, and President Putin made clear that he was going to be accelerating this effort now,” he said.

President Putin inspected an auxiliary command post on Friday, where he was briefed by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and senior frontline commanders, and called Konstantinovka the “key to liberating the entire territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic.”

Watch the full interview below:

The liberation of the city of Konstantinovka gives Russia an opportunity to envelop the last heavily fortified area under Ukrainian control in Donbass, former US Army officer and military commentator Stanislav Krapivnik has said.

Moscow announced the liberation of the city on Friday after weeks of intensive combat in the area. Konstantinovka is located at the southernmost tip of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of cities in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which Ukrainian troops have turned into a single, heavily fortified fortress, riddled with a vast system of reinforced trenches, tunnels, and bunkers. The city lies some 15km southeast of Kramatorsk, with the small town of Druzhkovka located in between.

Gaining control of Konstantinovka opens new opportunities for Moscow to advance on the last Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass, Krapivnik told RT on Saturday.

“This is very important because this also allows Russian forces to go around Druzhkovka and Kramatorsk and start to hit them in a double envelopment,” he added.

The situation for Ukrainian frontline troops in the area appears to be dire, with both attempts to hold their positions and efforts to retreat likely to result in heavy losses due to “Russian drone dominance, Russian artillery, and Russian aviation,” Krapivnik believes.

“At this point, the only way they’re coming out of this alive is to surrender. Once they’re spotted, they either stay in place and get destroyed or they run and get destroyed,” he said.

Watch the full interview below:

The US-Israeli attack on Iran earlier this year was completely unprovoked, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has stated on his way back from the Islamic Republic. The deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council attended the funeral ceremony for Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on Friday.

The 86-year-old was assassinated, along with several members of his family, on February 28 during the first wave of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.

Speaking to Russian journalists as he flew back to Russia on Saturday, Medvedev said that “there was no serious reason for the American attack… [as] Iran posed no threat to the United States.”

The Russian official noted that Tehran was engaged in negotiations with Washington at the time US President Donald Trump ordered the attack. This fact, according to Medvedev, points to the erosion of international law.

He also recounted that before hostilities began in late February, Russian President Vladimir Putin had proposed a roadmap aimed at peacefully resolving the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. The US and Israel cited the latter as one of the pretexts for military action against the Islamic Republic.

“I think Iran surmounted this toughest of ordeals with dignity,” Medvedev observed, saying that even though some parts of Tehran still lie in ruins, life in the Iranian capital has largely returned to normal.

He told Russian reporters that during the course of the conflict, the Islamic Republic realized that it possesses a deterrent on par with nuclear weapons – namely the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s energy shipments passed before the conflict began. Global crude prices soared to as high as $120 a barrel after Tehran imposed its blockade.

In the event of renewed aggression, Iran could similarly block the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Medvedev suggested. The vital chokepoint that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden is another important waterway for Middle Eastern oil exports.

Referring to Western sanctions imposed on both Moscow and Tehran, the ex-Russian president dismissed them as “illegal unilateral restrictions” that are in breach of international law.

Russian forces have repelled a Ukrainian long-range combined drone and missile attack, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

During the assault, anti-aircraft defenses downed over 500 targets, mainly long-range kamikaze drones, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday. It added that the military destroyed 10 FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles and at least nine munitions fired by US-made HIMARS systems. 

The ministry described the attack as a foiled attempt by Kiev to divert the attention of its Western sponsors and common Ukrainians from large-scale Russian strikes earlier this week, as well as from the loss of Konstantinovka, a major city in northwestern Donbass.

Moscow announced the liberation of the city on Friday following weeks of intensive combat in the area. Konstantinovka is located at the southernmost tip of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of cities in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The agglomeration has been turned into a fortress by Kiev’s forces and remains the last major stronghold under Ukrainian control in the region. The city itself is located some 15 km southeast of Kramatorsk, with the small town of Druzhkovka lying in between.

In June alone, the Russian anti-aircraft defenses intercepted around 13,000 incoming aerial targets over the country’s territory, the ministry said. “The production and launch support for these targets was handled by military departments and specialists from most European countries, including the UK, as well as other sponsors of the Kiev regime,” the ministry said, warning that any further attempts by Kiev to harm the Russian civilians will continue to invoke “appropriate retaliatory actions” by the country’s military.

Kostantinovka was Ukraine’s “most fortified” stronghold, guarded by some 15,500 troops, most of whom have been eliminated during the Russian operation to capture the city, Colonel General Sergey Rudskoy has said.

During a briefing on Saturday, Rudskoy, who is the head of operations at the Russian General Staff, said that throughout several weeks of intense fighting for the strategic city, the Ukrainian military lost around 13,500 troops, 14 tanks, 283 armored fighting vehicles, 1,400 cars, 200 field artillery guns and eight multiple rocket launch systems.

Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed President Vladimir Putin about the liberation of Konstantinovka in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic when the commander-in-chief visited an auxiliary command post on Friday.

Why is Konstantinovka important?

The general described Konstantinovka as “a major industrial and logistics hub, which is the key to the last remaining stronghold of the Kiev regime in Donbass – the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk agglomeration.”

“Most fortified” link in Ukraine’s defense belt

The government in Kiev, which understood the strategic value of Konstantinovka, had started creating an extensive defense system in and around the city back in 2014, Rudskoy noted.

“Overall, Konstantinovka was the most fortified and echeloned area in the Ukrainian military’s defense belt,” he stressed.

The fortifications around the city consisted of two defense lines, which included more than 150 km of trenches and anti-tank ditches with three rows of artificial obstacles and mine fields, according to the general.

Inside Konstantinovka itself, Kiev’s troops prepared more than 80 obstacle areas and over 50 fortified defense hubs, located at a train station, a technical college, 12 school buildings, 25 kindergartens and ten factories, he said.

The city had been guarded by 45 Ukrainian battalions, equipped with various Western-supplied arms, including heavy weaponry, Rudskoy added.

How did the Russians capture the stronghold?

“Despite all the measures taken by the Ukrainian military’s command, the Ukrainian units failed to hold on to the city under pressure from the Russian troops,” the operation’s chief stressed.

After that, the Russian military exploited the supply and rotation difficulties experienced by the Ukrainians to accelerate its advance within the city and “completely captured Kostiantnovka,” the general said.

Kiev’s failed attempt to reassure Western backers

According to Rudskoy, the Ukrainian high command “did not spare the lives of the Ukrainian soldiers, ordering them to hold the defense [in Konstantinovka] until the end.”

“By doing so, the Kiev regime tried to convince its Western curators that the Ukrainian troops are capable of stopping the advance of the Russian army,” he stressed.

“Donbass will be liberated”

The Russian military is continuing to close in on the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk region from several sides. It is the last populated Ukrainian-held area in the DPR, Rudskoy said.

“The tasks assigned by the supreme commander-in-chief to fully liberate Donbass will be achieved,” he insisted.

Moscow is aware that the Baltic states have allowed Ukraine to use their airspace for drone strikes targeting north-western Russia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Galuzin has said.

Kiev has been ramping up its long-range UAV attacks on energy infrastructure in Russia’s Leningrad Region, which surrounds the country’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, since spring. There have been a number of incidents where explosive-laden drones crashed in nearby NATO member states – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – while on their way to Russia in recent months.

Leningrad Region witnessed its latest major Ukrainian drone attack in the early hours on Saturday; at least 72 UAVs were shot down by air defenses, according to local governor Aleksandr Drozdenko.

On the same day, Galuzin told RIA Novosti that the Russian authorities “have verified data indicating that Latvia and other Baltic republics have already provided air corridors for Ukrainian drones that have attacked our country’s civilian infrastructure.”

In May, the ruling coalition in Latvia collapsed over the slow military response to Ukrainian drones. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo claimed that he had challenged Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky on the issue in-person during their meeting in Armenia the same month, calling the aerial incursions “unacceptable.” Estonia had also reported intercepting several UAVs over its territory.

However, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said on Monday that Tallinn will accept Ukrainian drones violating its airspace as long as they are causing damage to Russia. “Of course we are not happy about [the UAV incursions]. But we are not saying to Ukraine to stop it,” he told the Financial Times.

The Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry has published footage of its rescuers fleeing from a large fire whirl in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The agency has been tackling blazes near the defunct Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant since last week, but have so far been unable to contain the fire.

The 30 km (19 mile) radius exclusion zone was set up around the plant after the 1986 nuclear disaster. The mostly-forested area of 2,600 km² (1,000 square miles) remains closed to the public due to being heavily contaminated with radiation.

The clip, which was uploaded by the ministry on its Telegram channel on Friday, captured the formation of a large fire devil that quickly started moving towards the firefighters, forcing them to jump into their vehicles and retreat.

“A Fire tornado: wind, dust and flames merge into one destructive force. That’s exactly how the blazes, which parts of the Kiev Region are constantly fighting in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, look,” the post read.

Over 60 long-range Ukrainian drones were downed en route to the Russian capital overnight, after Moscow announced the liberation of the key Ukrainian stronghold of Konstantinovka and warned Kiev against targeting civilians to simulate “imaginary achievements.”

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said at least 62 drones had been intercepted in the Moscow Region on Saturday. The raid came just hours after the Defense Ministry briefed Russian President Vladimir Putin on the liberation of Konstantinovka in the northwest of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

The mayor reported no casualties or damage on the ground, adding that emergency services swiftly responded to all of the sites where debris fell.

St. Petersburg Governor Aleksandr Beglov said an overnight drone attack targeted an oil terminal in the city, and that a total of 72 UAVs were intercepted. There were no casualties and the aftermath of the incident has been fully dealt with, he added. Debris from one of the UAVs fell in the suburb of Peterhof, home to an 18th-century imperial palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Russia’s air defenses intercepted a total of 389 Ukrainian drones over multiple regions overnight, the Defense Ministry said on Saturday.

Escalating long-range attacks on Russian infrastructure, including oil refineries and bridges in border regions, have become a key element of Kiev’s war strategy, as manpower shortages have prevented it from turning the tide on the battlefield.

On Friday alone, a woman was killed by a missile strike in Russia’s Belgorod Region, while a drone attack on a market in Tokmak, Zaporozhye Region, left five residents dead and another 18 injured.

“To reinforce their legends and lies, their false statements, the opponent may take certain actions of a diversionary-terrorist nature, carry out raids – even with small forces, but with great propaganda pomp – in order to confirm their theses about imaginary achievements,” Putin said.

The Russian president also warned that continued attacks on civilian sites would only force Moscow to push Ukrainian forces farther from Russia’s borders in Sumy, Kharkov, and Dnepropetrovsk regions.

In the meantime, Moscow has vowed to intensify strikes on Ukraine’s military-industrial infrastructure and facilities supporting its operation, after Russian attacks in June already degraded Kiev’s ability to produce long-range weapons and strike targets deep inside Russia.

The Russian Defense Ministry has released a video featuring highlights from the battle for the city of Konstantinovka, after Moscow announced the full liberation of the key Ukrainian stronghold on Friday.

Konstantinovka is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of small cities in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The agglomeration has been heavily fortified by Ukrainian forces and remains the last major stronghold under Kiev’s control in the region.

Footage released by the military shortly after the announcement shows moments from the fierce battle for the city.

The liberation of Konstantinovka has been touted as a major achievement by the Russian leadership. The city is located at the southernmost tip of the fortified agglomeration, some 15 km southeast of Kramatorsk; the small town of Druzhkovka is located between them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow will do “everything necessary” to protect Russia’s civilians and infrastructure, warning Kiev that its terrorist attacks will only result in a deeper security zone along the border – and cautioning Ukraine’s sponsors about possible “big decisions” in the future.

The commander-in-chief visited an auxiliary command post alongside top military commanders and Defense Ministry officials on Friday, where he was briefed on the advance of the Russian army in Donbass, including the liberation of Konstantinovka, which had been one of Kiev’s key strongholds.

Putin expressed confidence that Russia would win no matter what, after one of the commanders told him that “victory will be ours.” He noted that the commanders of the Russian armed forces “must act rhythmically and rationally, doing everything necessary to preserve the lives of our soldiers and ensure the unconditional fulfillment of combat tasks.”

However, to prop up their “fictitious successes on the battlefield” and “bolster their legends and lies,” the Kiev may take certain actions of a “diversionary-terrorist nature,” he warned.

The president wondered whether Kiev’s European backers were now openly encouraging strikes on Russian civilians, after praising its “innovative” use of drone technologies in a joint Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8) declaration in early June.

“Does this mean they also have in mind strikes on our civilian sites, civilian infrastructure, transport carrying civilians and children, and student dormitories?” Putin said.

Putin said Russia would respond accordingly and ordered the military to continue massed and group strikes on Ukraine’s military-industrial infrastructure and facilities supporting its operation.

The Russian president also issued a veiled warning to Kiev’s NATO backers and “instigators of war,” ordering the military to analyze their direct involvement in combat actions on the ground.

“This analysis is necessary for us to make possible big decisions in the future,” Putin stated.

The Russian military's campaign against Ukraine's defense industry has significantly weakened Kiev's ability to produce long-range weapons, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has said.

He made the remarks on Friday during a high-level meeting at a forward command post of the joint forces involved in the Ukraine conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, and other senior military and civilian officials attended the meeting.

In June alone, Russian forces struck 55 Ukrainian defense-industrial facilities, including a plant producing FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles and multiple enterprises assembling long-range drones, Gerasimov said. Around ten military airfields were also targeted.

According to the general, the campaign has substantially degraded Ukraine’s ability to manufacture long-range strike weapons and carry out attacks deep inside Russian territory.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the targets included facilities producing drones and missiles, plants manufacturing electronic warfare equipment, a major fuel depot, and several gas infrastructure sites supplying energy to Ukraine’s defense industry.

Russian troops have captured Kiev’s longstanding stronghold of Konstantinovka in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbass, with Russian President Vladimir Putin calling the city a “key” that opens a direct path toward liberating the rest of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

The city is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk-Konstantinovka agglomeration in the northwest of the DPR, which Kiev had touted as a virtually impregnable “fortress” after spending a decade heavily reinforcing it following the 2014 Maidan coup that triggered the conflict in then-Ukrainian Donbass.

Konstantinovka has seen intensive fighting over the past few weeks, after Russian forces advanced from multiple directions, effectively cutting the city in half and surrounding part of the disorganized Ukrainian garrison.

The Russian commander-in-chief said the liberation of Konstantinovka was “only the first, but very important stage” in destroying Kiev’s remaining positions in the region, during a visit to an auxiliary command post on Friday, where he was briefed by Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov and senior frontline commanders on the combat situation on the ground.

During the briefing, commanders reported that Russian troops had entered Konstantinovka from multiple directions, breaking Ukrainian defenses into isolated pockets before clearing them one by one. They said Kiev’s forces had built several fortified defensive lines around the city, relying on concrete-reinforced positions, basements, industrial sites, and dense urban districts.

One commander told Putin that Ukrainian troops had believed the defenses to be “practically impregnable,” but Russian assault units had managed to infiltrate behind enemy lines in small groups, block Ukrainian forces, and disrupt the city’s organized defense.

A platoon commander speaking by video link from central Konstantinovka reported that his unit had cleared a high-rise district and taken control of several administrative buildings, while Russian troops continued to search the city for remaining Ukrainian servicemen hiding in basements, damaged buildings, and ruins.

Putin thanked the soldiers involved in the operation, saying he had “no doubt” that Russia would win.

The president also warned that Russia would continue deepening a security zone along the border as long as Kiev keeps targeting civilian infrastructure.

Four local officials have been injured after their vehicle was blown up by a Ukrainian mine in Russia’s Kursk Region, Governor Aleksandr Khinshtein has said.

The blast took place on Friday morning in central Rylsk, a town roughly 25 km from the Ukrainian border. The explosive device appeared to have been detonated remotely when the district administration vehicle was passing through the area.

Rylsk District head Vladimir Kovalchuk was inside the car and suffered blast injuries and shrapnel wounds to his legs. The driver, Sergey Besedin, head of the district’s administrative support department, sustained a non-penetrating abdominal wound and shrapnel injuries to his thigh.

Two other administration employees standing on the steps of a nearby building were also injured by the blast and shrapnel. They were taken to a hospital with acoustic trauma and wounds to their arms and legs.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a terrorism case over the attack, stating that the explosive device was planted remotely by Ukrainian forces using drones.

The incident follows a string of similar attacks in Rylsk. On Wednesday, Ukrainian drones reportedly scattered explosive devices on two city squares. A bomb technician was killed while trying to defuse one of them, and a police officer was also injured.

Khinshtein described the situation in the town as tense and urged residents to avoid unnecessary travel, stay away from roadsides, and not touch unfamiliar objects.

A rise in drone-dropped mines has also been reported on roads in Russia’s Donbass, Novorossiya, and other border regions. Several civilian vehicles have been blown up in recent weeks, with multiple deaths reported.

President Vladimir Putin said last week that Kiev’s attacks on civilians are aimed at intimidating the Russian population, undermining public confidence, and pressuring Moscow into halting its advance on the front line.

He said such attacks would not affect the battlefield situation or stop Russian forces from pursuing their objectives.

A Russian military court has sentenced 12 defendants over a plot to assassinate RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, handing the alleged ringleader 25 years in prison.

The case stems from a 2023 operation by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which said it had foiled a Ukrainian-backed plot to kill Simonyan and celebrity journalist Ksenia Sobchak.

Authorities arrested members of the neo-Nazi group Paragraph-88, alleging they had conducted surveillance of the two women’s homes and workplaces in preparation for the attacks.

The FSB said it had seized a Kalashnikov rifle with ammunition, rubber batons, knives, brass knuckles, Nazi symbols and communications devices containing evidence of the plot. The agency said the detainees admitted that they had been preparing the killings on orders from Ukraine’s Security Service in exchange for 1.5 million rubles ($20,000) for each murder.

The defendants were charged with crimes including participation in a terrorist organization, aiding terrorist activity, public calls for extremism, incitement of hatred, robbery and hooliganism. Balashov and Savelyev were also accused of preparing to acquire firearms and plotting to kill Simonyan.

Investigators also said members of the group had carried out attacks on foreigners and people they identified as LGBT, filmed the assaults and posted the footage online.

Commenting on the verdict on Friday, Simonyan said she harbors no ill will toward the would-be assassins, adding that she had “forgiven them right away.”

RT’s editor-in-chief also said she would be willing to help the “young children or elderly parents” of those convicted of plotting to kill her, should they need assistance.

As a Christian, Simonyan said she is saddened that some people are willing to kill for money.

A pioneering Russian anti-drone round, which uses special three-element bullets in standard small-arms munitions, has been showcased in a new video released by the defense conglomerate Rostec.

The Mnogotochie (Ellipsis) project was unveiled earlier this year and is currently undergoing trials in the army, according to the report. On Friday, Rostec published footage showing the new munitions in action at a testing range.

Mnogotochie is a variant of a multiple-projectile cartridge for rifled weapons. Each bullet consists of three stacked elements made from a special bronze-like alloy. The spin gives them sufficient stability to be compatible with muzzle brakes, unlike shotgun rounds, while the spread increases the chances of hitting and disabling a small FPV drone.

According to the developer, a Russian producer of precision firearms with expertise in specialized munitions, a 5.45x39mm Mnogotochie round remains effective at ranges of up to 150 meters, while its larger 7.62x54mm version is suited for twice that distance.

In the video, rounds of both calibers were tested in single shots and bursts against stationary and moving targets, demonstrating high penetration and a decent rate of dispersion. At 100 meters, Mnogotochie munitions have enough punch to consistently pierce a 25mm layer of wood backed by a 0.8mm steel sheet.

The idea behind the round is to remove the need for a separate anti-drone weapon, replacing it with relatively lightweight magazines for weapons already carried by troops.

The government in Kiev and its handlers in NATO are resorting to terrorism because they have been “demilitarized” by Russia during the Ukraine conflict, military analyst Andrey Martyanov has said.

Ukraine has intensified drone attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure, residential areas, and vehicles including passenger buses, amid continued setbacks on the front line in recent months.

Moscow warned that it would carry out “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure and “decision-making centers” in response to Kiev’s terrorist attacks, including one in the Lugansk People’s Republic on May 22. On that occasion, Ukrainian forces targeted a college dormitory in the town of Starobelsk in several waves of drone attacks late at night while students were asleep, killing 21 people, mostly teenage girls, and injuring dozens of others.

Martyanov told RT on Friday that he believes that the responsibility for the attacks on civilian targets inside Russia lies with NATO as the bloc’s officers are “essentially in the operational strategic command of the armed forces of Ukraine.” 

“Terrorism… is the only weapon they basically have… They will continue to attack children, hospitals. This is what they do. This is... well, basically, the moral qualities, or rather lack thereof, of the Western European elites. They are also very scared,” the analyst stressed.

Russia carried out another large-scale UAV and missile strike against military-related targets in Ukraine on Thursday, hitting drone-manufacturing facilities, fuel depots, and energy infrastructure.

The raids “will be consistent and… nonstop, essentially. And that’s what we are observing. The intensity probably is going to increase,” Martyanov said, giving his characterization of the Russian president’s position.

A Ukrainian missile strike on Russia’s Belgorod Region overnight has left a woman dead and caused water and power outages, acting Governor Aleksandr Shuvaev has said.

Another woman was injured and five cars were damaged, the official reported on Friday.

In Smolensk Region, a Ukrainian attack drone sparked a fire at an industrial facility but resulted in no injuries, Governor Vasily Anokhin has said.

In Krasnodar Region, drone debris caused damage in nine separate locations, local officials said. The roofs and windows of several buildings were hit, while strikes on a gas pipeline and a power grid pole did not interrupt supplies, according to the report.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported intercepted 155 Ukrainian kamikaze drones overnight.

The Ukrainian government is reportedly asking its Western sponsors for tens of billions of dollars in additional funding, claiming there is a small window of opportunity to force Moscow to walk back its goals.

Moscow has responded by ramping up its own attacks. On Thursday morning, Kiev was hit by what Ukrainian officials have called one of the biggest Russian strikes on the capital since the conflict escalated in 2022.

The Russian Defense Ministry released a list of targeted locations, including production facilities for Ukrainian deep-strike drones and missiles, as well as other sites essential to Ukraine’s war effort.

A Ukrainian drone strike on a market in Tokmak, Zaporozhye Region has left at least five residents dead and another 18 injured on Friday, Governor Evgeny Balitsky has reported.

The Russian official stressed that the casualty count is preliminary, as local rescue services continue to respond to the emergency.

His initial report said victims were being rushed to a local hospital amid an ongoing Ukrainian raid.

Balitsky said Ukrainian forces deliberately struck people who were buying groceries and fit a pattern of attacks against civilian locations.

A series of Ukrainian overnight attacks on the region have killed three people and injured several others, Balitsky previously said. One of the fatalities was the driver of a truck hit by a drone, according to the official. The two others were an elderly couple, whose bodies were recovered from a destroyed rural home.

Zaporozhye Region is among former Ukrainian territories that Kiev claims sovereignty over and seeks to retake through continued hostilities. It joined Russia following a referendum in late 2022, which the Ukrainian government branded a “sham.” Parts of the region remain under control of Ukrainian forces.

Russian troops are nearing the end of the search-and-destroy operation to eliminate the remnants of the Ukrainian garrison in the city of Konstantinovka, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has announced.

The hostilities in the city, located in the northwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), have intensified in recent weeks. Russian forces have advanced to the city from multiple directions, effectively cutting it in half and disorganizing the Ukrainian defenses in the area.

Konstantinovka is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a string of settlements in the northern part of the DPR. The agglomeration has been heavily fortified by Ukrainian forces, which effectively turned it into one large fortress. Konstantinovka is located roughly 15km to the south-east of Kramatorsk, with the town of Druzhkovka lying in between.

Over the past 24-hour period, Ukraine has lost up to 80 servicemen in the city, over 20 soft and armored vehicles, and three artillery pieces, as well as 25 ground unmanned vehicles, the ministry stated. Apart from that, Russian forces have destroyed some 27 Ukrainian UAV command and control points, it added.

Drone footage from the city shared by the Defense Ministry features multiple Ukrainian ground unmanned vehicles, apparently used to bring supplies to the blocked troops, hunted down and destroyed by Russian FPV drones. The video also shows a group of Ukrainian soldiers taking cover in a residential house and ending up being subjected to artillery shelling.

The commander of the international brigade ‘Pyatnashka,’ Akhra Avidzba, told the Russian news outlet Vesti later in the day that the city had already effectively come under Russian control. Avidzba, better known by his call sign ‘Abkhaz,’ pointed at the change of rhetoric in Ukraine, which had long-portrayed Konstantinovka as a part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk fortress.

“The rhetoric before was that it’s an agglomeration of fortresses and cities that will form a unified line of defense, but now they’re saying, ‘So what if we lost Kostiantynivka or will lose it? Like, nothing depends on it.’ This rhetoric alone makes it clear they’ve already abandoned Konstantinovka,” Avidzba said.

The situation in which Poland now finds itself is a good example of how even a relatively successful country can drive itself into a foreign policy impasse through the narrowness of its own thinking.

Poland is not, by modern standards, an inept state and its economy is growing, its institutions function and it occupies an important place in European affairs. Yet its foreign policy has been reduced to a single organizing principle: opposition to Russia. Warsaw has designated Moscow as its ideal adversary and has subordinated almost every other aspect of its external activity to the goal of harming Russia by any means available.

This applies first and foremost to Poland’s relationship with the Kiev regime. It would be naïve to believe that Polish politicians have ever held many illusions about the nature of the authorities in Ukraine and nor have they traditionally had warm feelings towards their Ukrainian neighbors. On the contrary, the Polish elite’s attitude to Ukraine has long been shaped by contempt and historical suspicion and this view has been formed over centuries and, it must be admitted, has not emerged without reason.

Nevertheless, in recent years Warsaw has made itself Kiev’s most energetic advocate in Europe as it’s supplied Ukraine with vast quantities of weapons and has turned its own territory into the main logistical hub for Western military aid. At the same time, the Polish authorities have done everything possible to destroy channels of dialogue with Moscow and Minsk, casting Poland as Russia’s most irreconcilable opponent, even by the standards of the wider West.

The problem is that Warsaw convinced itself of something that was never realistic in that it imagined that Ukraine could serve as a powerful Polish instrument for containing Russia while remaining manageable and responsive to Polish requests. Some in Poland also appear to have believed that Kiev was fighting for a European choice and that its desire to join NATO and the European Union would make it more accommodating.

Both assumptions were wrong and the Ukrainian authorities have behaved towards their Polish patrons in exactly the way one should have expected. They have taken what was offered, demanded more, and then publicly insulted and humiliated those who helped them. The recent exchange of awards and diplomatic gestures is only the most visible symptom of a deeper problem after Poland imagined a relationship that couldn’t exist and then built a strategy around this chimera.

As a result, Polish foreign policy now looks absurd as Warsaw has invested enormous political and emotional capital in Ukraine, only to find that Kiev feels no need to show gratitude. Worse still for Poland, there is no obvious way out because a serious confrontation with Kiev would undermine the whole anti-Russian structure of Polish policy, while continuing as before means accepting repeated humiliation.

That fixation has deep historical roots as for Poland, Russia isn’t merely a neighboring power, but a source of complexes and envy on a scale rarely found in modern European politics. Russia deprived Poland of any chance of becoming the leader of the Slavic world and later, the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union shaped the conditions under which modern Polish political culture developed. The struggle against Russian domination became one of the defining themes of Polish public life.

In effect, opposition to Russia helped create modern Polish identity, but it left the political elite with little ability to look at the world through any other prism. The result is the mindset of a sizeable European nation whose foreign policy imagination has room for almost nothing except the struggle against its great eastern neighbor.

The career of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the American political thinker of Polish origin, embodied this drama. He wrote a series of striking works on international relations, but almost everything in them was subordinated to the Russian question, which meant his intellectual universe was large in appearance, but in practice revolved around one object.

That leaves Russia and here the Polish elite feels entirely at home as, for two centuries, it has trained itself to think of little else. Now, however, reality is intruding because Kiev is behaving as Kiev was always likely to behave, taking Polish support for granted, glorifying figures whom many Poles regard as war criminals, and treating Warsaw not as a patron but as a useful subordinate.

Still, the current crisis is unlikely to produce a military clash between Poland and Ukraine, or even a genuine political break. Nor will it lead to a significant reduction in Polish support for Kiev and we can already see the dispute being presented as an internal Polish quarrel, a by-product of rivalry within Warsaw’s ruling elite. In this version, the problem isn’t Kiev’s conduct but Poland’s own domestic politics and this is convenient.

It allows Polish politicians to avoid confronting the failure of their strategy. After a few rounds of public argument, they will probably try to push the matter aside and return to business as usual. To do otherwise would mean admitting that Poland has no coherent foreign policy beyond its hostility to Russia.

This is the deeper humiliation as Poland, unable to formulate a foreign policy that is not anti-Russian, inevitably becomes an instrument of other people’s interests. For many years these were primarily American and British interests, but now Poland also finds itself serving the interests of the Kiev regime, a government entirely dependent on outside support but still capable of dictating the emotional terms of its relationship with Warsaw.

All this is especially strange because Poland has no urgent need to behave this way given it’s one of the few major European countries whose economy is still growing at a steady pace, roughly 3.3 to 3.6 percent a year. A more self-confident country might have used this position to consolidate, enrich itself and avoid unnecessary geopolitical adventures.

But Poland can’t do that. A relatively large country must have a foreign policy and since Warsaw has no foreign policy idea except opposition to Russia, it will continue to move in circles.

That’s the trap Poland has built for itself. It imagined that Ukraine could be used as a weapon against Russia, but instead, it’s discovered that those who define themselves only by hostility to Moscow are easily used by others.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.

Three people have been injured after a Ukrainian drone struck a tourist bus traveling from Belarus to Russia’s Black Sea coast, officials from both countries said on Thursday.

The bus, carrying 19 passengers from the Belarusian capital Minsk to the resort city of Anapa, was hit near the Krasny Kamen border crossing in Russia’s Bryansk Region.

Acting Bryansk Region Governor Egor Kovalchuk said that the “Ukrainian terrorists” used an aircraft-type drone in what he described as a “targeted strike on civilians.”

The two Belarusian drivers suffered shrapnel wounds, while the Belarusian Health Ministry later reported that one passenger had also been injured. Emergency crews were dispatched to the scene.

Passengers were evacuated to a temporary accommodation center, where they received hot meals and psychological support. Belarusian citizens were later transported to the Gomel Region, while six Russian nationals remained at the facility in Bryansk Region.

The Krasny Kamen crossing was temporarily closed following the attack, causing long lines of cars and buses.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a terrorism case, accusing the Ukrainian military of carrying out another attack on civilians. Investigators said that they are working to identify the type and model of the drone used.

Minsk strongly condemned the strike. Belarusian MP Oleg Gaidukevich called it another attempt by Kiev to draw Belarus into the wider Russia-Ukraine conflict, but said that Belarus would not be provoked and that “everyone involved in terrorism and extremism will be held accountable.”

Belarus described that attack as a “monstrous crime,” while President Alexander Lukashenko called it a deliberate provocation. Kiev denied responsibility.

The latest strike also follows a series of threats by Vladimir Zelensky against Belarus. Last month, he demanded that Minsk dismantle alleged drone relay stations near the border, warning that Kiev would destroy them if Belarus failed to act.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned Kiev against expanding the conflict, saying that Moscow is prepared to defend Belarus under their joint security pact, which includes the potential use of nuclear weapons.

The recent theft of a bronze monument to iconic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in Germany has sparked concerns in Moscow that state-backed efforts aimed at eradicating Russian culture in Eastern Europe are spilling over into other countries.

The crime occurred sometime between last Friday and Saturday, according to the administration of Hemer, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, which on Tuesday offered €1,000 ($1,140) for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators.

The Russian Embassy called the theft “unsettling,” stressing that the monument “has for years served as a symbol of the importance of Russian cultural legacy in Germany.” Diplomats from the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and members of the Russian-German community visited the site in the town park last month.

The monument was a gift from Shchyolkovo, Hemer’s sister town in Russia, and was created by local artist Grigory Pototsky. It was unveiled in September 1994.

Images from the scene showed an empty stone base with the remains of the steel framework that used to support the poet’s statue. Hemer officials said its sheer weight suggests that several individuals had to use power tools and an escape vehicle to steal it.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday that the incident echoed the “war on monuments” in Poland and the Baltic states, aimed at removing sculptures dedicated to the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, as well as the Ukrainian government’s crackdown on Russian culture.

Moscow views the campaigns in Eastern Europe to remove Russian wartime monuments as part of an attempted rehabilitation of local Nazi collaborators.

In Ukraine, mass vandalism and the removal of monuments after the 2014 Western-backed coup initially targeted Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. However, it has since grown into a state-backed purge of Russian cultural landmarks, such as the monument to Catherine II and her royal aides in Odessa in 2022 and the statue of writer Mikhail Bulgakov in Kiev earlier this year.

Dozens of monuments to Pushkin have been dismantled throughout Ukraine as part of the campaign.

The EU’s top court has ruled that private individuals can face criminal prosecution for posting RT videos on public websites, widening the bloc’s crackdown on Russian media.

The Court of Justice of the European Union issued the ruling on Thursday in a case from Germany, where three people are being prosecuted for publishing RT DE videos on a freely accessible website.

The site did not charge readers and was financed only through voluntary donations. The CJEU, however, said that made no difference and ruled that all persons who are “directly or indirectly” responsible for making banned content available to the public can be treated as “operators” under EU sanctions rules.

The judges argued it was irrelevant if the individuals were running a business, how long the content was available, or how widely it was spread.

Under the German law cited in the ruling, violations of EU sanctions-based media bans can carry up to five years in prison.

The ruling effectively pushes the EU ban on RT beyond broadcasters, platforms or media companies, allowing for the criminal prosecution of any individuals accused of making RT content publicly available online.

The EU banned RT and Sputnik, among other Russian media outlets, after the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. Brussels said the sanctions would remain in place until the end of the Ukraine conflict and after Moscow ceases to conduct “disinformation and information manipulation actions against the EU.”

Germany had targeted RT even before the bloc-wide ban, with RT DE facing licensing pressure, platform bans, banking problems and regulatory action.

RT has vehemently condemned the restrictions and rejected the EU’s accusations, stressing that the bloc has consistently failed to point to a “a single example, a single grain of evidence” of false reporting.

Moscow has repeatedly condemned the restrictions as censorship and an information war against Russia, accusing EU governments of using the Ukraine conflict as a pretext to silence dissent, suppress Russian-language media, and intimidate journalists who challenge the mainstream Western narrative.

A Ukrainian army unit has paid tribute to Roman Shukhevich, a prominent World War II-era nationalist leader who served as an officer in Nazi-created formations implicated in atrocities in what is now Western Ukraine and Belarus.

Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade, one of the successors of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, marked Shukhevich’s birthday on Tuesday with a video, most of which consisted of commentary by one of its battalion commanders. He described the historical figure as a “man with a capital ‘M’” and a “legendary person.”

The commemoration came amid a diplomatic row with Poland over Ukraine’s glorification of members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, including Shukhevich.

Nazi attack dog

The Ukrainian nationalist was born in 1907 near Lviv, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later came under the sovereignty of the Second Polish Republic. He joined Ukrainian militants in 1925.

Ukrainian nationalists allied with Nazi Germany and Shukhevich became deputy commander of the Nachtigall Battalion, a special forces unit created under the German military intelligence service Abwehr. The force, composed predominantly of Ukrainian volunteers, was directly involved in the massacre of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians in Lviv in June and July 1941.

Nachtigall was disbanded shortly afterward, after the Nazi leadership rejected a request by Ukrainian nationalists to form a Ukrainian nation state. Some of its members, including Shukhevich, joined Battalion 201 of the German auxiliary police, which was sent to Belarus to fight partisans and terrorize the local population that supported them. That unit was disbanded in 1942.

Ukraine says it can venerate whomever it wants

Ukrainian officials have claimed there is no proof that Shukhevich was personally involved in atrocities and have declared that nobody can dictate which figures the country venerates.

In late May, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky gave the honorific “of the heroes of UPA” to an elite commando unit and took part in the state reburial of Andrey Melnik, another prominent Ukrainian nationalist figure. The moves sparked outrage in Warsaw, triggering a major diplomatic row.

This week, the Ukrainian parliament approved a plan to create a national pantheon, which the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki called an escalation in the ongoing conflict.

The Ukrainian capital and several other cities across the country were hit by a combined drone and missile strike early on Thursday morning, in what the Russian Defense Ministry called a response to terrorist attacks by Vladimir Zelensky’s government.

The first wave of blasts in Kiev was heard around 2 AM local time, followed by more explosions in multiple waves until 4 AM. Mayor Vitaly Klitschko urged residents to seek shelter as the capital’s air defenses engaged incoming targets.

Klitschko has since described the strikes as “the largest attack” the city had experienced since the escalation of the conflict in 2022, stating the capital was hit by ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. “It was a terrible night for Kiev,” he wrote on Telegram.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the strike with “high-precision long-range weapons” targeted “military industry enterprises and facilities and the fuel and energy facilities in the city of Kiev and the Kiev region, as well as military airfields and other infrastructure in Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Cherkasy, and Chernigov regions.”

Videos from Kyiv show the moment Russian missiles strike the Ukrainian capital. pic.twitter.com/yqKjWOiSsm

— Global OSINT (@GlobalOSINTHQ) July 2, 2026

The Russian military later released a detailed list of targets. Among them was a plant producing guidance systems for Ukrainian drones and missiles, a factory producing long-range drones and loitering munitions, a plant involved in upgrading Ukrainian armor and producing military optics, an electronic warfare equipment producer, a drone parts depot, a fuel depot, and several gas facilities that the statement said provided energy supplies for weapons manufacturing.

Videos shared on social media show numerous blasts and fires in and around the Ukrainian capital.

Klitschko reported extensive damage across all districts of the city. Ukrainian officials claimed that many of the missiles struck residential buildings and civilian infrastructure, killing at least 20 people and injuring around 90 more.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stressed that the attack was “not about civilian Kiev, but about the military strategic targets being used by the Kiev regime to kill civilians.”

The exact locations and types of facilities hit are difficult to verify, as the Ukrainian authorities tightly restrict information about strike sites and penalize those who share footage of impacts, except when civilian infrastructure is affected.

Moscow has pledged to conduct “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military installations, drone manufacturing sites, command posts, and “decision-making centers” in retaliation for deadly “terrorist attacks.”

In recent weeks, Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone raids deep into Russian territory, often hitting residential buildings and civilian infrastructure. On Tuesday, a six-month-old baby was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow Region. Last week, 12 people were injured in a strike on a WWII museum in Rostov Region.

Last month, Kiev launched one of its largest drone attacks on Moscow, hitting an oil refinery in the capital and injuring 17 people, including two children.

Kiev routinely accuses Russia of deliberately hitting civilian sites, but has a long history of using civilian installations, including warehouses, public buildings, and agricultural and industrial facilities for military purposes.

Ukrainian media recently exposed a drone plant at a film studio hit by Russia. Over the course of the conflict, Kiev has taken considerable steps to decentralize its weapons production chain, creating small-scale assembly sites that mainly produce FPV and fixed-wing long-range drones from components supplied from abroad.

Something unusual has happened in Poland. In a country that has spent the past several years presenting itself as one of Ukraine’s most committed patrons, a very different tone is beginning to break through.

The immediate trigger was the latest quarrel over honors and historical memory. Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Vladimir Zelensky’s Order of the White Eagle over the glorification of Nazi collaborators. Former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Pyotr Poroshenko, together with a number of other Ukrainian public figures, responded by handing back their Polish decorations.

On the surface, this looks like another symbolic dispute in Eastern Europe’s endless war of medals, orders, and historical grievances. In reality, it points to something deeper: Poland is growing tired of Ukraine.

This would be easier for Kiev to dismiss if it came only from the conservative camp given that Nawrocki belongs to the Law and Justice milieu, the party of churchgoers and national conservatives. Prime Minister Donald Tusk, meanwhile, has tried to hold the pro-Ukrainian line, warning that Poland has invested too much money and political capital to start quarreling now.

Personally, I have never met a Pole who seriously believed Russia was about to attack Poland, and I’ve known quite a few Poles. I was even married to one. In Poland, the constant warnings of a Russian invasion are usually heard not as a real assessment of danger, but as a pretext for armaments and American purchases.

Law and Justice helped start that race with Patriot batteries, American visits, universal military training in schools, and endless talk of an eastern threat. Then the public tired of it and the party lost power when Tusk returned through coalition maneuvering. The conservatives understood the signal and began to adjust. Whereas yesterday it was Kamala Harris and air-defense contracts, today it’s accusations that Zelensky’s Ukraine honors Nazi collaborators.

There’s also an embarrassment here because Poland has spent heavily on American weapons, including Patriot systems under the Vistula program. Deliveries are due to begin in 2027, yet the war has already shown the limitations of such systems against modern Russian missiles and drones, which is politically awkward. But the issue is bigger than money.

For Poles, Ukrainians were long seen as the peasant population of lands Poland considered its own. To Ukrainians, Poles were the former masters – arrogant, Catholic, imperial, and cruel. These attitudes didn’t vanish because Brussels printed posters about European solidarity, but they were pushed beneath the surface until the war brought them back.

The refugee wave made the old resentment visible again as millions of Ukrainians arrived in Poland, many of them from western and central Ukraine and not from the front line. They received support, housing, welfare and sympathy, but by 2023 many Poles had begun asking a blunt question: why are we paying for people who fled their own country while our government buys weapons for the war they avoided? That’s where sympathy began to curdle.

For Poland, Ukraine isn’t only the victim presented in Western newspapers, it’s also Volhynia, Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the massacres of Polish civilians and the refusal of Ukrainian political culture to repent properly for crimes that live on in Polish family memory.

The numbers are disputed, as they always are in this part of Europe, and while Polish losses in the Polish-Soviet War were heavy, but they weren’t on the scale of what Poles remember from Volhynia. Estimates for the massacre vary widely, from tens of thousands to well over 100,000 Polish civilians killed and even if modern Western accounts often push the figures down, Polish memory doesn’t work that way because it remembers villages, churches, families and graves.

It also remembers the role played by Ukrainian auxiliaries in Nazi terror, including in the liquidation of ghettos. This is why the argument over Zelensky and historical symbols has such force. It touches the nerve of Polish memory.

Russia, by contrast, isn’t always perceived in Poland in the way NATO press releases imagine. Yes, there is anti-Russian sentiment and fear, suspicion, and resentment. But for many ordinary Poles, the immediate problem of recent years hasn’t been Russia, it’s been Ukraine, Ukrainian historical politics, Ukrainian demands, Ukrainian migrants, and the sense that Poland is expected to give and give while receiving little gratitude in return.

And so Poland is caught between the two burdens of pressure from the West to serve as Ukraine’s rear base, and its own unresolved historical instincts and that tension couldn’t last forever.

The old Polish military song says:

“Once we’ve explored Warsaw, we’ll be in a hurry
To see our old Vilnius.
The road from Vilnius is already ready,
It leads straight on to Lviv.”

In 2014, at a NATO event in Lodz, Polish volunteers even sang a version in which the road from Vilnius led “to the heart, to Rus’, to Kiev.” Kiev remained silent then, but perhaps it should have listened.

Poland gave up formal claims to western Ukraine in order to enter the Euro-Atlantic world and in return, it was expected to support Ukraine politically and financially. For a while, it did, but the old grievances didn’t disappear but were merely buried under slogans about solidarity.

Now they are resurfacing as the Polish public increasingly sees aid to Ukraine not as a moral mission but as a yoke placed on its shoulders by America and the European Union. Ukrainians were welcomed and funded, but, in return, many Poles feel they received arrogance and contempt.

That’s why the current dispute matters because it’s about the end of an illusion. Poland and Ukraine were never natural brothers, but temporary partners under Western management and that arrangement is beginning to crack.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team

Former top Ukrainian General Valery Zaluzhny has told Vladimir Zelensky he will challenge him in the next presidential election, with current polling suggesting he would win in a run-off, Ukrainskaya Pravda reported on Wednesday, citing sources. Zelensky’s presidential term expired more than two years ago, and he has since been reluctant to hold a new election despite repeated calls from the US.

Zaluzhny, now ambassador to the UK, was summoned back to Kiev last week – officially to discuss the political turmoil in London, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he would soon step down. The real reason, the outlet said, was Zelensky’s concern that Zaluzhny will run for president.

In a one-on-one meeting, Zelensky told the former commander that the current battlefield situation has created a “window of opportunity” for an election, but warned that it has to be held in a way that will not divide the country.

Zelensky did not offer his rival any posts, Ukrainskaya Pravda said – though sources in government circles claimed that the Ukrainian leader was ready to discuss almost any post, including prime minister. Zaluzhny reportedly said that while he has never sought a political career, he could not betray the trust of the Ukrainian people who are counting on him.

Zaluzhny was dismissed as army commander-in-chief in February 2024 and was sent off to London to serve as ambassador – a move widely seen as an attempt by Zelensky to sideline a potential rival. Zaluzhny has since consistently topped Zelensky in trust ratings. Though he insists that he has no political ambitions, media reports suggest that he is gearing up for a presidential run.

A closed poll cited by Ukrainskaya Pravda puts Zelensky first with 33% support, ahead of Zaluzhny with 22% and top Zelensky aide Kirill Budanov with 14%. In a run-off, however, Zaluzhny would defeat Zelensky 37% to 32%, and narrowly defeat Budanov 34% to 32%.

Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024. He has refused to call a new election, citing martial law, which was imposed after the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in early 2022. Moscow has since declared him illegitimate and argues that his dubious legal status as leader is an obstacle to signing a peace agreement.

Zelensky has been pressured to hold a new election by US President Donald Trump, who once called him a “dictator without elections.” Zelensky responded by saying he is ready to hold an election, but demanded that Ukraine’s supporters ensure its security.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has announced that it has disrupted a major drug supply route from Latin America to the country and has seized over half a ton of cocaine hidden inside a shipment of frozen fish from Ecuador.

In a statement on Wednesday, the agency said the drugs were found in a container that arrived at the Great Port of St. Petersburg by sea. The cocaine had been concealed inside legally imported frozen, ungutted tuna carcasses.

A Russian citizen suspected of helping organize the scheme has been detained. An FSB operative noted that the suspect was unemployed and had been linked to a criminal group involved in cocaine smuggling.

The agency released footage of the raid, showing officers detaining the man and cutting open dozens of frozen tuna with a chainsaw to remove hundreds of packages of cocaine.

FSB operatives also searched the suspect’s home, where they seized digital devices containing crypto wallets with the equivalent of $613,000, 13 luxury watches worth more than $1.3 million, and five high-end cars valued at no less than $1.6 million.

The bust follows several major cocaine seizures in Russia in recent years. In September 2025, the FSB said officials in St. Petersburg had intercepted a record 1,500 kg of cocaine hidden in a shipment of bananas from Latin America, worth more than $240 million.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned in June that global cocaine use has continued to soar in recent years, outpacing all other narcotics. Its illegal production skyrocketed to a record 4,000 tons in 2024, more than four times the level recorded a decade earlier. Consumption has also increased from an estimated 17 million people worldwide in 2013 to more than 25 million in 2024.

Western governments and media are trapped in a “bubble of lies” where Ukrainian attacks on civilians are automatically framed as “legitimate defense,” Russian Ambassador to the OSCE Dmitry Polyansky has said.

Kiev repeatedly uses drones to strike civilian targets. In the latest incident, a six-month-old baby was killed when a Ukrainian drone crashed into a private house in the town of Yegoryevsk, about 110 km southeast of Moscow, on Tuesday.

Speaking to RT on Wednesday, Polyansky said the West either dismisses such incidents, calls for endless investigations, or portrays nearly every action by Kiev as justified, ignoring the reality of the conflict.

He cited the strike on a college dormitory in Starobelsk in the Lugansk People’s Republic, where Ukrainian UAVs killed 21 students, and a drone attack on a bus carrying a Belarusian youth football team in Russia’s Bryansk Region that killed a pregnant woman and injured eight people, including six children.

Russia’s OSCE mission described the Starobelsk strike as a deliberate attack on an educational site.

“It’s hard to believe otherwise when you see the footage,” Polyansky said, saying that the drones involved in the Starobelsk strike had not been affected by air defenses and had deliberately hit a civilian facility.

Watch RT’s full interview with Polyansky below:

The unfolding diplomatic dispute between Ukraine and Poland has caught the attention of the whole world. It started when Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky named one of the units of the Ukrainian armed forces ‘Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA)’ – which is basically the same thing as naming it ‘Heroes of Nazi collaborators’. 

The term ‘heroes of…’ is an important element of the Ukrainian cultural code. However, it’s ironic that within this ideology, we may find quite different ‘heroes’: for example, a metro station in Kiev was named ‘Heroes of the Dnieper’ (in honor of Soviet soldiers who liberated Kiev during WWII in the fall of 1943); at the same time, there’s the ‘Alley of Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred’ commemorating the victims of the Euromaidan (who overthrew the memory of the WWII heroes); and now there is also a Ukrainian military unit named in honor of Nazi collaborators whose mission it was to kill those very ‘Heroes of the Dnieper’, i.e., Soviet liberators. But that’s not even the main point. 

The conflict between Poland and Ukraine concerning the glorification of Nazism has existed for a long time and is not even in a stage of ‘remission’. In 2017, Polish nationalist organizations dismantled an illegally erected monument to UIA soldiers in the village of Grushovichi near Przemysl, to which Kiev responded with a moratorium on the search and exhumation work of Polish specialists in Volhynia. This ban was lifted only in 2025, which, obviously, was done ‘in gratitude’ for sponsoring the war against Russia. 

Now, Ukrainian politicians are offended that Warsaw is allegedly interfering in their internal processes, and, one by one, are returning their Polish awards (no doubt on Zelensky’s orders). Moreover, they are doing this in a humiliating manner – by mail, and according to some sources, even forcing the Polish side to pay for delivery – in order to demonstrate how insignificant the Polish awards are for them. Polish politicians have also returned Ukrainian awards to Kiev.

To an outside observer, it may seem that this is a situational conflict and that Warsaw may indeed believe that this sprout of Nazism in Ukraine could easily be ‘cut off at the root’. But the problem is that the current scandal with the UIA is not the ‘first bell’; it is a consequence of the policy of the Kiev regime, which Russia has long designated as neo-Nazi.

How Poland didn’t notice the Nazis

Poland’s ignorance of the fact that the toponym ‘Heroes of the UIA’ has existed in Ukraine for a long time is quite surprising. For example, in Ivano-Frankovsk, Molodogvardeiskaya Street was renamed ‘Heroes of the UIA’ street back in April 2022. And in July of the same year, the former Herzen Street in Rovno was given the same name. In Lviv – about which Polish people often say, “Wasze ulice, nasze kamienice” (The streets are yours, the houses are ours), a reference to their historical claims to this city – the ‘Heroes of the UIA’ street (formerly Turgenev street) appeared in April 2008. It is unlikely that Warsaw didn’t know about this.

Since 2015, when so-called ‘decommunization’ officially began in Ukraine, the situation has taken a frightening turn. 

On the other hand, there appeared all sorts of avenues of Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevich, and other figures who have an extremely ambiguous reputation not only in Russia and Belarus, but also in Poland – which, by the way, called itself Kiev’s closest ally (but, apparently, only within the framework of Ukraine’s role as a ‘private military company’ fighting Russia).

Moreover, only major routes were named in honor of these figures. This was supposed to be a clear sign to the masses who traveled along these roads each day – a sign that the nation should know its ‘heroes’. Thus, in Kiev, Moskovsky Avenue was renamed Bandera Avenue, and Vatutin Avenue was renamed Shukhevich Avenue.

Ukrainian heroes

Let’s take a closer look at the figures celebrated by the Kiev authorities:

Stepan Bandera – Leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Collaborated with Nazi Germany. Participated in mass ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews. Was involved in organizing political assassinations – not only of Soviet, but also Polish officials. For example, he participated in organizing the murder of the head of the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs, Bronislaw Pieracki.

Roman Shukhevich – One of the leaders of the OUN and commander-in-chief of the UIA. Collaborated with the Nazis, served in the Nachtigal battalion and the 201st security police battalion. Participated in the execution of Jews in occupied territories. Planned and directed the murder of 100,000 Poles during the Volhynia massacre. Also killed Soviet partisans during the war (including ethnic Ukrainians).

Olena Teliga – Poet and literary critic. Also an activist in the OUN. During the German occupation, she worked in local collaborationist newspapers that published anti-Semitic materials.

Yevgheny Konovalets – Military figure. Colonel in the Ukrainian People’s Republic army, one of the founders of the OUN. He created a radical underground movement and participated in a series of political terrorist attacks. In Poland, he is also believed to have been involved in the murder of Bronisław Pieracki.

How Ukraine slid into neo-Nazism

Along with the elimination of the Russian language, religious persecution, and labeling entire groups of people as ‘wrong’ Ukrainians, the Kiev regime also replaced the heroes who formed the basis of Ukrainian history. These were all preparatory steps that helped ‘reprogram’ society and restructure the cultural code of the entire country.

Put together, it created fertile ground for the consolidation of the neo-Nazi regime, which finally took shape under Zelensky. And this has nothing to do with the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO). The SMO was Russia’s reaction to the rise of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, which had gradually taken root over the past 30 years. 

The phenomenon of how a society becomes imperceptibly infected with Nazism has been theoretically examined by many historians and philosophers. Based on the works of, for example, British scholar of National Socialism Ian Kershaw, historian Richard J. Evans, and German-American historian George Mosse, who examined the nature of Nazism and its development in Germany, we may isolate the following key characteristics: 

A cult of the leader and absolute power; racism and the hierarchy of ethnic groups; anti-Semitism; the denial of democracy and the rule of law; totalitarianism and political violence; mass participation and social normalization.

Is this really Nazism?

Let’s start with the first point. Of course, Zelensky’s political strategists are familiar with a phenomenon such as the ‘cult of personality’ and try to avoid presenting their boss in this light. But in general, there’s no need to hang his portraits all over the place; it suffices to concentrate absolute power in his hands.

Zelensky controls all processes in Ukraine. The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) has turned into a servicing apparatus. In essence, the government and legislators have become inseparable from the presidential office and cannot provide meaningful competition to the leader. Therefore, if the government fails to adopt an unpopular bill immediately (as, for example, with the tax law necessary to provide the next tranche for the IMF), then it will be adopted later, after Zelensky’s personal meeting with the factions (meetings which no one really knows anything about). 

Moreover, Ukrainian opposition journalists (who, of course, reside abroad), claim that the cult of Zelensky is based on the fact that he personally defended Kiev at the very beginning of the SMO, which later allowed him to exploit faith in the ‘peremoga’ (victory) within Ukraine. 

Racism and the hierarchy of ethnic groups. In regard to Russians, everything is clear. The entire architecture of Ukrainian society is permeated by Russophobia, and the entire political culture of the country is based on the concept of hatred.

Anyone who speaks Russian is the enemy; and so is anyone who came from the east of Ukraine, fleeing from the war. Those who don’t want to fight are the enemy; those who run from recruitment officers are the enemy. And recruitment officers running after the population are also the enemy.

Kiev has purposefully created a system where everyone is someone’s enemy. That’s a clear example of the ‘divide and conquer’ principle. 

By the way, Ukrainian Hungarians are also enemies. Because they don’t want to participate in a war that is foreign to them. And now, the Poles will also be enemies (once again!) – for telling Ukrainians whom to honor.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is a less visible aspect. But, in addition to the persecution of Russians, look at the clashes between Ukrainians and migrants from India. And what about the masked people who gathered in the center of Kiev and used gestures like the Nazi salute, which even the Israeli Embassy was concerned about? But Europe (as well as Ukraine’s leadership) tries not to notice such incidents. Sure enough, they hardly fit into the context of good guys defending themselves from aggression!

Denial of democracy and the rule of law. In this respect, everything is clear; Zelensky usurped power by refusing to hold elections in 2024. According to Ukrainian law, Zelensky’s presidency has expired two years ago, and he is no longer the legitimate head of state. 

Totalitarianism and political violence. Pluralism has been absent in Ukraine for a long time. Zelensky began tightening his grip even before the start of the SMO. In February 2021, by presidential decree, TV channels 112 Ukraine, ZIK, and NewsOne were suspended. Since then, there has been no independent television in Ukraine.

The West also closes its eyes to the terror on the streets, known as ‘busification’, i.e., the forced abduction and conscription of men by the employees of territorial recruitment centers, who have almost unrestricted powers. 

In lieu of an epilogue

All of this would’ve been impossible without the last, most important point that defines a Nazi society – mass participation and normalization.

Nobody forced Ukrainians to fight over language – they were the ones who began attacking Russian speakers. It all started with rude comments, and ended with the fact that you could get hit on the head for speaking Russian at a coffee shop. 

Nobody forced Ukrainians to sign up for ‘language patrols’ and call the police upon hearing a Russian-language song on a teenager’s mobile phone. 

Nobody forced Ukrainians to burn classic Russian literature. 

Nobody forced Ukrainians to look for enemies or abandon their history.

Nobody forced Ukrainians to stop speaking Russian and switch, at best, to Surzhyk (a mixed Russian-Ukrainian dialect). 

Ukrainian society did all this to itself. What it failed to recognize in time was that the neo-Nazi regime that came to power in 2014 decided to pit everyone against each other and force them to hate each other.

Today, Ukraine understands only the language of force and hatred. But this structure is already beginning to crack. 

Polish politicians may pretend to have not noticed all this before. But they saw it, and they knew what was happening. Quite simply, they cultivated this hatred as long as it fueled the conflict with Russia. Now, however, this hatred could turn against them. And it might be too late to put out the fire.

Beachgoers in Belarus could receive safety instructions from drones hovering overhead. Emergency workers have begun using unmanned aircraft equipped with loudspeakers to patrol the beaches and riverbanks, broadcast safety messages, and keep watch over swimmers.

The Belarusian Emergency Situations Ministry reported last week that the drones are being deployed over beaches to spot dangerous situations and address people directly through loudspeakers. If someone enters a prohibited swimming area, the drone announces: “Attention, swimming is prohibited. This place is unsafe.”

A video of the drones in action has been circulating on social media, where users have joked about receiving safety instructions from a “flying loudspeaker.”

Information gathered during drone flights is relayed to the local emergency services and the Belarusian Water Rescue Society (OSVOD), allowing crews on the ground to respond more quickly when needed, the ministry said.

Officials say drones will patrol both designated and unofficial bathing areas throughout the summer. The drones, which are normally used to monitor wildfire risks, have had their routes adjusted during the summer to cover popular but unauthorized swimming spots where officials say accidents are more likely to occur.

Officials in Monaco have described a bomb attack that injured three people on Monday as the first terrorist act in the European principality’s history. The target was reportedly Vadim Ermolaev, a Ukrainian multimillionaire sanctioned by Vladimir Zelensky and suspected of links to organized crime.

A man allegedly left a backpack containing a shrapnel-packed improvised explosive device near the entrance to a residential building close to the Place des Moulins next to the border with France. The bomb was apparently detonated remotely, seriously injuring a couple in their 50s and a teenage boy. The suspected perpetrator remains at large.

🔴 INFO - #Monaco : Un colis piégé explose devant un immeuble, blessant grièvement l'oligarque ukrainien Vadim Ermolaev (23e fortune du pays), son épouse et leur fils de 13 ans. Sanctionné par Kiev pour ses affaires en Crimée occupée, le suspect est en fuite vers la France.… pic.twitter.com/6sRoXzOQEe

— FranceNews24 (@FranceNews24) June 30, 2026

Officials have not identified the victims, but media reports say Ermolaev, 58, his wife, and their son were injured in the apparent assassination attempt.

How did Ermolaev become rich?

The Dnepropetrovsk-born Ermolaev rose to prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, repeatedly appearing on Forbes’ list of the 100 richest people in independent Ukraine and ranking among the most influential figures in his home city. His net worth was estimated at nearly $400 million in 2014.

Ermolaev has interests in several sectors, including construction materials, real estate development and leasing, agriculture, and alcoholic drinks production.

Why did Zelensky sanction Ermolaev?

Zelensky targeted Ermolaev for doing business in Russia’s Crimea, a prominent winemaking region, which is illegal under Ukrainian law. The personal restrictions were imposed in 2023, four years after Ermolaev renounced Ukrainian nationality and became a citizen of Cyprus.

The millionaire is a member of the so-called ‘Battalion Monaco’ – dozens of Ukrainian elites accused of illegally leaving the country after the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022. As the name suggests, many of them settled in the principality.

As for his business interests, Ermolaev allegedly uses opaque ownership structures to conceal his sprawling empire and relies on powerful government connections to protect his wealth. Sergey Lysak, a retired general of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) who headed the administration of Dnepropetrovsk Region before being reassigned to Odessa last year, is reportedly a personal friend of Ermolaev.

Was Ermolaev ever prosecuted?

Not personally, but his adult son Artur received a slap on the wrist from Estonia earlier this year. He was accused of leading a scam group that allegedly defrauded EU citizens of an estimated €100 million ($114 million).

Is the bombing attack unprecedented?

While Monaco is known for its high level of public safety, the small nation has had experience with bomb attacks. In 2004, an explosive device went off early in the morning at the Louis II stadium, causing no casualties.

No terrorist organization claimed responsibility. Investigators reportedly concluded that some disgruntled football fans were behind the incident.

The incident this week is certainly extraordinary for Monaco, but violence is nothing new for Ukrainian organized crime, where competition is fierce and often brutal.

The case was particularly shocking because a leaked video appeared to show Komarovsky, apparently tortured, begging for a $10 million ransom to be paid. By the time the footage was sent, he was reportedly already dead.

A six-month-old baby has been killed in a Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow Region, Governor Andrey Vorobyov has said, adding that three other people were pulled from under the rubble of a residential building.

In a Telegram post on Tuesday, Vorobyov said the drone came down in the town of Yegoryevsk, around 110 km southeast of Moscow. “At night, as a result of a drone crash in Yegoryevsk, a private house caught fire. People were trapped under the rubble,” he wrote. The surviving victims – two adults and one child – have been hospitalized and are receiving assistance, Vorobyov added.

The infant died on the way to the hospital, the governor said, expressing his condolences.

According to Vorobyov, the Yegoryevsk strike was part of a wider overnight assault in which air defenses repelled 60 drones across Moscow Region, mostly in the south.

The Russian Defense Ministry said air defense units intercepted 419 Ukrainian drones overnight across the nation.

Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone raids deep into Russian territory in recent months, often targeting critical infrastructure as well as residential buildings. Earlier this month, Kiev launched one of the largest drone attacks on Moscow since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, hitting an oil refinery in the capital and injuring 17 people, including two children, across the capital region.

NATO is openly helping Ukraine acquire weapons capable of reaching strategic targets deep inside Russia, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. The latest joint arms development tender shows that the US-led bloc is actively integrating Ukraine into its structures, moving dangerously close to an open confrontation with Moscow, she warned.

Zakharova was referring to a €250,000 ($285,656) bidding contract announced in mid-June by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) – one of the bloc’s two strategic commands – in cooperation with the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC). Created in February 2025, JATEC describes itself as “the first joint NATO-Ukraine organization in the NATO Command Structure.”

Although the contract does not mention Russia directly, it contains a clear reference to enhancing Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities with “solutions” capable of “persistent airport denial.”

The project gives priority to various unmanned systems or loitering munitions capable of flying in signal-denied, electronic-warfare-contested environments and effectively striking runways, fuel reserves, and ground support facilities.

The contract shows that NATO is accelerating Ukraine’s integration into its command structures and military-industrial complex, Zakharova said on Monday.

The bloc “is steadily losing what remains of its rationality and drifting into an increasingly high-risk zone” in an effort to turn Ukraine into a “testing ground” for emerging military technologies, she added.

However, NATO strategists are “clearly underestimating” the risk of further escalation of the Ukraine conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow, the spokeswoman said.

The development comes amid broader European militarization, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte consistently urging member states to adopt a “wartime mindset.”

Senior UK and German defense officials recently urged citizens to accept “difficult choices” on military spending as NATO states move to hit targets of 5% of GDP. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius claimed last year that Russia could attack a NATO member “as early as 2028,” insisting on the need for a costly military buildup.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in February that Russia has no reason to attack Europe unless it is attacked first. Earlier, he warned that the EU is sliding into a “Fourth Reich.”

The recent spat between Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and Polish President Karol Nawrocki may seem absurd. After all, in the current war, Poland is Ukraine’s critical ally. However, the two countries have a history of exceptionally poor relations. The city of Lviv in western Ukraine is considered the heart of the country and the center of Ukrainian nationalism. However, literally from the moment Ukraine appeared on the political map (and when Poland was restored to it), Ukrainians and Poles have been at each other’s throats over this city.

In the chaos of the First World War, a handful of new states emerged. Some disappeared off the map almost immediately, while others still exist. Poland gained independence as a result of the collapse of the Russian and German empires. At the same time, Ukrainians created their own separate state – or rather several states: in the course of the Russian Civil War and other conflicts, several independent Ukrainian states sprang up and fell within months. 

Lviv was founded in the Middle Ages in a border zone. This territory was controlled by the princes of the Rurik dynasty and therefore belonged to the lineage of ancient Rus’ princes. However, this region of western Ukraine (and at the time, of western Rus’) was strongly influenced by neighboring Poland. 

Lviv first belonged to prince of southwestern Rus’ Daniel of Galicia; then it came under Polish rule; and, after the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, it came under the control of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty.

Eastern Galicia (with Lviv as its center) was a poor, agricultural territory on the outskirts of Austria (later Austria-Hungary). Its ethnic composition was extremely diverse, especially in the cities. The population consisted of Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians (a small East Slavic ethnic group closely related to Ukrainians). It was a curious mix of different cultures. 

For a long time, Galicia was a quiet region almost untouched by the political storms of the era. However, much changed with the outbreak of the First World War. 

Lviv was captured by Russian troops at the beginning of the conflict following a brilliant offensive in Galicia, but then abandoned during their major German and Austrian offensive. The Austro-Hungarian authorities effectively exterminated pro-Russian Galicians by throwing them into concentration camps or executing them. 

Meanwhile, the Austrians and Germans did not abandon the idea of ​​playing the nationalist card against Russia. The Austrians formed a legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, which included Ukrainians living in the country as well as prisoners willing to join the legion. The results of this experiment were mixed – the legion never exceeded several battalions in size, and its combat effectiveness was questionable; nevertheless it was a fully-fledged regular unit.

The Germans began forming loyal Polish units. WWI gave impetus to both Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. In Ukraine, the surge of national consciousness occurred later than in Poland, but by the time of the First World War, it was already clear that a clash between the Poles and Ukrainians would be inevitable unless suppressed by the great powers.

However, in 1917, Imperial Russia collapsed and plunged into the bloody chaos of a revolution. Soon enough, hard times arrived for Germany and Austria as well.

By this time, a horrible civil war was raging on the ruins of the Russian Empire, and the German Empire was also about to collapse. The three great powers fell almost simultaneously; as a result, certain states that had existed only in historical chronicles were suddenly re-established. 

The race for Lviv begins

In Lviv, the atmosphere was exceptionally tense. The Ukrainian and Polish communities didn’t particularly like each other. Both planned to incorporate Lviv into their states. Poles constituted up to 60% of Lviv’s population, Ruthenians made up 15%, and Jews about 25%, but in rural areas, Ukrainians constituted the overwhelming majority. National military units already existed on both sides.

The Poles were the first to create their own state. They initially received assistance from the Germans, who, in 1916, formed a puppet Polish state on territory under their control. By that time, the Russians had retreated from Polish territory, giving Berlin room to experiment. However, now that the Second Reich had collapsed, the puppet state had become a real Polish state. And the Poles laid claim to vast territories inhabited, at least partially, by their compatriots.

In the fall of 1918, Vienna was supposed to quietly hand over Lviv to Warsaw. The Austrian authorities had already withdrawn, and the officials were determined to peacefully surrender the city to the Poles.

However, on October 29, a decisive event occurred: Dmitry Vitovsky, a centurion of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, arrived in Lviv.

Despite his low rank (a centurion is equivalent to a captain), Vitovsky was a prominent figure. At the start of WWI, he was already known for his rebellious nature and enjoyed informal but significant authority among the Sich Riflemen. In Lviv, he immediately started preparing an uprising. Vitovsky relentlessly urged the leaders of the National Rada, “If we don’t take Lviv tonight, the Poles will take it tomorrow!”

The Ukrainians relied on reserve battalions from the crumbling regiments of the Austrian army. In total, they started out with about 1,500 men. 

They snatched Lviv right from under Poland’s nose. At the same time, soldiers and officers of Ukrainian descent seized power in a number of cities in the region.

The Poles, of course, weren’t about to sit back and watch all this quietly. 

A city turns into a battlefield

The presence of Ukrainian flags certainly couldn’t change the national self-identity of Lviv’s Polish population. Units were formed on day one of the conflict. Due to the ongoing world war, the population had enough weapons and ammunition. Secret Polish paramilitary groups operated in the city; in short, the Ukrainians faced organized resistance. Captain Czesław Mączynski led the Poles. Like his opponent, Vitovsky, he had served in the Austro-Hungarian army. He had graduated from university in Lviv and knew the city well. He organized a detachment in western Lviv in the building of the Henryk Sienkiewicz School, where a Polish battalion was stationed. Initially, the Poles had only a few dozen rifles. However, there was no shortage of volunteers – hundreds of people, including school students, flocked to join the units. 

At that moment, fighting broke out throughout western Ukraine. Fire was exchanged in various places. Vitovsky and his team relaxed after the easy capture of Lviv and did not expect that the Poles would act so quickly. Some of the riflemen had even returned home by then.

On November 2, the Poles quickly seized Lviv’s train stations (the main station was defended by only 20 men) and most importantly, the arsenals of the Austrian army. Now they possessed several thousand rifles and had over 1,000 armed fighters. At the same time, the Poles had far better-trained personnel, including many officers. 

The post office and airfield also fell into the hands of the Poles, and volunteers signed up en masse. Streets were blocked with barricades.

By November 5, a front line had been established in Lviv. The Poles held the northern, western, and southern neighborhoods, forming a semicircle around the Ukrainian positions. Ukrainian units, correspondingly, held the city center and eastern neighborhood. Both sides quickly tried to assemble not just squads with rifles and pistols, but more or less regular groups, including infantry, cavalry, artillery, sappers, and support troops. The Poles even built a gun truck. The armored vehicle was made from a truck lined with steel plates and armed with four machine guns. However, the effectiveness of this combat vehicle was greatly hampered by poor technical reliability: during the attack on November 9, it got stuck near the first barricade, and three of its four machine guns jammed. Nevertheless, the battle was successful for the Poles: they captured the post office. The Poles also employed aircraft. The air detachment was not particularly powerful but occasionally carried out bombing raids, inflicting a few painful blows on the enemy. 

The attacks by both sides turned out to be unproductive. Armed looters rampaged through the streets. Meanwhile, Ukraine was trying to resolve its political issues. On November 13, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed. It laid claim to the territory of the westernmost regions of present-day Ukraine – the areas of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire populated by Ukrainians. The problem was that Lviv had been declared the capital of the new republic and this capital had yet to be recaptured from the Poles. 

The battles of mid-November were bloody but inconclusive. The front line in the city was fluid and determined by skirmishes.

In several days of active fighting, both sides suffered heavy losses. On November 17, a ceasefire was established. It lasted only a few days.

The battle that decided Lviv

The Poles used this time to greater advantage. They transferred new reserves to Lviv by rail – 1,400 fighters with 8 cannons, 11 machine guns, and an armored train under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Michal Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski, who led the Polish operations in Lviv. In total, they had 5,800 men against 4,600 Galicians. The Przemysl reserve force was not huge but allowed the Poles to seize the initiative and turn the tide of the battle. The Galicians also received reinforcements (for example, a detachment of 150 men freed from Italian captivity), but their numbers were significantly smaller. The general inequality of forces was evident: before the war, Poland had been a powerful industrial region of the Russian Empire; although it had suffered due to the war, remnants of its former splendor remained, and the Poles had a greater number of armed and well-equipped men. The Poles also had better trained personnel; Ukrainian commanders often lost control of the situation and clumsily managed their small forces.

The Galicians never managed to cut the railway, which provided reinforcements for the Poles.

On November 21, at 6 a.m., Polish forces launched an offensive. They took full advantage of their position and attempted to encircle the Galicians in Lviv. Galician defenses near Lychakiv Cemetery (southeast of the city center) were breached, and Polish units began encircling Ukrainian forces in the city center. Air strikes suppressed Ukrainian artillery. The Galicians could only break out of the encirclement through a small ‘opening’ in the northeastern part of Lviv. 

Finally, on November 21, the leaders of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic decided to evacuate the city. More than 4,000 people left. Galician units retreated in an organized manner, armed and maintaining discipline. The Poles got their hands only on the rearguard of the army. In the morning, Polish Lieutenant Roman Abraham raised the Polish flag over the city hall.

The violence that shaped a century

The capture of Lviv on the morning of November 22 was marred by an outburst of violence. Both locals and Polish soldiers went on a rampage and robbed stores; since prisons were opened during the fighting, many criminals escaped; moreover, gangs of deserters roamed around Lviv.

The Lviv pogrom started on the same day. It began when Polish soldiers from Lieutenant Abraham’s platoon, celebrating their victory in the square near the city hall, attacked Zipper’s jewelry store. Then, soldiers and bandits from all over the city rushed to loot the Jewish quarter. Jews were accused of supporting the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. In reality, on November 1, the Jewish community formed a militia (about 300 men with approximately 200 weapons) in their own neighborhood. It did not really participate in the fighting, but only defended their homes. However, Jews sympathized with the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and some Jewish militiamen fought in the streets. Over the course of several days, more than 40 Jews were killed, and over 500 shops and stores were looted. Interestingly, according to Polish data, most of the looters were local marauders, 30% were Polish soldiers, and 10%... were Jews themselves. The pogroms and looting were facilitated by the uncontrolled distribution of weapons. Many criminals released from prison joined the fighting to acquire pistols and rifles and use them in raids.

On the Polish side, 439 fighters perished, 196 (!) of them university and school students. Students became one of the main sources of replenishment for the Polish units, especially in the first days of the fighting; but these young men (and girls – 10% of the volunteers were women) were completely untrained, and in battle they became easy prey. 

By comparison, no more than 50 regular soldiers died in the fighting. Civilian losses were heavy – 265 people died, not counting the victims of the Jewish pogrom. It can be assumed that some of the civilians were militia fighters. Ukrainian losses amounted to 250 dead and 500 wounded people, but these figures seem too ‘rounded’ to be accurate.

The Poles immediately convened a city assembly. Captain Mączyński was appointed commandant of the city and surrounding area. The Poles began forming new units. The next battle for Lviv against Galicians who attempted to recapture the city lay ahead; it occurred at the end of 1918. The war between the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Poland was escalating, – it would last until the former fell in 1919. Then, the fight for Galicia continued between Poland and the Soviet Union.

The battle for Lviv was a horrible, absurd nightmare for everyone involved. Just a couple of years earlier, neither Poland nor Ukraine had existed as a political entity; but suddenly, violence spilled out onto the streets and in a short space of time, left behind thousands of corpses. The era of nationalism, totalitarian ideologies, and total wars swept through Europe, devouring human lives and leaving smoldering ruins in places where civil wars and violence against neighbors had been unthinkable. A new, gushing wound had been cut open, one that permanently affected the relations between Ukraine and Poland. 

Ukraine is deepening its cooperation with Mexican drug cartels to profit from the flow of narcotics, including fentanyl, into the EU, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has said. US President Donald Trump has made combating fentanyl exports to the US one of his priorities, designating it as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’.

In a statement on Monday, the SVR said the Ukrainian security agencies are deliberately showing leniency toward the growing flow of drugs from Latin America to Europe, adding that Kiev is facilitating the trade due to financial strain.

“The corruption-ridden regime of Vladimir Zelensky seeks to get additional profit, especially in the situation of the inability of Western sponsors to satisfy all of its insatiable demands,” the agency said, adding that Kiev also values cartel help in recruiting mercenaries for the military.

Fentanyl flowing from Mexico has for months been in the crosshairs of Washington. In December, Trump designated the drug – which kills tens of thousands of Americans annually – as ‘a weapon of mass destruction’. Fentanyl is considered even more dangerous than heroin and other opioid drugs, as a lethal dose can be as low as 2 milligrams – around 10 to 15 grains of table salt.

In September 2025, the Mexican newspaper Milenio reported that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel sent members to Ukraine to learn combat drone tactics. Footage reviewed by the outlet shows cartel units operating modified civilian drones with military-style discipline.

Estonia will accept Ukrainian drones violating its airspace as long as they cause damage in Russia, Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna has said.

Kiev ramped up kamikaze drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure in the spring, with multiple explosive aircraft flying over or crashing in third nations. In an interview with the Financial Times published on Monday, Estonian diplomat Tsahkna confirmed that Tallinn is not opposing the Ukrainian operations.

“Of course we are not happy about [these incidents],” he said. “But we are not saying to Ukraine to stop it.”

Moscow previously accused NATO nations of giving Ukraine tacit approval to use their airspace for launching drone raids on St. Petersburg. Officials in the Baltic states denied the claim, while Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said he had directly challenged Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky on the issue during an in-person meeting in Armenia, calling the incursions “unacceptable.”

The latest Ukrainian ‘gamechanger’

Kiev and its backers have described Ukraine’s growing long-range drone capabilities as a gamechanger in its conflict with Russia, citing damage inflicted on oil refineries and export terminals.

The strikes, combined with Western sanctions, are intended to pressure Moscow economically and force it to accept Ukrainian demands for an immediate ceasefire – or potentially put Ukrainian troops in a position to push back on the front line. Similar hopes were previously pinned on multiple Western weapons systems provided to Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday denied any critical changes in the balance of power, saying Russia has the tools needed to counter Ukrainian drones, which use “new technologies that they receive from Europe,” and that Kiev requires time to scale up their deployment.

Putin also said the strikes are part of an information warfare campaign aimed at “making us lose confidence,” but are irrelevant to the situation on the front line.

The Russian military previously released a list of addresses of facilities in NATO states that it said are providing critical components for Ukrainian drone strikes.

A monument will be erected in Kiev honoring Ivan Mazepa, a 17th-century Cossack military commander who was infamous for switching sides between major powers seeking regional dominance in Eastern Europe, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has said.

Zelensky announced the project on Sunday at a ceremony to unveil a bust of Mazepa at the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery. He claimed that Russia has “smeared” Mazepa as a traitor and insisted that he was an outstanding statesman.

Mazepa led the Cossack Hetmanate, an autonomous entity that split from the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth amid economic exploitation and religious persecution of its Orthodox Christian population.

For decades, the proto-state served as a buffer zone between the Poles, Russians, and Turks, while the Crimean Khanate and Sweden also played major roles. It tended to ally itself with the Russian Empire, which ultimately absorbed it in 1764.

Mazepa was condemned in Russia as an oath-breaker. Peter the Great issued a mock award intended for Mazepa known as the ‘Order of Judas’ which featured the likeness of Judas Iscariot.

Ukrainian statehood rooted in antagonism against Russia

Modern Ukrainian statehood is based on antagonism toward Russia and historic figures who opposed it in some way. Zelensky said the monument to Mazepa will be erected on a street named after Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, at the site that previously featured a monument to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.

The decision is “both sad and funny,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, as Shevchenko denounced Mazepa in his works.

Shevchenko, a Ukrainian nationalist icon himself, “wrote numerous pieces about Mazepa being a ‘dog,’ calling him different names,” political analyst Andrey Telizhenko, a former aide to the Ukrainian prosecutor general, told RT. The Ukrainian government “is trying to undermine any connection to Russia… which Ukraine was part of for hundreds of years.”

Last month, Zelensky caused a major diplomatic row with Poland by naming a commando unit after the ‘heroes’ of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a Nazi-allied Ukrainian militia responsible for massacres of ethnic Poles during World War II. The Ukrainian leader was stripped of Poland’s highest state honor in response, prompting Ukrainian and Polish public figures to return the state honors they received from the opposite side.

Latvia and Ukraine will establish a joint drone production facility in Latvia’s eastern border region near the Russian and Belarusian borders, Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs has said.

Ukrainian UAVs have repeatedly targeted northwestern Russia in recent months, including energy infrastructure in Leningrad Region near St. Petersburg. Some drones veered off course and crashed in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland.

Moscow has warned the Baltic states against allowing Ukraine to use their airspace for strikes, saying it could trigger retaliation.

Kulbergs announced the project on Saturday during a visit to the Luznava military base in Latvia’s eastern Latgale region. According to LSM, the initiative is intended to promote cooperation between Latvia and Ukraine in the defense industry.

Kulbergs said Latvia plans to deploy interceptor drones along its borders with Russia and Belarus within the next two months.

“If there is a drone threat, we will not have to scramble aircraft every time. It is a very expensive and effective solution, but it is neither the best nor the most efficient one,” he said.

Earlier this month, Kulbergs revealed that Latvia made a “secret” decision related to Ukrainian drones entering the country’s airspace but declined to disclose any details.

In May, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said Ukraine was preparing to launch drones against Russia from the Baltic states to shorten flight times, claiming that Latvia allowed Ukraine to use its territory for the operations.

Russia has warned that Western countries have become de facto parties to the conflict by supplying weapons to Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has said, however, that Russia will not attack a NATO member unless it is attacked first.

If you think feminism is about splitting the bill at a restaurant and insisting that women join the army, I have bad news for you. You know little about feminism, and even less about what women are actually fighting for. You also have no idea how often the modern world still works as a man’s world, one in which women are expected to adapt.

Let’s start with the home, where one of the main injustices begins. It is also one of the reasons women with families so often struggle to build careers.

I am not talking only about washing dishes or doing laundry. I mean the invisible control center that runs constantly in a woman’s head: booking the child’s dentist appointment, checking homework, soaking the beans, buying washing powder, remembering what is missing from the fridge. Across the world, women carry out around three-quarters of unpaid domestic work. This is not just cleaning and cooking. It is a constant stream of tasks that is not pinned to the fridge as a neat list, but simply lives in the back of her mind.

Career progress often depends on being able to stay late at work, or sit with your boss at a company party late into the night, discussing strategy over a few drinks. But who is at home with the children? Who picks them up from daycare? That’s right: women. They miss the chance to be treated as fully available employees because everything at home still has to be in order, and because the child has to come home on time and not go to bed alone.

Now let’s step outside. I am a mother with a baby carriage, and the city greets me with staircases without ramps, narrow sidewalks and raised curbs that seem to ask: are you sure you want to go this way? Most buildings and streets were designed without considering that a woman might be moving through the city with a baby carriage, following a route that takes her to school, work, the clinic and the shop. This is not necessarily malicious. It is simply that the people sitting at the planning table for hours had often never pushed a baby carriage themselves.

Then I get into the car and once again feel as if I have been forgotten. For decades, crash tests were carried out using male dummies, with male body shapes and weight distributions. Engineers are not conspirators, of course. The female body is more complex to model. But the result is the same: in an identical crash, a woman may face a higher risk of serious injury because the safety systems were not calibrated for her. Perhaps it is time to put dummies with different measurements in the car.

Now imagine I have driven to the pharmacy. For a long time, medicines were tested mainly on men, while women were sidelined. After all, we have periods, hormonal fluctuations and the possibility of becoming pregnant, so how can the experiment be “pure”? As a result, women take medicines tested on a hypothetical 70-kilogram man, and doctors are sometimes genuinely surprised when the body does not react as the textbook says it should.

I have an autoimmune condition that affects women more often than men, yet much of the research has historically been carried out on men. The condition remains poorly understood partly because studies have not always reflected the people most affected by it. The medication was not developed with women properly in mind either. It is hard not to see the irony.

Finally, a brief note on work, because maternity leave does eventually end. Uniforms and protective clothing are still often made to men’s measurements, even though women’s bodies and muscle structure are different. Poor equipment can hinder a woman’s ability to work effectively, including in professions where she may be saving lives. But who cares?

At the end of the day, feminism is not about fighting men. It is about asking the world to stop pretending that humanity consists of people of one gender, one size and one set of needs.

Women can join the army, split the bill and do all the other things people use as dismissive arguments. But the real struggle is not about proving that women can do everything men do. It is about making sure the world is organized in a way that works for both men and women.

That is a very different thing.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team 

The commander of Ukraine’s battle-hardened 154th Separate Mechanized Brigade, Colonel Vladimir Kononnikov, has been found dead with a gunshot wound, police said.

Kononnikov’s death was first reported by Ukraine’s Operational Command South. The command said on Facebook that the officer’s body was discovered on Sunday and that “preliminary findings indicated there were no signs of violence.”

Police, however, later released a brief statement saying that Kononnikov was found dead with a gunshot wound and that a murder investigation has been launched.

The brigade was formed in September 2023 and has primarily fought in Kharkov Region and Donbass. It took part in the battle for Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsk), which was captured by Russia in December 2025, and in the ongoing operations around Kupyansk.

The unit is currently based in Gulyaypole, a town in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Zaporozhye Region. The region voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia in a referendum held in September 2022.

Last week, Ukrainian news website Babel published a bombshell report alleging abuses at the training camps of the 425th Separate Assault Regiment Skelia (formerly Skala), which it said led to the deaths of at least 26 recruits.

The authorities confirmed the non-combat deaths of 25 of the recruits mentioned in the report but did not disclose the causes of death. The unit’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yury Garkavy, was suspended pending an investigation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the convention of his party, United Russia, in Moscow on Sunday, and gave a sweeping speech that touched on development, Western pressure, and global instability.

The convention was held ahead of the parliamentary election in September. 

World in turmoil

Russia is facing a difficult time, with the entire world experiencing a period of “fundamental and systemic transformation,” Putin said, noting the flare-up of regional conflicts and fragmentation of international cooperation.

New artificial obstacles that affect the “economy, technology, science, and even culture, sports and humanitarian cooperation” are emerging, he said.

Western pressure on Russia has reached unprecedented levels, according to Putin.

He went on to say that the Western elites are unable to “inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia, and their efforts to destabilize it from within are proving ineffective.

“Consequently, they keep supporting the Kiev regime, which they have chosen as a battering ram in their struggle against Russia, without any sympathy for the Ukrainian people.”

As Ukraine faces setbacks on all parts of the front line, it has turned to “terrorist activities,” engaging in “targeted attacks on civilians and civilian facilities” and openly recruiting people to conduct terrorist attacks in Russia, Putin said.

The West, meanwhile, turns a blind eye to Kiev’s methods, he added.

National security

Russia is “confidently repelling” all attempts to deter its economic progress, Putin said, referring to the “unlawful” Western sanctions. “We have sufficient resources, means, and political will, and nobody should doubt that.” 

The ultimate goal is to ensure the security of Russia, its people, and its borders “for decades ahead,” he stressed.

Safeguarding the future

Putin vowed to “take Russia’s economy to a fundamentally new technological level,” to create modern, high-paying jobs, and to “support national businesses and advanced industries that guarantee Russia’s sovereignty and leadership.”

He also expressed support for building new housing and roads, as well as new support measures for teachers proposed by United Russia.

He identified the preservation of traditional values and demographics and improving living standards and the quality of life across the country as key priorities.

The upcoming election

Putin praised Russian soldiers, volunteers, engineers, and other workers for serving the country, repeating his view that the veterans are “Russia’s true elite.” They should continue serving in civilian life after military service, he said.

“Many party members, including those who have held high posts in government and business structures, have volunteered to go to the front, and frontline heroes are joining your ranks, winning preliminary elections and running for office at all levels.” 

The upcoming September parliamentary election will be held in strict adherence to the law and with all measures taken to ensure their integrity, including from external influence and manipulation, Putin said.

The people’s trust in the nation’s democratic institutions is the “essential condition of our society’s stability and unity,” he stated.

No deals were reached at the Anchorage summit in Alaska last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has confirmed in an interview with Rossiya-1 on Sunday.

The summit, where Putin met with his American counterpart Donald Trump, marked the first top-level direct contact between Moscow and Washington in the years since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, and was hailed as a breakthrough. However, on Thursday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the meeting produced only “a proposal” and no agreement.

“There really were no agreements in Anchorage,” Putin confirmed.

However, the compromises which Russia discussed and eventually accepted at the meeting were proposed by the American side, he said. The ‘Spirit of Anchorage’ was not “embodied in any formal documents” but both sides discussed certain possibilities for settling the Ukraine conflict.

We were asked to accept the compromises formulated by the American negotiators. We agreed. 

Putin stressed that he has not received any other offer from the US administration since.

Putin has repeatedly stressed that for a lasting peace deal, Kiev must withdraw Ukrainian forces from the portion of Donbass it still controls. As long as Ukraine refuses to compromise, Russia will push towards its goals via military means, Moscow has said.

Russia is preparing to deploy dozens of homegrown satellites this year to expand a low-orbit broadband network that President Vladimir Putin says “doesn’t fall short of” Elon Musk’s Starlink and “may even surpass it in some ways.”

The cluster, made up of Rassvet (“Dawn”) satellites, sits at the center of Moscow’s push to build a sovereign space umbrella that bolsters national sovereignty, strengthens the country’s drone warfare capabilities, and keeps Russia connected amid Western pressure.

Here is what we know about Russia’s next-generation Rassvet satellites.

What makes the Rassvet satellites special?

Created by private Russian aerospace firm Bureau 1440, part of the IKS Holding conglomerate, Rassvet debuted in 2023 with three experimental satellites, followed by a second test mission in 2024. In March, Bureau 1440 deployed the first commercial-scale batch of 16 satellites.

Unlike Starlink, Rassvet operates from a higher orbit of around 800 km – a choice that balances the number of satellites needed against their lifespan and coverage area.

What are Russia’s plans for the satellite group?

A second batch of 16 Rassvet-3 satellites is slated for launch in the second half of June from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, using a Soyuz-2 rocket, according to RocketLaunch.Live, a website that tracks space launches based on notices issued by aviation authorities.

Russia plans to have 156 Rassvet satellites in orbit by the end of 2026, a number it intends to grow to around 900 by 2035.

The rollout, however, hasn’t been entirely smooth: one of the satellites launched in March, known as Object 4, suffered an apparent thruster failure and burned up in the atmosphere on June 6. Bureau 1440 confirmed the loss, stressing that the constellation’s capabilities remained intact.

Could Rassvet be used by the Russian military?

Putin confirmed earlier this month that Moscow is working on heavy attack drones with satellite-based control. Drones steered via satellites are difficult to jam by electronic warfare measures, since Rassvet relies on a 5G non-terrestrial network that uses tightly focused radio beams from space.

Why does Rassvet matter for Russia as a whole?

Beyond the battlefield, Rassvet has the potential to emerge as critical infrastructure for a country too vast to be wired entirely with fiber or cell towers. Towers are especially problematic on steppe and tundra where permafrost is melting and ground is shifting. The satellite coverage could prove particularly beneficial for such remote but strategically important areas as the Arctic and the Far East.

In 2025, mobile operators Beeline and MegaFon signed agreements with Bureau 1440 to link nearly 1,000 base stations to provide consumers with access to next-gen internet connections.

What is the difference between Starlink and Rassvet?

While both Western media and even Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov described Rassvet as a Russian rival to Musk’s Starlink, the two diverge in design philosophy. Starlink relies on thousands of small satellites flying at roughly 450-480 km, while Rassvet’s higher 800-km orbit means fewer satellites can cover more ground, though with somewhat higher latency.

SpaceX has also concentrated Starlink’s coverage over the world’s most densely populated, commercially lucrative regions, leaving out Russia, Belarus, China, and large swaths of Africa and Asia. Rassvet, meanwhile, is built to provide steady coverage across the Russian Arctic, Siberia, Crimea, and the Far East.

Both systems can also connect directly to standard mobile phones without extra hardware, with the Russian constellation relying exclusively on a newer 5G architecture.

Discussing the differences between Rassvet and Starlink, Shelobkov stressed that Bureau 1440 was not trying to clone the US-designed system and that it builds all of the satellite’s key components and systems in-house.

Is Rassvet a milestone for Russia’s digital sovereignty?

Russia’s homegrown satellite network is arguably one of the most critical breakthroughs for the country beset by Western sanctions, with much of its communications infrastructure still relying on vulnerable undersea and land cables, and foreign-controlled satellite networks.

A Russian satellite network: Bottom line

Rassvet may not match Starlink satellite-for-satellite, but it doesn’t need to. For Moscow, the constellation is not about beating Musk on the market – it’s a crucial connectivity tool independent of the goodwill of Western businesses and governments.

Development of homegrown satellites is also about gaining an edge in drone warfare and agile frontline communications, while offering a practical fix for a country too vast to wire with fiber or cell towers, reaching the Arctic, Siberia, and the Far East.

Whether Rassvet ever rivals Starlink’s scale is almost beside the point – its real value lies in providing Russia with true sovereignty.

The Russian military has struck a training facility of the Ukrainian special operations command center ‘South’, the Defense Ministry has said, publishing a video of the attack. The troops hit barracks and storage facilities hosting sea drones in a series of “high-precision strikes,” it added.

A short video published by the ministry shows several single-story buildings engulfed in thick plumes of smoke, with the ground near them still burning. The clip also includes a successful strike on one of the targets, causing a major explosion.

According to the statement published on Telegram on Sunday, the troops used several Geran drones that hit their targets in a “self-homing” mode. The ministry did not comment on the extent of the damage caused by the strikes.

The development comes as Russian forces continue their offensive on the front lines. On Sunday, the Defense Ministry reported that its troops had liberated the village of Novoselovka in Russia’s Zaporozhye Region and took over the village of Pisantsy in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk Region by driving the enemy away from their fortified positions. Ukrainian forces lost dozens of soldiers, as well as nearly a dozen of armored fighting vehicles and over 40 heavy strike drones in two operations, according to the statement.

Kiev is ramping up long-range strikes on Russia, targeting civilian and energy infrastructure as Ukrainian frontline troops suffer setbacks. On Friday, the Russian military reported intercepting 660 Ukrainian kamikaze drones in just one night – the largest number to date.

On Saturday, the governor of Russia’s Rostov Region reported a Ukrainian drone attack on a popular local World War II museum complex, which injured 12 people.

The West is attempting to sow unrest and destabilize the internal political situation in Russia, as it is unable to beat it on the battlefield, President Vladimir Putin has said.

Speaking at a convention of his United Russia party in Moscow, Putin said that the country was facing severe and “unprecedented pressure from Western elites.”

“They are unable to inflict a strategic defeat on us, to win on the battlefield, and they are trying to destabilize the political situation and sow internal unrest, but this is also unsuccessful,” he said.

Western elites continue to support the Kiev regime, which they have chosen as “a battering ram against Russia,” with no thought for the Ukrainian people, he said.

As Kiev’s forces are retreating on the front lines, Ukraine is resorting to “openly terrorist actions,” Putin said, citing its “targeted strikes against civilians and civilian sites.”

On Saturday, a Ukrainian drone strike on a World War II museum in Russia’s Rostov Region injured 12 people, according to Governor Yury Slyusar.

Over the previous week, Ukrainian attacks killed at least 41 civilians, including one child, according to Rodion Miroshnik, who leads the Russian Foreign Ministry mission responsible for tracking Ukrainian war crimes.

A high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer behind a thwarted terrorist attack in Russia’s Crimea has been killed, local news agencies have reported, citing a source in the Russian security services.

“Rustem Fakhriev, a colonel of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), was eliminated on May 18,” the source said.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said previously that Fakhriev organized a failed assassination attempt against a high-ranking Russian officer in Crimea on December 1, 2025.

A Ukrainian national, who had been recruited by the HUR colonel, was killed in a gunfight with Russian security forces when he tried to plant a Western-made explosive device on the officer’s car. An accomplice was also detained and slapped with terrorism charges, according to the FSB.

Ukrainian spy agencies have tried carrying out multiple bomb attacks against Russian officials, officers and public figures since the escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. Only some of them have suceeded, with most being thwarted by the Russian security serices.

In August 2022, Ukrainian agents carried out a car bombing outside Moscow that killed journalist Darya Dugina, the daughter of philosopher Alexander Dugin.

The following year, an improvised explosive device was used to asasinate military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky during a fan meeting at a café in St. Petersburg.

In 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, was killed along with his aide when an improvised explosive device detonated outside his apartment building in Moscow.

A member of Ukraine’s 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skelia” (formerly “Skala”) has issued a thinly-veiled threat to journalists over a report detailing allegations of abuse, torture and non-combat deaths among the unit’s recruits.

On Thursday, the regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Yury Harkaviy, was removed from duty pending a probe; earlier this week, the Ukrainian outlet Babel published an article alleging the severe mistreatment of mobilized soldiers under his leadership.

According to the report, which was based on accounts of relatives, former servicemen and current soldiers, at least 26 recruits had died in or after passing through Skelia boot camps over the past six months. It described beatings, forced confinement, people being bound with tape or handcuffs, and cases of draftees with serious health issues being subject to grueling assault training.

A member of the Skelia regiment, Nikolay Kharlan, published an angry video address on Thursday, labelling Babel’s reporters “journowhores” and accusing them of “spreading misinformation for cash.”

Kharlan lashed out at the Ukrainian government, saying that it has “removed itself from fulfilling its duties” due to being unable to stop the dissemination of “fake news” about the regiment.

“In this case, the units of the armed forces will be able to defend themselves,” he warned.

The Skelia fighter denied the report, saying that “of the 26 people who died, 18 died in medical institutions – not at Skelia. This s**t is absolutely insane. Nine suicides? This information is false, and does not correspond to reality.”

Kharlan also implied that Babel was “Russian propaganda,” but provided no proof.

The scandal in Skelia comes as Ukraine faces deepening manpower shortages after more than four years of conflict with Russia due to high combat losses, mass desertions and draft dodging.

Kiev has tightened mobilization rules and expanded compulsory recruitment, while Ukrainian media outlets have repeatedly reported violent draft raids – a practice dubbed ‘bussification,’ deaths in conscription centers and cases of seriously ill men being declared fit for service.

At least 12 people have been injured in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Rostov Region, Governor Yury Slyusar has said. The strike targeted a museum and a monument dedicated to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the area from the Nazis during World War II in 1943, according to the official.

A Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) hit the main exhibition hall and the information center of the Sambek Heights museum complex, Slyusar said in a statement on Telegram on Saturday, calling the incident a “great tragedy.” Ten of the people injured were subsequently hospitalized, he added.

The Sambek Heights monument was initially created in 1980 to honor the deeds of the Soviet troops who fought in the area. In 2013, the regional government approved a public initiative to establish a museum complex near the monument, which eventually opened in 2020.

The complex is also commonly known as the “people’s museum” as it was built with donations provided by the people living in the region. Slyusar branded the attack “an act of exceptional cynicism” on the part of the Ukrainian military.

On Friday, the Russian military reported intercepting 660 Ukrainian kamikaze drones in just one night – the largest number to date.

On Saturday, Volgograd Region Governor Andrey Bocharov said that one person was killed and 11 injured in a Ukrainian attack on an industrial facility in the regional capital. Two people are in critical condition, he added.

Russia maintains that these attacks, which it sees as terrorist strikes, will not make it abandon its key security goals in the conflict. Moscow previously warned that it would respond to such attacks with “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure, including drone production facilities, command posts, and “decision-making centers.”

The commander of one of Ukraine’s largest assault units has been suspended after a media investigation reported torture, abuse, and multiple non-combat deaths among recruits.

Lt. Col. Yury Harkaviy, who heads the 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skelia” (formerly “Skala”), was removed from duty pending inspections and investigations, the army’s communications service announced on Thursday.

“If the facts of criminal offenses mentioned in the publications are confirmed, the guilty will definitely be held accountable in accordance with the law,” the Ukrainian army said in a statement.

The move follows an investigation by the Ukrainian outlet Babel published on Tuesday, which alleged severe mistreatment of mobilized soldiers at the regiment’s training sites. Citing relatives, former service men, and current soldiers, the outlet said at least 25 recruits had died in or after passing through the unit’s training camps over the past six months.

One former recruit, Aleksandr Semyonov, reportedly arrived at a hospital in January with head wounds, lacerated arms, broken fingers, and abrasions, claiming that he had been beaten and dragged along the ground after being tied to a quad bike. He died days later, with pneumonia listed as the official cause of death.

Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation responded to the report by opening a pre-trial probe into possible abuse of authority by military officials under martial law.

“Skelia” has denied systematic abuse, declaring that the allegations require verification. The regiment said that many of the reported deaths occurred in hospitals or on the way to medical facilities, and attributed some fatalities to illnesses or poor health among mobilized soldiers.

The scandal comes as Ukraine faces deepening manpower shortages after more than four years of conflict. Kiev has tightened mobilization rules and expanded compulsory recruitment, while Ukrainian media have repeatedly reported violent draft raids, deaths in conscription centers, and cases of seriously ill men being declared fit for service.

Moscow has repeatedly said Kiev is running out of willing soldiers and is relying on coercive mobilization to replenish battlefield losses. Russian officials have accused the Ukrainian authorities of sacrificing their own population to keep fighting on behalf of Western backers.

Former Russian Defense Minister and longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin, Sergey Ivanov, has died at the age of 73, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced on Friday.

Ivanov began his career in the late 1970s as a KGB officer in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, where he first met Putin. He later recalled that they shared an office during their time in the Soviet security service.

Fluent in English, he spent a decade in the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, undertaking assignments in the UK, Finland, and Kenya, according to Russian media. Years later, Ivanov told reporters that he had also learned Swedish during his stint as a KGB operative.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ivanov joined the newly created Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) before moving to the Federal Security Service (FSB). There, he rose to become deputy director under Putin, who headed the agency in the late 1990s.

During that period, Russia was hit by a series of major terrorist attacks carried out by Chechen Islamist militants – events that preceded the Second Chechen War. Amid the conflict, Ivanov was appointed secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

He served as defense minister from 2001 to 2007, overseeing the early stages of a sweeping military reform aimed at building a more professional armed force by expanding contract service and reducing reliance on conscription.

After Putin endorsed Medvedev’s candidacy, Ivanov backed the nomination. Following Medvedev’s election victory, Putin became prime minister, with Ivanov serving as deputy prime minister.

When Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, Ivanov was appointed head of the presidential administration, a position he held until 2016.

For the last decade, Ivanov served as Putin’s special representative for environmental protection and ecology before stepping down in February.

Outside politics, Ivanov was an avid basketball fan with a passion for ballet and classic rock, particularly The Beatles and Pink Floyd, as he said in interviews with Russian media.

No details of Ivanov’s funeral have been announced, although Russian media have suggested he may be laid to rest in his native St. Petersburg.

Russian air defenses stopped 660 Ukrainian kamikaze drones overnight, the military said on Friday. The figure was the largest ever reported for the metric, reflecting an escalation of Western-funded strikes inside Russia.

The Russian Defense Ministry normally reports the total number of drone interceptions conducted between 10 PM and 7 AM Moscow time every day. The previous record was 556 in mid-May, while earlier this month the Russian military downed 555 Ukrainian aircraft overnight. Other standout figures since 2025 were in the 300s.

Kiev is ramping up long-range strikes against energy infrastructure as Ukrainian frontline troops suffer setbacks caused by manpower shortages and Russian weapons superiority. Ukrainian officials claim the economic damage will force Moscow to agree to a ceasefire along the current front line, and have threatened to withdraw the offer unless it is accepted soon.

Both sides are developing more affordable ways to intercept long-range drones, such as cheap interceptor aircraft, and are trying to protect their weapons from countermeasures. Ukrainian operations are supported by Western funding, intelligence gathering, and an industrial base that supplies drone components.

Russia and Ukraine have conducted another prisoner of war exchange, with 160 servicemen returned to each side, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has announced.

In a statement on Friday, the ministry said “160 Russian servicemen were returned from territory controlled by the Kiev regime.” In exchange, 160 Ukrainian Armed Forces prisoners of war were released.

The returned Russian servicemen are currently in Belarus, where they are receiving psychological and medical assistance, the ministry said. Russian Human Rights Commissioner Yana Lantratova is working with the freed soldiers.

The servicemen will later be transported to Russia for further treatment and rehabilitation.

The exchange was carried out with mediation from the United Arab Emirates, the Defense Ministry said.

The May swap had been described as the first stage of a wider 1,000-for-1,000 exchange, which was announced following US-mediated contacts around Russia’s Victory Day commemorations.

Russia and Ukraine have continued to exchange prisoners and the bodies of fallen soldiers despite the ongoing conflict. The UAE has repeatedly acted as a mediator in humanitarian efforts between the two sides.

Ukrainian conscription officers have reportedly targeted a dog in a disturbing act of revenge after failing to seize a man in Odessa.

Kiev is using press gangs to enforce mandatory conscription on a resistant population, with violent confrontations involving draft patrols reported on a daily basis. The incident that allegedly took place in the port city on Wednesday stands out because a helpless animal was apparently targeted.

A viral video on social media shows a large group of uniformed men hastily getting into an unmarked van, one of them dragging a small dog by its leash. A man chases them, demanding that they return the pet and smashing the vehicle’s window with a baton as it drives away.

According to the local newspaper Dumskaya, the dog is a Jack Russell terrier named Tito. It was reportedly found about 500 meters from the site of the clash, with the owners telling the outlet that their pet requires knee surgery after the kidnapping.

Ukrainian officials have not commented on the incident, which sparked anger among animal rights activists.

Kiev’s so-called ‘busification’ mobilization campaign, named after the nickname for the vans used by draft patrols, has emerged as a major source of tension in Ukrainian society. While officials call it unavoidable in the conflict with Russia, many citizens see it as rife with state-sanctioned corruption and as disproportionately targeting poor people.

The sentiment is fueled by incidents in which conscripts are allegedly treated as cannon fodder by military commanders. Just this week, the leaders of the ‘Skelya’ (Rock) frontline regiment, where at least 26 recruits died outside combat this year, were accused of condoning torture and murder to maintain discipline. The authorities have launched an investigation following the expose.

A separate ‘busification’ case reported in Odessa this week involved a draft patrol allegedly ramming a man’s car into a street lamp. Witnesses filmed the officials dragging their targets out of the blocked vehicle.

The Israeli Embassy in Ukraine has criticized a Ukrainian far-right group for allegedly using Nazi symbols during a march in Kiev, held as a counterprotest to the annual pride march in the country’s capital.

Police used barricades to keep the two rival events – organized by pro-LGBT groups and far-right ultranationalists – separated last Sunday. The event has been marked by street violence and angry clashes in previous years.

The Israeli Embassy said on Wednesday that members of the Brotherhood movement, led by radical nationalist Dmitry Korchinsky, “chanted Nazi slogans and performed Nazi salutes,” and called for a “prompt response by the Ukrainian law enforcement authorities.” The brief statement did not give examples or further details of the alleged violations.

Heute erlebt Kiew zwei Märsche

LGBTQ+Pride-Marsch - rechtsextreme Marsch

Mit Parolen wie „Nation, Rasse, Familie“ und „Tradition, Ordnung“ marschieren die militärischen Einheiten wie Revenge, Raid, Bratstvo, der 67. Brigade, der 3. Sturmbrigade und Asow pic.twitter.com/9Lpr8Fafrp

— Liane (@liane3974) June 21, 2026

On Sunday, members of Brotherhood and other far-right groups gathered for a counterprotest, with many dressed in black and wearing face masks. They marched through central Kiev chanting slogans such as “idea, nation, down with degradation” and “family, tradition, order.” Videos from the rally showed several heated verbal confrontations, while some participants trampled LGBT flags on the ground.

WATCH: Anti-Pride protesters and LGBT march participants faced off in Kyiv despite an air raid alert.

Tensions flared with insults and taunts, including the shout:

“Putin is also a f*ggot, he's proud of you!” pic.twitter.com/Du21ygDkMh

— Clash Report (@clashreport) June 21, 2026

While Nazi symbols are banned under Ukrainian law, the restrictions have rarely been enforced against far-right groups and military units that openly use them as insignia. Troops wearing patches featuring the ‘totenkopf’ variant of the death’s head symbol and the Nazi eagle have repeatedly appeared in official photos and videos published by Vladimir Zelensky’s office and other Ukrainian government institutions.

Some Ukrainian far-right activists claim the Nazi-style salutes they use in public are not controversial. “Raising the right hand in Ukrainian tradition is a symbol of honor, strength and readiness for action,” the leader of the Carpathian Sich group, Taras Deyak, said in an interview last year. “This gesture is dedicated to the fight for the Ukrainian state.”

Russian law enforcement agencies have detained an underage suspect whom they allege is behind a major international online terrorist community funded by Ukraine, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Friday.

The suspect was apprehended in the Republic of Dagestan in southern Russia during a joint operation involving the FSB, the Interior Ministry, and the Investigative Committee, the agency said.

The criminal community was responsible for attacks not only inside Russia but also had “global outreach,” operating in the US and Europe, the FSB said.

According to the agency, acting under the guidance of handlers in Kiev, the suspect recruited radicalized teenagers to carry out school shootings, bomb attacks on transport infrastructure, and false bomb threats targeting social facilities.

The FSB said the suspect’s involvement in organizing at least 15 terrorist crimes across ten Russian regions has been confirmed. All of the perpetrators have been arrested, it added.

“Extra financial bonuses were promised for carrying out attacks with the highest number of casualties,” with the money being provided by Ukraine, the agency said.

In 2025 and 2026, members of the terrorist community orchestrated arson attacks and acts of vandalism targeting more than 20 civilian vehicles and a Christian church in several cities across the US and Europe, according to the FSB. They also made false bomb threats against educational institutions and other social facilities.

The video and text materials used to indoctrinate American and European youths through social media platforms were produced in Kiev, the agency said.

Watch a report on the detention of the terrorist community admin by RT’s Roman Kosarev:

The EU is engaging in “fascism” with its recent proposals to preserve visa-free travel only for select groups of Georgian citizens, Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili has said.

The European Parliament initiative, put forward earlier this year as part of discussions on a potential suspension mechanism for Georgia’s visa-free regime, would allow students, journalists, and civil society activists to continue entering the bloc without visas even if the waiver is suspended for the rest of the population.

Papuashvili argued that the plan effectively ranks citizens by social category, granting privileges to some while excluding others.

“These three social groups would have more rights from the EU than workers, farmers, engineers, and doctors. This is called nothing other than fascism,” Papuashvili told local media on Wednesday, stating that the proposal amounts to a “segregation” of the Georgian people.

The categories singled out by the European Parliament also seem to overlap with the forces that have driven Georgia’s recent protest movement, namely activist groups, opposition-linked NGOs, student networks, and media outlets that Georgian officials have repeatedly linked to Western-backed efforts to destabilize the country.

In March, the European Commission also suspended visa-free travel for holders of Georgian diplomatic and service passports, citing concerns over democracy and fundamental rights.

Tbilisi condemned the move, accusing the EU of weaponizing visas to pressure Georgia to adopt the EU’s anti-Russian track and impose sanctions on Moscow.

Tbilisi has also repeatedly accused Brussels and Western-funded organizations of using street pressure to overturn election results and enact regime change in the country. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has compared the unrest to Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan coup and has said that foreign actors have been trying to push Georgia to open a “second front” against Russia.

The EU has rejected allegations of regime-change efforts, instead accusing Georgia of democratic backsliding and excessive force against protesters. Tbilisi says Brussels is punishing the country for pursuing an independent policy and refusing to sacrifice its national interests.

On June 19, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky issued an ultimatum to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, demanding the removal of drone relay stations allegedly located on Belarusian territory and being used to guide Russian drone attacks on Ukraine. 

On June 24, Zelensky stated that Lukashenko had complied with his ultimatum and the relay stations were no longer operational. Lukashenko did not comment, and no evidence of either the existence or removal of these stations was provided. We are supposed to take Zelensky at his word.

Below, we examine what the story was all about, why Kiev resorted to such rhetorical escalation, and why it ended the way it did. 

What happened and where? 

While Russia is Ukraine’s eastern and northeastern neighbor, Belarus lies directly to the north of Ukraine. From Belarus, the western regions of Ukraine and the Ukraine-Poland border are accessible via the shortest possible route. And the straight-line distance to Kiev from the Ukraine-Belarus border is less than 100 km. 

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko considers himself more of a mediator between Russia and Ukraine: the first negotiations between Russia and Ukraine occurred in Gomel in 2022, and then moved to Istanbul a week later. 

However, Belarus in the north poses a constant and serious threat to Ukraine: the latter has to maintain infantry cover and air defense units along the entire 1,000 km-long Ukraine-Belarus border. Meanwhile, these tens of thousands of servicemen, though not of the best combat quality, could be useful at the front, considering the Ukrainian army’s catastrophic personnel shortage. 

Zelensky himself is quite nervous. Since January of this year, he has toughened his rhetoric towards Lukashenko, and in February even imposed sanctions against him.

The issue of the relay stations has also been raised repeatedly. For example, on February 23, Zelensky stated that the Ukrainian side had done everything possible to ensure that “three or four” of them “no longer exist” on Belarusian territory. Just like today, no data on the existence of the stations or their removal was published at the time. 

On April 18, Zelensky stated that Belarus, on orders from Russia, was preparing to attack Ukraine (allegedly, on Lukashenko’s orders, roads to the border were being built and artillery positions were being set up) and, in a rather rude manner, threatened the Belarusian president with the fate of the kidnapped Maduro.

We must note that the Belarusian army, although well-equipped, is quite small: in peacetime, its ground forces number approximately 20,000 people. This number could quickly be increased to 100,000 by calling up reservists, but despite regular mobilization exercises, there have been no signs of calling up reserve forces in Belarus. 

In any case, Zelensky’s ultimatum on Saturday was a logical continuation of his increasingly aggressive rhetoric, and it caused a stir only because of the clear deadline: within a week, Zelensky promised to “remove” Russian equipment from Belarusian territory himself. He also threatened to strike Belarusian oil refineries, which allegedly supply fuel to the Russian army.

What were the options?

Ukraine’s supporters took Zelensky’s threats seriously and even enthusiastically. This is understandable: according to Western media, Ukraine has turned the tide of the conflict since the beginning of the year and is decisively defeating Russia in the air. From this perspective, it is quite logical to expand the conflict to Moscow’s allies.

We identified four possible outcomes of Zelensky’s ultimatum: 

First (improbable) option: Lukashenko could have complied with the ultimatum, publicly admitting that the relay stations were in place but were removed at the request of the Ukrainian side. Alternatively, he could publicly refuse to supply Russia with fuel.

Third option: As in February, Zelensky could declare that the relay stations were removed. He announced the threat, he resolved it. The story would soon become irrelevant and would be forgotten in a few days.

Finally, the fourth option: Ukraine could have launched minor provocations against Belarus, pushing its red lines. First, one or two drones could strike insignificant targets, or even an isolated forest area. Then the drones would increase in number, the targets would become more serious, and in just a few weeks or months, the skies over Belarus would become as turbulent as in the European part of Russia. Moscow would have to supply its ally with missile defense systems, which would mean pulling air defense systems from its own territory and weakening its own airspace.

It might look like the latter option could be a win-win for Kiev. Since Ukraine is already under fire, it has nothing to lose, so it could complicate matters for Moscow without much risk – most likely, such ‘salami tactics’ would not provide grounds for a decisive response.

However, this option comes with significant risk. So far, Kiev has refrained from declaring that the air attacks on Ukraine are carried out from Belarusian territory. But after the first Ukrainian strike, Lukashenko would be able to ask Moscow for protection, and Moscow, in accordance with its allied obligations, would provide such protection.

However, the distance from the Belarusian border to Kiev is less than 100 kilometers by air, and the Ukrainian capital could be attacked directly with UMPK precision-guided munitions, against which air defenses are virtually ineffective. Currently, UMPK bomb kits are used only at the front; they cannot reach Ukrainian cities in the rear.

These precision-guided munitions would also be able to target the strategically important railway route from Poland to Kiev and the northern part of the Ukraine-Poland border. Therefore, a proper and decisive response would have the opposite effect to what Kiev intended: the Ukrainian capital and cities in the rear would become more vulnerable, not safer. 

Therefore, Kiev certainly understands that drawing Belarus into the conflict will dramatically worsen Ukraine’s strategic position.

***

We all know how the story with the relay stations ended. Just like in February, Zelensky chose the third option, declaring that the stations had been shut down at his request. His attempt to ‘bluff’ Lukashenko with his ultimatum failed. Meanwhile, Minsk hasn’t commented on the situation at all, ignoring both the ultimatum and its miraculous revocation.

However, in a wider sense, this is hardly the end of the story. Zelensky’s logic of verbal escalation leaves him with no other option but to resort to threats again and again. After all, the drones will continue flying and the aerial threat can’t be solved with magic spells on the internet. 

A church in Odessa dedicated to the Russian Orthodox saint Aleksandr Nevsky has been seized by anti-Russian activists. The incident follows a pattern of government-backed crackdowns on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the country’s largest denomination.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Ukrainian authorities have carried out raids on monasteries and churches, imposed sanctions on clergy members, and backed efforts to transfer UOC properties to the rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), whose clerics reportedly participated in the church takeover on Tuesday.

Why is there a church schism in Ukraine?

The OCU was launched as part of then-President Pyotr Poroshenko’s reelection campaign in 2019 and is considered schismatic by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the UOC.

The canonical Ukrainian church has denied accusations that it serves Moscow’s interests and formally severed all administrative ties with the ROC in 2022. Despite that, it faces a possible legal ban under a law that current Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky signed in 2024.

How was the Odessa church targeted?

According to the UOC’s Odessa diocese, priests and parishioners arrived at the Aleksandr Nevsky church in the morning to find the gates locked. During a confrontation outside, one of the men involved in the takeover, who appeared to be a private security employee hired by the OCU, allegedly grabbed a priest by the throat.

In a video posted online, OCU cleric Teodor Orobets claimed the church now belongs to “real parishioners,” including “military service members, veterans, and our military chaplains.” He declared the church to be re-dedicated to an 11th-century monk of the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery.

In footage filmed inside the church after the takeover, he criticized icons depicting saints who have no connection to modern-day Ukraine, denouncing them as “markers of Moscow religious life.”

What was the Church response?

The UOC said it will challenge the seizure in court. Church officials noted that the congregation restored the building between 1999 and 2001 and has used it ever since.

The church was originally built in 1897 on the grounds of a military hospital, but it was forced to shut down in the late 1940s under Soviet rule.

The temple is dedicated to Aleksandr Nevsky, a medieval Russian prince and Orthodox saint who ruled several principalities, including Kiev. The OCU has rejected his veneration, citing his role in the development of Russian statehood.

Agapetus of Pechersk, after whom the OCU wants to rename the church, is recognized as a saint by both the Ukrainian church it seeks to replace and the Russian one.

Nuclear weapons are the only thing preventing humanity from sliding into a global war, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, as he commented on the worsening state of international security.

While the civilization-ending power of atomic weapons still deters a global confrontation, regional conflicts continue to erupt and are becoming increasingly devastating, the Russian official said on Wednesday. Peskov made the remarks while moderating a panel discussion at the Primakov Readings in Moscow.

“Directly speaking, we have nothing left in the world except nuclear deterrence. It’s the only thing saving the world from a global war,” Peskov said of international security mechanisms.

“We don’t really have any levers to reach an agreement in this area,” he added. “We can’t even reform the United Nations Security Council.”

The current international security system was established after World War II, with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council playing a central role in maintaining global stability. The same countries – China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US – are also the only states recognized as nuclear powers under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Several other countries have acquired nuclear weapons outside that framework, including India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel, though the latter neither confirms nor denies its status.

Critics argue that growing tensions between major powers have left the UN Security Council increasingly divided and less effective. Moscow has blamed the situation on Western efforts to preserve the unipolar world order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Western nations are no longer hiding their preparations for war with Russia, President Vladimir Putin has said, adding that NATO and EU leaders are using “false claims” about the supposed ‘Russian threat’ to justify rampant militarization.

Putin made the remarks on Tuesday during a ceremony in the Kremlin for graduates of Russia’s military, security, and law enforcement academies, saying NATO’s posture has shifted from supporting Kiev with weapons and funding to outright preparations for war.

“Now, they are openly saying that they are preparing for war with us, increasing military offensive budgets,” Putin said. He argued that Western governments are using the same playbook that has always been used against Russia.

Putin’s remarks come as NATO’s European members and Canada raised defense spending by 20% in real terms in 2025, reaching a combined $574 billion, citing the supposed ‘Russian threat’. Moscow has dismissed speculation that it plans to attack NATO countries as “nonsense.”

Turning to Ukraine’s drone campaign against Russian cities, Putin said the strikes on civilian infrastructure are designed “to rock society” rather than achieve military aims. “When the whole West is working for them, with this huge flow of drones, [the aim is] to create doubt in the actions of the Russian Armed Forces,” he said.

Putin noted, however, that European nations are still reluctant to launch strikes on Russia from their own territory because “they understand that there will be retaliation.”

Putin’s comments came as Ukraine continues to carry out long-range strikes deep into Russia, which often lead to civilian casualties. Last week, Kiev launched a drone raid on Moscow – the largest in two years – with Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reporting the destruction of 194 drones. The attack damaged an oil refinery, a shopping center, and several residential buildings, with more than a dozen people injured.

A rare tornado swept through Russia’s Sverdlovsk Region in the Urals on Monday, damaging more than 100 homes, knocking out power lines and injuring residents.

The worst of the devastation was reported in the town of Kushva, located roughly 170 kilometers north of Yekaterinburg, where local authorities promptly declared a state of emergency.

Footage shared online showed a large funnel cloud ripping through neighborhoods, leaving behind uprooted trees, shattered concrete poles, and torn roofs 

Healthcare authorities said 16 people sought medical help after the storm, with one person hospitalized in the city of Nizhny Tagil. Governor Denis Pasler said the lives and health of residents were no longer in danger.

Close-up footage of a significant tornado in Kushva, Sverdlovsk oblast, Russia, 2 hours ago. pic.twitter.com/xFHSHueTa8

— Kirill Bakanov (@WeatherSarov1) June 22, 2026

According to regional reports, 32 private homes were completely destroyed and nearly 100 more were damaged. The storm also damaged over two dozen cars, schools, kindergartens, gas pipes and at least 15 power lines. 

Some 4,000 residents were left without electricity, forcing critical systems like local hospitals to temporarily run on backup generators while emergency grids were restored. Water and gas networks were also punctured, requiring temporary safety shutoffs.

Pasler said 16 miners were also trapped underground at the Yuzhnaya mine after a power grid failure, but all were brought safely to the surface by 4am and sent home.

A hurricane destroyed a church in the Chelyabinsk region.

The day before, in the village of Bolshoy Kuyash, a church dedicated to the Nativity of Christ was damaged during a violent storm.

The small dome with the cross was torn off by strong winds, and sections of the… pic.twitter.com/yHJl3B9vRM

— Russian Market (@runews) June 23, 2026

Emergency crews, utility workers and regional officials have been sent to Kushva to clear debris, restore power and gas supplies, and assess the damage. 

Meteorologists have described the tornado as rare for the region but not impossible. Weather specialist Aleksey Pulin said such vortexes form in the Urals every few years, but usually over sparsely populated areas, and are often confirmed only later by damage patterns in forests. He noted that this latest event was highly anomalous due to its direct path through dense residential zones.

A person mowing the lawn in the Estonian countryside stumbled on what was likely a Ukrainian drone packed with 5 kg of explosives earlier this month, a local official has revealed. The UAV apparently went down during a Ukrainian raid on Russia on June 3, despite officials’ earlier assurances that no unauthorized aircraft entered the country’s airspace at the time.

Harrys Puusepp, bureau chief at Estonia’s Internal Security Service, confirmed on Monday that the drone crashed in a field in Rouge municipality, around 40 km from the Russian border. The discovery was reported to authorities on the evening of June 10 but was not made public until June 22 due to an ongoing major exercise, he added.

“The person discovered a drone in taller grass while mowing. Some parts of the drone were also found in a tree, so it had apparently fallen from there,” he said, adding that shortly after the incident, “the danger area was secured, and no bystanders were put at risk.”

🇺🇦🎮⚔️🇪🇪 An Estonian man discovered a fallen Ukrainian drone while mowing the grass.

The discovery was made in the Rõuge municipality back on June 10, but news of it has only just emerged.

According to Harris Puusepp, a bureau chief at the Estonian Internal Security Service… pic.twitter.com/DGJ5eLFt7o

— dana (@dana916) June 22, 2026

Puusepp said the drone may have been among those reported during alerts on June 3 during a Ukrainian raid on Russia, with Kiev previously targeting oil infrastructure on the Baltic Sea coast. At the time, the Estonian military scrambled jets and sent warning notifications to residents, but said “no air threat was detected.”

Despite the assurance, several people living in Voru county, where a suspected Ukrainian drone was later found, told ERR they had heard a noise that may have been related to a UAV.

Ukraine has often apologized for the incidents but has given no indication that it plans to scale back its drone campaign.

In an incident on May 19, a Romanian F-16 shot down a suspected Ukrainian UAV near Lake Vortsjarv, with wreckage landing close to the village of Kablakula in southern Estonia.

Russia is ready to invoke its security guarantees to Belarus if Ukraine follows through on threats to strike targets on its territory, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned.

Lavrov made the remarks during a round-table discussion on the West’s role in the Ukraine conflict on Monday. He was commenting on Vladimir Zelensky’s demand that Minsk dismantle or disable what Kiev claims are Russian-linked relay stations along the Belarus-Ukraine border. Zelensky gave Belarus one week to act, warning that Ukraine would otherwise destroy the equipment itself.

The Russian foreign minister described the ultimatum as a threat against a sovereign state, stating that “this is obviously aimed at dragging Belarus directly into the conflict and expanding the geography of hostilities.”

He noted that Russia and Belarus have had a security guarantees treaty in force since March 2025 under the Union State framework.

The pact treats an attack on either Russia or Belarus as an attack on the Union State and allows both sides to use all available military and technical means, including nuclear weapons, to repel aggression and threats to their sovereignty or territorial integrity.

Minsk has said it will not dismantle the equipment or halt fuel deliveries to Russia, similarly warning that an attack from Ukraine would trigger a response.

Lavrov also criticized the EU for what he said was support for Zelensky’s threats, citing remarks by a European Commission spokeswoman who accused Belarus of aiding Russia and said Ukraine has the right to self-defense.

The foreign minister stressed that Europe cannot act as a neutral mediator in the conflict while arming Ukraine, expanding the sanctions on Russia, and backing threats against Belarus.

Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Sekreta said Minsk is closely watching the exercise and accused Europe of embracing a militarized ideology. “Who are they planning to fight again?” he said.

Russia and Belarus have denied that they have any plans to attack NATO or the EU unless attacked first. They have accused Western states of using the Ukraine conflict, NATO drills, and military buildups on the bloc’s eastern flank to prepare for a direct confrontation with Russia and Belarus.

A US-educated executive who has headed Ukraine’s national postal service for a decade does not have the professional competence required for the position, the country’s central bank has ruled.

Ukrposhta chief Igor Smelyansky has faced years of criticism over his salary, reportedly the highest in Ukraine’s public sector, as well as his dismissive communications style. The regulator responsible for financial oversight has demanded that he be removed from his post within five days, while the postal chief has threatened to strike back.

In a sharply worded ruling published on Tuesday, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) cited multiple violations by the state-owned company, including alleged anti-money laundering failures. Smelyansky’s qualifications, the regulator concluded, “do not meet the professional requirements” for the top executive of a major payment operator.

Ukrainian postal chief threatens central bank

Smelyansky has dismissed the ruling as “nonsense” and claimed it was a personal attack by NBU head Andrey Pyshny, whom he accused of corruption.

Smelyansky, a graduate of Georgetown and George Washington Universities, worked in Ukraine’s banking sector before taking over Ukrposhta.

Central bank ruling like ‘a Russian strike’

The postal chief, who presents himself as an efficiency-focused reformer, has said his monthly salary of $21,500 is lower than what he earned in the private sector.

He has claimed that managing a state-owned enterprise is more difficult and less emotionally gratifying than working for a private company.

Smelyansky has insisted he will remain in his high-paying job until martial law is lifted, meaning not before the conflict with Russia is resolved. Ukrposhta plays a role in Ukrainian military logistics, and its storage facilities have been targeted by multiple Russian strikes.

He claimed Ukraine’s central bank under Pyshny is as damaging to the national postal service as Moscow, but added that Ukrposhta knows how to “recover from enemy attacks.”

Backlash over sexualized schoolgirl images

In February, Smelyansky labeled a critic of Ukrposhta’s recent rebranding “a whore,” while on another occasion he described people working for minimum wage as “sick in their heads.”

Another controversy involved Ukrposhta’s St. Valentine’s Day campaign, which featured sexualized images of schoolgirls and a “post of love” theme. Smelyansky later called the campaign “a mistake,” while the advertising firm behind it deleted the most provocative images.

Ukrainian special services attempted to use two Moscow women as unwitting suicide bombers in a double-tap attack on a Russian law enforcement facility, investigators say.

The operation began last week when the two suspects, aged 19 and 47, traveled from Moscow to Pyatigorsk, a city in Stavropol Region, Russia in the North Caucasus, according to statements released on Tuesday by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Investigative Committee. The women were reportedly unaware of each other and did not know that the courier jobs they accepted were intended to be suicide missions.

Investigators said the 19-year-old suspect was detained on Saturday while heading toward a checkpoint near the intended target. The 47-year-old woman later aroused suspicion as she approached the same area, the authorities said.

Both women allegedly collected backpacks containing improvised explosive devices from caches in Pyatigorsk. The bombs were destroyed in controlled detonations, according to video footage released by the FSB. The video also shows the second suspect crying, thanking the officers for saving her life and saying that Saturday was her birthday.

Russian officials believe the Ukrainian handlers intended the first courier to trigger a security response, while the second was meant to inflict maximum casualties among law enforcement personnel.

The FSB has reported several cases in which it claimed Ukrainian operatives used people as unwitting suicide bombers. The first high-profile incident took place in October 2022, when a commercial driver was reportedly tricked into transporting a bomb across the Crimean Bridge. He was killed in a remotely triggered explosion, along with four other civilians traveling nearby.

Recent alleged attacks include a woman and a man who were reportedly instructed to deliver explosive devices disguised as a Christian icon and a portable speaker to the FSB’s regional headquarters in Crimea.

Russian officials claim that Kiev is resorting to terrorist tactics due to setbacks suffered on the battlefield. The CIA helped Ukraine overhaul its special services after the 2014 coup, turning them into proxies for espionage operations focused on Russia, according to media reports.

Russian Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers have conducted drills over the neutral waters of the Barents and Norwegian seas, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. The mission took place amid tensions between Moscow and NATO over the Ukraine conflict.

The aircraft were escorted by MiG-31 fighter jets and conducted mid-air refueling drills during what the ministry described as a routine patrol flight over the Arctic region between Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. According to the ministry, the bombers were shadowed by fighter aircraft from unspecified foreign countries during parts of their 16-hour mission.

“All flights of the Russian Aerospace Forces are conducted in strict accordance with international rules governing the use of airspace,” the ministry said on Telegram.

Russia and Belarus conducted their first joint nuclear exercise last month. President Vladimir Putin said nuclear deterrence protects the sovereignty of both countries at a time of “growing global tensions, as well as the emergence of new threats and risks.”

“A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could rapidly escalate into an exchange of nuclear strikes, with catastrophic consequences,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wrote in a recent op-ed that was rejected by Politico Europe.

Lavrov also expressed “deep concern” over France’s proposal to extend its nuclear deterrent to Germany and other NATO members.

Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum this month, Putin reiterated that Russia would not attack a NATO member unless Russia is attacked first.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation has drawn a mix of mockery and skepticism in Moscow, with officials and experts saying that his departure is unlikely to change London’s hostile stance towards Russia.

Relations at ‘zero level’

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the idea that Starmer’s departure would alter bilateral ties, arguing that the British leader had “not done anything to distinguish himself on the issue of UK-Russian relations” and had consistently favored keeping them “at a zero level.” Peskov added that there was little reason to expect any successor to take a markedly different policy.

Starmer’s resignation ‘unites us all’

Russian Special Presidential Envoy Kirill Dmitriev appeared to celebrate the news on X, writing: “We did it. Starmer's resignation unites us all,” echoing comments made earlier by US President Donald Trump.

The criticism extended to Russia’s parliament, where Senator Vladimir Dzhabarov predicted Starmer would be gone by autumn, branding him “a destroyer of everything possible” who “only sets countries against each other” and “hinders any negotiation process.”

UK policy on Ukraine and Russia to remain unchanged

Speaking to RT on Monday, Nikolay Topornin, director of the Center for European Information and an international observer, said Starmer’s departure is unlikely to bring any major shift in British foreign policy.

“The British course to support Kiev, to punish Russia, and to provide military and financial support to Ukraine will remain unchanged,” he said.

Moscow has long insisted that any lasting settlement must address those issues, including Ukraine’s neutrality, demilitarization, protections for Russian speakers, and recognition of territorial realities.

The UK remains bound by agreements with Germany, France, Brussels, and Washington, Topornin argued. As long as they maintain a common stance on Russia and the Ukraine conflict, there is little room for any major shift in London's policy, he said.

The analyst noted that much will depend on appointments to top foreign-policy posts, but argued that no prominent British politician currently favors a meaningful change of course on the Ukraine conflict.

Who’s next?

Topornin predicted that Labour politician Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, would succeed Starmer. Burnham “has not yet distinguished himself by some radical statements about foreign policy and changes in approaches to the conflict,” he said, adding that the rhetoric towards Moscow is unlikely to become “more pragmatic” as the new prime minister is expected to follow “the politics of the previous cabinet.”

Sergey Shein, a research fellow at the Higher School of Economics, echoed that view. He argued that Starmer is likely to oversee a managed transition rather than a sudden exit, while any successor, including Burnham, would initially be preoccupied with uniting the Labour Party. Domestically, Burnham would likely focus on economic recovery, housing, and healthcare, he added.

NATO and the EU’s ongoing militarization is starting to resemble plans for Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, a senior Russian diplomat has said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko made the remarks in an interview with Izvestia published on Monday, June 22, the date Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941, an assault historians describe as the largest invasion in military history.

By some estimates, the Red Army suffered up to 4 million casualties within the war’s first six months alone, with millions more taken prisoner, though the Soviet Union eventually succeeded at stopping the Nazi onslaught at the gates of Moscow. Germany’s offensive benefited from military and economic support from numerous European countries, with volunteers from officially neutral nations such as Spain also joining the fight.

“Of course, we proceed from the premise that they are really preparing for a military clash with Russia somewhere around 2030,” he added.

Grushko also sounded the alarm over the resurgence of neo-Nazi ideology, stressing that Moscow is drawing attention to the dangerous trend at international forums.

The interview was released as European nations continue to ramp up their militarization, citing an alleged “Russian threat.” Last year, NATO countries pledged to raise defense spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, with Germany being particularly active, raising this year’s military budget to roughly €108 billion ($123 billion).

Western officials and media have also alleged that Russia could attack NATO within several years – a claim President Vladimir Putin has dismissed as “not only pure insanity but also a deliberate provocation.” 

Moscow has also consistently accused the West of using Ukraine as a “battering ram” against Russia, noting that it appeared to be willing to fight the country “until the last Ukrainian.”

Five people have been killed and dozens injured in a Ukrainian attack on the Russian city of Voronezh, Governor Aleksandr Gusev has said.

A missile attack warning was issued for the region, around 450 km south of Moscow, on Monday morning. Gusev reported that air defenses intercepted “high-speed aerial targets” over the city.

According to the governor, the strike hit an industrial facility, causing “significant damage” and a fire which has since been extinguished. The attack damaged a dozen apartment blocks, as well as six single-family homes and around 50 vehicles, Gusev said in a statement published on Telegram.

Russian officials did not immediately identify the weapons used in the strike. However, media reports have claimed that British-French Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles were used.

Kiev’s military effort continues to rely heavily on Western support. The EU has shouldered much of the financial burden since US President Donald Trump cut off assistance last year.
Ukraine has intensified long-range strikes inside Russia as its forces gradually retreat along parts of the front line and face a worsening manpower shortage.

The deep strikes are reportedly intended in part to demonstrate Ukraine’s ability to inflict damage and to encourage foreign backers to approve further multibillion-dollar aid packages.

Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory have repeatedly caused civilian casualties. In Voronezh, a girl in her early teens was injured by drone debris last Sunday.

Every country has its catastrophic moment – the date that goes down in history as the nation’s darkest day. For Russia, disaster struck on June 22, 1941.

The Nazi attack on the USSR resulted in the deaths of 27 million people; around half of them were unarmed civilians – innocent victims of the war and the Nazis’ genocidal plans. The Soviet territory occupied by the Nazis during the war was the size of a country like Iran and had a pre-war population of 86 million.

It took the USSR four years to repel the attack and win, by which point many cities and regions were completely destroyed. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), set a grim record in the war. The city wasn’t occupied by Nazi forces, but the merciless siege, bombings, and the horrific famine during the Siege of Leningrad claimed the lives of 650,000 people.

World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, inflicted the most terrible collective trauma in the country’s modern history; the long-term consequences affect the population to this day. Most Russian families know where their ancestors fought, worked, and died during the war.

An army that showed up too late 

We’ll have to start from far off. The Red Army, like the other participants of the war, was influenced by former experience. However, in Russia’s case, this experience was particularly complex and dramatic. 

In Russia, World War I was followed by the Russian Civil War. It lasted until 1922 and had catastrophic consequences for the entire country, including its society, industry, and the armed forces. The new army had to be built almost from scratch. A huge portion of the officer corps either died fighting in the Civil War or emigrated. Russians could be found in the most surprising corners of the world: For example, the former colonel of the Tsar’s artillery became chief of the General Staff of Paraguay after the Civil War. The problem was that these people were removed from their own armed forces. Then, several waves of political purges occurred in the Red Army, which eliminated a certain number of both old officers and new commanders who gained experience in the Red Army.

At that time, the USSR was very poor and couldn’t afford modern weapons. And weapons weren’t the only problem. In 1929, a local conflict on the border with China revealed the country’s extreme level of poverty; the equipment was worn out, and there was even a shortage of binoculars and wristwatches. Ammunition production rates were quite dismal.

Surprisingly, Red Army commanders had quite advanced theoretical views regarding the future war. But due to the general poverty of the population, those who remained in the army were either useless slackers or people willing to work for food just to get near a machine gun. Nevertheless, the concept of army development envisioned the creation of highly mobile mechanized units, a powerful air force, and the combined use of these forces for achieving deep, dynamic breakthroughs.

In the 1930s, industry in the Soviet Union developed at a rapid pace, and some issues were hastily resolved. However, many of the old problems remained. A severe shortage of spare parts, ammunition, and auxiliary equipment impacted the army’s ability to operate on the battlefield, since equipment was also required for training.

In 1940, a few months before the start of the war, Inspector General of the Infantry Andrey Smirnov demanded that the country’s highest leadership urgently find additional ammunition for training soldiers, and complained that officers up to the level of battalion commanders were poorly trained. 

The repression of the officer corps (the losses during the Civil War, the trials of the 1920s, and finally the decimation of 1937, when tens of thousands of officers were sent to camps or executed) completed the grim picture. By 1941, both the command staff and regular soldiers had a very poor level of training. Moreover, even if the repressions had not occurred and the army only had to contend with the consequences of the Civil War and the low education level inherited from the Russian Empire, the situation would have been somewhat better, but it would not have fundamentally changed.

The weakness of industry meant that it could only partially meet the military’s demands, and entire classes of equipment were unavailable throughout the war. For example, there were no Russian-made self-propelled howitzers; all armored personnel carriers were supplied by the Allies under Lend-Lease or captured from the Germans, and there was an acute shortage of repair equipment.

Despite this, the army command and industry leaders undertook colossal efforts to prepare the country and army for war. By 1941, the Red Army had formed mechanized corps. These formations looked impressive on paper and possessed hundreds of tanks. In reality, however, the weak industrial base and a lack of experience seriously undermined their potential. The mechanized corps were severely underequipped with auxiliary and specialized equipment, transport, communications equipment, and spare parts. Some advanced equipment was designed, including T-34 and KV tanks, but crew training wasn’t adequate. The air force faced similar issues. While limiting the range of produced equipment allowed a large number of tanks and aircraft to be produced, the quality of the equipment and the skill level of those who operated it were quite low.

In 1941, the German army was at the peak of its capabilities, having gained extensive combat experience in Europe without suffering heavy losses that would have affected the quality of its troops. Meanwhile, the Russians only had experience in local conflicts, and many officers had not taken part in these conflicts.

By 1941, the Red Army had done a lot to overcome its shortcomings. If the Soviet army had a couple more years to correct its flaws, it could have become significantly stronger. But it didn’t have the luxury of time, and in war, there are no silver medals.  

Moreover, the above-mentioned challenges were compounded by politics. 

The pact and its consequences

In 1939, the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Whether this was a mistake is still a subject of debate. Hitler would certainly have started the war even without the pact, but the treaty allowed the USSR to withdraw from the world war for the next couple of years. Stalin hoped that Hitler would become bogged down on the Western Front. This time, however, France, which stood firm in 1914, collapsed from a single major blow.

In the summer of 1940, Hitler turned his attention to the East. On the one hand, the Nazis planned to acquire ‘living space’ within the framework of their chimerical ideas. On the other hand, Hitler hoped to eliminate the last force that could oppose him in Europe, and thus destroy the last hope of Great Britain, which continued to fight.

Finally, it was decided that the attack on the USSR would occur on June 22.

The military, unlike the political leadership, did not like the idea of preserving peace at all costs. On May 15, the operational directorate of the General Staff, represented by generals Vasilevsky, Vatutin, and Zhukov, presented an analytical note titled ‘Scheme of the strategic deployment of the armed forces of the USSR in case of war with Germany and its allies’.

The primary author of the document was the deputy chief of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky (a year later he became the head of the General Staff); the head of the operational department, Nikolay Vatutin, and the chief of the General Staff, Georgy Zhukov, also had a part in preparing the document.  

The document resembled a memorandum; it did not outline specific plans, but rather made a direct appeal to the country’s leadership: War is a matter of the coming weeks, it said, and it is necessary to begin mobilization and strategic deployment right away – i.e. to mobilize the population and prepare the army for battle. 

The military believed that it was better to enter the war earlier, but in full battle order, with an adequate army. 

The result of this delay was disastrous. The Wehrmacht already had qualitative and technical superiority, and now it also had numerical superiority, since by June 22 no coherent grouping had been created on the western border of the USSR, and there were gaping holes in the formations of the Soviet troops. Their destruction became inevitable.

Soviet military officials spoke out about these problems quite frankly. We do not know Vatutin’s opinion, since he died in the spring of 1944, but we do know the position of Vasilevsky and Zhukov. In his memoirs, Vasilevsky outlined his position in a polite but very clear manner, stating that the mistake of delaying mobilization and deployment led to terrible consequences for the Red Army in the first days of the war.

As for Zhukov, he prepared a report on this subject in 1956 but wasn’t allowed to present it: Even for the new Soviet leadership, which criticized Stalin for his ‘cult of personality’, it was too harsh. The draft speech was published many years later. Zhukov expressed numerous complaints about Stalin’s pre-war orders, and highlighted the failure to make critical decisions in time.

The standoff 

Early in the morning of June 22, 1941, the most terrible war Russia was ever involved in began. The Wehrmacht crossed the border and launched an offensive in three directions – through the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus – heading toward Moscow.

Border defenses collapsed in several places. The first major encirclements of the war followed in the next days. The terrible meat grinder that would operate for the next four years was set in motion. 

Unfortunately, the ratio of losses was catastrophic, and German troops moved deep into the country, encircling and destroying the ‘thin red lines’ that sprang up on their path. While the soldiers fought furiously and died, the Stavka of the Supreme High Command, established in the first days of the war, took measures at its own level.

If we were to summarize the measures that stopped the blitzkrieg, it would come down to the idea of total war. In the depths of the country, new divisions were urgently formed, since everyone realized that the old ones had either been defeated or soon would be. The soldiers were undertrained and had a reduced artillery fleet – in fact, they lacked everything.

However, the concept of ‘permanent mobilization’ assumed that even poorly armed and trained units would still influence the operational environment. In fact, there was simply no other solution. This concept was brought to life by Boris Shaposhnikov, a former colonel in the Imperial Russian Army. This was not a ruthless decision; there was simply no other option. What was formally called a ‘division’ was in reality a group of people who had been trained for three weeks, operated without artillery cover, and were commanded by an elderly general of the quartermaster service pulled out of retirement or a young major hastily promoted to colonel. No one could have imagined that in December, these divisions would destroy experienced Wehrmacht formations that stood only a short distance from Moscow, and which by that time had wasted their strength and become vulnerable. In the meantime, their role was reduced to the formula ‘stand strong and die’.

Industrial equipment was moved from territories that were in danger of being captured. This was one of the most remarkable operations of the war: In the shortest possible time, many factories were disassembled and relocated into the depths of the country. The decision to evacuate from a particular area was most often made at the last moment. This was done for obvious reasons: It was necessary to maintain production for as long as possible. The longer the factory remained in place, the more products it was able to produce while operating at full capacity. However, there was always a risk that the decision to evacuate would be made too late. For example, the three largest factories that produced tanks and components and equipment for them were relocated from Kharkov. The critical month during the evacuation was September 1941. At this time, the Red Army suffered one of the biggest military defeats near Kiev and the front moved to within 70 km of Kharkov. The factories were relocated to Nizhny Tagil, 1,770 km east of Kharkov.

Special instructions were immediately issued to the factories. Groups of specialists, including chief engineers, were evacuated to the new location in advance. Open-hearth furnaces and a foundation for a rolling mill were built at the new site. Construction of houses for 40,000 people began in Nizhny Tagil. By October 19, everything was moved to the new location; 67,000 people were evacuated, including 22,447 factory workers and family members. Some of the cargo was lost en route due to chaos on the railways and air strikes. The evacuation of the industrial base did not go smoothly. The Soviet narrative is often silent about how many disruptions and problems arose when relocating equipment and workers. However, this is the only example in world history of such a massive evacuation, so there is nothing to compare it with.

In the regions occupied by the Germans, partisan detachments were created. They were usually formed in advance, so caches of weapons could be hidden and partisan groups formed. Everyone knew how cruel the Nazis were, but it was necessary to sabotage enemy communications. Often the remnants of the defeated and encircled units formed partisan units. The Nazis began to experience problems by the summer of 1941; and by winter, they were sitting on a volcano.

Many of these measures resulted in a death sentence for the people; sometimes it even looked like organized suicide. But there was no choice: The genocidal plans of the Nazis became known very quickly, and those who were less quick to grasp the situation soon came face to face with the reality of the occupation. The country went to war and was ready to win it at any cost. The expression ‘at any cost’ was often repeated in official orders. And everyone had to be ready to pay the price.

Summary

The catastrophe of 1941 was not the result of one fatal mistake. It was so devastating because many factors were involved. 

1. The Third Reich had a more powerful, better trained, skilled, and battle-hardened army. It inherited this superiority in part from the Kaiser’s empire (while the Red Army inherited its problems from Imperial Russia) and in part developed it through combat experience, which the Russians did not possess. Moreover, the Red Army was weakened by the purges of the 1930s, the losses of the officer corps in the Civil War, and political reasons. This was not the main reason, but it became an additional problem for the Red Army. Also, we should not forget the enemy’s formidable power. In the 1930s, the Germans were able to form not just advanced, but breakthrough armed forces, and for a long time no one was able to resist them. If an American expeditionary force had found itself on the European continent, it would have undoubtedly faced the same fate as the Anglo-French forces. Despite the terrible losses, the USSR turned out to be the only country that was able to repel a Nazi ground invasion. 

2. Germany possessed a much more powerful industrial base than the Soviet Union. The Russians could produce machinery, but this did not mean the quality and technical condition of the equipment was adequate. The Third Reich could rely on the resources and industrial base of the conquered parts of Europe and it had its own powerful industrial base. The efforts made by the USSR to reduce this gap were significant but not sufficient; so more efforts had to be made in the course of the war. The severity of the problem was partially mitigated by the allies, but by that time, the USSR had already lost a huge part of its production. In order to truly bridge this gap, Russia had to resort to the strategy of total war.

3. Additionally, the Red Army was pressured by the mistakes of Stalin and the country’s political leadership. Politicians are rarely inclined to trust professionals, but in the case of the USSR, this distrust had truly fatal consequences. In 1941, the intelligence reports did not convince Stalin that the war would soon start, but the danger was apparent. The General Staff was convinced that by May 1941, war was a matter of the coming weeks. However, as we know, Stalin hesitated until mid-June, due to which four critical weeks out of five were lost. The result of this mistake was that the final preparations began at the last minute. So, the Wehrmacht received an unexpected numerical and positional advantage just before the start of the war. The consequences of this loss of time were virtually impossible to correct; by then, it was just a matter of surviving the blow. By June 22, the Red Army was in a hopeless position. At the time the war broke out, there were simply no good decisions left for the Red Army.

The only advantage the Soviet Union had was incredible determination at every level – from the Kremlin official to the soldier clutching a rifle in the trenches. The resistance put up by the Soviet Union was extreme; at all levels of the social hierarchy there was absolute willingness to make sacrifices and use any opportunity to hurt the enemy. Stalin paid for his mistakes with the life of his son, an artillery officer who was captured and killed. The Soviet leader was a brutal dictator, but his determination to fight and win the war and sacrifice everything to this end matched that of the rest of the people. 

The country went to war determined to win or die trying. It sacrificed 27 million lives, but survived what would have broken many others, ending the war with a resounding victory on the streets of Berlin and Vienna.

On July 3, 1941, Wehrmacht Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder wrote in his journal, “It is no exaggeration to say that the campaign against Russia was won within 14 days.”

The general was off by two orders of magnitude: The war lasted just over 1,400 days after those words were written. He was also mistaken about the victors: Four agonizing years later, amid torrents of blood, the Third Reich was totally defeated and crushed. 

A total of 84 Ukrainian drones were intercepted in 24 hours while flying toward Moscow, local officials say. The broader Ukrainian overnight wave included over 300 aircraft targeting Russia. The barrage comes as the nation marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported no casualties or damage on the ground during the raid, which took place from Sunday night into Monday morning. Several airports serving the Russian capital temporarily halted operations in response to the Ukrainian drone threat.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses destroyed or intercepted 301 Ukrainian long-range drones over an 11-hour period.

The attack coincided with the date when Russia commemorates the Nazi assault on the USSR on June 22, 1941. The invasion began the bloodiest conflict in the country’s history and ultimately cost the Soviet Union more than 27 million lives.

Last week, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky was stripped of Poland’s highest merit, the Order of the White Eagle, after Warsaw objected to his decision to name an elite commando unit after “the heroes of UPA.” Previously Warsaw tended to overlook the Ukrainian framing of the historic atrocities to prioritize current military support against Russia.

Kiev has continued to launch EU-funded kamikaze drones against Russian energy infrastructure. Last Thursday, a barrage involving almost 200 UAVs targeting Moscow resulted in damage to a refinery in the city’s southeastern Kapotnya district and left at least 17 people injured in the surrounding Moscow Region.

The current joint exercises between Armenia and several NATO member states are being held for purely political purposes, Armenia’s former defense minister Arshak Karapetyan has told RT.

The Eagle Partner annual drills, which began last week and are running through Thursday, are officially intended to prepare troops for international peacekeeping missions. While the exercise involves NATO member states, it is not NATO-led. For the first time since its launch in 2023, it includes not only US troops but also personnel from France and Greece.

Karapetyan, who holds the rank of major general, cited the small scale of the drills, which feature 250 troops from Armenia’s Peacekeeping Brigade and 93 foreign soldiers, to dismiss the exercise as politically motivated rather than militarily significant. For comparison, many routine bilateral exercises between NATO members involve several thousand personnel.

“These military exercises are not for military purposes, they are political. Armenia gains nothing militarily. Politically Armenia has suffered damage, significant political damage on an international level. We essentially have problems today with Russia as a strategic ally,” he told RT.

Moscow has been Yerevan’s principal security partner for decades through bilateral military cooperation, the Russian military presence in Armenia, and the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). In 2024, however, Yerevan froze its participation in the bloc and signaled its intention to leave amid a broader deterioration in relations with Moscow. Since then, the Armenian government has increasingly sought closer ties with NATO member states and the EU.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s recent ultimatum to Belarus is part of Kiev’s PR campaign to project strength despite setbacks on the battlefield, Belarusian MP Vadim Gigin told RT. He added that Ukraine’s terrorist attacks have the same objective.

Earlier this week, the Ukrainian leader threatened Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko with military action if Minsk does not dismantle the air defense radar array along its southern border. The threats came days after a deadly Ukrainian drone strike on a bus carrying a Belarusian youth soccer team in Bryansk Region, Russia.

“This kind of loutish rhetoric in politics is... part of the PR war, part of the line of psychological warfare being waged by the Kiev regime, evidently with the support of the European Union,” Gigin said on Saturday in an interview with RT.

“They need to create the impression of strength,” he said. “If they cannot achieve that on the battlefield – where the situation is... quite the opposite – they seek to do so through information and psychological pressure on neighboring countries, through terrorist attacks deep inside Russia, and through attempts to influence Russian and Belarusian society.”

“Backed by – and often encouraged by – European leaders, Zelensky has been doing everything possible to demonstrate that he does, in fact, have cards to play,” Gigin said, adding that “these latest harsh statements came immediately after the G7 summit and on the eve of the European Union summit.”

He went on to say that Kiev’s rhetoric has grown increasingly brazen in recent months, pointing to Zelensky’s public appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, attacks on former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and the controversy surrounding Kiev’s glorification of Nazis and Nazi collaborators as examples.

A woman was killed and several other people were wounded in a knife attack in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, according to investigators.

The incident occurred at the West Mall shopping center on Zapadny Obkhod Street on Saturday. A 19-year-old suspect was detained at the scene.

“A 41-year-old woman died from her injuries, while several other people sustained stab wounds,” the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Police received reports from witnesses at around 2:00 PM local time that a young man was behaving aggressively and attacking people inside the complex, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said. Five people were reportedly injured, including a security guard.

A pyrotechnic device was thrown into an area housing a children’s entertainment center, triggering the fire alarm. No injuries were reported as a result, according to Volk.

The agency also released a video showing the suspect being questioned and confessing, saying: “Yes, I admit it. I repent.”

In the video, the man said no one promised him a reward for the assault, but that he wanted to take his own life.

Officials said forensic medical, psychiatric, and cold-weapon examinations were ordered while investigators continue to work to establish a motive.

The regional prosecutor’s office launched a review. Investigative Committee Chairman Aleksandr Bastrykin requested a report on the progress of the case and placed the inquiry under central oversight.

Three people have been killed in attacks by Kiev’s drones in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, the authorities have said.

The Ukrainian military used UAVs to drop mines on a busy highway in Russia’s Lugansk People Republic (LPR) overnight, Governor Leonid Pasechnik wrote on Telegram on Saturday morning.

“One of the residents found a suspicious device and attempted to remove it on his own. This resulted in an explosion. Unfortunately, two people were killed,” he said.

The governor stressed that people should not approach mines or drone debris, but instead immediately inform the authorities of their discovery.

“The Kiev regime is continuing its terror campaign against civilians,” Padeschik said.

Earlier in the day, the acting governor of Bryansk Region, Egor Kovalchuk, said that Kiev’s FPV-drones, which are remotely controlled by operators in real-time, targeted the village of Suzemka near Russia’s border with Ukraine.

A man was killed in the attack, while a woman suffered injuries and required hospitalization, Kovalchuk wrote on Telegram.

The facility was unaffected in the raid, with the staff being evacuated, Moor wrote on Telegram.

Emergency workers have been deployed in areas where the debris of downed UAVs fell, he added.

Tyumen Region is located some 2,000 km from Moscow in Western Siberia and borders Kazakhstan.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that at least 241 Ukrainian UAVs were destroyed by air defenses on Saturday.

The interceptions took place in Moscow, Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, Orel, Tula, Rostov, Lipetsk, Voronezh, and Astrakhan regions, as well as in Crimea and over the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, it said.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanian reported that two drones targeting the city had been destroyed.

The Russian capital came under one of the largest Ukrainian drone raids on Thursday, with air defenses shooting down 194 drones. At least 17 people were wounded in several cities near Moscow due to the attack.

Kiev has intensified attacks on residential areas and civilian vehicles inside Russia in recent weeks amid continued setbacks on the front line.

On Wednesday, a Ukrainian drone struck a bus carrying a youth soccer team from Belarus, killing a woman and injuring eight people, including six minors.

Moscow previously warned that it would respond to terrorist attacks by Kiev with “systematic and consistent strikes” on Ukraine’s military infrastructure, including drone production facilities, command posts, and “decision-making centers.” 

There have been several large-scale drone and missile raids by Russia over the past month, including one in late May that involved the deployment of two state-of-the-art intermediate-range hypersonic Oreshnik systems.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has issued an ultimatum to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, threatening him with military action if Belarus fails to dismantle the communication stations along its southern border, just days after a deadly Ukrainian drone strike on a bus carrying a children’s soccer team from the country.

Earlier this week, Lukashenko said that those seeking to drag his nation into the conflict “will have to pay dearly for that,” demanding answers from Kiev regarding the strike on the bus and other “provocations.” The attack in Russia’s Bryansk Region left six children injured and killed the wife of a Belarusian school soccer team coach who was accompanying the young athletes to a Russian seaside resort.

Kiev has denied responsibility, while Zelensky claimed that it was Lukashenko who must “be honest” and prove Minsk’s peaceful intentions by removing “retransmitters on his communication towers” along the border with Ukraine.

Lukashenko has repeatedly said that Belarus has no intention of engaging in a war against any nation and “is not threatening anyone.” Zelensky, however, stated that there was “no need for unnecessary words,” and issued another veiled threat against the Belarusian oil refining industry.

“Just like his, for example, oil refining industry,” Zelensky said, claiming that Minsk is one of Russia’s “main” suppliers of petroleum products. “Can this be stopped? I am sure that it is within his power.”

In November, Minsk released 31 Ukrainian citizens from detention in a “goodwill gesture” at the request of Kiev and US President Donald Trump, who was also seeking to mediate the conflict.

Over the past few weeks, Zelensky has been ramping up his rhetoric about an allegedly growing threat posed by Belarus – and threatened it with a preemptive strike. Earlier this year, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces warned that Kiev had already identified some 500 potential military and logistical targets across the country.

The opposition Strong Armenia bloc has petitioned the constitutional court to annul the results of the June 7 parliamentary election, alleging that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government orchestrated widespread electoral violations. The bloc placed second in the vote.

Pashinyan’s pro-EU ruling party, Civil Contract, claimed a decisive victory, securing 49.74% of the vote, according to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC).

Strong Armenia, founded by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, won 23.27%, while the Armenia Alliance, led by former President Robert Kocharyan, garnered 9.92%.

Businessman Gagik Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia narrowly missed the 4% threshold required for parliamentary representation, receiving 3.98%. Its failure to enter parliament proved pivotal for Civil Contract, helping the ruling party retain a constitutional majority that allows it to pass legislation and appoint senior officials without opposition backing.

In a statement published on Facebook on Friday, the bloc said it had filed a complaint with the constitutional court seeking to invalidate the election results and order a new vote, citing what it described as “mass and organized election violations” by the authorities.

The court said it would decide within two days whether to accept the application for review. If deemed admissible, a final ruling must be issued within 15 days of its registration. According to the court, it has received seven similar complaints, including from Strong Armenia, Prosperous Armenia, Armenia Alliance, and several smaller parties.

Earlier this week, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Central Electoral Commission headquarters, demanding that the election results be annulled.

The same day, prosecutors opened a criminal case against Kocharyan, accusing the former president of abuse of power and money laundering in connection with an allegedly illegal 2004 real estate deal. His lawyer dismissed the case as a “political hit job.” On Wednesday, the CEC voted to lift Kocharyan’s immunity from prosecution.

Another opposition leader, Samvel Karapetyan, has been in custody since last year on charges of plotting a coup, which he denies.

Pashinyan also said this week that his party plans to confiscate assets belonging to the three main opposition leaders, accusing them of using their wealth to influence elections and saying they “should be left hungry.”

Russia is urging members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to develop their own digital platforms to reduce dependence on Western media giants.

The SCO comprises China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus.

Speaking at an SCO media forum in Kyrgyzstan on Friday, Russian Digital Development Ministry official Ekaterina Larina said Western platforms have amassed “huge influence” over global audiences which could be used to shape public opinion and information flows.

“All SCO countries one way or another enter negotiations with global platforms, trying to reach certain agreements on rules,” Larina said. “But an important area in ensuring information security remains the development of our own resources and platforms.”

Moscow has long argued that states should exercise greater sovereignty over their national information spaces and reduce dependence on foreign-controlled digital infrastructure.

Addressing the participants, Kyrgyz Culture Minister Mirbek Mambetaliev called for closer cooperation among SCO media outlets, saying stronger ties could help create a shared information space based on trust and partnership.

The event features discussions on media digitalization, the use of artificial intelligence in journalism, and the growing role of online platforms in shaping news consumption. Participants are also expected to explore joint media initiatives and broader cooperation as digital technologies continue to transform the global information landscape.

The UK will provide Ukraine with 150,000 UAVs by the end of the year, London announced on Thursday following one of Kiev’s largest drone attacks on Moscow since the start of the conflict.

The package, worth £752 million ($996 million), was announced by British Defense Secretary Dan Jarvis at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels. According to the British government, which has been among Kiev’s most active military supporters, the package will be funded through London’s £2.26 billion loan to Kiev, backed by proceeds from frozen Russian sovereign assets.

British officials presented the package, which includes drones, missiles and radars, as necessary military support for Kiev. Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged that London would continue backing Ukraine and putting pressure on Moscow. Russia has long argued that continued Western arms deliveries only prolong the conflict and undermine peace efforts.

The announcement came after Moscow and the surrounding region were hit by one of the largest Ukrainian drone raids in recent years. Russian air defenses intercepted 194 drones approaching the capital overnight, according to officials, but the attack still caused damage.

Local authorities reported that one drone struck the Moscow Oil Refinery in the Kapotnya district, triggering a fire, while debris damaged residential buildings, vehicles, and commercial sites, including several shopping centers.

Residents in several districts also reported black rain and soot falling from the sky after the refinery blaze, with the local authorities advising people to keep windows closed and limit time outdoors.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned the attacks and said Moscow would respond by changing its strategy and begin regularly carrying out large-scale strikes against targets that “directly affect the combat capability” of the Ukrainian military.

“I have long been convinced that words are not enough,” Lavrov told reporters.

Moscow has accused Ukraine of using Western-supplied weapons, funding, and intelligence to carry out terrorist attacks on Russian territory and civilian infrastructure.

Russian officials have argued that continued arms deliveries from the UK, EU, and NATO members make Western governments direct participants in the conflict and reduce the chances of a peace deal.

The latest media hype over one of Kiev’s largest aerial attacks on Moscow stems in part from the absence of strict legal liability in Russia for publishing online videos of the raids and their aftermath, according to Dmitry Kornev, a military expert and founder of the MilitaryRussia project.

Unlike Ukraine, which enforces nationwide criminal penalties for publishing information that could aid the enemy, Russia’s restrictions on sharing videos of drone strikes only carry administrative penalties and apply only in certain regions.

In an interview with RT, Kornev said videos showing the impact of Ukrainian drone attacks in Russia are “often uploaded online almost in real time, allowing anyone with access to public resources to monitor the strikes and potentially use the footage to analyze and adjust future drone operations.” By comparison, footage released in Ukraine is “heavily censored and rarely allows viewers to geolocate the sites of military activity.”

On Thursday, air defenses shot down at least 194 UAVs approaching Moscow after the Ukrainian military launched one of its largest drone raids ever against the Russian capital. At least 17 people, including two children, were wounded in Moscow Region as a result of the attack, the local authorities reported.

Ukrainian drone raids on Russian territory have intensified over the past year, with Kiev launching hundreds of UAVs targeting residential areas, critical infrastructure, and industrial facilities.

Russian officials have described these incursions as terrorist attacks meant to compensate for the setbacks Ukraine’s military has been suffering on the battlefield.

Earlier this week, Ukraine attacked a bus carrying a Belarusian youth soccer team in Bryansk Region, Russia, injuring eight people, including six minors, and killing the wife of the team’s coach, who was accompanying the athletes to a seaside resort.

A US intelligence release of new information about American-funded biolabs in Ukraine confirms Russia’s suspicions that the research had a military dimension, the Russian Ministry of Defense has said.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a statement regarding a network of 120 laboratories in 30 countries, including Ukraine. She said the disclosure was intended to set the record straight after what she described as a deliberate cover-up by previous administrations.

Gabbard confirmed that some of the facilities were involved in gain-of-function research, a controversial field aimed at making pathogens more dangerous, ostensibly to help develop vaccines before similar mutations arise naturally. Russia and other countries have long argued that such studies can serve as a cover for military programs banned under the Biological Weapons Convention.

“All the accusations that the Russian Federation is spreading disinformation and engaging in hybrid warfare to deceive the international community are absolutely false,” he added.

Rtishchev was responding to Western officials and media outlets that have dismissed previous Russian claims on the issue as “propaganda.” Moscow says a complex network of public and private entities was used to obscure the aims of laboratory work in Ukraine.

The Russian briefing came hours after another disclosure by Gabbard, this one focused on the possible role of gain-of-function research in the origins of Covid-19. She accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as a White House adviser on the pandemic under two US administrations, of steering investigations toward the natural-origin theory, allegedly to protect himself.

Fauci directed US funding of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology while serving as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022.

Ukraine’s latest large-scale drone attack on Moscow was designed primarily for “dramatic effect” and was aimed at harming civilians, military analysts have told RT.

The strike, described by Russian media as the largest drone raid on the nation’s capital in two years, was intended to generate headlines rather than achieve meaningful military objectives, according to US-based military analyst and author Andrei Martyanov.

“This is done all for dramatic effect, for the PR action,” Martyanov told RT, adding that “the practical outcome of this is negligible.”

According to him, drones are not the main force shaping combined-arms operations, which continue to rely primarily on artillery and air power.

“Drones are very good, essentially, instrument, if you wish, for the terrorist regime, which is Nazi regime in Kiev,” he said. “That’s what they do. They kill civilians.”

Martyanov argued that Moscow’s enormous size makes such attacks militarily insignificant while ensuring they attract outsized attention abroad.

“Many people still do not understand what Moscow is… it is comparable to a small country such as Luxembourg… It is purely for the shock value,” Martyanov said.

Watch RT’s full interview with Andrei Martyanov below.

Political commentator and former US Army officer Stanislav Krapivnik, who is based in Moscow Region, agrees that the consequences of such operations are borne primarily by civilians rather than military targets.

“I’ve seen videos sent by friends and friends of friends of the drones flying directly into apartment buildings. Not clipping them, not being shot down and falling on them, but actually targeting apartment buildings to kill civilians,” Krapivnik told RT.

“At the end of the day, this has to be settled on the battlefield,” he said, adding that French and German leadership is “just as guilty for the murder of civilians” as the Ukrainian leadership.

Watch RT’s full interview with Stanislav Krapivnik below.

For the media, the main theme of this year’s spring-summer military campaign is the exchange of long-range strikes between Russia and Ukraine. Against this backdrop, news from the front recedes into the background. This is partially understandable: the conflict is now in its fifth year, and the capture of yet another small town isn’t exciting news for the media; it needs something new to write about.

Deep strike attacks, however, will not determine the outcome of the conflict; its fate will be sealed on the battlefield. The army that begins to crumble first, losing the ability to hold ground, will lose the war. 

Several important events, which we had predicted at the beginning of the year, are currently unfolding: the Russian Army is conducting two strategic operations (in the Konstantinovka-Kramatorsk and Orekhovo-Zaporozhye fronts), as well as a third, auxiliary but very important operation to expand its zone of control along the ‘old’ Russia-Ukraine border.

Liman: North of the Seversky Donets

Liman is a city with a pre-war population of 20,000 and one of Ukraine’s largest railway stations. The city was first captured without significant fighting at the beginning of the Russian operation, and then just as quickly lost during the Ukrainian military’s Kharkov offensive in September 2022.

Last year, the front again approached Liman. Active fighting for the city began in mid-May 2026, and in less than a month, Russia’s ‘West’ group of forces had almost completely cleared the urban area. By June 18, fighting was already underway in the center of Liman, near the railway station and the Kommunalnaya industrial zone. Ukrainian military still claims that the southern neighborhoods are under its control, but reports from the ground may be delayed.

On June 17, a three-ton aerial bomb disabled the bridge over the Seversky Donets River, the only land supply route for the remaining Ukrainian forces in Liman. It looks like the remnants of the garrison are attempting an organized withdrawal from Liman, meaning the fighting for the city has entered its final stages.

However, the offensive on the flanks of Liman continues. Back in April-May, a bridgehead was established on the southern bank of the Seversky Donets River near Svyatogorsk. Some reports indicate that Russian assault groups have entered Brusovka, but so far there is no proof of control over the area. This brings the front line very close to Slavyansk: following the capture of Liman, Slavyansk will be less than 10 km away from the front. More importantly, the same short distance will remain to Slavyansk and Kramatorsk’s main supply route: the M-03 highway to Izyum. In modern warfare, this means a significant portion of it will be under constant fire control. 

Recognizing the importance of the Liman front, Ukrainian forces are attempting to launch counterattacks. In late May, Ukrainian assault groups were spotted in the Yampol area, but there has been no news since; apparently, they failed to consolidate their position there.

Unlike other areas, this front remained active throughout the winter; from February to May, assault teams from the ‘South’ group of forces advanced along a broad front from Seversk to the high ridge of chalk mountains near Rai-Aleksandrovka. The terrain in this direction is very difficult (the chalk mountains are up to 100 meters high) and the defense is reinforced by the Seversky Donets-Donbass Canal, familiar from the battles for neighboring Chasov Yar. However, this direction is crucial since it opens a direct route to Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. 

Fighters from the ‘South’ group of forces had been pushing at this line for several weeks, and now its defense seems to have collapsed like dominoes. On June 2, the canal was crossed and a bridgehead established near Tikhonovka (expanded to neighboring Malinovka on June 17); on June 15, Russian forces reached the important settlement of Korsunovka on the banks of the Seversky Donets; and finally, on June 18, the village of Rai-Aleksandrovka (pre-war population 1,000) – the Ukrainian military’s main defensive hub in this sector.

The speed of events suggests that Ukrainian forces are unable to counterattack in this direction, so they are deprived of the only means of slowing or stopping the Russian advance. 

The next goal is the town of Nikolayevka (pre-war population 14,000), about 3 km from Rai-Aleksandrovka. Nikolayevka is part of the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration, a satellite town of Slavyansk. The Seversky Donets-Donbass Canal begins there.

However, the fighting for Nikolayevka is unlikely to begin until Liman is captured and the northern bank of the Seversky Donets in this area is cleared. The reason for this is clearly visible on the map.

Approaching Konstantinovka

Konstantinovka, with its pre-war population of 78,000, is the largest city captured by the Russian army following the liberation of Mariupol in May 2022. 

Therefore, the longer the army within the encircled city holds out, the greater its losses – within the city itself (as a result of air and drone strikes), along the ‘road of death’ leading up to it, and, most importantly, due to attempts to break the encirclement with counterattacks.

The most sensible solution for the Ukrainian side would be to evacuate the garrison and not sacrifice soldiers in a futile attempt to hold the doomed city. However, in a military context, this is impossible: if they abandon Konstantinovka, Druzhkovka will suffer the same fate; and if they retreat from Druzhkovka, they’ll expose Kramatorsk, and so on. 

Russian forces completed the broad semi-encirclement of Konstantinovka in March. Then, for about two months, advancement here was minimal, and it might have seemed as if the Russian offensive in Konstantinovka had stalled.

Squeezing Konstantinovka 

In fact, in the course of those two months, from March to May, the Russian Army was accomplishing the main goal of its offensive: depleting the Ukrainian garrison and its supply lines, and repelling Ukrainian flank counterattacks (at least 15 were attempted during this time). Lacking the Russian Army’s assault experience and air and artillery capabilities, Ukrainian forces are unable to conduct sustained offensive operations, so they end up suffering significant losses without achieving their objective. So, having gone on the defensive, the fighters of the ‘South’ group of forces simply had to wait until the enemy became exhausted and could no longer hold the front with counterattacks.

By the end of May, Konstantinovka’s vast industrial zone was cleared. This area the size of Azovstal fell in a matter of days, though in better times, it could have held out for months. In early June, the remnants of the garrison were completely cut off – this was the Russian Army’s second large-scale encirclement (a so-called ‘cauldron’) recently, after Mirnograd. According to some reports, units of the 28th, 100th, and 156th Brigades of the Ukrainian armed forces, as well as the 49th Assault Battalion, were encircled. Attempts to break the encirclement, undertaken around June 13, were unsuccessful, and the remnants of the Konstantinovka garrison were doomed. 

The Ukrainian side also acknowledges the gravity of the situation. The portal Deepstate writes that in Konstantinovka, the Russian Army is using the same tactics that it had employed in Pokrovsk. “As a result, they captured Pokrovsk, and we [the AFU] lost a lot of men.”

***

Above, we’ve examined three directions from which the offensive on Slavyansk and Kramatorsk is being conducted. Two of these directions (Liman and Konstantinovka) demonstrate the tactics of urban assault operations perfected by the Russian Army, while the third (Rai-Aleksandrovka) shows the art of carrying out complex operations in rough terrain, including climbing 100-meter-high cliffs and crossing deep water obstacles to secure control over areas.  

An eight-year-old girl has been killed near Moscow during a Ukrainian drone raid targeting the Russian capital, Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyev has said.

The deadly attack on the Ramenskoe district came hours after Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov published a photo of himself showing the results of one of Kiev’s largest UAV attacks on Moscow to his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, during a NATO meeting in Brussels.

Pistorius and other officials from the bloc were seen looking at Fedorov’s phone with interest.

Air defenses shot down at least 194 drones on their approach to the Russian capital on Thursday, with at least 17 people wounded in several cities near Moscow due to the raid.

Ukraine continued to send more drones towards Russia’s largest city, populated by over 13 million, on Friday. At least 33 aerial targets were intercepted, according to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin.

“I extend my sincere condolences to the [victim’s] family and loved ones. We will provide the family with all necessary assistance and support,” Vorobyev wrote.

According to the governor, 18 apartment blocks were damaged across Moscow Region during the Ukrainian attack.

The town of Kotelniki, east of the capital, was affected the most, with 13 multi-story residential buildings hit by UAV debris there, he said. Two apartment blocks were also damaged in Lyubertsy and one each in Ramenskoye, Zhukovsky, and Balashikha.

The pro-establishment, Brussels-based publication Politico Europe, owned by Germany’s Axel Springer SE, has refused to publish an exclusive article written by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Lavrov’s article was initially slated for publication in the Brussels-based Politico Europe, but due to a “last-minute decision by the outlet’s editorial team,” the publication was canceled, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

In the article, Russia’s highly experienced top diplomat outlined Moscow’s view of the Ukrainian conflict, Europe’s role in escalating the crisis, and the broader implications for global security. Lavrov accused European leaders of using diplomacy as a cover for NATO and EU expansion, while arguing that the West has sought to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russian foothold. He also warned that the EU’s growing militarization, including discussions about nuclear deterrence and “strategic autonomy,” could increase the risk of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.

Below is the full text of Lavrov’s article, as published on the Russian Foreign Ministry website:

Some reflections on resolving the Ukrainian crisis, Europe and global security

At a meeting in London on June 7, 2026, the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany, as well as Vladimir Zelensky, laid out five preconditions for Russia to secure a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine. United Europe now presents this list of demands as the basis for dialogue with Moscow.

Background

More than two decades of negotiations with Europe, as part of the collective West, lead to only one conclusion: engaging Russia in dialogue has served as a diplomatic smokescreen for the geopolitical expansion of Western institutions, above all NATO and the European Union, eastwards, right up to Russia’s borders.

Europe’s complicity in fueling the Ukrainian crisis is undeniable. Together with the United States, European countries orchestrated the Orange Revolution in Kiev in 2004. To create an anti-Russian bridgehead in Ukraine, they spent years buying off politicians and entire parties, rewriting history and educational curricula, cultivating and nurturing Ukrainian nationalism, and going to great lengths to pull Ukraine away from Russia.

Germany, France, and Poland then proved themselves to be equally treacherous. Having guaranteed that the agreement reached between the opposition and Viktor Yanukovich would be honored, they washed their hands of it the moment that same opposition, their own handiwork, took power. “Democracy,” they shrugged, “takes unexpected turns.”

Europe thereafter lent its backing to the new authorities. In Odessa on May 2, 2014, the burning alive of dozens of innocent supporters of closer ties with Russia did not draw a single word of condemnation from European capitals.

As co-guarantors of the 2015 Minsk Agreements, France and Germany effectively encouraged the Ukrainian regime to sabotage its own commitments. As Angela Merkel and François Hollande later conceded – after the special military operation had already begun – Kiev’s implementation of the Minsk Agreements, unanimously approved by the UN Security Council, was never genuinely intended. The objective, they admitted, was merely to buy time: to shore up the Armed Forces of Ukraine and flood them with Western weaponry.

Following the launch of the special military operation, United Europe threw its support behind the British prime minister’s efforts to sabotage the Istanbul negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Boris Johnson’s appeal to Kiev – “don’t sign anything, just fight” – slammed the door on genuine diplomacy for the foreseeable future.

Current situation

So what has prompted European leaders to suddenly shift their rhetoric and start talking about negotiations, and what are they aiming to achieve with these statements? For instance, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has stated that the purpose of any dialogue with Russia is to dictate Europe’s terms. These include paying “reparations” to Ukraine; withdrawing troops from Transnistria and the South Caucasus; abolishing the “foreign agents” law; and accepting strict limits on the size of the Russian Federation’s Armed Forces. In her framing, “there can be no just and lasting peace without accountability for Russia.” During the UN Security Council session on May 19, 2026, an EU representative made the point unequivocally: “Supporting Ukraine militarily does not contradict the pursuit of peace, but rather serves as a fundamental prerequisite for any credible, good-faith negotiations.”

Europe’s plan is to talk with Russia while simultaneously pressing ahead with a campaign of legal warfare orchestrated through the Council of Europe. Within this once-respected organization, an entire infrastructure is being assembled for the express purpose of “holding Russia accountable”: a Register of Damage, a Claims Commission, and a Special Tribunal.

The real objective of Europe’s leaders, then, is not to negotiate with Russia. It is to shore up the Zelensky regime and preserve it as a launchpad for continued confrontation against Russia. With this in mind, European leaders are scrambling to secure a ceasefire as quickly as possible and for one reason only: to prevent the collapse of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. The plan is to “freeze” the conflict without addressing its root causes, and then rapidly deploy military contingents from the Anglo-French “coalition of the willing” onto Ukrainian soil.

United Europe continues to dream of expansion. It intends to absorb Ukraine and Moldova while pulling Armenia into its sphere of influence. NATO has already expanded eastward, swallowing up Finland and Sweden. As for Ukraine, it is increasingly being eyed as the “striking fist” of a future European military force, independent of the United States and independent of NATO.

Risks to global security

This state of affairs poses serious threats to global security. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could rapidly escalate into an exchange of nuclear strikes, with catastrophic consequences.

For all that, Europe’s political and military establishment continues to attribute aggressive plans to Russia – plans that, they claim, reach far beyond Ukraine. The Russian president has stated on numerous occasions that all of this is nonsense, provocation, and disinformation, aimed solely at extracting budget funds for the fight against Russia. That is scarcely the climate for substantive dialogue.

Russia’s position

As for negotiations, Vladimir Putin reiterated at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russia is not opposed to contacts with any party. We see Europe, however, as a party bent on Russia’s defeat – a stance the Europeans themselves openly avow. Dialogue with Europe, therefore, cannot be conducted as though it were an impartial third-party observer.

Russia would prefer to achieve the goals of the special military operation through diplomacy.

That requires reliably guaranteeing security along Russia’s western borders and ensuring respect and dignity for our citizens and compatriots, including the right to speak their native Russian language and practice the Orthodox Christian faith. Further military, political, and economic expansion by the West is unacceptable: it runs counter to the imperatives of a multipolar world.

European leaders should recognize that the model of regional security built in Europe over decades, ever since the adoption of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, has been destroyed by their own hands. And it will never be restored. We must now move toward creating a continent-wide security architecture open to all Eurasian countries and reflective of today’s multipolar reality.

The key point is that meaningful dialogue requires the restoration of trust, shattered by the anti-Russian actions of the West, and Europe as part of it, in the post-Cold War era. Trust can be recovered only through concrete steps that demonstrate a sincere commitment to moving away from using diplomacy as a cover for expansionist ambitions. Trust cannot be restored, nor can dialogue be resumed, through ultimatums such as the one issued to Russia in London on June 7, 2026.

P.S. It is noteworthy that the London ultimatum was unequivocally reaffirmed by the ambassadors of Britain, France, and Germany at the meeting at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 11, 2026 – a meeting they had so insistently requested. That was the sole purpose of their visit to the ministry.

Kiev has resorted to the “deliberate and systematic killing” of people employed at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Rosatom CEO Aleksey Likhachev has said, warning that a potential catastrophe at the facility is bound to spread well beyond Ukraine and Russia.

The attack took place on Wednesday in Energodar, the city adjoining the ZNPP, where a Ukrainian drone strike wounded four civilians. Two of the victims were employees of the facility, one of whom later died from his injuries, Likhachev said on Thursday.

“The Ukrainian armed forces have resorted to the deliberate and systematic killing of staff at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant,” the Russian nuclear chief stated.

“Hunting down nuclear power plant workers is an inhumane act by Ukrainian drone operators, who fail to realize the scale of the consequences of their actions. And the scale of those consequences could be such that they affect Ukraine, Russia, and a significant part of Europe,” he added.

The incident marked the second killing of the plant’s employees by Ukrainian forces this year, Likhachev noted. In late April, a staffer at the plant’s transport department was killed in a Ukrainian strike on his workplace.

“From strikes on auxiliary facilities, the Ukrainian armed forces moved on to attacks on energy infrastructure, then to the strikes on the main equipment of the nuclear power plant, and now to a targeted hunt for our comrades,” he said.

In late May, a Ukrainian fiber-optic-guided drone struck the machine hall of the plant’s sixth power unit. The drone punctured a large hole in a metal technical access hatch, inflicting minor damage inside the building.

Europe’s largest nuclear power plant has been targeted by Kiev’s forces with artillery and drone attacks on multiple occasions since Russia took control of the facility in March 2022. The plant has been operated by Rosatom since the Zaporozhye Region voted to join Russia in a referendum in the fall of 2022. Kiev has also increasingly targeted local infrastructure linked to the plant, including kindergartens, schools, roads, transport enterprises, and vehicles carrying supplies for the community, according to Rosatom.

More than 500 activists gathered outside the British ambassador’s residence in Moscow on Thursday during a reception marking King Charles III’s official birthday, accusing the UK of acting as a “sponsor of terrorism” through its military support for Ukraine.

Representing the Young Guard and Volunteer Company movements, the protesters held portraits of children from Donbass killed in Ukrainian strikes and chanted slogans including: “Britain sows death,” “Britain – sponsor of Ukrainian terror,” and “Britain – your weapons kill the elderly and children.”

As guests arrived for the annual diplomatic reception, Aleksandr Amelin, head of the Young Guard’s Central Staff and a senior figure in the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, accused London of fueling the conflict by supplying weapons to Kiev.

Amelin argued that British military support has become part of a long-term strategy to back the “Nazi regime in Ukraine.”

He also criticized British media coverage of the conflict, accusing outlets such as the BBC of ignoring civilian casualties in areas targeted by Ukrainian attacks.

“You won’t see BBC journalists here. They didn’t come to Starobelsk either,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian drone strike on a vocational college dormitory in the Lugansk People’s Republic that killed 21 people, mostly teenage girls. Around 50 foreign journalists from 19 countries visited the site at Moscow’s invitation, while the BBC and CNN refused to attend.

The European Union is no longer the only benchmark for regional integration, according to Aleksandr Bobrov, associate professor at MGIMO, Russia’s leading international affairs university.

Speaking to RT on Thursday as Russia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) marked 35 years of partnership at a summit in Kazan, he said the bloc has demonstrated that integration can succeed without the supranational institutions that characterize Brussels while still delivering economic growth and geopolitical influence.

“We are used to believing that the European Union is the main model of integration,” Bobrov said. “But ASEAN demonstrates that it is possible to build a successful regional organization without creating supranational institutions and transferring key powers to them.”

Bobrov noted that ASEAN maintains strategic partnerships with major global powers, including the US, Russia, China, and Australia. He described the bloc as “one of the most successful and effective” regional organizations, providing a platform for cooperation in trade, politics, security and responses to emerging challenges.

The academic also highlighted ASEAN’s role as a neutral and balanced actor in international affairs.

Russia and ASEAN are approaching “a very important milestone” in their relationship as they prepare new projects and cooperation initiatives, Bobrov said. He noted that ASEAN leaders regularly attend major Russian events, including the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and stressed that all eleven member states are interested in expanding ties with Moscow.

Negotiations in Kazan, both bilaterally and within the broader summit framework, create “good opportunities” for launching new joint projects and strengthening long-term cooperation, he added.

ASEAN summit shows demand for Russia ties 

The ASEAN-Russia summit in Kazan has shown that Moscow remains an increasingly important partner for the Global South, Ladislav Zemanek, a non-resident research fellow at the China-CEE Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Budapest, has told RT.

The gathering demonstrated that many countries continue to see Russia as a reliable and predictable partner, despite Western efforts to limit Moscow’s international engagement after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022

“The summit once again demonstrated that Russia is not isolated internationally and remains an increasingly sought-after partner in an evolving multipolar world”.

Zemanek noted that after an initial downturn in relations in 2022, Moscow has continued to strengthen ties with many countries across the Global South, including key ASEAN members such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam. For these states, he said, cooperation with Russia remains valuable in areas ranging from energy to security.

The summit also showed strong interest among ASEAN countries in expanding ties with Moscow in strategic sectors such as nuclear energy, infrastructure, and regional security, Zemanek added.

More broadly, he argued, the meeting highlighted a significant degree of convergence between Russia and its ASEAN partners on major international issues. These include the need to protect national sovereignty, adapt to ongoing geopolitical shifts, and deepen economic interconnectedness.

His participation, the expert said, suggests that many Southeast Asian countries do not view engagement with Moscow and Washington as mutually exclusive. Instead, they see it as part of a balanced and pragmatic foreign policy aimed at preserving room for maneuver in a changing international environment.

ASEAN eclipsing Western-centered G7

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is increasingly emerging as a new, alternative center of global power, albeit not in the old sense of confrontational bloc politics, according to Farhad Ibragimov, a Middle East expert at Russia’s Financial University. This is in no small measure attributable to the region’s massive footprint in terms of the world’s economic output, logistics, and trade, he argued.

The Russian expert also named such global formats as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as the pillars of an emerging multipolar world, which now longer revolves around just a few great powers.

Moscow and ASEAN nations share a common pragmatism in international relations, which shows that there really is no global anti-Russian consensus, contrary to the picture that the West is trying to present, Ibragimov concluded.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has welcomed the US-Iran memorandum of understanding and expressed its readiness to help facilitate further diplomatic efforts toward establishing peace in the Middle East.

The 14-point document was signed remotely by US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian late on Wednesday, with immediate effect, according to Pakistani mediators.

In a statement on Thursday, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow stressed that during the upcoming 60-day negotiation period, which is expected to culminate in the signing of a final peace agreement, “it is highly important that all parties involved in the armed conflict… not allow a renewed dangerous escalation [to happen] in the region, including in Lebanon.”

The Foreign Ministry stated that Russia is willing to continue facilitating the diplomatic process in the Middle East with the aim of establishing a lasting peace in the region.

According to the statement, late last month, Moscow handed over an updated version of its Collective Security Concept for the Persian Gulf to unspecified Arab nations and Iran for consideration.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials have hailed the signing of the memorandum as a major diplomatic victory for the Islamic Republic.

Tehran has noted that the document envisages a series of concessions by Washington, including the lifting of the US naval blockade on Iran, sanctions waivers for Iranian oil exports, access to frozen Iranian funds, and a US-backed economic reconstruction plan to the tune of at least $300 billion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have delivered a joint address at the Russia-ASEAN summit in Kazan. The Philippines holds the rotating chairmanship of the group this year. 

The two presidents delivered the address at the conclusion of the second day of the summit, which was also attended by the leaders of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam.

The summit has “clearly demonstrated the genuine interest of both Russia and the states of Southeast Asia in further developing mutually beneficial cooperation, building upon time-tested traditions of friendship and the accumulated experience of a multifaceted and fruitful partnership,” Putin stated.

Marcos expressed his gratitude to Putin on behalf of all the ASEAN nations for a warm welcome at the summit, stating the group hopes to “strengthen cooperation in security, politics, economics, and culture” with Russia.

Earlier in the day, the participants of the summit, which marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of ties between Russia and ASEAN, adopted a joint declaration hailing the event as a “significant milestone” in their partnership.

The declaration also affirmed “a common aspiration, amid increasingly complex global challenges arising from geopolitical and geo-economic shifts, towards a just multipolar world as guided by international law and the principles of the UN Charter to promote mutual benefit and respect for all states.” The signees vowed to continue strengthening ties in various fields, including trade and investment, energy and food, maritime cooperation, security, combatting transnational crime and other areas.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Putin discussed the Ukraine conflict with the ASEAN leaders, among other issues. “There was a detailed discussion about Ukraine, he briefed everyone in detail on how the situation is developing and our assessment of the actions of the Kiev regime,” the top diplomat said.

Russia and the nations of Southeast Asia should conduct more trade in their national currencies, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

Speaking after the second day of the Russia-ASEAN summit in Kazan on Thursday, which was attended by the leaders of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam, Putin said his country would continue supplying the ASEAN members with food and energy products and expand exports of higher value-added goods, including fertilizer and pharmaceuticals.

Moscow has accelerated efforts to move away from the Western-dominated financial system by trading with international partners in their national currencies, a trend increasingly embraced by ASEAN members. By the end of 2025, 85% of Russia’s international transactions were conducted in currencies other than the dollar and euro, according to Maksim Oreshkin, deputy head of the presidential administration.

Putin also called for the removal of trade barriers and the expansion of maritime and rail transport links, saying summit participants backed stronger trade and a more multipolar world order.

The Russian leader made the remarks alongside Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., whose country will chair ASEAN in 2026.

Putin also noted that ASEAN countries shared Russia’s position on a number of global issues, including the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran to end hostilities.

“We unanimously welcomed the agreements reached by the Iranian and American sides to end the military conflict and work on the parameters of a future peace agreement,” he said, adding that he expected the situation in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf to stabilize, with a positive impact on global markets.

The summit also approved a new action plan for 2026-2030 which sets out ways to increase cooperation in areas such as politics, security, trade, investment, energy, transport, agriculture, the digital economy, and science and technology.

The June 17-19 summit in Kazan marks 35 years of relations between Russia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

A deadly drone strike on a bus in Russia carrying a children’s soccer team from Belarus was a “provocation” intended to push Minsk to directly involve itself in the Ukraine conflict, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said.

The attack in Russia’s Bryansk Region killed the wife of a Belarusian school soccer team coach, who was accompanying the young athletes to a Russian seaside resort. Eight others were injured, including six minors.

Speaking to senior military officials on Thursday, Lukashenko warned that “the war is at our borders,” pointing to “various provocations” and “direct breaches of agreements.”

He condemned “the behavior of certain states,” citing a Ukrainian drone strike on a vocational college dormitory in Starobelsk, Russia that killed 21 people during a nighttime raid. Anyone attempting to drag Belarus “into war,” he warned, “will have to pay dearly for that.”

“The [Ukrainian military] say they did not strike Bryansk Region at the time. But the driver says he personally – and other witnesses will probably confirm this to investigators – saw not one drone, but several, which he said were circling and buzzing over the bus,” the Belarusian leader said.

“We need the truth. And we expect Ukrainian civilian and military officials to provide this truth, a real fair response,” Lukashenko added.

Later in the day, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry reported issuing a formal protest to Kiev over what it described as a “monstrous crime” and an “inhumane act of terrorism that can have no justification.” Minsk demanded a thorough investigation and accountability for people responsible for the attack.

Russian officials have described the Bryansk Region drone strike as the latest in a long series of “terrorist attacks” carried out by the Ukrainian government. Moscow has accused Western countries that fund Kiev’s war effort and provide components for long-range drones of ignoring Ukrainian strikes that kill civilians and cannot be mere accidents.

At least 17 people have been wounded after the Ukrainian military launched one of its largest drone raids against Moscow, Russian officials have said.

Air defenses shot down at least 194 UAVs on the approach to the Russian capital overnight, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin wrote in a Telegram post on Thursday morning.

Some drones made it through and caused blazes, with witnesses reporting large plumes of thick black smoke in several areas in and outside the city.

Several drones reached the Moscow Oil Refinery in the southeastern Kapotnya district of the city, Sobyanin said. Firefighters have been deployed to the site.

Debris from a downed UAV delivered minor damage to a building at the Sadovod shopping center in southeastern Moscow, according to the mayor. 

Two children among civilians wounded in Moscow Region

Nine people, including a three-year-old child, suffered shrapnel wounds and other injuries in the town of Kotelniki east of the capital as a result of the Ukrainian drone raid, Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyev said on Telegram.

In Ramenskoye, south-west of Moscow, three people were wounded, including a ten-year-old girl, he said.

Debris from destroyed drones fell in several locations in Lyubertsy, east of Moscow, according to Vorobyev. Two men were hospitalized there, with one sustaining a hip injury and the other fracturing his arm, he wrote.

The roof of the nearby Belaya Dacha mall on the Moscow Ring Road caught fire during the raid by Ukrainian forces, Vorobyev said. The administration later announced that it was temporarily shutting down the mall as firefighters tackled the blaze, which was extinguished after several hours.

One person was also injured in Solnechnogorsk and another in the attack on the Sadovod shopping center, the governor said.

Falling drone debris damaged private homes and vehicles in the cities of Chekhov and Elektrostal as well as other areas, he added.

Hundreds of flights delayed at Moscow airports

The drone raid prompted temporary airspace restrictions around the Russian capital, affecting all four of Moscow’s international airports, according to the federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsia.

A total of 527 flights were delayed or canceled at Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo, Domodedovo, and Zhukovsky airports, Interfax reported, citing airport timetable data.

Over 550 drones downed across Russia

The Russian Defense Ministry said more than 550 Ukrainian UAVs had been shot down across the country since Wednesday evening.

One person was killed and two others wounded in a drone attack on the town of Gukovo in Rostov Region, according to Governor Yury Slusar.

The Defense Ministry in Moscow said on Thursday that Russian forces carried out another strike overnight against Ukraine’s military-linked energy infrastructure in response to terrorist attacks by Kiev.

A fuel depot outside Kiev and an oil refinery in Poltava Region were hit with missiles and drones, it said.

The G7 group is considering providing Ukraine with licenses to allow domestic production of Western weaponry, including anti-aircraft and long-range missiles.

RT looks into why the West is doing this so late in the conflict and Ukraine’s ability to deliver on mass arms production.

The scheme

The G7 made the announcement in a joint statement following its summit in Geneva, stating it had agreed to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities.”

“We are also ready to consider extending to Ukraine the benefit of licenses to allow for an increase in Ukraine’s military production,” the group said in a statement.

The plan also involves US manufacturers granting licenses to EU military-industrial companies in order to compensate for shortages in production of high-demand weapons, according to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“We are all currently producing too little, and this can be offset by granting licenses to companies that have these production capabilities, including European and Ukrainian firms,” Merz told reporters.

How is the scheme supposed to work?

The US rarely grants weaponry production licenses to its partners, pressing them into buying ready-made products instead, or in some instances, creating overseas manufacturing plants without transferring technologies to the third parties. The enduring need to supply Ukraine, as well as the extensive use of assorted munitions during the US-Israeli attack on Iran, however, could have softened Washington’s stance on the outsourcing of arms manufacturing.

US President Donald Trump has confirmed the licensed production of anti-aircraft missiles for Patriot systems in Ukraine is under consideration, specifying that no decision has been made yet. “They would like to be able to do that, we’ll take a look at it. They have asked about it,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

Over the past few years, Kiev has repeatedly urged Washington to grant it licenses to manufacture such munitions. The US, however, has consistently rejected the idea, while the American arms giants have reportedly been very wary of making any investments in Ukraine due to the obvious risks connected to the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Does Ukraine have actual industrial capacities?

Setting up a full-cycle production of sophisticated weapons in Ukraine seems to be highly improbable, given the country’s shrinking industrial capacities, as well as questionable record of local arms manufacturers. While Kiev inherited a well-developed industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been in decline ever since, with the process further accelerated by the civil conflict in formerly Ukrainian Donbass and the subsequent war against Russia, given that a bulk of plants were located in the east of the country.

The supposedly domestically built Ukrainian weapons, mainly assorted drones, are at best assembled locally from components supplied from abroad.

The hyped FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile also gives a glimpse of Ukraine’s real industrial capacities. The missile has emerged as a parts-bin project, with design features varying from one piece to another, a US-made free-fall bomb used as its warhead, and antique Soviet-era AI-25TL engines, believed to be recovered from scrapped trainer aircraft, used for propulsion.

Why is the West doing this now?

In mid-April, the Russian Defense Ministry published a list of Ukraine-linked military production facilities scattered across Europe and beyond. The military said it had identified such sites in the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland, as well as in Türkiye and Israel.

“The implementation of terrorist attack scenarios against Russia… using supposedly ‘Ukrainian’ UAVs manufactured in Europe is leading to unpredictable consequences,” the ministry stated. “Instead of strengthening the security of European states, the actions of European rulers are rapidly drawing these countries into a war with Russia,” it added.

The licensing scheme could be a part of the effort to further decentralize arms production to avoid potential retaliatory strikes from Russia, as well as to disguise the supplied weaponry as a Ukrainian homegrown product.

One drone assembly site destroyed in a Russian strike was accidentally exposed this week by the Ukrainian media. A warehouse at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kiev, which was allegedly used to store some “unique costumes,” had multiple aircraft wings visible in its rubble, with the parts appearing to be consistent with FP-1/2 drones produced by Vladimir Zelensky’s favorite and corruption-scandal-plagued company Fire Point.