According to our estimates, at least 230 people have been victims of enforced disappearances in Crimea over the past twelve years. It is impossible to determine the exact number, but clearly it is significantly higher.

The volume of these abductions is the result of a deliberate and consistent policy that Russia has been pursuing since the beginning of the occupation. The same abduction tactics have been used since 2014, and they are carried out by the same security agencies, primarily the FSB. In March 2022, this practice received formal legal approval in the form of a secret Putin's "decree", which allows the detention of individuals without a court order "for opposing the special military operation (SMO)." The formulation is so vague that it permits the abduction of people for literally any display of dissent – from participating in the partisan movement in the Kherson region to subscribing to Ukrainian Telegram channels found on a phone during "filtration."

For many months, we have been searching for information about abductions in Crimea in collaboration with a research team from the Ukrainian Archive at Mnemonic, an organization that specializes in collecting, preserving, and analyzing evidence of human rights violations and war crimes during the war in Ukraine. After a detailed analysis, we reconstructed the horrific terror that Russia has organized on the peninsula since the beginning of the occupation and continues to perpetuate today.

"This is a steady stream of abductions that follows a clear pattern. The number remains roughly the same every year – neither exceeding nor falling short of the plan so as neither to overload themselves nor skew the statistics. This is a deliberate state policy", says a former Crimean lawyer. For security reasons we cannot reveal their name, or the identities of the other Crimeans we interviewed extensively for this article.

In our work, we primarily relied on the results of our own name-by-name search. Meanwhile, cases of abductions are also documented by international, Ukrainian government, and civil society organizations: the Representative Office of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the Crimean Human Rights Group, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, and others. These organizations use various methodologies and sources, which may explain the differences in their estimates.

According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, 104 people were abducted in Crimea between 2014 and 2024. This number includes 43 individuals abducted during the first two years of the occupation, according to data from the Ukrainian human rights organization CrimeaSOS.

The investigative team of the Ukrainian Archive at Mnemonic has identified and verified 94 individuals who have been victims of enforced disappearances from the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine through the end of 2025. These individuals were abducted directly in Crimea. However, this number should be supplemented by more than a hundred additional verified persons who were secretly transported to Crimea after being abducted in the occupied southern part of Ukraine. Most of these persons are residents of temporarily occupied areas in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and parts of Donetsk regions.

Our report on how Russia turned abductions into one of the key tools of its occupation policy in Crimea is divided into four parts:

– the first months of the occupation;

– how a system of abductions that served as a tool for suppressing dissent had been established on the peninsula and practically replaced criminal investigations during political persecution by 2022;

– how this system changed for Crimeans after the start of the full-scale invasion;

– and, finally, how Crimea became a transit hub for people abducted from other occupied territories.

We begin this publication with the most critical part: what is currently occurring in Crimea. Crimeans suspected of dissent or pro-Ukrainian sympathies by the occupying authorities are abducted, tortured to extract "confessions," and then held incommunicado (in isolation, cut off from the outside world) for months or even years. The regulatory authorities cover up these abductions, and the occupying courts legitimize them once the abductee, driven to desperation and under pressure, is willing to sign any statement. It is impossible to achieve justice when faced with this system.

We hope that our report and the findings of this investigation can be used in national and international courts as evidence that Russia has turned the abduction of people into a deliberate policy to suppress dissent in occupied territories. For this reason, we developed our research methodology in accordance with the norms of international law.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define several criteria for "enforced disappearance":

– "the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty";

– the involvement of "agents of the State or persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State";

– "a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time".

After numerous consultations (with lawyers and experts from the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group (ULAG), and other organizations), we consider abductions in a broad sense. This includes both classic enforced disappearances and holding people incommunicado. Both categories meet the criteria for abduction.

Moreover, in accordance with the norms of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which protect the civilian population during occupation, we classify incidents as abductions, even if we have not been able to determine who exactly abducted the person – whether it was FSB operatives, "Crimea Self-Defense" militants, police officers, or other individuals – but available evidence enables us to conclude that the abduction was carried out in the interests of the occupying authorities.

We also consider someone to have been abducted if they are detained by Russian law enforcement agencies – most often the FSB, police, or the Investigative Committee – and kept hidden from lawyers and family members for a certain period. During this time, their whereabouts and conditions of detention remain unknown, and they are held incommunicado.

The number of such cases, Russia's evident interest in concealing the facts of the abductions, the targeting of victims, and the extensive involvement of Russian forces in these crimes are all reasons to characterize the abductions in the occupied territories as Russia's state policy and as crimes against humanity.

We conducted numerous face-to-face interviews with released victims of abduction, their relatives, and their lawyers. Unfortunately, most of them requested to remain anonymous for security reasons, and we cannot disclose their names. To verify these interviews, we also analyzed legal documents, primarily inquiries from lawyers, and responses from Russian law enforcement agencies.

"A person resisting the 'special military operation'"

In late July 2022, Hennadiy Lasynskyi, 35-year-old man, arrived at the police station in the village of Velyka Kardashynka, located in the occupied left-bank part of the Kherson region. Until 2014, he had worked for the Ukrainian police, and now came to apply for a job with the Russian police. Unexpectedly, he was detained and severely beaten, including with a stun gun. After that, officers claimed he was hiding explosives and weapons. The weapons cache did exist; it had been set up by Lasynskyi's friend – who now works as a detective for the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine – when he was leaving the occupied territory. Before leaving, this friend had told Lasynskyi about the weapons. How the Russian police found out about this information remains unknown. According to Lasynskyi's father, who lived with him, his son was detained on July 25.

From then until October 2023 Lasynskyi was held incommunicado, and there was no response to any attempts by his lawyer or father to find him. Oleksiy Ladin, his lawyer who was leading the search, was one of five Crimean lawyers who were later stripped of their licenses for representing Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians abducted from the newly occupied territories. In response to all inquiries, Ladin was told that they have the right to held Lasynskyi in custody without a court order as "a person opposing a special military operation." It was impossible to find out anything else – neither where Lasynskyi was being held, nor his condition or status.

Later, it was revealed that Lasynskyi had been "arrested" by a so-called Extraordinary Commission formed by the occupying Military-Civilian Administration due to the absence of a court in Kherson, which was occupied at that time. The commission extended his "arrest" several times. Ultimately, the Crimean "Supreme Court" refused to consider the lawyer's appeal because the "arrest" had been authorized by a dubious organization created during the occupation.

In October 2023, Lasynskyi was transferred to Crimea, to the recently opened Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 in Simferopol, where most of the detainees were abducted Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Only after that his whereabouts were established by his lawyers and family. Lasynskyi spent fifteen months in captivity.

His case was heard by the Pervomaisky District Court of Crimea. Lasynskyi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years, which he had already served almost in full by that time. After his release, he was sent – with an expired Ukrainian passport – to a migration camp for foreigners in the Rostov region. He managed to arrange for his deportation via Georgia, where his trail was lost.

Lasynskyi's case is a salient example of how the policy of abductions in the occupied territories has changed since Russia's full-scale invasion. Almost everything that happened to him – his abduction for "opposing the special military operation," his transfer to Crimea, where at that time a new detention center had been opened specifically for people like him, and months spent in incommunicado detention – has been experienced by hundreds of residents of the occupied regions.

A remand detention facility reserved for prisoners of war, abducted civilians and political prisoners

Four years after a mechanism was put into effect, it became known that the Russian authorities had developed this mechanism allowing them to abduct and detain people without a court order on charges of "opposing the special military operation." However, it had already been applied in Lasynskyi's case.

On March 8, 2022, Vladimir Putin signed a "decree" on "the organization of the admission and detention of individuals opposing the special military operation." According to the "decree", a suspect could be sent to a detention center without a court order for any period. The text of this "decree", as well as the "temporary instruction" that supposedly elaborated on it, were not published. Information about them was obtained from responses to lawyers' inquiries regarding the search for abducted individuals, and it is evident that such a mechanism for legalized abductions is being applied very widely.

People who end up in detention often have no legal status. For months, and sometimes years, no charges are brought against them. Meanwhile, they are held in complete isolation with no access to relatives or lawyers.

"It is strange," says one of the Crimean lawyers. "But often, charges are not even brought after interrogations, when a person who has spent many months in a detention center and is ready to sign any documents tells them everything they demand."

Detention periods may vary. The longest known detention is that of Oleksandr Babych, the mayor of Hola Prystan in the Kherson region, who has been held incommunicado for more than four years.

Babych was detained in late March 2022. Prior to that, the mayor had been organizing pro-Ukrainian demonstrations in the city. According to Ivan Moshensky, an employee of the Hola Prystan administration, Russian troops did not initially enter the city. Instead, fighting took place near the Antonivsky Bridge, closer to Kherson. In anticipation of an assault, residents organized local self-defense units and attempted to block streets. They also protested the occupation at meetings until March 28, when Russian military personnel and Rosgvardia troops finally blocked the city, established an occupation administration, and abducted the mayor from his office in the city council building.

As far as it is known, no charges have been brought against Babych. However, he has been isolated, and all inquiries from his lawyers are met with the response that Oleksandr Babych is not among those officially detained. Apparently, he is being held in custody without trial under the same mechanism outlined in Putin's "decree" – as a "person opposing the special military operation." Former prisoners who have since been released, say that after his abduction, Babych was transported to Crimea, where he was held in the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2, and in 2025 he was moved to the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog. Based on the latest information, he still remains there.

The Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 in Simferopol, located on the territory of a maximum-security prison at 4 Elevatorny Lane – where Babych was secretly held for several years – was opened in the fall of 2022 specifically for Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians abducted from the occupied territories. Later, they were joined by Crimean political prisoners. Therefore, the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2, which is formally subordinate to the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Russian Federation (FSIN), was overseen by the FSB from the very beginning. Part of the security staff also consisted of special service agents. The detention center has a capacity of 340 inmates. According to former detainees who were interviewed, living conditions there are much better than in the old and dilapidated Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1, but at the same time, control is much stricter and isolation from the outside world is much greater.

In 2023, one of the Crimean lawyers representing civilians abducted in occupied Kherson and Melitopol regularly visited the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 to meet with his clients. On his request, his clients collected a list of individuals who were held incommunicado in the detention center, memorizing their names during roll calls. As a result, they managed to compile a list of more than fifty names and pass it on to the lawyer, who forwarded this list to Ukrainian human rights defenders so they could find the relatives of these individuals.

Apparently, the detention center administration became aware of this, because after that, inmates were referred to by their numbers rather than their names during roll calls. However, this remains one of the ways to search for abducted people in Crimean detention centers.

The conditions in the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 were initially extremely harsh. After their release, the detainees reported that they were forced to remain on their feet for 16 hours a day. They were forced to listen to, learn, and sing the Russian national anthem and patriotic songs, particularly those from the Soviet era: songs by Oleg Gazmanov and Yaroslav Dronov (SHAMAN), as well as old Soviet songs such as "Katyusha" and "Victory Day."

One of the former detainees, Crimean Tatar Ekrem Krosh, recalled that detention center guards used stun guns to torture prisoners, and when he complained about this to the detention center's chief, Mykola Ryabov, Ryabov responded by repeatedly striking Krosh in the face.

In the detention center, there is almost no informal communication among inmates, unlike in the old, conventional Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1. However, even there, it was possible to organize searches for the abducted and find them.

A detention facility with painted-over windows

A quite different situation exists in the more secretive Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8, which opened in Simferopol in the summer of 2023. The first records of the center were found on the State Procurement of the Russian Federation website, where window blinds and office supplies were ordered for the new detention center. However, the detention center's registration date is even earlier, October 2022, that is, at the same time as the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2, which is located in the same building. Rauf Idrisov was listed as the acting chief of the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8 at the time of registration; he served in that capacity until March 11, 2026. Since then, the detention center has been headed by Anton Panin, who previously worked in the FSB directorate in the Altai Republic.

From the very beginning, the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8 was designed to hold prisoners in complete isolation. Although it formally remained under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, only FSB officers worked there as guards. Eventually, in July 2025, a law that allowed the FSB to operate its own detention centers went into effect. A few months later, seven detention centers, including the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8 in Simferopol, were transferred to the special services agency. From that time on, all information about the center, including the name of its chief, was permanently classified. According to our information, Anton Panin has remained in that position.

The Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 also underwent leadership changes. In 2023, the center's first chief, Mykola Ryabov, was detained in connection with a bribery case involving the Crimean Department of the Federal Penitentiary Service. According to the prosecution, the leadership of the department and the detention center received kickbacks from an online store in St.Petersburg that delivered packages and letters to the center. Ryabov was ultimately found guilty but received only 10 months in prison. Anton Gorkun then took over as the chief of the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2.

At first, it is difficult to understand how two detention centers can be housed in a single building. However, according to our information, the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2 occupies the first and second floors – cells 9 through 40 – while the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8 occupies the third and fourth floors – cells 41 through 73 on the third floor and cells 74 through 95 on the fourth floor.

One of the Crimean detainees, who spent some time in the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8, said on condition of anonymity that the abducted people were held on the third floor. Of the twelve cells, one was reserved exclusively for abducted women, even though the detention center officially has no women's section. The detainee recalled that during his stay there were four women being held incommunicado in that cell.

Abductees who are held in the pretrial detention centers are called "the chargless." Once criminal charges are brought against them, they are transferred to cells on the other side of the same third floor. For example, the cell of the detainee who reported this incident held two former abductees. One abductee had spent a year in incommunicado detention, and the other one had spent a year and a half.

In the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8, there is literally no access to daylight. All the windows are covered with a thick layer of paint, and it is impossible even to tell what time it is. The guards, who are FSB officers, including special forces, treat the detainees, some of whom have not been charged with any crimes, in their usual manner. Detainees are forced to walk in the "swallow" position, with their hands behind their backs and bent very low toward the floor. The radio plays constantly and very loudly in the detention center. The sound of propaganda broadcasts and patriotic songs has become another form of pressure.

A former prisoner from the Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8 called it the "Lefortovo branch" because the FSB had complete control over it. This control was exerted not by the Crimean branch, but by the central office even before the detention center was officially transferred to the security service in 2025.

House search, abduction and incommunicado detention

On January 26, 2024, the home of Ismail Shemshedinov, a Crimean Tatar massage therapist and rehabilitation specialist, was searched. FSB officers conducted the search and took Shemshedinov with them. His mother, Elzara Abibullaeva, was assured that her son would return within three days. This was especially concerning because he was taken away in a tracksuit and not allowed to put on warmer clothes.

Ismail's family waited several days, but he never showed up. Then they began a search that lasted a year. They contacted all law enforcement agencies and searched every detention center in Crimea. Everywhere, they were told that Shemshedinov had not been detained. In the meantime, Ismail was being held in complete isolation in cell No. 44 on the third floor of the secret Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 8.

He spent almost a year incommunicado in that cell, cut off from his family and his lawyer, who continued to search for him. Every day, he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem. With no care packages and personal belongings, he spent the entire year wearing the same underwear and constantly washing it.

In the spring of 2025, Shemshedinov was finally charged with treason. According to the investigation, he collected data on the locations of military units, Russian National Guard bases, and oil depots in Crimea, and passed this information on to the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine. Shemshedinov was allowed to see a lawyer and meet with his family only after the criminal case was opened. In July 2025, the Supreme Court of Crimea sentenced him to 13 years in prison. The year Shemshedinov spent in isolation was not included in the sentence because he was not formally detained or registered at the detention center.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Shemshedinov's abduction has become a typical case in Crimea, which follows a standard pattern: a house search, abduction, and detention incommunicado in a system of secret pretrial detention centers, all without a court order. At the same time, no information is provided to either the lawyer or the family. Shemshedinov was abducted for over a year, but according to our data, the average detention period for all abducted individuals in Crimea since the full-scale invasion is 2–8 months.

Furthermore, according to our estimates, since the beginning of 2022 nearly 45% of abducted individuals in Crimea are Crimean Tatars. They are being persecuted for their involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir (an Islamic party that is banned in Russia but operates freely in Ukraine and most European countries), the Noman Chelebidzhihan Battalion (a volunteer Crimean Tatar unit formed in late 2015 to participate in the blockade of Crimea), and on other charges. Their abductions usually do not last long and are used to exert pressure, extract "confessions," and break them psychologically.

In cases where we can make an educated guess about the reasons for the arrest, about 30% of detainees were later charged with treason and espionage. Among them are also people charged with making money transfers to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, providing data about various sites on the peninsula, and generally supporting Ukraine. Another 15% of abducted persons are being prosecuted for anti-war activities and displaying Ukrainian symbols, ranging from posting flyers in support of Ukraine to purchasing military-themed stamps.

Overall, according to the Mnemonic team's estimates, at least 94 people were abducted in Crimea between the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the end of 2025. However, this figure only includes individuals whose names have been verified, so the actual number is in all likelihood much higher.

Anton Naumliuk

This publication was produced with the financial support of the Czech organization People in Need, within the framework of the SOS Ukraine initiative, and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the position of People in Need or the Open Society Foundations.

Ukraine fields only a limited number of these systems and has yet to develop an anti-ballistic missile capability of its own – a shortfall Russia is actively exploiting. Each week, Russian forces launch dozens of Iskander ballistic missiles, S-400 missiles and hypersonic Kinzhal and Zircon (also spelt Tsirkon) missiles.

It is only this year that Russia has begun actively deploying Zircon missiles, with around 40 launched since the start of 2026. Kinzhals have been in use for longer. Despite the increased use of Zircons, questions have been raised about their capabilities.

Ukrainska Pravda has looked into a study by OSINT analyst Fabian Hinz and spoken with Ukrainian military personnel and Pavel Luzin, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and the Saratoga Foundation, to examine the origins of the Zircon missile and the threat it poses.

Zircon strikes

The first reports of the use of Zircons emerged in late 2023, when Ukrainian bomb disposal experts found debris from a missile of this type in Zaporizhzhia. Over the next two years, Russia launched just six Zircon missiles. That picture has changed significantly this year, as around 40 launches have been recorded since the start of 2026.

Defence Intelligence of Ukraine attributes this uptick to expanding Russian stockpiles. While Russia was assessed to have about 40 Zircon missiles in 2024, Ukrainian intelligence now estimates the number has increased to around 230.

There has also been a shift in tactics. Launches previously came mainly from temporarily occupied Crimea, from where a Zircon takes approximately three minutes to reach Kyiv. Russia is now also firing them from Kursk Oblast. This has further reduced air defence reaction times and made interception more difficult.

The Zircon's key advantage is speed. Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin has claimed that the missile can travel at Mach 9 (around 11,500 km/h, or about 7,100 mph). Valery Gerasimov, Chief of Russia's General Staff, has cited a lower figure of Mach 8 (10,200 km/h, or 6,300 mph) and said it can cover 450 km in 4.5 minutes.

Ukrainian analysts, however, put the figures lower, at Mach 5.5-7.5 (6,700-9,200 km/h, or 4,200-5,700 mph). Ukrainian Air Force officials say the missile slows to about Mach 4.5 (5,500 km/h, or 3,400 mph) before reaching its target, which creates a possible interception window. Out of 46 Zircons launched, Ukrainian Air Force data indicates that 41% have been shot down.

The Enigmatic Missile

The discrepancy in estimates of Zircon's speed stems from the fact that the missile has been insufficiently studied. Russia began developing it in the early 2010s and introduced it into service around 2022. However, details of its development and combat performance have been closely concealed by Russian authorities.

The Zircon was developed by the NPO Mashinostroyeniya (Machine Building Research and Production Association), a Russian rocket design office, and was initially intended for Admiral Gorshkov-class ships and Yasen-class submarines. Over time, K-300P Bastion launchers were also modified to carry the missile. It is from these platforms that Russia is striking Ukraine, and Ukrainian forces have managed to destroy some of them in Crimea.

Since Russia has sought to keep data on the missile tightly under wraps, analysts have had to piece it together gradually, drawing on leaked documents, patents and debris from downed missiles.

A single Zircon missile costs around US$5.6 million, according to Militarnyi, a Ukrainian military news outlet that accessed Russian procurement documentation. It is among the most expensive conventionally armed missiles, second only to the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile. Ukrainian military estimates place the warhead weight at 220 kg, including about 80 kg of explosives. The Zircon is also assessed as potentially capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, although it is not known whether a nuclear version exists.

The officially stated range of the Zircon is over 1,000 km, although analysts treat this figure with scepticism.

"It is extremely difficult to fit a solid propellant for such a range within the stated dimensions. Moreover, a great deal depends on the type of engine," explains Pavel Luzin, a senior research fellow at CEPA and the Saratoga Foundation.

Scramjet, ramjet or rocket

The key mystery surrounding the Zircon lies in its engine. NPO Mashinostroyeniya has long focused on supersonic anti-ship missiles, such as Oniks and Granit, which use liquid-fuelled ramjet (air-breathing) propulsion systems.

When Russia presented the Zircon as a hypersonic missile, analysts suggested it might be powered by a supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet). That would have suggested Russia had mastered this advanced propulsion technology. However, no evidence to support this has been found.

Some analysts then suggested that the Zircon uses a supersonic ramjet engine.

"It is unlikely that the Zircon is hypersonic," Luzin said. "It is more likely a supersonic missile with a ramjet engine – a signature product of NPO Mashinostroyeniya. In all likelihood, Zircon is a further development of Oniks. Since its appearance, any mention of the Oniks-M programme has vanished."

The fuel type also indicates that a scramjet engine is unlikely. Ukrainian experts analysing debris from downed missiles assessed that Zircon runs on solid fuel. The use of solid fuel in scramjet engines is still experimental, unlike ramjet technology, where this has long been tried and tested.

However, the ramjet theory also has shortcomings. Engines of this type require an air intake. In the Oniks, for example, it is integrated into the missile's body. In Zircon, however, analysts have been unable to identify one.

NPO Mashinostroyeniya's tendency to adopt non-standard engineering solutions led analysts to suggest that the air intake could also be concealed within the missile's body. However, neither patents nor footage of Zircon launches have confirmed this.

Ultimately, the absence of an air intake and the use of solid propellant led analysts to assess that Zircon is likely a quasi-ballistic missile.

Quasi-ballistics

The Zircon's flight trajectory also points to a quasi-ballistic profile. A quasi-ballistic missile follows a ballistic trajectory but can manoeuvre en route to its target to improve accuracy or complicate interception. This also helps explain fluctuations in the Zircon's speed recorded by the Ukrainian military.

"Based on its flight parameters, the Zircon is ballistic," a Ukrainian defence forces officer and author of the Telegram channel General Staff Colonel told Ukrainska Pravda.

Debris from downed Zircon missiles, examined by the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise, suggests the use of a solid-propellant rocket engine rather than a liquid-propellant system.

This assessment is also supported by Russian patents. Russian engineer Alexander Dergachov, who played an important role at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, outlined the company's concept for prospective hypersonic anti-ship missiles as early as 2016. In 2026, he was appointed acting director general of the company.

Three patents of his were co-authored with engineers from NVO Iskra, a leading design office specialising in solid-propellant rocket engines. The patents relate to a new turbojet engine design.

Furthermore, despite its usual focus on supersonic anti-ship missiles, NPO Mashinostroyeniya has been developing concepts for quasi-ballistic systems in parallel since the 1990s. In 2011, its engineers patented a manoeuvrable quasi-ballistic missile capable of flying at supersonic and hypersonic speeds.

A step towards hypersonic technology

Whether Zircon is a hypersonic or quasi-ballistic missile is, above all, a question of how far Russia has advanced technologically.

In the public's imagination, Zircon is seen as a state-of-the-art hypersonic cruise missile, reinforcing the perception of a sophisticated, technologically advanced weapon. In the context of information warfare, this is significant, as it supports the narrative that Moscow is ahead of the US in the hypersonic arms race. The air of mystery surrounding the missile further amplifies this perception.

However, it would be wrong to treat Zircon purely as a propaganda tool. In much of the literature and in many online articles, missiles are divided into hypersonic and non-hypersonic categories, but this oversimplification is misleading. In hypersonic systems, speed is not the main factor; rather, it is the ability to manoeuvre and sustain those manoeuvres at hypersonic velocities.

Although a quasi-ballistic system is less complex than a scramjet-powered missile, it is still a viable approach. As an interim capability, Zircon provides Russia with both a combat-ready weapon and practical experience that may support the development of genuine hypersonic technologies in the future.

A similar approach has been taken by Japan with its HVGP and by Iran with its Fattah missile series. In their early stages, these systems were closer to ballistic missiles, but they are projected to evolve into fully fledged hypersonic missiles in the long term.

It is noteworthy that as early as 2016, NPO Mashinostroyeniya submitted a design for a hypersonic winged missile featuring a detachable scramjet engine.

Zircon is therefore not the ultimate objective, but rather a step along this path.

Illia Volynskyi

Translated by Artem Yakymyshyn

Edited by Susan McDonald

Her work focuses on democracy, education, culture and the future of humanity in an era of technological transformation. In recent years, Andersen has devoted much of her work to exploring how democracies can remain resilient in times of global crises, as well as developing new approaches to education that help people not only acquire knowledge but also cultivate their own values and sense of responsibility.

During a visit to Lviv, she spoke with Ukrainska Pravda about Russia's war against Ukraine, why Russia poses a threat not only to Ukrainians but to the democratic world as a whole, the future of Europe, why modern education is losing its ability to shape individuals, the impact of artificial intelligence on society and why the complexity of the modern world requires new ways of thinking.

This article is produced in partnership with Lviv Media Forum 2026 and features a speaker from this year's conference.

Out of date education systems

We all grew up in the modern world in the presence of postmodernism, which tried to deconstruct everything. There is a generation of younger people who grew up with smartphones and the internet – the so-called digital natives. But our institutions, our school systems, our legislation – all the frameworks around our lives are still analogue. They are still part of the 20th century. They were conceived in the 20th century, if not the 19th century. And the education that we get – the knowledge that we have in order to navigate the world that we're in – is from the 20th century. We have all been equipped with a worldview and understanding of the world that is tuned for around the year 1995. And that's where we are. A completely different kind of world, and things are changing extremely fast.

And we're still trying to not only navigate it with a worldview and understanding of the world from 30, 40, 100 years ago, but also to regulate it, coexist with it and legislate for it with these old ways of understanding the world.

And therefore we're coming up with insufficient answers to the problems that we're facing, as a civilisation, and as a species.

Bildung and education

Bildung [the German word meaning self-realisation] is a learning for life and becoming fully human in the process and becoming everything that you, specifically you, or specifically I, or anybody else – that unique thing that you hold inside you, how can that come out and flourish?

One of the ways that I describe bildung now is that there's two kinds of knowledge. One is the transferable kind of knowledge which is how many grams to a kilo? Or what is the correct French grammar or something like that. So it's academic content but it can also be practical content. And I can transfer that and I can test whether the transfer has taken place.

And then there's a non-transferable kind of knowledge, which is life experience. Falling in love, becoming a mother, buying a car and being screwed by the car dealer. All that stuff that goes into life. I can tell other people about it. I don't have children, so I can't tell anybody about that, but if somebody has children and they tell me about it, I cannot identify with it. I can listen, but I can't feel what it's like.

But if we've both had the same experience, like falling in love, and I say, "I met this wonderful man. I just can't concentrate. I work and it feels like I can't focus on anything," you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. There's a resonance. These two kinds of knowledge, and your struggle with making it yours and getting as much of it as possible, both the life experience and the transferable knowledge, that is Bildung and making it your own.

If I were just a normal teacher, it would just focus on the transferable kind of knowledge. Usually, there would be a test at the end of the course, and then we'll figure out how much of the knowledge has been transferred.

But if I'm a Bildung teacher, I would see each individual in the classroom and try to figure out what it is inside this particular kid or young adult that needs to be challenged, appreciated, have more of the same thing? Where is the talent? Where do I see the light in their eyes? Where do I see them? Do I hand them a book or hand them a task and they won't stop?"

And then, when I've found that light – hopefully in all of them, but it's easier with some than others – that is when I can start challenging them and saying, "But you could also read this, or have you thought about trying this thing?"

Or if it's somebody who just wants to play music and doesn't want to learn maths, you can bring in Aristotle and how he figured out that if you have a string and you make it swing, it makes the sound. If you have half the length of the string, the tone goes up one octave. This is maths. So now you can connect maths and music. The whole class can benefit from this, and you can have this child who loves to play the instrument show it on a violin.

This takes a different approach to education, but it also makes education what most teachers went into education to do, because they want to see that light in the eyes of the students. And of course, the challenge is that if you have more than 24 kids in the classroom, it becomes impossible. And you will just narrow down the goal of what can be achieved to simply transferring knowledge.

Keeping AI away from areas of human creativity

I mean it's ironic that so much of time people spend using AI is spent on doing exactly the things that make us happy, like making art, making music, doing graphic design, telling stories – and we are letting AI take it away from us.

I just translated my book The Nordic Secret into Danish. I wrote it in English 10 years ago.

And when I started talking about doing it in Danish, one of my colleagues said "But you can get AI to translate that." I said "No, I can't." "Yes, you can! It's going to be so quick – you'll save so much time." And I was like "No, I can't." And just to humour him, I actually took some pages and let one of the AIs translate them. And it's interesting, because every sentence was there, but it had completely lost its spirit.

It had lost my voice. It had lost everything that was my part in that book. And that was me in that text. That weird thing between the lines. And I realised that this applies to pretty much everything that we ask these AIs to do, if it's any kind of intellectual or mental work.

If it's digging more sophisticated holes in the ground or something like that, it's not going to take anything away from us. But if it is any kind of work that has the slightest kind of creativity in it, it is going to turn that wonderful, exciting creative work – like writing for instance – into a really tedious, awful piece of work, only leavings us with the fact checking and controlling that it hasn't been delusional and written something that is wrong.

That's what I found from looking at an AI translation of a couple of pages of my book. It just became this really, really awful task that I had to do and all the joy of writing it had completely disappeared. And so I think the same thing is going to happen with music and painting and photography once you have an AI that can do the work for you.

Yes, we're just going to realise "No, I'm just going to get sick and tired of the one thing that made me really happy and I'm not happy anymore." So, I think there is going to be some kind of protest, riot, obstruction against AI pretty soon because people don't want it. It's really just the tech giants who do.

The disastrous goal of education today

I think there is so much more that we need to know today than anybody needed to know 20 years ago, and so much more than 50 years ago. My dad went to school for seven year, and then he left to take up an apprenticeship and got a job after that. Whereas today we all need around 20 years of education sooner or later, and then we need to upgrade it.

So things have changed. But we've done particularly one disastrous thing, which is that we wanted to make education more efficient. We want to create a more productive workforce.

And so we got rid of all the cultural heritage that gives us a symbolic language and that allows us to struggle with the stress, with love, with hate, with conflict, with despair, all the nasty stuff that is part of life, and part of death too for that matter.

There are generations before us that have struggled with all of this, and authors have written about this in fictitious form, where you can resonate with and mirror yourself in the characters. The result is emotional maturation. One of the great things about literature is that if it's well written, you identify with the characters.

You can have a completely different experience to what you have in your own life and feel that you are there, inside the story. I mean you can be a prison guard in a death camp or you can be a single woman travelling the globe, or any kind of character. If it's well written, you are that character as you're reading. Which means that you experience emotions that you might not experience otherwise.

When I went to high school, we studied the old Greek tragedy Medea. I've forgotten the storyline except that she ended up hating her husband so much that she killed their two sons and chopped them up into small pieces, and then she dumped the pieces in the water so that the husband could sail after her and gather all the pieces of his sons.

When you're 17, 18, 19 years old and you read that, you think "What a completely nutcase woman!" And then when you go through a breakup or a divorce, it's like I understand exactly why she did what she did.

If I had never read Medea, I wouldn't have known that story, but when I did at some point go through a break-up, although I don't have any children, so there was nobody to chop up, and I don't think I would have done it if I had, I can actually identify with that sense of wanting to find a way to get through to this person who just doesn't want to understand. And that's what art can do.

And if we take that away from children and young people, when they end up in a situation later in life with these big life crises and big stories and moral challenges, they don't have that mirror.

They may think that they are the first person in history ever to have this weird emotion of whether it's love or hate, or despair, or frustration, or something. And it really helps to know that there is a play there, there is a novel there, there is a song there. Somebody else went through this and just nailed it in a song. So yes, we're taking that away from people, and I think that's a disaster.

Education's impact on choices in war

In war, you are constantly facing impossible choices, and you're bound to make decisions that go against your moral values.

If you make one choice, some people die. If you make the opposite choice, other people die. So, you are in an impossible situation. And whatever you choose is going to stay with you after that.

I think those of us who haven't been in that situation cannot say what that is like. But if you're facing life or death decisions, it is going to be larger than you are. I think we're not used to talking about that because we think that we're in control. We've given ourselves the impression that we're in control, and sometimes we're not. And that is also part of being human.

Sometimes you just make horrible, horrible, horrible, disastrous decisions. That is also part of being human. The question is: how do you find some kind of forgiveness either from yourself or from others? And I think that if you are conscious about your life choices and your values, and what is important to you, you are less likely to be caught off guard when you come to face really hard choices. But you will eventually face choices where you have no previous knowledge, in an area you have never given thought to, and you just have to make the choice in the moment. And that is terrible.

I think the one thing that's helpful to say about Ukraine's case is that Ukraine has absolutely no guilt in the situation it finds itself in. You're put in a situation by somebody else where you are faced with choices you never asked to have as a country and as individuals. Somebody else decided to take actions which have resulted in you being in your current situation. And you can only do your best, to the best of your knowledge and to the best of intentions.

But the more that you have considered what it means to be human as you grow up, the easier it is to be confident in your moral values, and to ask questions like "What is it that I'm fighting for? What am I standing up for?"

And part of what you're fighting for is freedom for your children and for their being in Ukraine. And one of the really remarkable things about humans is our ability to self-sacrifice. And all civilisations build on that one way or the other. The Soviet Union had a really bad habit of telling people what they should sacrifice themselves for.

The whole point of self-sacrifice is that you yourself find out what you want to sacrifice yourself for. And that's the difference between a totalitarian society and a free society – you are free.

Totalitarian systems just tell you what to self-sacrifice for and they have a tendency to phrase it as if it's something you do want to do because they don't even want to admit that they're just creeps who want power. So, there are some existential choices that each one of us can only ask ourselves about. We can discuss it with others but eventually you are alone with that choice.

On the perception of freedom

A lot of Europeans just see this war as a Ukrainian-Russian problem. A lot of Americans definitely do too. But there are also a lot of people who see it as a global problem, or at least a European problem. These people do see what Russia and Putin are up to, and that they just can't stop themselves because they would lose face if they were to stop, and that their whole sense of self would fall apart if they lost face.

Of course being faced with life or death decisions pushes you to a limit where you haven't been pushed to before. I've never been at war. So I have no idea what that is like. I don't wish to ever be in that situation. I want this war to stop. I want Russia to start behaving like a normal country.

Somebody has to take this on because we can't have a violent, nuclear, authoritarian colonising failed state that just tries to cover up its own mistakes and shortcomings by attacking others.

The good thing about Putin and Xi and mullahs and Iran is that they're all completely disloyal to anybody except themselves, which means they cannot collaborate. They can trade, but there is no loyalty among them. Which we actually do have in the West. We do have that in the EU. Well, not with the US at the moment. But Trump is not all of America.

There are all these people in the US who still are loyal to NATO. So that's part of democracies and a world of people, and you can actually build institutions and loyalty and collaboration and you can have each other's back. So I say that's part of the good news. But we're not smart about this.

So I will say two things that give me hope with regard to Ukraine. One is that Russia will collapse, one way or the other. What is that going to look like? It might be a disaster or it might be a situation where Russia becomes even weaker and we have a window of opportunity. The other thing is that once this war is over, all Europeans are going to go to Ukraine for vacation because it's like "We've heard so much about Ukraine." There are so many people who are so impressed with Ukraine. There's such a strong sense of identification. I'm here in Lviv for the first time. It's beautiful, it's amazing.

There's tons of interesting stuff in Kyiv as well. There are all these places that we've heard about on television. There's so much going on. People are so impressed with your drone industry, with your clever solutions to so many things. To be Ukrainian is actually very, very cool right now.

So, I think that as soon as the war is over, at first you'll see the backpackers. And then, you'll see the middle classes. Your food is excellent, your hotels are excellent. I can use my computer, it plugs right away, I don't need an adapter. You're already set up to be part of the EU. And these are many little things. I also discussed the number plates on your cars. They only have the letters that work in both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. Who came up with that? That's brilliant. So we're looking at Ukraine and it's like "Okay, as soon as this war thing is over, we need to go there. We need to find out who these people are because we didn't pay attention to the Ukrainians before, but we do now." So, there's hope.

Alina Poliakova, UP

Edited by Shoël Stadlen

When the campaign began in 2024, the main effect of the strikes was to generate publicity. But now their consequences are now being felt with increasing severity by both the Russian population and the Russian economy.

The Kremlin has been forced to respond to the production shutdowns by restricting fuel exports and introducing limits on petrol and diesel sales. Kilometre-long queues have been forming at Russian filling stations.

Could Ukraine's "long-range sanctions" turn localised disruptions into a full-blown fuel crisis, depriving one of the world's largest oil producers of its own resource?

The answer to this question doesn't just matter in terms of understanding the state of the Russian economy. Fuel is a critical resource for waging war. It powers military hardware, aircraft, logistics and the defence industry.

For this reason, further strikes on oil infrastructure may prove to have greater impact than attacks on ammunition depots or military airbases.

From dozens of strikes to hundreds

Ukraine has been striking Russian oil refineries for several years now. These strikes have repeatedly forced individual facilities to halt production and undergo "scheduled" repairs. But since the start of 2026 the campaign has reached a new level, increasing the intensity of attacks, their geographic spread, and the number of repeat hits on the same refineries.

This map shows that the strikes on Russia's oil infrastructure are not isolated incidents, but deliver a broad geographical spread of pressure on the fuel system. Between 2022 and 16 June 2026, 121 strikes on 99 facilities have been recorded. Out of 37 refineries, 25 have been marked as hit, and out of 62 other oil infrastructure facilities, 36 have been hit.

In 2026 the intensity of these attacks is high: 38 recorded strikes fall within this period – nearly a third of the entire dataset. There are 39 incidents in the database for the past six months, showing that the campaign against Russia's oil infrastructure has not only continued, but was particularly intense in the first half of 2026.

As well as the rise in intensity, the 2026 strikes are also shifting focus from border regions and areas near Ukraine towards more remote logistical hubs and export infrastructure. This is reflected on the map in incidents around Ust-Luga, Primorsk, Novorossiysk, Taman, Crimea, the Volga region and individual pipeline stations. In other words, the campaign is increasingly looking like pressure not just on individual refineries, but on Russia's fuel system as a whole.

Virtually all the major refineries in European Russia have come under attack during this period. Two large refineries beyond the Urals remain untouched: Omsk and Angarsk. The same facilities are increasingly being hit over and over again, preventing the Russians from fully completing repairs and resuming production.

For example, the Ryazan and Saratov Refineries have each been struck over 15 times, while Syzran, Afipsky, Ilsky and Tuapse have each been hit more than 10 times.

And it isn't just oil refineries. Fuel depots, export terminals, fuel storage tanks and oil pumping stations are also being struck on a regular basis. Ukraine's defence forces are moving from inflicting localised damage towards the systematic destruction of the entire logistics chain of Russia's oil industry.

The objectives of the campaign are no secret: Zelenskyy has repeatedly dubbed the strikes "long-range sanctions". They serve two purposes. The first is to reduce the Kremlin's oil revenues – its principal source of funding for the war. The second is to create domestic economic problems and compel Moscow to agree to a halt in mutual energy infrastructure strikes ahead of the next heating season.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Kyiv views its strikes on oil refineries as a lever of pressure on the Kremlin to achieve an energy ceasefire.

What are the consequences?

The consequences of the sustained attacks are becoming increasingly visible – not only in industry statistics, but in Russians' everyday lives. Motorists in various regions are now facing kilometre-long queues at filling stations, restrictions on fuel sales and rising prices.

Russia is going through the most extensive fuel crisis in its history, although there is still potential for it to deepen further. What are the signs of this crisis?

Russia has banned exports of petrol and jet fuel and is considering an embargo on diesel exports, which are already subject to export quotas.

In May, refinery throughput fell to its lowest level in 16 years, averaging 4.58 million barrels per day, with nearly one-third of the country's refining capacity lying idle. As a result, Moscow has been forced to export more crude oil instead of processing it domestically. Since the beginning of 2026, Russian crude exports have risen to 3.49 million barrels per day – the highest level since the start of the full-scale war.

Petrol shortages have spread to almost one-third of the country, affecting 25 regions, including Moscow and St Petersburg. Some filling stations have imposed a limit of just 20 litres per customer. Fuel supply disruptions have also affected farmers, and restrictions have been introduced on aircraft refuelling.

The price of petrol in Russia has risen by 28-34% since the beginning of 2026, while diesel has become 43% more expensive. Meanwhile the price of jet fuel has surged to a record high of RUB 110,000 (about US$1,500) per tonne. Against this backdrop, the Russian authorities have temporarily allowed refineries to produce lower-grade fuel in an attempt to make up the shortfall. Some refineries have been authorised to sell fuel labelled as meeting the Euro 5 standard even though its actual quality corresponds to Euro 3 specifications.

In particular, the permitted sulphur content in petrol has been raised to 15 times the Euro 5 limit, while the permitted level in diesel has been increased 35-fold. This lower-quality fuel may only be sold on the domestic market – exports are prohibited.

The situation is particularly acute in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

For reference: Ekonomichna Pravda has analysed online data from Crimea's two largest petrol station chains, ATAN and TES, which operate a combined total of 181 filling stations – 116 and 65 respectively. According to data collected on 15 June 2026, 26 filling stations, or 14.4% of the sample, had no AI-95 petrol available.

The shortage of diesel appears to be even more pronounced. Of the 181 filling stations surveyed, 44 (24.3%) had no standard diesel fuel available. Even when premium diesel is counted as an alternative, 22 filling stations – or 12.2% of the sample – had no diesel fuel of any kind.

The situation is different at each of the two chains. At ATAN, 11.2% of filling stations had no AI-95 petrol, while 27.6% were out of standard diesel. At TES, more filling stations had no AI-95 (20%), but fewer had no standard diesel (18.5%). In other words, it's not that fuel has disappeared entirely from the market, but the shortages are already clearly visible at the major filling station networks, with diesel particularly affected.

The picture becomes considerably gloomier once sales restrictions are taken into account. Although AI-95 was officially available at 155 filling stations, at 149 of them (96.1%) it could only be purchased using ration coupons or fuel cards. The situation is similar for diesel. Standard diesel was available at 137 of the 181 filling stations, but sales were restricted at 127 of them (92.7%). In practice, therefore, "available" does not mean freely available for most motorists.

The situation could deteriorate further, as the seasonal peak in fuel demand is still ahead.

Could Russia run out of fuel?

Serhii Kuiun, director of the A-95 Consulting Group, says Russia has traditionally experienced fuel supply problems towards the end of the summer, when consumption reaches its annual peak. In 2026, however, these difficulties began much earlier.

"We're only at the start of the peak demand season, yet they're already having serious problems. If the situation is this turbulent now, what will it be like in August and September?" he says.

Kuiun believes the current situation resembles Ukraine's fuel crisis in 2022, when shortages spread gradually but steadily across the country. He also warns that panic on the part of the public could make matters worse: "People will start buying up fuel wherever it's still available. Panic buying could rapidly aggravate the situation."

Oleksandr Sirenko, an analyst at the Naftorynok consulting company, argues that the crisis is being driven not only by reduced refining capacity, but also by mounting logistical problems: "This crisis has two defining features: refineries being shut down by strikes, and disrupted logistics."

He believes this is particularly evident in temporarily occupied Crimea, where fuel deliveries have become more challenging because of restrictions on both maritime and overland transport routes.

Energy expert Hennadii Riabtsev offers a similar assessment: "Logistical problems are often a direct consequence of the actions of Ukraine's defence forces. Once a refinery goes offline, fuel has to be brought in from other regions. It's more expensive, time-consuming and complicated."

In his view, logistics could become the catalyst for a much broader crisis: "This stopped being a market long ago. It's all being run on an ad hoc basis now: send one rail tanker here, dispatch one fuel truck there."

Despite these mounting difficulties, Russia still has a considerable safety margin.

"Its vast territory, excess refining capacity, state regulation and administrative allocation of resources enable the Kremlin to prevent a full-scale collapse. Even so, the problems are already obvious to everyone and building up by the day," a parliamentary source told Ekonomichna Pravda.

That, the sources say, is precisely why even the large-scale strikes have yet to trigger a full-blown crisis. "Russia is so vast that you can bite off half its backside and the signal still won't reach the brain straight away," says Riabtsev.

Nevertheless, he warns that the system may eventually reach breaking point.

"These have been the most effective strikes of the entire [full-scale] war. They're complicating logistics and draining enormous sums from the pockets of Russia's oil companies. The cost ratio is staggering: a handful of relatively cheap drones can disable installations worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The key is to keep striking consistently. Over time, that could bring about a systemic collapse."

"For now, Russia is putting out fires by taking ad hoc measures – redistributing fuel between regions and imposing restrictions," a Cabinet of Ministers source told Ekonomichna Pravda. "If the strikes continue, the localised disruptions we are seeing today could develop into a systemic crisis across Russia's entire fuel market by the end of 2026."

Mykola Topalov for Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Anastasiia Yankina and Tetiana Buchkovska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

In response, some service members began thanking Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's team for "cleaning up the Augean Stables" that none of the previous defence ministers nor either of the commanders-in-chiefs had been willing to go anywhere near.

Most, however, have been unsparing in their criticism.

Ukrainska Pravda spoke with around 30 service members occupying various positions and levels of responsibility in order to gain a broad understanding of military reactions to the Ministry of Defence's proposals.

Interestingly, some of our interviewees have no intention of leaving the military any time soon, even under the new contracts, as they are convinced that the war will not end in the near future.

Below we outline the main grievances voiced by service members – often in remarkably direct and emotional terms – and explain several of the proposed changes that may have been misinterpreted.

The key provisions of the Defence Ministry's reform are as follows:

• New contracts are being introduced: contracts lasting 6-14 months for infantry and assault troops, and 24-month contracts for all other military specialisations. Upon completion of their contracts, service members will receive a guaranteed deferral from mobilisation for at least six months. Previously such deferrals did not exist, except under the "18-24" contract scheme for volunteers aged 18-24.
• In addition to the six-month basic deferral period, a cumulative deferral system is being introduced. The longer a service member remains in the military and the more time they spend in combat positions, the longer the deferral they will receive. In theory, this deferral could extend to several years.
• Since 13 June, service members who have gone absent without leave have been allowed to return directly to some of the military's most sought-after brigades without first passing through reserve battalions or the Military Law Enforcement Service, which previously served as an intermediary stage. This guarantees placement in their chosen unit rather than assignment to a regiment or brigade with priority staffing rights. The measure is temporary and will remain in effect until 20 September 2026.
• Soldiers and sergeants are being granted the right to transfer automatically through Army+ [a government app created for the military] within the corps under which their brigade is operating (this option will not be available to officers). For example, an infantryman serving in the 155th Brigade, which is fighting under the operational command of the 7th Air Assault Corps on the Pokrovsk front, may transfer to the 25th Air Assault Brigade if it is operating under the same corps and on the same front.
• Some categories of service personnel will receive higher pay. Rear-echelon personnel will earn UAH 30,000 (about US$668) per month, personnel serving at command posts UAH 70,000 (US$1,558), brigade commanders UAH 150,000 (US$3,338), corps commanders UAH 230,000 (US$5,119), and infantry and assault troops between UAH 300,000 and UAH 460,000 (US$6,700-10,242) per month.

Overall, the Defence Ministry's proposals are sensible and necessary. Moreover, had they been introduced in 2024, they would likely have been regarded as a major step forward.

Now, however, in 2026, in the twelfth year of the war, when one of service members' key demands is at least some form of partial demobilisation (we will return to this term shortly), the state's offer to "serve a little longer" feels less like recognition of their contribution and more like an insult.

Let's take a closer look at the concerns being raised by military personnel.

1. No clear terms of service

The first and most significant issue that service personnel raise regarding the new reform is that it totally fails to meet their expectations. The reform does not provide a clear answer to the question that matters most to them: WHEN WILL I BE ABLE TO GO HOME?

This issue is particularly acute for those who joined the military voluntarily between 2014 and 2022, as well as during the first few months of the full-scale invasion.

Consider this: a civilian who enlisted in 2014 and has managed to preserve both their health and their life until now has been fighting for 10 to 12 years (we have encountered many such people while reporting from the front). Someone who enlisted in 2022 has now been at war for more than four years.

"I genuinely don't understand why those who have been serving since the ATO-Joint Forces Operation period and who automatically had their service extended after 24 February 2022 [all contracts signed before 2022 became open-ended – ed.] should have to sign another contract at all. If anyone deserves priority when it comes to discharge, it's them," an officer from one of the Air Assault Forces corps told UP.

[The ATO or Anti-Terrorist Operation is a term used from 2014 to 2018 by the media, the government of Ukraine and the OSCE to identify combat actions in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts against Russian military forces and pro-Russian separatists. The Joint Forces Operation succeeded the ATO and lasted between 2018 and 2022 – ed.]

"Why, after four and a half years of service, should I have to serve another two?" a soldier deployed on the Dobropillia front, who has been serving since 2022, asked rhetorically.

"In my view, mate, we've been stitched up. Taken for fools behind our backs..." said an FPV drone pilot who has been fighting since the early days of 2022, quoting a song by Kuzma Skriabin.

Instead of offering a clear discharge date, the Ministry of Defence is proposing that all current service members serve an additional period – between six and 14 months for infantry personnel or 24 months for drone operators, logistics personnel and other specialisations. Only after completing this "additional" service would they receive a deferral from remobilisation for at least six months.

Those who choose not to sign the new contracts will continue serving until demobilisation. Among the service members interviewed by UP, this was by far the most common position.

A contract soldier and a mobilised soldier serving, for example, in the same trench will receive the same pay.

"And what if the war ends in six months but I still have 18 months left on my contract? What am I then, some kind of mug? I ask myself that every six months," explained Bohdan, who has been fighting since 2022, when asked why he intends to wait for demobilisation.

"I want to keep serving under mobilisation because, as a UAV operator, this contract offers me nothing new. The automatic transfer system has a limit of 50 people per brigade – first come, first served. As for the money, we already had logistics and support personnel who were earning more before this reform. Rear-echelon staff were getting UAH 50,000 (US$1,113) for almost a year. So what now – back to UAH 30,000 (US$668)?" said a UAV pilot currently serving in Sumy Oblast, explaining why he intends to remain under mobilisation.

"There is no reform. There is only an illusory six-month reprieve after two years on a contract," he added angrily.

Those who still believe in demobilisation – in the best possible sense of the phrase – are mostly former civilians who are prepared to devote themselves to military service during the active phase of the war but do not see themselves remaining in the armed forces once it is over. Not for higher pay, nor for any other incentives.

"As long as the war is being fought, I want to fight. Once it's over, all that's left is the army and army bulls**t. I don't particularly want anything here to keep me around after that," Bohdan added.

At a recent briefing dedicated to the reform, however, Fedorov's deputy, Mstyslav Banik, appeared to become the first official to publicly acknowledge that the ministry is not yet prepared to discuss demobilisation. Any large-scale demobilisation process and the transition of the military to a peacetime footing can only begin once hostilities have ended – and nobody knows when that will happen.

Banik asked journalists not to use the word "demobilisation" and instead to use the term "discharge".

2. Uncertainty over who will be eligible for discharge outside the contract system

Another aspect of the reform that warrants particular attention is the proposed "phased discharge of those who were mobilised earlier". This process is expected to begin as early as the end of this autumn and would run in parallel with discharges under the new contract scheme.

The first person to raise this possibility publicly was the president when announcing the military reform in early May. The Ministry of Defence later echoed the idea, including through statements by Fedorov and Banik.

For service members, however, the proposal remains entirely unclear.

On the one hand, many view it as a fragile source of hope that they may be able to leave the military without having to accept any additional conditions. On the other, they still do not know who exactly will be classified as having been "mobilised earlier", how pre-2022 service will be calculated and documented, or – most importantly – how long they will have to wait for their turn. This procedure is still being developed.

Those classified as having been "mobilised earlier" are expected to be discharged under a separate presidential decree.

In theory, if one assumes that Ukraine's armed forces currently number around one million personnel, and that only a few thousand service members can be discharged each month – perhaps even fewer – some individuals could end up waiting years for their turn.

"The number of service members discharged each month will depend on the situation on the battlefield, whether Russia announces a mobilisation campaign or not, and many other factors," Fedorov explained in an interview with Ukrainian TV channel 1+1.

This may be why he advises everyone, including those who have served the longest, to sign the new contracts. If their turn for discharge arrives before the contract expires – for example, in November 2026 – they would be able to return home.

According to the minister, in such cases a presidential decree would take precedence over the contract. However, the service members interviewed by UP remain sceptical that such a mechanism will work effectively.

3. All the attention and bonuses are for civilians that the state wants to recruit

Another source of discontent was that the military felt it was not the target audience for the reform.

From their perspective – and, in fact, judging by Minister Fedorov's own statements – the primary audience for this reform is civilians whom the state is trying to attract into the armed forces. In other words, the transformation of Ukraine's defence forces has begun with an attempt to make them a more comfortable and appealing place for newcomers: here are clear service terms and high salaries – just come and join.

In theory, this is an entirely logical step. It is meant to encourage civilians to join the army and replace those who already want to leave it. However, there are two caveats.

The first is that some military personnel see it as deeply unfair that civilians who have still not joined the military twelve years into the war are immediately offered better conditions.

"It turns out that the longer a person postpones joining the army, the better the conditions they are eventually offered. And those who enlisted when things were at their hardest once again remain outside all the new incentive programmes and speeches," writes Alina Mykhailova, head of the Ulf medical service, in her column.

"I don't want to cry betrayal, the guys [Fedorov's team – UP] have stepped into 'Augean Stables' that no one before them even dared to tackle. Although they say they spoke to service members at all levels, there is a sense that the logic underpinning this reform is very warped… What Alina [Mykhailova] wrote really resonates. Everyone is thinking about how to offer great conditions to those they want to recruit, while those who are already here 'have nowhere to go'," an officer named Hennadii shared his thoughts with UP.

One of our sources, a soldier from the 93rd Brigade who has been in the army for ten years, has not even read the news about the new contracts. He is convinced that the state will not release him from service for a long time. It should be noted that for a year of service between 2014 and 2022, the Ministry of Defence offers only one month of deferral, whereas for a year after 2022, it's six months.

In response to concerns about unfairness towards those already serving, the Defence Ministry says that, firstly, those who have served the longest should wait for the discharge procedure under a presidential decree. Secondly, a current serviceman can sign a new contract for 10 months, while a civilian can only sign one for 14 (as if this were truly a significant difference).

The second caveat – or rather, a concern about the logic of the reform – is that it is currently difficult to say whether it will work for civilians at all. Because if it doesn't, who will replace those leaving their posts? And will they even be able to leave?

"If there is no one to replace the current assault troops, if there are not enough conscripted personnel, then how will the state demobilise the current assault troops? It will be easier to rewrite the service terms on paper than to leave the front exposed. Although Fedorov's team promises to present changes to the mobilisation process at the next stage of the reform. If we see queues at recruitment centres rather than just polished presentations, then we will be able to be happy for our guys and see them off on leave. For now, the reform is viewed with scepticism," an officer from one of the assault regiments told UP.

UP also, out of curiosity, asked one conscription-age man who is currently avoiding service but regularly donates money whether the new contracts had inspired him. He replied that the topic of "new contracts" simply does not exist in his civilian bubble.

"It's being discussed on Threads, among the military, journalists – they are the ones thinking whether to sign a contract or not, reading into it. But civilians don't care, just as before. They are only thinking about whether their disability group [deferral based on a fictitious disability – UP], deferral or university admission will be cancelled. They have already decided for themselves that they will not go. Maybe only those who cannot afford a deferral will look into these contracts. If this had been adopted in 2024, maybe something would have changed. But now it's two years too late," the man said.

4. Lack of clarity on what to do with existing contracts and whether deferral will apply

The issue is that Fedorov's proposed contracts are not the only ones of their kind. Before them, there were million-hryvnia contracts for young people aged 18-24 (which, unfortunately, did not work out). Before those, there were standard army contracts for one, three or five years or contracts "until the end of the special period".

This means that part of the Ukrainian military (according to UP estimates, at least 25-30%) is already serving under various contracts. At present, they do not understand whether they should terminate their current contracts in favour of new ones, or how deferral will be calculated for them.

"Personally, I was really waiting for instructions on what those of us with 'until demobilisation' contracts [often signed in 2022 – UP] should do. Because I'm on one myself. And with every legislative change, these contracts are constantly overlooked. Yet a huge number of people signed them – practically everyone in my circle is on such a contract. It feels as though no one remembers them anymore," an officer from one of the Air Assault Forces corps told UP.

A few days ago, Deputy Defence Minister Mstyslav Banik clarified on his Facebook page that service members who already have contracts may either re-sign them under the new terms or serve out their existing ones. However, what this means for deferral remains unclear, and UP has so far been unable to establish this.

Service members themselves are awaiting official guidance, which is expected to be issued to military units, on whether it is worth re-signing their contracts.

Incidentally, there is another notable detail: following Banik's briefing, his remarks about the "special status of officers" – implying they are too valuable to be released from service – were widely reported.

However, as the Defence Ministry clarified to UP, this claim is incorrect. Officers can sign new contracts and expect deferment on equal terms with others. Banik himself, who is an active serviceman, has already signed a 24-month contract and expects to receive deferral after completing it.

5. Uneven salary increases

Perhaps the second most contentious aspect of the reform, after the lack of clear service terms, is the pay rises.

The main grievance among service members is that the increase has effectively bypassed UAV operators and technicians, who now account for the majority of battlefield strikes and have effectively replaced a significant number of other military specialisations. It has also only marginally affected rear-echelon personnel – logisticians, cooks, media staff and others.

Formally, the pay of rear personnel has indeed increased by as much as 50%, from UAH 20,000 (US$445) to UAH 30,000 (US$667).

However, when one considers the cost of food, fuel and rent in cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv or Pavlohrad – where many rear headquarters are based – it becomes clear that, firstly, this pay is meagre. Secondly, it falls far short of what would be expected for what should now be considered a prestigious profession.

While working in the east, UP regularly encounters service members in rear positions who rent rooms in the homes of elderly people because they cannot afford separate accommodation.

"If rear positions are so unimportant, then why do they exist? If they are necessary for the functioning of the army, then why are the people who have been ensuring its operation for years paid salaries that increasingly lag behind the realities of life?" Alina Mykhailova aptly asks in her column mentioned above.

At the briefing, UP asked Deputy Minister Banik why rear personnel receive such low pay and whether this aligns with the concept of fairness that the Ministry of Defence so strongly emphasises. He replied that the ministry would be happy to pay more, but is constrained by available resources.

Separately, several sources focused on assault troops and infantry in the context of salary increases. The question is whether high pay (UAH 300,000 (US$6,700) – UAH 460,000 (US$10,200) per month) can now, in 2026, motivate new recruits to join the infantry – that is, to undertake the most difficult and dangerous tasks.

An officer from one of the assault regiments, speaking to UP on condition of anonymity, is convinced that pay does not significantly influence the motivation of assault troops.

"Our fighters already earn significantly more than they did in civilian life – instead of UAH 10,000 (US$222) – UAH 20,000 (US$445), they now receive UAH 100,000 (US$2,200) – UAH 200,000 (US$4,450). For them, this is already a different income level, and it is sufficient. Increasing it to UAH 300,000 (US$6,700) – UAH 400,000 (US$8,900) makes little difference. Moreover, previous attempts to use financial incentives have not produced tangible results. We do have some who joined under the '18-24' contract, but overall, a million did not motivate young people. It is unlikely that the current increase will either," the officer said.

***

At the next stage of the reform, the Ministry of Defence promises to address the mobilisation process – in particular, Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Centres as its main instruments – as well as the two million Ukrainians who are evading military service.

What exactly will be changed and what methods will be used to work with draft dodgers remains unknown. To all journalists' questions about mobilisation – perhaps the most broken, painful, yet necessary process – the Ministry of Defence responds: "Wait and see."

Despite the justified criticism directed at Fedorov's team, it must be acknowledged that they have taken on some of the most difficult challenges of our time. And we all have a vested interest in seeing them resolved.

Let the walls of the stables come crashing down.

Olha Kyrylenko, UP

Translated by Anna Kybukevych and Yelyzaveta Khodatska

Edited by Susan McDonald

Over the next eight hours, he crawled his way towards the pump, metre by metre. He watched as some drivers turned up and cut in ahead because someone else had been saving a place for them while queueing themselves. He was equally irritated by others who were waiting despite still having at least half a tank full.

It's not hard to imagine how he felt when the filling station ran out of petrol moments before his turn finally came. He had to spend the night in his car so as not to lose his place in the queue.

He eventually managed to get some petrol at around 11:00 the following day, after spending 19 hours waiting in his vehicle. He was allowed to buy just 20 litres (about 5.3 gallons) – the current limit per customer in Crimea – before finally driving home.

This is just one of the many stories that have flooded Crimean social media over the past two weeks. Occupied Crimea is facing an unprecedented fuel crisis unlike anything seen before.

The crisis is the result of a series of strikes by Ukraine's defence forces on the logistics infrastructure that supplies fuel to the peninsula. The long queues at petrol stations, with no guarantee that fuel will be available even after hours of waiting, are only the most visible symptom.

In this article, we explore how occupied Crimea descended into a "logistics lockdown", what disrupted its usual fuel supply routes, and what might happen next.

Managed shortage

"Logistics lockdown" is a term coined by Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. On 27 May, he announced an expansion of mid-range attacks (known as "middle strikes"), which target Russian positions at distances of 150-300 km. The objective is to systematically destroy Russian logistics and military capabilities in the operational rear.

"Our task is to further increase pressure on the Russians behind the front lines and deprive them of the ability to conduct active assault operations," Fedorov said. "Over the past few months, we have quadrupled the destruction of enemy logistics, storage points, equipment, command posts and supply routes in the operational rear. The pattern is already visible on our dashboards: the more Russian logistics are destroyed, the fewer assault operations take place along the line of contact."

Fedorov added that as part of the programme's first phase, the Ministry of Defence, together with the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, had allocated an additional UAH 5 billion (about US$111 million) to procure modern middle-strike assets.

The effects of the "logistics lockdown" had been felt in Crimea several days before Fedorov's announcement. The occupation administration in Sevastopol introduced the first fuel restrictions as early as 22 May, limiting sales to 20 litres per vehicle "until the situation stabilises". Just two days later, petrol disappeared from filling stations operated by TES, one of Crimea's two largest fuel chains.

On 30 May, the 20-litre limit for AI-95 petrol was extended across the entire peninsula. Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of the occupation administration, urged residents not to stockpile fuel.

Ironically, only last December Aksyonov had promoted a new fuel supply logistics mechanism that he claimed would eliminate the risk of shortages altogether, assuring residents they could now be confident that fuel would always be available.

Local social media channels were instantly filled with reports of empty petrol stations and kilometre-long queues at those that still had supplies.

The arrival of summer only exacerbated the crisis. On 4 June, the occupation authorities banned sales of fuel for cash. Aksyonov promised to send local officials to every petrol station to monitor the pumps and record the registration numbers of the vehicles that were being filled up using ration coupons.

To show that officials were sharing the burden, the Crimean authorities reduced the use of official vehicles to one car per "ministry".

On 6 June, Sevastopol switched to fuel sales via QR codes, which could only be obtained through the Russian messaging app Max. The system was simple: the number of QR codes corresponded to the amount of fuel available. Codes for the following day were released at 22:00 and snapped up within seconds.

It wasn't long before the fuel shortage hit public transport. Around 400 buses across Crimea stopped running. Transport companies began cutting routes. The main beneficiaries were taxi drivers with gas-powered vehicles, and taxi fares skyrocketed.

The crisis soon spread beyond the fuel market. Sugar, cereals and sunflower oil began to disappear from supermarket shelves, and some retailers introduced purchase limits on certain products.

An anonymous Crimean activist told Krym.Realii (Crimea.Realities), a regional Radio Liberty project: "Large retail chains with their own warehouses and storage facilities are still holding out, but even they already have shortages. The authorities are urging them to eke out supplies from their warehouses, so in recent days some popular cereals can still be bought in the morning, but by the afternoon the shelves are empty. Pensioners have already bought up almost all the sugar. A lot of small shops that relied on direct supplier deliveries are closing because they have no stock left."

The occupation authorities are trying to contain price increases through agricultural fairs, where products are traditionally sold more cheaply than at markets. In addition, several retail chains and producers have pledged not to raise mark-ups above 5% on a range of basic food items.

Serhii Sapiehin, director of the Psychea Scientific and Technical Centre, describes the situation in Crimea as a managed shortage that is already showing signs of becoming a systemic logistical problem for the occupation authorities.

"It's still too early to speak of a complete collapse. As long as healthcare, utilities, food deliveries, public transport and basic military supply continue to function, this remains a managed shortage. However, if the disruptions spread from petrol stations to the broader economy, essential services and military logistics, then it becomes a systemic crisis," he explains.

In Sapiehin's assessment, Crimean residents are likely to begin seeing signs of a systemic crisis within a month.

No petrol, no tourists

On 8 June, reports of petrol shortages began emerging from Russia's Krasnodar Krai as well. Locals were quick to identify the culprit: Crimeans crossing the Kerch Bridge to buy fuel. In reality, however, it is not possible to transport large quantities of fuel back to Crimea this way, as private vehicles have long been prohibited from carrying more than 100 litres of liquid across the bridge.

The shortage immediately gave rise to a new business opportunity. Reselling petrol on the black market became highly profitable, with some sellers asking RUB 450 per litre (around US$6.24; for comparison, a litre of A-95 at Ukrnafta stations cost US$1.67 on 15 June). Some people paid up, while others reported the new entrepreneurs to the authorities. Several sellers were detained by security forces and had their fuel confiscated. The formal charge was doing business without registration or a licence. Some were forced to apologise on camera, with the videos later posted on Crimean Telegram channels.

But it wasn't just fuel resellers that aroused public anger. Anyone perceived as wasting petrol also became a target.

"Where can I send a video? It's outrageous what's going on in Yalta!" one user complained in the comments on Sergei Aksyonov's Telegram channel. "A sightseeing boat is sailing with zero passengers on board while Crimea is facing a catastrophe – there's no petrol/diesel! How is this possible? Boats are cruising around empty or half-empty while ordinary people can't fill up their cars."

The queues at petrol stations and the growing flood of complaints on social media inevitably hit one of Crimea's most sensitive sectors: tourism. According to Russian media reports, hotel bookings in Crimea were down by a third in the two weeks following the onset of the fuel shortages compared with the same period in 2025. Meanwhile, the cancellation rate reached 79%, all while the cost of holidays in Crimea rose by 17-25%.

One hotel in Saky attempted to salvage the tourist season by offering 10 litres of petrol free with bookings of at least two nights and 20 litres for stays of three nights or more. The promotion did not last long – not because the hotel ran out of rooms, but because it ran out of fuel. Another villa owner proposed an even more inventive deal, offering free accommodation in exchange for 100 litres of petrol. It's not known whether anyone accepted.

"The tourist season adds another layer of demand," notes Serhii Sapiehin. "It isn't just fuel for visitors' cars. It also means additional pressure on shops, hotels, catering services, transport, water deliveries, food supplies and service providers. As a result, even a relatively small reduction in fuel supplies can be felt much more acutely during the holiday season."

The power of middle strikes

After occupying part of Ukraine's south, the Kremlin set about developing a land corridor to Crimea. The route became particularly important after Ukraine's first successful attack on the Kerch Bridge in October 2022. According to Vasyl Maliuk, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Russian forces stopped using the bridge for military logistics altogether after the Ukrainian strikes.

Nevertheless, the Rostov-on-Don–Taganrog–Mariupol–Melitopol–Simferopol route remained relatively secure for a long time. It was used by both civilians and the Russian military, as Ukraine's defence forces simply lacked the capability to strike this logistical artery.

Everything changed when Ukraine began deploying middle-strike drones on a large scale. The land corridor to Crimea was one of the first targets. Ukrainian drones started hunting military and freight vehicles, including fuel tankers. Drones were also used to mine roads. The campaign gradually expanded. According to Ukrainska Pravda, at least 27 units from various branches of Ukraine's defence forces are now known to be conducting strikes at ranges of up to 300 km.

As early as mid-May, the Ukrainian attacks prompted Volodymyr Saldo, the Russian-installed governor of the occupied part of Kherson Oblast, to restrict lorry traffic along the section of the land corridor under his control.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces continued to strike fuel logistics facilities within Crimea itself. On 30 May, the 412th "Nemesis" Brigade hit the Feodosiia maritime oil terminal, a key hub for the supply of fuel and lubricants to the peninsula by sea.

A week later, the terminal was targeted again, this time by Ukraine's Special Operations Forces. Another target during that operation was the Semykolodezianska oil depot, where Russian forces store fuel oil and diesel. On the same night, drones also attacked an Atan fuel depot containing 17 storage tanks of various types.

Ukraine's strikes have also targeted rail infrastructure and bridges leading to Crimea. In early June, Ukrainian forces hit the Chonhar Bridge, one of the key crossings linking the peninsula with mainland Ukraine. As a result, freight traffic had to be rerouted via a pontoon crossing or diverted to alternative routes.

"The destruction of the Chonhar Bridge adds 140 km to the journey, and along a route where Ukraine has significantly greater strike capabilities to control the road," military expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi told Ukrainska Pravda.

On 11 June, Ukrainian forces attacked several bridges connecting Crimea with Kherson Oblast. According to Ukrainian sources, drones struck a convoy of around 50 lorries carrying military equipment and fuel that had gathered near one of the crossings.

"The fuel crisis is a continuation of the consistent efforts by Ukraine's defence forces to isolate Crimea and transform it, in logistical terms, from a peninsula into an island. 'Crimea is an island' used to be a popular phrase in Russia. We're turning it into an island for the occupiers," Mykhailo Honchar, president of the Strategy XXI Centre for Global Studies, told Ukrainska Pravda.

Honchar recalled that after the Ukrainian strikes on the Kerch Bridge, Russia was forced to go back to using train ferries between Crimea and the Port of Kavkaz. However, that route has also gradually been lost. In April, Ukraine's Defence Intelligence reported that drone strikes had disabled the Slavyanin, the last remaining train ferry operating across the strait.

"The remaining option is for tankers carrying petroleum products to arrive at the ports of Feodosiia, Kerch and Sevastopol. But that also carries significant risks, because experience has shown that such vessels can be destroyed quite effectively by our drones," Honchar noted.

The challenge is not only getting fuel onto the peninsula, but also storing it in sufficient quantities. That is becoming more difficult as fuel storage facilities are themselves being increasingly targeted by Ukrainian drones. For this reason, maintaining an uninterrupted flow of supplies has become critically important for Crimea's occupation authorities.

The Kerch Bridge and anti-drone nets

Could Russia resume supplying fuel to Crimea via the Kerch Bridge? At present, vehicles weighing more than five tonnes are not allowed to cross. Following the latest attack in the summer of 2025, the Security Service of Ukraine reported that the bridge's supporting structures at the impact sites were in a critical condition.

Nonetheless, Russia continues to upgrade the bridge's defences.

"They may use it to a limited extent. But again, they understand that if we see the bridge being actively used for these supply chains, we will make decisions about striking it. Especially since we have the capability to do so," military expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi explains, arguing that Russia is unlikely to restore freight traffic across the bridge to its previous levels.

Most of the experts interviewed by Ukrainska Pravda believe the most likely scenario is that Russia will attempt to cover the land corridor to Crimea with anti-drone nets. These nets have long been used along other supply routes, although it is understood that they cannot provide 100% protection.

Pavlo Lakiichuk, head of security programmes at the Strategy XXI Centre for Global Studies, says that what the defence forces are currently doing in Ukraine's south resembles the formation of a blood clot in an artery.

"They identify pressure points and create blockages there. If key sections become clogged, you can cover the rest with nets, but traffic still won't be able to move," he says.

According to Serhii Sapiehin, Crimea's population consumes approximately 4,000 tonnes of fuel per day, of which around 2,500 tonnes are for civilian use.

"That means Crimea requires about 120,000 tonnes of fuel per month, or roughly 2,200 railway tank cars. These are enormous volumes that cannot pass unnoticed by Ukraine's defence forces. So there is little reason to expect any improvement in fuel supplies to Crimea," he concludes.

Rustem Khalilov, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

This is an event conceived by Putin for Putin and about Putin. Every year, the Russian leader gathers officials and business leaders on his home turf to expound his vision of the world, sketch out a picture of the future he would like to see, and demonstrate that Russia is still an "influential power" – and that Putin himself is still a strong, consequential leader.

But in 2026, the conference's unlikely main participant turned out to be someone else entirely.

For many years Ukraine has had no presence at the forum whatsoever. But this year it decided to take part – albeit, as they say in such cases, with a twist.

Ukraine's representation in St Petersburg took the form of long-range Ukrainian drones, which struck energy facilities on the city's outskirts and the Russian naval base at Kronstadt.

A second blow to the forum was delivered by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. The Ukrainian leader published an open letter to Putin, timed precisely to coincide with his scheduled press conference. In this seemingly simple manner, Zelenskyy set the media framing for the Kremlin ruler's subsequent exchange with journalists – a framing Putin wasn't able to break free of.

In reality, this dual strike – by drone and by letter – was part of a bigger story. According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources in the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), the St Petersburg strikes were among the first public signals that Ukraine's summer military-diplomatic campaign had begun.

Zelenskyy has touched on its preparation in passing during meetings with MPs and parliamentary faction leaders, outlining a series of military and political steps intended to bring the Kremlin to an awareness of a simple point over the coming months: that there is no alternative to serious negotiations.

"There is no visible sign that Putin wants to move towards swift negotiations," a source in the president's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "But there are many indirect signals and hints from all the global powers that by autumn the situation may have changed in such a way that leaves him no choice. Our task now is to do everything possible to ensure that Putin has no alternative path available to him at all."

Ukrainska Pravda examines what Ukraine's new "two-pronged offensive" strategy entails, what key objectives must be met for it to succeed, and what role Kyiv assigns to Europe and the United States in this process (spoiler alert: these roles are very different).

Negotiations are dead – long live negotiations!

"We have to acknowledge the obvious: the previous negotiating process is effectively dead," a source within President Zelenskyy's diplomatic team told Ukrainska Pravda. "It has stalled and is going nowhere. Our talks with Kushner and Witkoff, which had been building up since the end of last year, have pretty much come to a halt."

Earlier this year, following the reboot of Ukraine's negotiating team and the arrival of Kyrylo Budanov and David Arakhamiia, the process had been moving along fairly steadily. The parties had worked through virtually everything within their mandates. But one step short of a leaders' meeting, the negotiations went silent.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources in the President's Office insist that Ukraine has spent the past few months trying to do everything possible to revive the talks and draw the Americans back into a more active role.

The problem is that since Donald Trump's return to office, the United States has changed its role. Where once it was an unconditional ally of Ukraine, since the beginning of last year it has sought to position itself as a facilitator of the process.

In Kyiv, this is viewed with considerable scepticism.

"We tell them: 'Friends, you can't just be messengers.' They see their role as listening to us, relaying our position to the Russians, then listening to the Russians and relaying their position back to us. But that is not how Great America can function," one of Ukrainska Pravda's sources said with frustration.

"If you've taken it upon yourself to moderate a conversation, then behave like moderators, not couriers. Project strength, set the terms of the dialogue, make the parties listen to you and to one another," the source added.

It was this stalling of the diplomatic process that compelled Ukraine to seek new ways of strengthening its own position. Now new arguments have begun to emerge.

Since the start of the year, Ukraine has been gradually seizing the initiative in certain domains of the war – primarily by increasing the volume and effectiveness of long-range strikes against Russia's defence companies, energy infrastructure, and oil and gas sector.

The second significant change was depriving the Russians of access to Starlink satellite communication technology. When Ukraine secured a monopoly on the use of Elon Musk's service at the front, this gave the Armed Forces of Ukraine a significant operational advantage.

That advantage has been compounded by the rapid scaling up of production of mid-range (30-200-km) drones which operate via Starlink and can be guided throughout the duration of their flight.

This technology is already beginning to deliver serious results and may in time become one of the main factors to change the situation on the battlefield.

Ukraine is moving step by step towards what the Ukrainian military is calling a "logistics lockdown" of Crimea: the gradual severing of military, transport and energy logistics both on the peninsula itself and along the land corridor that connects it to Russian territory.

If this plan succeeds in full, Crimea and the southern grouping of Russian forces could find themselves in a first-of-its-kind operational drone blockade – with no large-scale Ukrainian ground offensive and no major mechanised operations, but with the gradual destruction of their air defence systems, logistics, energy supply and troop support capabilities.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources in the senior leadership of the defence forces say this process is already underway.

"Wait until July – and you will see what Ukrainian might is," one of them said.

It is against this backdrop that Zelenskyy has decided to intensify the diplomatic counter-offensive as well.

Wartime correspondence

Credit where credit is due: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a master of media strategy and holding the public's attention. He's even managed to breathe new life into the long-forgotten art of political letter-writing.

In early June, the president sent several important letters to key world capitals – Washington, Berlin and Brussels – as well as the aforementioned missive to Putin.

The idea proved unexpectedly effective, at least in terms of media engagement.

These letters serve much the same purpose as Zelenskyy's video addresses to the world did at the start of the full-scale invasion. They capture the attention of international audiences, compel all the parties involved to respond, and at the same time allow Ukraine to shape the narrative on its own terms.

The first indication that Putin could and should be subjected to media pressure came on 9 May, when Ukraine succeeded in drawing the Kremlin into a behind-the-scenes discussion over permission to hold the Victory Day parade in Moscow. Whatever decision Putin made, he was already on the losing side of the information battle.

Now the strategy is to turn that one-off tactical success into a sustained operational advantage. In other words, rather than reacting to Russian information operations, Ukraine aims to set the agenda itself and force the Kremlin into carefully prepared information traps.

Another objective behind the drone campaign and the exchange of letters has been to bring the US's attention back to Ukraine.

American diplomacy has largely shifted its focus to the Middle East and Iran in recent months. Kyiv has made little effort to conceal its frustration over this.

"They're completely tied up with Iran," a source within Zelenskyy's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "Every couple of days a deal is supposedly about to be signed and then everything falls apart again. Quite simply, they can't take their eyes off Iran long enough to focus on anything else. We're no longer their top priority. But we'd like Trump's people to at least come here and decide how we're going to move forward."

Zelenskyy himself has even joked about the oft-announced and just as often postponed visits by the US envoys.

"We are in fact in constant contact with the American side regarding our negotiators. We are waiting for the negotiating team to arrive. But in my view, we have been waiting for them for a very long time. Sadly, we are not their focus today. Iran is the number one issue for the United States of America, followed by Ukraine. Unfortunately, we are in a queue of these wars," the Ukrainian president said on 3 June.

Eventually, after waiting in vain for Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to visit Kyiv, Zelenskyy spoke to them by phone during a stopover at Chișinău airport.

"We discussed prospects in the context of the G7 Summit and other events in June. I outlined the data we have regarding what Moscow is intent on," the president said briefly about the conversation before flying on to London for talks with the leaders of the UK, France and Germany.

During the meeting of the so-called E3, and later in discussions with the Nordic-Baltic Eight, Zelenskyy told his counterparts directly that the time has come to become more actively involved and jointly increase pressure on Putin across all international platforms, including within the G7 framework – a topic Zelenskyy had, somewhat unexpectedly, also discussed with Trump's envoys Kushner and Witkoff.

Ukraine's logic is fairly straightforward: having the Americans act solely as mediators is not particularly beneficial for Kyiv – not least because Zelenskyy's team is perfectly capable of talking to the Russians itself.

This was evident during direct negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, where the Ukrainian and Russian negotiators spent several hours speaking without intermediaries.

Direct contact with Putin became apparent after the Russian leader revealed that his trusted oligarch Roman Abramovich had travelled to Ukraine and met with Zelenskyy.

It was not the billionaire's first visit to Kyiv during the full-scale war. In March 2022, he was secretly received in the Ukrainian capital and even managed to suffer what appeared to be poisoning. The incident caused Zelenskyy's team such alarm that they only relaxed once Abramovich had safely left Ukraine alive.

Ukrainska Pravda has been aware that further talks with the Russian oligarch had taken place in Ukraine but, at the request of its sources, could not report on them for fear of jeopardising this communication channel. However, after Putin himself effectively disclosed its existence, Zelenskyy described in detail both the substance of the talks and the message he had sent to the Russian leader.

One additional detail can be revealed: Zelenskyy's message also included a brief postscript from the Ukrainian negotiating team. The gist of it was that Russia's military commanders are misleading Putin about the true situation on the battlefield and they will not capture the whole of Donbas either by the end of the summer or by autumn. When he eventually realises this, the message went on, he should remember that Ukraine warned him of precisely this outcome, and it would therefore be wiser to just stop.

So far, Putin has publicly stated that he sees no point in a face-to-face meeting with Zelenskyy because there is "nothing to negotiate".

Kyiv had expected that response. Nobody in the President's Office seriously believed that Putin would agree to end the war in June or July.

Instead, the timeframe increasingly being mentioned by Ukrainian officials is October or November.

"Taking the totality of military, diplomatic and international factors into account, that is when a genuine window of opportunity for negotiations could open. Sometime before the US elections and after Russia's State Duma elections," a source in the president's diplomatic team reflected.

At that point, the aim would not necessarily be to reach a final peace agreement immediately. Rather, it would be possible to formally acknowledge the new balance of forces on the battlefield, achieve a phased cessation of hostilities, and only then move on to searching for political solutions to bring the war to a definitive end.

Until then, Ukraine has an opportunity to make the most of the coming months.

First, it must do everything possible to launch genuine integration into the EU following the opening of accession negotiating clusters.

Second, it must secure agreement on a European role in any future peace talks. Ukraine wants Europe at the negotiating table, but not as merely another "facilitator".

Speaking in Tallinn recently, Zelenskyy put it as plainly as possible: Europe cannot be a neutral mediator, because it is an ally of Ukraine.

For that reason, Kyiv's primary objective today is not to force Putin to the negotiating table tomorrow, but to use the summer to strengthen its own position.

Then, when a genuine window for major decisions opens in the autumn, Ukraine will be as strong, united and well-prepared as possible, ready to shape the agenda together with its allies rather than having it imposed upon them.

Roman Romaniuk for Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Anastasiia Yankina and Tetiana Buchkovska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

Today, things are very different. A Google search for the village returns more than 200,000 results in Ukrainian and nearly 300,000 in English. Ukrainians have come to refer to the settlement as a "fortress" and "the second Chornobaivka".

Almost every day, social media users have been creating new memes about the defence of the village. The famous phrase by the British banker Nathan Rothschild – "whoever controls information controls the world" – has been humorously reworked with "information" replaced by "Mala Tokmachka".

Behind this unexpected "popularity" lies Russia's repeated failure to establish even a foothold in the outskirts of this small village, located 75 km from the city of Zaporizhzhia. Over the past year, Russian officials and propagandists have repeatedly claimed to have captured Mala Tokmachka, only for Ukrainian forces to refute those claims each time.

Why is it so important for Russia to seize this settlement?

"Mala Tokmachka is the southern gateway to Orikhiv," says Dmytro Pelykh, Head of Communications for Ukraine's 118th Separate Mechanised Brigade. "If the bastards manage to enter the village and reinforce it with additional drone units, they'll make life in the town far more of a nightmare than it already is. But the Russians simply don't have the resources to pull that off." Soldiers from the brigade have been defending Mala Tokmachka since 2023.

Orikhiv is one of the Armed Forces of Ukraine's key defensive strongholds on the Zaporizhzhia front. Should Russian forces push deeper towards the town, they would gain additional opportunities to increase pressure on Zaporizhzhia.

The defence of Mala Tokmachka has now lasted for more than 1,500 days.

The village itself, however, has long since been reduced to rubble, its only remaining form defined by the lines on a map. Before the full-scale invasion, Mala Tokmachka was home to nearly 3,000 people. Today, not a single civilian remains.

Ukrainska Pravda looks at how people lived in Mala Tokmachka before 24 February 2022 and what is happening in the village today.

The Makhno movement, famine and war: a brief history of Mala Tokmachka

Written records of Mala Tokmachka date back to the late eighteenth century. Its first settlers were Ukrainians from Chernihiv, Poltava and Kyiv oblasts. Population records were kept by local priests, and one of the earliest entries in the village parish register records the birth of a child to the Ishchenko family.

Ishchenko was the maiden name of the grandmother of Serhii Plokhii, the internationally acclaimed, 69-year-old author and Harvard professor of Ukrainian history. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Plokhii family also appears in the settlement's records.

Plokhii has only visited his ancestral home once, long before the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war.

"Mala Tokmachka loomed so large in our family's memory that when my father and I finally arrived there, we felt a slight sense of disappointment because it turned out not to be the centre of the world we had imagine," recalls Plokhii with a smile during an interview with Ukrainska Pravda. "The landscape was beautiful, though: the Konka River, green plants all around, everything in bloom."

The next stop on the Plokhii family's journey was the Nestor Makhno Museum in Huliaipole, around 50 km from Mala Tokmachka.

Between 1918 and 1921, the village of Mala Tokmachka was one of the strongholds of the Makhno movement. Insurgent detachments were formed and based there, while control of the local railway station allowed the Makhnovists to move infantry and weapons swiftly between fronts. [The Makhno movement is a large-scale attempt by Ukrainian peasants, led by Nestor Makhno and his Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921 – ed.]

"The commander of a large Makhnovist detachment in Mala Tokmachka was Yakiv Ishchenko," says Plokhii. "My great-grandfather's surname was also Ishchenko. I suspect they didn't get on, because the Makhnovists shot at my great-grandfather. After being wounded, he was forced to give up farming."

Within the historian's family, the Makhno movement was associated with banditry.

"I was told stories like this: a young man proposed to a girl and was rejected; later he joined the insurgents, returned and burned down her house. But village stories are often very complicated," he says.

After the Ukrainian struggle for independence in 1917-1921, Plokhii's great-grandfather became the head of one of the newly established collective farms. He would later become one of the defendants in the notorious "Orikhiv Case" during the Holodomor. [Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine which lasted from 1932 to 1933 and claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians – ed.]

In the winter of 1932, the entire leadership of the district party committee and executive committee, along with officials from agricultural institutions in the Orikhiv district, were accused of "organised sabotage" of grain procurement. They were alleged to have sought to reduce and conceal the true harvest yields. The suspects were arrested.

Plokhii's great-grandfather was sent to serve his sentence in Zaporizhzhia. His family brought him a warm coat so that he would not freeze in prison. Plokhii's aunt still keeps this piece of clothing to this day.

In early 1933, Plokhii's great-grandfather was released from prison. He gathered the entire family and moved 8,000km east to the Kamchatka peninsula in the hope of disappearing into the vastness of the Soviet Union. He returned to Zaporizhzhia in the late 1930s and bought a house near the railway station so that he could occasionally travel to Mala Tokmachka. But the Ishchenko-Plokhii family never returned to village life.

During World War II, the people of Mala Tokmachka lived under German occupation for almost two years, from October 1941 until September 1943.

The occupying forces terrorised and looted the local population, forcibly deporting young people to Germany in freight wagons. The mother of Halyna Levchenko, the director of the folk ensemble Tokmachanochka, found herself on one of these trains at gunpoint. Miraculously, she managed to jump from the carriage and make her way home.

Halyna spent her childhood listening to her closest relatives recount the horrors of wartime. She hoped that a war like this would never happen again.

But in February 2022, the first Russian missiles struck her native Mala Tokmachka.

How the village lived and celebrated life

Halyna Levchenko will soon turn 80. She spent almost her entire life in Mala Tokmachka. Her home resembled a museum of musical instruments, with an accordion, button accordion, wooden flute and tambourine among its exhibits.

For the past three decades, she has led Tokmachanochka, a folk ensemble founded in the village in 1985. Its repertoire includes some 600 traditional songs that Halyna collected from across Ukraine.

Before the full-scale invasion, Tokmachanochka performed in many Ukrainian cities, from Donetsk and Luhansk in the pre-war years to Kyiv and Yaremche in Ukraine's west. After 24 February 2022, the ensemble ceased to exist.

"We still keep in touch, but everyone has scattered. Some went abroad, others to the west of Ukraine. Only four of us are left in Zaporizhzhia, and we're all older now – we can no longer travel to give concerts," Halyna told UP.

In late February 2022, Levchenko was forced to leave her museum-like home and relocate from Mala Tokmachka to Zaporizhzhia. She has not returned since. However, she remains in contact with the Ukrainian soldiers defending the village. All that remains to remind her of Tokmachanochka is a single stage costume and an album of photographs from the ensemble's performances.

We interviewed Halyna Levchenko about the old and new traditions of Mala Tokmachka and about life in the village during the full-scale war. Here is her story in her own words.

"When I was young, we had a tradition called vyriazhanky, held when young men were called up for military service. There would always be an evening of music, dancing, games and a feast – almost like a grand wedding celebration. People would sing and dance right up until the train carrying a recruit to Zaporizhzhia departed. Only when he waved to us from the carriage would everyone finally go home. I was always invited to sing at these gatherings.

By the way, my ensemble never sang Russian songs – only Ukrainian folk songs. And hardly anyone in Mala Tokmachka spoke standard Russian. People mostly spoke surzhyk [a mixed Ukrainian-Russian vernacular].

Our favourite holiday was Ivana Kupala Night. There was a meadow by the river outside the village where livestock usually grazed. On Kupala Night, young people gathered there. The girls wove flower wreaths and set them afloat on the river to see who would marry first. That tradition had existed in Mala Tokmachka for generations.

We had everything we needed: a church, a hospital with a laboratory, a school, a nursery, a community arts centre, shops and a market. Many local people worked at the prison colony [Orikhiv Correctional Colony No. 88]. We hardly ever went to Orikhiv because we could shop for groceries and receive medical treatment in the village itself.

About five or six years before the full-scale war, gas and running water were installed. The entire village had street lighting. There was a tree-lined avenue with benches in the centre where we would spend our evenings. Music used to play there. Girls used to dance with such energy that sparks seemed to fly from their heels.

My garden was full of daffodils, tulips and peonies. There was an orchard with apple, plum and apricot trees. We had a wonderful life. But it has all been destroyed. The village lies in ruins. The craters in the roads are so deep that they cannot be bypassed. The only way to reach my house now is across the fields, and only in dry weather.

All that remains of my home are the walls and a half-collapsed roof. The ceiling in the bedroom has fallen in. It crushed the place where my musical instruments were kept. I don't know whether they survived. At the end of my vegetable garden, an unexploded munition is still sticking out of the ground. The Russians 'liberated' us from our home – from the good life we had.

There are no locals left in Tokmachka now. Only soldiers. Until the very end, a few [civilian] men stayed behind. Then there was an attack on the centre of the village. One [man] fled, the other was killed. I don't know whether his family managed to recover his body. There were difficulties with that. I suppose he is still there. It's heartbreaking.

And it's heartbreaking to see the village like this. A village like ours can never truly be rebuilt. If I live to see the end of the war, and if the walls of my house are still standing, I will ask my son and grandson to restore everything exactly as it was. Those are my dreams. I would like to live just one or two days after victory, if only to set foot on my native land once again. And what will happen after that is in God's hands."

The Mala Tokmachka outpost

The penal colony Halyna mentioned provided many residents of Mala Tokmachka with employment in peacetime. After the start of the full-scale invasion, the prisoners were evacuated, and the facility became both a shelter and a defensive position for Ukrainian troops.

Roman "Rokhas" Haman, 42, a former serviceman of the National Guard's 15th Brigade Kara-Dag and frontman of the band Royalcat, was born in Drohobych in Lviv Oblast but says he was "reborn" in the Orikhiv colony in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

He joined the National Guard of Ukraine in early 2023. His first combat deployment took him to Mala Tokmachka in April 2023, when he first learned of the village's existence. During his service there, Haman wrote the song Tokmachka.

Rokhas was seriously wounded on the fourth day of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive. After several months of rehabilitation, he returned to rear-area service, first on the Zaporizhzhia front and later on the Donetsk front. In 2025, he left the army for health reasons.

He told Ukrainska Pravda how he was "reborn" at the Orikhiv colony. Here is his story in his own words.

"In the spring of 2023, not every house in Mala Tokmachka had yet been destroyed. Our unit even had an observation post inside one of them. We stayed in the village for a week or two before relocating to Tavriiske. From there, we drove out to our positions every night.

Near Tokmachka, our positions had names like Valencia, Hamburg, Rome and New York (laughs).

We called the prison Shanghai. It was like a small town, with numerous buildings. We launched drones from there. The colony provided good shelter, but the Russians knew we were inside, so they constantly bombarded it with tubed artillery, aircraft and self-propelled guns.

One day our Starlink stopped working, so we had to move temporarily from the prison to where our brothers-in-arms were based in a block of flats. The buildings were rather flimsy and stood right on the edge of Tokmachka. Beyond them lay open fields and then the enemy. The Russians hammered those apartment blocks with anti-tank guided missiles and artillery.

Command ordered us to operate drones from the top floor. The building had already been partially destroyed – one flat had taken a hit on the balcony, another in the living room. I walked into an apartment and saw children's toys scattered across the floor and a USB flash drive lying on a table. It was an incredibly strange feeling: only recently people had been living there, and now every single weapon you could imagine was targeting it."

At the beginning of June, I suffered a head wound. It was an airstrike. Ironically, our bad luck was that we were inside a shelter. The Russians hit the entrance directly, and fragments showered inside.

I saw light. There was complete silence around me. I remember saying to myself: 'Bro, that was a strike. You're Cargo 300 now ["injured in action" in Ukrainian military slang].' Then I thought: 'Why Cargo 300? If I can still think, I must not be dead.' My brothers-in-arms started trying to bring me round, slapping my face. I couldn't feel any pain, only overwhelming weakness. I wanted to dissolve into smoke and disappear.

My commander bandaged my head. They had to cut my clothes off to check for other wounds. I was wearing a fashionable American-made UBACS tactical shirt. I paid UAH 4,700 (about US$110) for it. We were experienced soldiers, after all. Seryi said to me, 'Bro, sorry, but I have to cut it.' After being wounded, I realised that in combat you should wear whatever you have.

They took me to the stabilisation point, and I blacked out. I opened my eyes after surgery. There were tubes everywhere. I immediately started testing my memory: my wife's name, my child's name, where I lived. Then I tried recalling lyrics to songs. I thought to myself, if I can still remember songs, then my memory must be alright [he smiles as he says this].

The fragment is still lodged in my brain. It's too deep. The neurosurgeon warned me: 'We can remove it, but afterwards you may never walk again – or you could be left in a vegetative state.' So Mala Tokmachka will stay in my head forever [he smiles again]. An X-ray of my skull became the cover image for the song I wrote about the village.

I feel as though I was reborn in Tokmachka. I realised that the most important thing in life is simply to be alive. Everything else is insignificant. If you've made a mistake or said something foolish to someone, it can all be put right. Since then, I've taken life's problems far less seriously and become much braver.

I would love to return to Mala Tokmachka one day. To see what has become of the village. To walk through the places where we fought. To remember my brothers-in-arms. So many lads were wounded there, so many were killed... It's horrific."

The village today

On the June map published by DeepState analysts, the outskirts of Mala Tokmachka are marked as a "grey zone". However, Dmytro Pelykh, Head of Communications for the 118th Brigade, told Ukrainska Pravda that the entire village remains under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

"The 'grey zone' appeared on the DeepState map in autumn 2025 after one large-scale Russian assault. Out of 26 enemy vehicles, only one armoured vehicle reached Mala Tokmachka and deployed ten occupiers. We destroyed all the other vehicles before they reached the village. Over the following three days, our troops killed five Russian soldiers. By the end of the week, they had captured another five," Pelykh explains.

Almost every day, Russian forces attempt to infiltrate Mala Tokmachka in small groups of two or three soldiers. According to the 118th Brigade's press officer, Ukrainian troops eliminate 90–95% of the assault groups before they reach the village.

However, due to their dispersed tactics, some Russian soldiers still manage to reach the outskirts of Mala Tokmachka. Their objective is to build up forces before attempting assaults on Ukrainian defensive positions.

Alongside these "meat assaults", Russian units are also employing a scorched-earth strategy.

Using guided aerial bombs, drone-dropped munitions and FPV drones, they are systematically destroying every building in the village. Destroying the structures means destroying potential shelters, making it increasingly difficult to hold defensive positions. Russian forces used the same tactic in Bakhmut and many other Ukrainian settlements.

Mala Tokmachka had reliable shelters: the brickworks and the prison camp. Both have suffered severe damage from guided aerial bombs (KABs). The brickworks has been almost levelled to the ground by Russian strikes. The penitentiary remains in somewhat better condition, although it continues to come under regular bombardment.

The constant threat from the air has made troop rotations for the 118th Brigade extremely difficult. In May 2026, the brigade managed to evacuate a 22-year-old soldier who goes by the alias "Monster" from the outskirts of the village after he had held his position for 137 consecutive days.

The conditions for defending Mala Tokmachka are exceptionally harsh. Nevertheless, the head of communications for the 118th Brigade insists: "We are defending, not attacking, so our losses are minimal. Compared with the enemy, the ratio is roughly one to ten – perhaps even less."

***

The wave of public attention surrounding Mala Tokmachka was initially triggered by false claims spread by Russian propagandists. In Ukraine, however, that narrative was seized upon, reshaped and turned into a form of counter-propaganda.

United24 began comparing the length of the village's defence to the Great Siege of Gibraltar in the 18th century and the Siege of Leningrad during World War II.

At the end of May 2026, representatives of the Ukrainian Book of Records ceremonially presented soldiers of the 118th Brigade with a certificate recognising their uninterrupted defence of the village.

It gives the impression that another media campaign, similar to the "Bakhmut Fortress" narrative, is beginning to take shape. The important thing is that, amid the swirl of memes and slogans, Ukrainians do not forget that behind every "fortress" lie countless casualties and shattered lives.

Myru Street runs through the entirety of Mala Tokmachka. Until recently, it was the heart of village life: parents walked their children to nursery, students went to school, and local performers staged concerts at the community arts centre.

The central feature of the village's coat of arms is a Sarmatian sword driven into the ground – a symbol of peace. Its blue background likewise represents peaceful skies.

The so-called Russian world has turned Mala Tokmachka into yet another ghost village, one that now survives only in the memories of its former residents and of those who have defended it for more than 1,500 days.

Anhelina Strashkulych, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska

Edited by Shoël Stadlen

This wasn't the first attack on the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In February 2025, a similar drone damaged the New Safe Confinement – the structure that covers the destroyed reactor 4 – and Russian drones now fly over the Exclusion Zone on an almost daily basis.

In fact, Russia's campaign of nuclear terror began on the very first day of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On 24 February 2022, Russian forces seized the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. They were assisted in the occupation by Rosatom, the Russian state-owned corporation responsible for nuclear energy development, generation and research.

In this article, which has been written in conjunction with our partners at the Book of Executioners project, we revisit how events unfolded at Chornobyl during the early weeks of the full-scale invasion. We also reveal what we have learned about some of the Rosatom employees who helped the Russian forces during the occupation of the plant.

"Kyiv in three days"

Reactor 4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant is only about 10 km away from the Belarusian border as the crow flies.

The first Russian troops arrived at the plant shortly after 15:00 on 24 February 2022. They entered through Checkpoint No. 2 and made their way towards the spent nuclear fuel storage facility SNFSF-1. It was nearly 16:00 when Russian armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and a tank reached the administrative building.

One of those who entered the building was Russian police colonel Andrei Frolenkov, then deputy commander of the Arsenal special forces unit of the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya) in Bryansk Oblast. He was soon joined by Major Sergei Burakov, head of the Special Purpose Centre for Rapid Response Forces and Aviation, who is believed to have commanded the occupation contingent during the seizure of the plant.

Following negotiations, the Ukrainian National Guard personnel stationed at the plant were forced to surrender, since engaging in combat on the grounds of a nuclear power plant posed a significant risk of a nuclear incident.

The plant effectively became a logistics hub for Russian forces moving through the area. Meanwhile, staff in the Exclusion Zone continued to work extended shifts and prevented the uninvited "guests" from accessing key facilities.

On 9 March 2022, the plant lost external power after an attack damaged the electricity grid. The Russian occupation forces proposed connecting Chornobyl to the Belarusian grid, but the plant's engineers opted instead to rely on diesel generators.

Meanwhile, the senior officers at the plant were being rotated. In the early weeks of March, Burakov was replaced by Major General of Police Oleg Yakushev, deputy commander of the Siberian District of the Russian National Guard. He effectively became the self-appointed commandant of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Also present at the site was Major General Alexei Rtyshchev, head of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection (RCBP) Troops of Russia's Eastern Military District, who was responsible for resolving the plant's electricity supply problems.

Later, Sergei Maltsev, head of a department within the Office of the Chief of Russia's RCBP Troops, arrived at the Chornobyl plant.

Colonel General Alexei Bezzubikov, deputy director of the National Guard, visited the site towards the end of the occupation to present awards to the Russian soldiers.

Our partners have also established that Russia deployed National Guard units from Dzerzhinsk, Zarechny, Balakovo and Dimitrovgrad to guard the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

When they retreated, Russian forces stole over US$135 million worth of equipment from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. In addition to computers, dosimeters and vehicles, they took servers away with them, and the Central Analytical Laboratory lost a spectrometer worth €6 million and several chromatographs.

The software required to operate the stolen equipment remained in Ukraine, nuclear safety and atomic energy expert Olha Kosharna told Ukrainska Pravda. Moreover, each device had been fitted with a tracker that enabled it to be remotely deactivated, so the Russians were unable to use the equipment they had looted.

The occupiers also took vehicles used for transporting radioactive waste, as well as fire engines that had been transferred to the Exclusion Zone during the major wildfires of 2020.

Most importantly, when they withdrew, the Russian occupation forces took 169 members of Ukraine's National Guard into captivity. Six of them remain imprisoned in Russia to this day.

On 4 April 2022, after Russia's withdrawal from the Exclusion Zone, Police Colonel Frolenkov was awarded the title of Hero of Russia, presumably for his role in the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Training with Rosatom

It is not possible to capture a nuclear facility without prior preparation. In conversations with staff at the plant, the Russians openly boasted that they had seized the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant with relative ease. One reason for that, they claimed, was that they had rehearsed the operation in advance at a facility with a nearly identical layout – the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Kurchatov. Ironically, this is the very plant that Russian milbloggers imagined Ukrainian forces would capture during Ukraine's Kursk operation.

The Kursk Nuclear Power Plant entered service in 1976, just one year before the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant was commissioned in 1977. A comparison of aerial photographs reveals striking similarities in the layout of the two facilities. You can even see the same type of ventilation stack that Chornobyl used to have before the New Safe Confinement structure was installed.

Furthermore, until recently the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant operated exclusively RBMK-1000 reactors – the same type used at Chornobyl. So it is entirely plausible that the facility was used as a training ground for the Russian occupation forces.

Our partners have established that such exercises did in fact take place in 2021. Among other scenarios, Russian forces rehearsed the seizure of a nuclear power plant under the command of the aforementioned Police Colonel Frolenkov. He was assisted by personnel from the RCBP Troops of Russia's Eastern Military District, who were supervised by Colonel Ruslan Tikhomirov.

Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine, who has researched Russia's occupation of Ukrainian nuclear facilities, told Ukrainska Pravda he has received information from multiple sources confirming that such exercises took place, most likely in early winter 2021.

"The information available to us indicates that the exercises were conducted in January 2021. We attempted to obtain additional evidence using satellite imagery, but due to adverse weather conditions and heavy cloud cover during that period, the images were not particularly informative," Burnie said.

A Rosatom representative known as Nikolai Nikolayevich later described these exercises to Vitalii Popov, one of the plant's employees. According to Popov, he openly boasted that the Russian military had used the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant to plan every step of the seizure of the Chornobyl facility.

Information obtained by our team also suggests that Nikolai Nikolayevich headed the group of Rosatom representatives who entered the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The Russian occupation forces are known to have brought a number of highly specialised experts with them. Their primary task appears to have been to advise the Russian commanders during the operation.

Despite the similarities between the Kursk and Chornobyl nuclear power plants, there was one critical difference: the territory of the Chornobyl plant was radioactively contaminated. The Russians therefore needed experts who could explain which actions were safe and which should be avoided. They also needed guidance on where within the Exclusion Zone troops could be stationed without risk to their health.

But the five weeks of Russian occupation demonstrated that either the military ignored their advisers or the experts failed to do their job properly. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain why the Russian troops would dig trenches in the Red Forest, one of the most radioactively contaminated areas in the Exclusion Zone.

Volodymyr Falshovnyk also recalls incidents involving radioactive contamination. He was the shift supervisor who, on 20 March 2022, volunteered to travel from Slavutych to Chornobyl to relieve some of the staff who had been working for 25 days without a break.

"The Russians wanted to wash their vehicles on the plant's premises," Falshovnyk recalled in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda. "We suggested several suitable locations, but they rejected all of them because they were outside the immediate territory of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Instead, they set up a makeshift car wash next to the repair workshops, where the rank-and-file Russian soldiers were also living. During one of our routine inspections, we detected a contaminated area there."

Falshovnyk added that after discovering the contamination, he contacted the Russian military, who sent a specialist named Dima – a young man responsible for radiation safety who was an academic and had gained a PhD in 2021. After inspecting the site together with Chornobyl's radiation monitoring specialists, the Russians shut down the car wash.

A second incident occurred later, when Russian troops stationed near the Red Forest began entering the plant's administrative buildings, bringing radioactive mud in on their boots. The plant's staff had to decontaminate the affected areas after them.

Falshovnyk recalls that to resolve any issue, he had to approach either the military representative known by the alias "90th" – whom our partners have identified as Oleg Yakushev – or the aforementioned Nikolai Nikolayevich. According to Falshovnyk, the latter wielded considerable authority and boasted that he was equal in rank to some of the commanders leading the occupation contingent.

Nikolai Nikolayevich

The Ukrainian investigation has identified "Nikolai Nikolayevich" as Nikolai Nikolayevich Mulyukin. Since 2016, he has been deputy general director for security at the Leading Design and Research Institute of Industrial Technology, a Russian joint-stock company involved in the construction of nuclear, hydroelectric and thermal power plants.

In April 2024, he was served a notice of suspicion by Ukrainian police for violating the laws and customs of war, specifically for participating in the looting of not only the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant but the entire Exclusion Zone.

The investigation established that Mulyukin had assisted the Russian forces by compiling lists of the equipment worth removing from the Exclusion Zone. He had also instructed the Russian soldiers on how specific pieces of equipment should be dismantled.

As for his rank, our partners have established that Mulyukin had previously served in the Russian police and retired with the rank of major general. Oleg Yakushev, whom we mentioned before, held the same rank. So it is not surprising that the plant's staff had to resolve their issues primarily through these two men.

Falshovnyk recalls that on one occasion a section of piping needed to be replaced as part of scheduled maintenance, but it was impossible to do it independently. Every movement had to be coordinated because the Russians had stationed guards and snipers throughout the facility. Following negotiations with the occupation command, a date and time for the work were approved, the Chornobyl staff were assigned an armed escort, and only then could the planned maintenance begin.

Falshovnyk also remembers that Rosatom staff occupied the KVANT building, which housed the radiography equipment and electrical workshops. The Russian nuclear specialists took over the third floor, and the shift supervisor maintained direct communication with them via a wired telephone line. The KVANT building is connected by a glass corridor to the Chornobyl administrative building, where the plant's shift supervisors were likewise based on the third floor. As a result, they would regularly see both Russian officers and Rosatom employees walking past throughout the day.

"They even came to use the showers on our floor, so the corridor looked like a public thoroughfare," Falshovnyk recalls.

From time to time, Mulyukin himself would stop by his office. On one occasion, Falshovnyk complained to him about one of the Russian generals (presumably Yakushev) who kept insisting that the Russian forces were saving Ukraine from "fascists and Banderites".

"More than half the people working our shift were actually born in Russia – in the Urals, Leningrad Oblast, or Kursk Oblast. We literally showed him a list of names and asked where exactly they were looking for fascists if half the staff had the same origin as them. After that conversation, the Russians took offence and stopped talking to us," Falshovnyk says.

He also recalls another interesting detail: the Russians promised they would not hit the city of Slavutych while the plant staff promised to continue performing their daily duties.

But on 25 March, Falshovnyk learned that Russian forces were engaged in fighting near the city. He immediately contacted Mulyukin. The Chornobyl employees informed him that they would refuse to work unless the Russian troops withdrew from Slavutych.

"Mulyukin said he needed half an hour to clarify the situation. He disappeared for about thirty minutes and then came back, saying that officially there were no Russian troops in Slavutych. I have no idea who he spoke to or who he clarified the matter with," Falshovnyk recalls.

Slavutych Mayor Yurii Fomichov later remembered that the Russian presence in the city had indeed been minimal: Russian troops entered the city, found no Ukrainian military forces there, and left shortly afterwards.

When the Rosatom staff eventually departed, Mulyukin did not even say goodbye. Falshovnyk had no opportunity to see him one last time. On 31 March, Russian forces began transporting the captured Ukrainian National Guardsmen away from the plant. Upon learning this, Falshovnyk used the plant's loudspeaker system to announce that the Russians were taking the POWs away.

Moments later, Russian soldiers burst into his office, ordered him not to touch the telephone, forbade him to leave the room and stationed armed guards outside. And for the rest of the day, the Chornobyl shift supervisors were forced to remain at their desks at gunpoint.

Falshovnyk also recalls that the Russians had promised not to harm the National Guardsmen. However, after a ceremony at which they received awards from a Russian general – most likely Bezzubikov – they were ordered to transport the Ukrainian servicemen into captivity in Russia. Clearly Mulyukin either could not influence the decision or chose not to. He left the Exclusion Zone together with the occupying forces.

"Guests" from Moscow and the Kursk and Leningrad Nuclear Power Plants

As of spring 2026, the identities of five Rosatom representatives known to have been present at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in March 2022 have been established. They were identified in no small part thanks to the plant's CCTV cameras, which repeatedly captured the individuals discussed below during the occupation.

One of them was Nikolai Mulyukin. To complete his profile, it is worth noting that he lives in the town of Balashikha, outside Moscow, and has purchased land to build a dacha (country house) in the village of Tabolovo in the Volokolamsk district. He owns an extensive collection of vehicles and has been regularly involved in road accidents, yet – according to official records at least – he has never been found to be at fault.

Mulyukin has hundreds of thousands of roubles in various bank accounts. He holidayed in the Crimean resort of Alushta after the Russian occupation, and in 2018 he also travelled to Cyprus.

Another "guest" from Moscow who took part in the occupation on behalf of Rosatom was Alexander Dorofeyev. He heads the Russian project office responsible for establishing the Unified State System for Radioactive Waste Management. It is likely that his area of responsibility at Chornobyl included the radioactive waste facilities that the Russian troops were supposed to be guarding – or, alternatively, areas they should not have approached at all.

Falshovnyk recalls, for example, that the Russians never managed to gain access to the liquid and solid radioactive waste processing facility located in the plant's main complex, or to Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facilities (SNFSF) Nos. 1 and 2. They did attempt to enter SNFSF-1 on 31 March, as they were fleeing the site, but the automated security system rejected the access pass they tried to use.

Dorofeyev is known to live in Moscow, in an apartment that he likely purchased with a mortgage. Like Mulyukin, he has several hundred thousand roubles in various accounts, amounting to more than two million roubles in total. In 2021 alone he earned RUB 8 million (over US$100,000) working for Rosatom.

Dorofeyev began his career in the 2000s with a Rosatom contractor, the Sosny Research and Production Company, which develops equipment for the nuclear industry and is based in Dimitrovgrad, where he lived for some time. He also got into financial difficulties related to loan repayments and was subject to court-enforced debt recovery proceedings.

After leaving the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, he travelled to Türkiye twice, in June and July 2022, visiting both Istanbul and Ankara. In 2023, he also flew to Kaliningrad.

Yan Ivanov is an operator at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and was one of the youngest Rosatom representatives at Chornobyl: he was 30 at the time of Russia's full-scale invasion.

He hails from a dynasty of nuclear workers: both his father and mother were employed at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant. Ivanov lives in Kurchatov and earned more than RUB 1.5 million (approximately US$19,200) in 2021. He works at Reactor Unit No. 1 as a reactor refuelling engineer and maintains an active presence on social media and streaming platforms.

Perhaps the most striking detail, however, is that Ivanov appears to support the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the Russian non-profit organisation founded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Yet that did not prevent him from taking part in the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Valery Polyakov is Ukrainian by birth. He was born in the town of Bilopillia, Sumy Oblast, and obtained Russian citizenship in 2000. He now lives and works in Kurchatov and has been an operator at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant since at least 2010, having joined the facility in the early 2000s. In 2021, he earned RUB 1.8 million (about US$23,100) while employed by Rosatom. He has held modest bank deposits and similarly modest debts, and has frequently changed his phone number.

The last Rosatom employee known to have participated in the occupation of Chornobyl is Maxim Prishchepa. Unlike his colleagues, he arrived in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone from Leningrad Oblast, from the village of Sosnovy Bor, which is next to the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. He is believed to have been responsible for technical matters at the Chornobyl facility.

According to leaked Russian databases, Prishchepa began his career at Rosatom in 2008 as a fitter. Up until then he had been self-employed, manufacturing bricks and slate roofing, driving a taxi, renting out garages, and engaging in both wholesale and retail trade. His mother has worked as a cleaner at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant since 2006.

In 2021, like his colleague Valery Polyakov, he earned around RUB 1.8 million while working at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. He also has several hundred thousand roubles in bank deposits.

It's important to note that it was no coincidence that the representatives from the Kursk and Leningrad nuclear power plants turned up in Chornobyl. Both facilities operate – or operated – RBMK reactors, and both have experience of decommissioning them.

The Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant shut down its first RBMK reactor in December 2018 and its second in November 2020. The Kursk Nuclear Power Plant permanently shut down its first reactor in December 2021. It is therefore reasonable to assume that other, as yet unidentified Rosatom employees may also have come from these facilities, as they had practical experience of working with decommissioned RBMK-1000 reactors.

One final point deserves emphasis. The number of Rosatom staff deployed to Chornobyl was far too small for them to have run the nuclear power plant independently. However, they included highly specialised experts who were capable of supervising the Ukrainian staff who remained at their posts. That was all the Russians needed: convinced they would "take Kyiv in three days", their objective was simply to install their own management at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and rely on the existing Ukrainian workforce to keep the facility running.

Rosatom has never actually denied that some of its employees were present in the Exclusion Zone. But the Russian state corporation has sought to preserve its international reputation by downplaying its role. In mid-March 2022, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported, citing a Rosatom statement, that the Russian specialists were merely "advising" the staff at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and were in no way part of the occupying military contingent.

The criminal case against Nikolai Mulyukin tells a different story. According to the notice of suspicion, Rosatom representatives arrived at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on the afternoon of 24 February 2022 – the very same day and at virtually the same time as the invading Russian troops. As a representative of Russia's state nuclear corporation, Mulyukin remained at the occupied plant from the first day of the invasion to the last, leaving only on 31 March 2022.

Fortunately, Russia's occupation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone lasted only five weeks. Had it continued longer, events might well have unfolded according to the scenario later seen at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

During the first six months of the occupation in Zaporizhzhia, Russian control over the Ukrainian workforce remained relatively weak. But following the sham referendums organised by the occupation authorities, employees came under increasing pressure to sign new contracts with the Russian state nuclear corporation. Those considered insufficiently loyal were arrested – often on accusations of "opposing the special military operation" [as Russia refers to the war against Ukraine] – and transferred deep into Russia. They were gradually replaced by successive waves of Rosatom staff.

But that is another story – and one that we will certainly tell in due course.

Research into the identities of the Russian nationals present at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant was conducted with the assistance of the Book of Executioners project and investigative journalist and open-source intelligence (OSINT) researcher Liubomyra Remazhevska.

Stas Kozliuk, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

While a year ago the problem was partly addressed through support from partners and emergency fuel imports, EU allies are now speaking of growing fatigue over continuously financing gas purchases for Ukraine. How much natural gas needs to be stockpiled before the start of winter, how severely has domestic production been affected, and where will the government find the tens of billions of hryvnias needed to import the resource?

Attacks intensify

The Russians have been attacking Ukrainian gas facilities since the first day of the full-scale war. In 2026 alone, there have been over 100 such attacks. Initially, Russia targeted underground gas storage facilities in Ukraine's west before shifting its focus to production sites across the country.

The Russians began actively striking compressor stations near underground gas storage facilities in the spring of 2024. Their main objective was to drive foreign traders out of the market, create fear around gas storage facilities and disrupt preparations for the next heating season.

The strategy worked. While non-residents stored 2.5 billion cubic metres of gas in Ukraine ahead of the 2023-2024 winter season, these volumes have fallen to zero over the past two years.

Since the beginning of 2025, following the expiry of the gas transit contract, the Russians have shifted to attacking gas production facilities. Their primary targets have been booster compressor stations, which clean and dehydrate gas before it is fed into the gas transmission system.

The attacks in 2025 resulted in the temporary loss of 42% of gas production. The state-owned companies Ukrgasvydobuvannya, the largest Ukrainian gas producer, and Ukrnafta, Ukraine's largest oil and gas company, suffered the greatest damage. Some equipment was brought back into operation within a week and repairs to other facilities took several months, while full restoration required up to a year.

This recovery timeframe remains relevant in 2026, meaning the scale of losses will depend on the extent of the damage. It is already clear that the Russians are increasing the intensity of their strikes and are likely to continue doing so in the future.

Ekonomichna Pravda sources in the market do not yet consider the situation critical for gas production.

"Some of the damaged facilities can be repaired relatively quickly, and current production levels are sufficient to cover domestic consumption and even inject small volumes into underground gas storage facilities. There has been a decline, but it is not critical, and facilities are gradually being brought back into operation," said a manager at one of the state-owned companies. According to the sources, the decline in gas production caused by Russian attacks currently ranges between 15% and 20%.

How much gas is needed?

During the winter, Ukraine relies on gas from underground storage facilities, domestic production and imported supplies. According to the Aggregated Gas Storage Inventory, Ukraine had 11 billion cubic metres of gas in storage at the end of May, including 4.7 billion cubic metres of "buffer gas" – fuel that cannot be withdrawn because a certain volume of technical gas must always remain in storage to ensure the safe operation of the facility.

The government has set a target of accumulating 14.6 billion cubic metres of gas by the start of the heating season, while the minimum required volume is 13.2 billion cubic metres. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal explained the lower threshold by pointing to the risk of further attacks: "Ukraine faces the same threats as last year, so forecasts regarding gas reserves may still be adjusted depending on the scale of attacks and destruction."

Where imports are coming from

Against the backdrop of rising gas prices caused by the war in the Middle East, imports collapsed 28-fold in May to 29 million cubic metres. Meanwhile, data from ExPro show that supplies had remained consistently high in the preceding months.

In 2026, Ukraine imported 2.21 billion cubic metres of gas, 2.1 times more than during the same period in 2025. The largest volume came from Poland – 1.03 billion cubic metres (46.8%). Imports from Hungary amounted to 779 million cubic metres (35.3%) and from Slovakia to 280 million cubic metres (12.7%), while 117 million cubic metres (5.2%) arrived via the southern route through the Trans-Balkan Corridor.

Ekonomichna Pravda sources in the gas industry say that in addition to gas from domestic production, Naftogaz plans to import a further 2-2.5 billion cubic metres of gas.

Where will the money come from?

The key challenge in preparing for winter is not only securing sufficient gas but also finding the money to pay for it. "We are capable of importing up to 2 billion cubic metres of gas per month, so the problem is not the availability of gas. The problem is the price and whether the money is there," said an MP involved in energy-sector decision-making. How much money is needed?

Ukraine entered the winter of 2025 with 13.2 billion cubic metres of gas in storage, but because of the attacks it was forced to purchase an additional 4.6 billion cubic metres of fuel. The initial procurement plan for 2026 envisages the purchase of 2-2.5 billion cubic metres.

Before the war involving Iran, gas in Europe was trading at below US$400 per thousand cubic metres. Since the conflict began, however, prices have largely remained in the range of US$500-600 per thousand cubic metres. Based on current prices and transportation costs, purchasing 2-2.5 billion cubic metres would cost between US$1.3 billion and US$1.5 billion. The final amount may vary depending on the actual volume purchased and prevailing market prices.

Does Naftogaz have that kind of money? In 2025, the company reported a consolidated profit of only UAH 5.8 billion (approx. US$130.7 million), six times less than in 2024. It appears that Naftogaz will once again have to rely on loans and financial assistance from partners.

Officials cite a lack of funding as the main reason behind the suspension of imports and the slower pace of gas injections into underground storage facilities. "My understanding is that there is simply no money. They effectively halted imports altogether back in April," a government source told Ekonomichna Pravda.

Another major issue is the company's substantial debt burden. According to sources in the market, Naftogaz has significantly increased its indebtedness, while state-owned banks have almost exhausted their capacity to provide the company with additional lending.

In 2025, the company spent almost US$1 billion of its own funds on gas purchases and borrowed €1.57 billion: €770 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, €300 million from the European Investment Bank and €500 million from state-owned banks, with PrivatBank providing the largest share among them at €240 million. Naftogaz also received an €85 million grant from Norway.

International partners are becoming increasingly reluctant to provide grants for gas purchases. "The Europeans are saying quite openly: we cannot continue giving away hundreds of millions of euros for Ukraine's gas imports for a fifth consecutive year. Ukraine must address this issue itself, including through a revision of gas tariffs," an Ekonomichna Pravda source in parliament said.

The government will likely have to seek emergency sources of financing, ranging from new loans to a possible recapitalisation of Naftogaz through the issuance of domestic government bonds, as was done in previous years. However, the issue that concerns the sources most is the weak pace of imports.

"The key priority right now is to increase the volume of gas in underground storage facilities. Naftogaz's management has either decided to wait for prices to fall or opted for a strategy of importing gas on a just-in-time basis during the heating season. Such an approach creates additional risks during wartime.

If import entry points come under attack – and we do not have many of them – this could create further problems. That is why importing gas in the middle of the heating season is not the best idea," concluded a representative of one of the state-owned companies.

By Mykola Topalov

Translated by Anna Kybukevych

Edited by Anastasiia Kolesnykova

The 52-year-old Azov serviceman is referring to that very ancient, traditional fighting spirit which the Russian Empire has always tried to destroy in everyone born on Ukrainian lands.

Oleksandr Laptii is a theatre and film actor and director who appeared in the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. His voice, physicality and real-life appearance brought one of the main characters in the world created by Ukraine's GSC Game World – the mercenary Shram (Scar) – to life.

A fan of Ukrainian underground culture and Eastern martial arts as far back as 2014, Laptii, who is from Chernihiv, volunteered to join the military with none of the reflections or discussions about motivation that are so fashionable today.

"I learned about that word and its meaning sometime in the 2000s," Oleksandr recalls. "I grew up in a different paradigm, where concepts like duty and discipline matter. That's what pushes a person towards serious decisions and action."

In this interview with Ukrainska Pravda, the Azov serviceman talks about remarkable Ukrainians, the magic of Polissia – a region of marshes and forests in Ukraine's north – and the interplay of technology and tradition in modern warfare. He also discusses the benefits and dangers of video games and how a new military is being shaped by a generation with a gamer mentality.

"We didn't accept socialist realism"

I'm 52 years old. I lived through the late Soviet period and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of independent Ukraine, the emergence of the internet, and all these technological leaps from push-button phones to smartphones. So I believe I have a unique life experience.

People who lived in the USSR were usually oriented towards the one single capital. There was one major city and everything else was considered provincial, and that shaped the mentality. But we [in Chernihiv – UP] felt we were so deep in the provinces that Moscow was simply out of reach (he smiles). So I grew up in a situation where there was no point in orienting yourself towards something that was fundamentally unattainable.

In the early 1990s, Russians in the media began working hard to create a post-Soviet imperial culture. But I took my inspiration from Yurii Andrukhovych, Yurko Izdryk, Bu-Ba-Bu, Foa-Hoka [a Ukrainian underground music band – ed.] and the Ukrainian underground – all of that was incredibly powerful. Thanks to them, it was possible to resist Russia's information pressure and not fall hostage to it, and even to feel proud that in some areas we outdid Moscow.

In my family, there were no celebrations without singing. My parents could harmonise quite well – at an amateur level, let's say. We didn't speak standard Ukrainian at home, but what they call northern surzhyk [a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian – ed.]. But my identity as a Ukrainian has been there since childhood. My birth certificate – a little green booklet – states that I am Ukrainian and so are my parents. My Soviet passport also identified me as Ukrainian. This is documented, and there could be no disputes about it.

Whenever I visited my grandmother, who lived in a village in the north of Chernihiv Oblast, I would sense the magic of Polissia. Life there is based on a blend of Christianity and folk traditions. I remember being bitten by a dog and developing a deep fear of dogs, and my grandma took me to see the whisperers – folk healers, almost witches. They performed strange rituals. To this day, it remains a mystery to me how all this coexists with Christianity and Orthodoxy.

The worldview in the north of Chernihiv Oblast is based on the idea that nature is a living being. There are vast black forests there – black because they are so incredibly dense. And in those forests, dark, evil forces are believed to dwell.

When you grow up surrounded by all this, it shapes your mind with a tendency towards metaphor, symbolism, metaphysics. For the people there, this is organic – it's part of their nature. That is why I say that in Sivershchyna we did not accept socialist realism, either in art or in our perception of existence (laughs).

There is and always has been something beyond you – forces that are beyond your control and even beyond your understanding.

There's no "save button" in war

Back in the mid-1980s, someone brought a game into school based on the Soviet cartoon "Nu, pogodi!" ("Just you wait!") – this little electronic device with buttons where the wolf catches eggs in a basket. This boy had a business mindset: he'd let you have a go for ten kopecks. The queue stretched down the corridor.

Among our first "computer games" were Soviet arcade machines in cinemas. I remember my mum once gave me one karbovanets [the former Ukrainian currency – ed.] to buy exercise book covers, and I blew it all. I got a massive telling-off when I came home, but I was really happy I'd managed to play Sea Battle to my heart's content.

Later there were consoles – Dendy, PlayStation. And then, with the arrival of home computers, I played Medal of Honour and Call of Duty – my favourite series.

From the perspective of philosophy, political science and other academic disciplines, the question of the impact of video games on modern humans is a complex one. I don't have the expertise to claim to be an authority on it. But I can't deny the significance of gaming culture nowadays. People who grew up within it are joining the military. Their minds have been shaped through intense interaction with what we call the gaming world.

It's a distinct kind of consciousness with its own algorithms and way of perceiving reality. I know a man who commanded a tank platoon in 2014 with no formal military education. He'd levelled up his skills – tactics, strategy, tank combat – playing World of Tanks, you see?

Every phenomenon has its negative aspects. They might emerge when someone goes to war thinking it will be like a game. But war at the front is real. There's no save button. There's no rolling back, no levelling up, no healing, no extra lives if you end up in a serious fight.

If a person doesn't understand this, it becomes a problem.

Modern technology enables you to fight at a distance; it provides a certain optics where the enemy is viewed through a screen. This shapes your perception of combat and of the enemy. But in warfare, however modern it is, there's no substitute for infantry – and the infantry are extraordinary people who move into positions under fire from drones and hold them. They have no illusions: it is definitely not a game for them, because real death is just a metre or two away.

Coming home

However advanced modern technologies become, whatever their aesthetics or form, the essence remains unchanged – the fighting spirit. That's what we should rely on first and foremost, and only then on weapons.

Some soldiers are inspired by Norse mythology, others draw strength from the Cossack era, the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen or the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Some look up to the "nineties generation" – people like Sashko Bilyi [a Ukrainian political activist – ed.] and his comrades who fought in Abkhazia and Chechnya. And some are inspired by anime (smiles). There are a lot of young soldiers who watch Naruto and identify with anime heroes while carrying out remarkable military actions.

What matters is always the essence, the core, not the form. The Russian Empire tried for centuries to destroy this gene we have – our fighting spirit – and erase the martial element from people's consciousness. They understood that Ukrainians could not be broken if they continued to cultivate this warrior spirit.

For centuries, our lands were home to warrior peoples with highly developed adaptive skills, to put it in modern parlance. They possessed the ability to adapt quickly to threats and find solutions in extreme circumstances.

Look at how the Cossacks developed their methods of warfare and how much they contributed to European military history and military science. Or think of the spirit of the Sich Riflemen and the fighters of the UPA, who pioneered small-unit tactics, various forms of camouflage, and underground communication networks. The deeper you delve into this history, the prouder you feel. Yet the enemy deliberately conceals these achievements or attempts to claim them as their own.

Today, our service members are finding solutions in situations that appear utterly hopeless, making you think: "Wow, that's incredible!" It genuinely sends shivers down your spine. As someone involved in culture, I often feel like applauding as if I were in a theatre – applauding their courage and their ability to think outside the box.

I've watched with immense admiration as our guys have gradually been establishing drone control over Donetsk Oblast. I've talked to people who defended Mariupol back in 2014, people who left the Azovstal steelworks, people who survived the Olenivka prison camp and returned from captivity – for them, everything that's happening now feels like coming home. Their eyes light up as they say: "We're back!" And this is yet another reason to admire what's been achieved: the creation of an entirely new structure and the development of technical capabilities that make it possible to monitor and disrupt enemy logistics over such vast distances.

We have to be smarter

Your attitude towards the enemy is always a complex issue in the moment. It takes time to reflect on it properly and formulate a coherent understanding, and you need to be able to look back with some distance. But when it comes to the enemy, one thing is certain from the outset: you must never underestimate them. Underestimation is the road to defeat.

We are dealing with a formidable force. And as someone involved in the arts, I understand that in the cultural sphere as well, the Russians are investing considerable effort in creating a positive image of their country in spite of the catastrophic and criminal things they have done to our state, my brothers-in-arms, our fellow citizens and my own family.

This winter, a Shahed drone struck beneath my balcony. I was at home with my child, and it was a miracle that we survived unharmed. When you're in an emotional state, caught up in the excitement and intensity of action, your attitude to the enemy corresponds to that. But with time comes distance. You regain control over your emotions, and you start to analyse the situation. The enemy is ruthless and will use every available means to destroy you. So we need to construct our lives, strategy and development accordingly.

If we ever reach a point where our relationship with the Russians is no longer defined by war, but in terms of culture and the arts, we will need to find new tools and not just be shouting "I hate you!" We have to be smarter and more cunning than they are if we are to prevail on the "cultural front", although that's not a term I'm particularly fond of. We must do everything possible to withstand and repel their relentless waves of propaganda and cultural influence – not just here in Ukraine, but in other European countries as well.

The Russians still have significant financial resources and highly skilled propaganda experts. I don't think everyone fully appreciates just how professional they are. As [Ukrainian filmmaker and soldier] Oleh Sentsov once said during a court hearing: "If I didn't know the reality and only watched your television, I'd believe it too."

Russian propaganda genuinely works. It is still present within our media landscape and continues its destructive efforts, preventing us from fully developing a distinctly Ukrainian consciousness.

Stalker

The release of the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game was a revelation for me. I became an instant fan. The subject of the Chornobyl disaster is very close to my heart, because I remember 26 April 1986.

What impressed me was that the developers had taken this tragic event and built a unique universe around it, creating an atmosphere so compelling that it completely draws you in. It got me so hooked that I started writing plays and literary sketches, reread the works of [Polish writer Stanisław] Lem and became passionate about science fiction. That computer game was a catalyst that pushed my mind towards a totally different world.

When approached responsibly and maturely, video games can have many positive effects. Firstly, they help develop fine motor skills, which are linked to our mental and cognitive functions and contribute to the development of emotional intelligence. Secondly, they teach people to analyse situations, make complex logical inferences and solve problems. All of this shapes your mindset in one way or another. The main thing with computer games is not to overdo it, just as with anything else in life.

When I was asked to work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, it was an incredible experience. I'd never worked with motion capture technology before, I only knew about it in theory, and suddenly I had the opportunity to express myself as an actor in a completely new medium and environment.

The atmosphere at GSC Game World is healthy and professional. If our film industry operated at the same level in terms of the way creative teams are treated and the depth of engagement with the material, I believe we would achieve far more and appeal to audiences across Europe and around the world.

The people I met are true professionals who are dedicated to bringing an idea to life, in an environment where everything is focused on achieving one goal, one dream: creating something that will captivate audiences around the world.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is steeped in Ukrainian culture and art, from its distinctive Ukrainian voice acting and dubbing to its music, atmosphere and messages. English-speaking players in Australia and Canada have messaged me to say: "We play the Ukrainian version with English subtitles. We really love what you've created."

I'm proud of our people

I focus on the positive aspects of our society. It's encouraging to see this promising, talented and thoughtful generation of young Ukrainians emerging. A lot of outstanding young men aged 21-24 have joined our unit as contract soldiers recently. I find it fascinating to observe the trends they are shaping within society.

We do have plenty of problems. We need to acknowledge them and search for answers. Why is it that one student donates part of their scholarship every month, while another person turns a blind eye to everything and won't even repost a message about a fundraiser? Obviously people are stressed out and exhausted, and some have chosen to distance themselves from the war. That is their choice. But we must continue our work.

We cannot divide Ukraine into soldiers and people in the rear. The rear is also made up of our people – everyone who identifies as Ukrainian. I am proud of them.

When the Shahed hit my building, firefighters from the State Emergency Service arrived immediately and started to bring the fire under control. Then the power engineers arrived. Explosions were still echoing, things were still crashing down around us, and they were already working to restore electricity to the residents. The heating pipes burst, and workers were there the next morning repairing the damage. I pay attention to these things. They are powerful examples of responsibility and maturity.

We're under a Shahed attack, and utility workers still turn up to collect the rubbish – see what I mean? You could make a film about that. There are so many heroes, each working on their own front. People in Western countries still struggle to imagine such a reality.

To be honest, I don't know how other European countries would cope if they were subjected to the bombardments that Ukraine endures day after day, night after night – how their infrastructure would hold up, how their social services, banking systems and public services would function. Yet we have developed ways of living and operating in extraordinarily harsh conditions.

Russian propaganda does everything it can to diminish our resistance and make us passive. And sadly, part of society is affected by it. But we have examples to follow – our heroes – and not only on the front line, but in the rear as well.

By Yevhen Rudenko, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Yelyzaveta Khodatska and Anna Kybukevych

Edited by Teresa Pearce

But since then the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) have been making concession after concession. In this article, we show how Russia has gradually returned to world sport.

How the positions of the IOC and IPC have changed

2022

• 28 February: The IOC recommended that international federations NOT allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete.
• 3 March: The IPC excluded Russia and Belarus from the 2022 Paralympic Games.
• 16 November: The IPC suspended the membership of the national paralympic committees of Russia and Belarus.

2023

• 29 September: The IPC allowed Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in the 2024 Paralympic Games as neutrals.
• 12 October: The IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) for including so-called "sports organisations" under the authority of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine (in the occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts) as members.
• 8 December: The IOC allowed "neutral" athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete at the 2024 Olympic Games.

2025

• 27 September: The IPC fully reinstated the membership of the national Paralympic committees of Belarus and Russia. Athletes from these countries were also granted the right to compete under their own flags.
• 11 December: The IOC recommended lifting all restrictions on the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in international competitions at junior and youth levels.

2026

• 17 February: The IPC confirmed that 10 athletes from Russia and Belarus would compete at the 2026 Paralympic Games under their national flags.
• 7 May: The IOC lifted restrictions preventing Belarusian athletes from taking part in international competitions under their own flag.

How Russians and Belarusians have been readmitted by international federations

The first returns happened in the early years after the start of the full-scale invasion, although athletes had to compete as neutrals. Russia returned to fencing, table tennis, taekwondo, judo, gymnastics, swimming and so on during this time.

A mass return under national flags began at the end of 2025 following the IOC's recommendation that athletes from Russia and Belarus should be readmitted to competitions at youth level.

2025

• 28 March: Russians were permitted to compete under their national flag in kickboxing.
• 27 November: The International Judo Federation allowed Russians to compete under their national flag in all competitions.
• 4 December: The International Sambo Federation (FIAS) admitted Russian and Belarusian athletes to all competitions under their national flags.
• 12 December: Russia and Belarus were readmitted to youth-level international volleyball competitions.
• 15 December: Russians and Belarusians were permitted to play in international youth chess tournaments.
• 23 December: Representatives of Russia and Belarus were readmitted to youth fencing competitions.

2026

• 19 January: Russians were readmitted to international youth curling competitions.
• 31 January: The World Taekwondo Federation permitted Russian and Belarusian athletes to return to competitions at all levels.
• 5 February: Russians and Belarusians returned to youth-level aquatic sports competitions.
• 26 March: Russia and Belarus were partially reinstated in international handball tournaments at national youth team level.
• 13 April: World Aquatics decided to lift all restrictions on the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in international aquatic sports. However, the European governing body for aquatic sports (European Aquatics) has postponed their return.
• 29 April: World Boxing allowed Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals. On 12 May, it lifted all restrictions on Belarus.
• 12 May: All restrictions on Belarus were lifted in the modern pentathlon.
• 13 May: Belarus was readmitted to international volleyball competitions.
• 15 May: United World Wrestling (UWW) lifted all restrictions on wrestlers from Russia and Belarus.
• 18 May: World Gymnastics removed all restrictions on Russian and Belarusian gymnasts. On 21 May, this decision was also supported by European Gymnastics.
• 19 May: Russians and Belarusians were permitted to take part in Muay Thai competitions under their national symbols.
• 27 May: The International University Sports Federation (FISU) lifted all restrictions on Belarusian athletes.
• 28 May: The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) partially lifted the suspension of Belarus and reinstated its national teams in several international competitions.
• 29 May: The International Ice Hockey Federation lifted the suspension of Russia for the 2026/27 season.
• 2 June: The International Fencing Federation lifted the suspension of Russia and Belarus.

...

Overall, Russians have been readmitted at all levels of international competition in 10 sports. At youth level the number is even higher – more than 20 federations have allowed athletes to compete under their national flags.

The situation is even more favourable for Belarusian athletes, as the IOC itself (essentially the main governing body of international sport) has issued decisions enabling them to return. As a result, most federations have followed this line.

However, some organisations, such as World Athletics and the International Tennis Federation, have opposed it.

***

At the beginning of 2026, Ukrainian MP and Olympic champion Zhan Beleniuk said:

"2026 will unfortunately be the year of Russia's large-scale return to international sport – including under its own symbols. This can already be stated as a fact."

Just five months later, it can already be said with certainty that Beleniuk was right. Russia is returning to world sport at an extremely rapid pace, and Belarus even faster. It now seems unlikely that this can be stopped directly.

But there are ways in which athletes from these countries can continue to be barred. Take the junior World Curling Championship, in which Russia had been expected to compete. The tournament was due to take place in Canada, and Ukraine reached an agreement with the hosts to deny the Russian athletes entry to the country.

Similarly, Nordic countries are refusing to host World Aquatics events due to Russia's readmission.

Mykola Dendak, Champion

Translated by Tetiana Buchkovska

Edited by Teresa Pearce

It was the first time the two politicians had met since Russia launched its full-scale invasion – and their first face-to-face meeting in Zelenskyy's seven years in office.

"We realised they had deliberately left us until the very end so they could speak to all the other factions first," said one person from Poroshenko's circle. "It was obvious that they spent the whole hour preparing for the conversation with us."

The preparations had begun days earlier. Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of Servant of the People, Zelenskyy's faction in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), and Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the President's Office, had reportedly talked to Poroshenko in advance and tried to establish a framework for the conversation. Up until the last moment, it was still unclear whether the meeting would happen at all.

Poroshenko had come prepared. But the approach he chose to take unsettled both Arakhamiia and Budanov, and almost tipped Zelenskyy into an emotional outburst.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, Poroshenko came to the President's Office armed with printouts of various memes and other materials from social media and launched into a rant, complaining that Zelenskyy and his circle were systematically discrediting him.

"For a few seconds, everyone on our side was speechless," one eyewitness from the government team said.

Words in response came quickly: within moments, the conversation had switched to raised voices and the only form of the enemy's cultural presence that can't be replaced – Russian swearwords.

Zelenskyy was outraged that Poroshenko was trying to cast himself as a victim when in his view, the fifth president's 'Porokhobots' (Poroshenko supporters) behave just as aggressively online and cost "millions of dollars". At the very least, Zelenskyy believed Poroshenko had no moral right to reproach him over something like that.

Zelenskyy, in turn, raised concerns about Poroshenko's support for potential rivals to the current government, above all Ukraine's ambassador to London and former commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

At that point, Poroshenko had to choose his words carefully. He responded that if the entire machinery of the state and all available government resources were being used against him, then there was nothing surprising about him seeking help from anyone capable of challenging the current authorities.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources said that despite its rocky start, the meeting gradually became somewhat constructive. At certain points, the sources said, it resembled a conversation between people who might be able to get over their mutual dislike and try to do something together for their country.

Poroshenko did not even directly raise the issue of the sanctions imposed on him, although he did mention that they are hindering his work.

"The position was simple: if we agree now on some model of cooperation, then the sanctions issue will eventually fall away by itself," a source from Poroshenko's team said. "If there is no agreement, then no requests will make any sense at all."

After the meeting ended, Poroshenko was left with a strange feeling of emptiness. Ukrainska Pravda's sources from the teams of Yuliia Tymoshenko and Dmytro Razumkov (leader of Smart Politics, an inter-factional association) said the same.

"No one agreed on anything. No one asked for anything, not even what we were ready to offer. There were no concrete decisions or proposals," a lawmaker from Razumkov's group told Ukrainska Pravda.

Zelenskyy's team explained that this approach – to ask for nothing and promise nothing – had been a deliberate decision.

As one member of Zelenskyy's team put it, "this first meeting was needed for something else entirely. We could not offer anything because we had different considerations."

To get a sense of how the President's Office is thinking now, it helps to look at three things: who persuaded Zelenskyy to reopen talks with the opposition and why; who was sitting beside him in those meetings; and, more broadly, who the president can still rely on inside government to keep the political system stable now that the "Yermak era" is over.

Ukrainska Pravda set out to find out exactly that.

The corridors of power: Bankova in search of allies

"If the first meeting had started off with bargaining over positions or votes, it would have looked like a crude 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'-type deal," a senior government source told Ukrainska Pravda. "So the point of the first meeting was simply to make a second one possible – and then more after that."

Zelenskyy had been sceptical at first. But speaking to allies the next day, he conceded the format could be useful over time.

At the very least, it signals to the political class as a whole that there may be changes in the way political and personnel decisions are made. It's the first time in seven years that the door to Bankova's corridors of power has been opened to representatives of other political camps.

"At one point the conversation at Bankova turned to appointments," a source from Zelenskyy's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "Someone asked Ze: why this fixation on only appointing people we nominated ourselves or people put forward by Servant of the People? Why are we so sure they're 'our people'? We don't really know them. We've never had any real working relationship with most of the Cabinet of Ministers [the Ukrainian government]. So why are they suddenly 'our people'?"

The same person then named the few exceptions to this. "Who did the president personally nominate? Yuliia Svyrydenko. Maybe Fedorov too.

And if that's how it is," the source went on, "why assume other factions would offer worse candidates than our own? On the contrary, if the Verkhovna Rada is trying to get rid of these ministers for the hundredth time, at least let them be ministers proposed by someone like Yuliia Tymoshenko – then we'd have someone to hold accountable. But as things stand, who can we hold accountable if these are supposedly 'our people'? There isn't even anyone to shout at."

That unannounced internal shift – the sense that some cautious cooperation with other political groupings is becoming inevitable as a governance crisis deepens – helps explain why Budanov and Arakhamiia pushed the idea of Zelenskyy talking with different factions.

As other political players start weighing up the prospects of moving from Bankova's corridors of power into its offices, Zelenskyy is buying himself time to solve another knotty problem: finding people for his new team of "five or six managers".

The need for them is clear. Post-Yermak, the president is facing an uncomfortable truth. What once looked like a monolithic single-party majority and a united team linking the President's Office and the Cabinet of Ministers is now a demoralised, fragmented collection of individuals prone to squabbles, intrigue and infighting.

They still call themselves a team on paper. But unless they change the principle governing their existence – the constant search for enemies – the system will keep on eating itself.

Whether that can be done is an open question. But Zelenskyy has at least been persuaded to try.

The argument has been made most forcefully by the two men who sit beside him at every meeting: Kyrylo Budanov and Davyd Arakhamiia. Despite their personal friendship, to Zelenskyy they represent two totally different currents inside the government – the "safe insiders" and the "insider-rivals".

The "safe insiders": Arakhamiia, Svyrydenko, Umierov, Tatarov and others

The dividing line between the "safe insiders" and "insider rivals" in Zelenskyy's team is fairly straightforward – whether they have political ambitions (and the approval ratings to back them) or not.

Kyrylo Budanov and Mykhailo Fedorov, for example, are both well-known and enjoy a measure of public trust, though to different degrees. Budanov has made no secret of the fact that he would like to have a shot if elections are held. Fedorov keeps any such ambitions out of sight, but many at Bankova are convinced he has them too.

Davyd Arakhamiia is different. He gained a lot more clout after Andrii Yermak's four days in pre-trial detention, yet he has never had strong personal ratings and it is unlikely that he ever will. That remains true regardless of how central he is to the day-to-day running of parliament, managing communication between the President's Office, Cabinet of Ministers and Verkhovna Rada, or taking part in peace talks with the US and Russia.

For whatever reason, public trust in the Servant of the People faction leader is limited. Arakhamiia does not appear especially bothered by that, because he seems not to cherish any political ambitions of his own.

That makes him "safe" and, for now, indispensable to Zelenskyy and the government in general. Those at the top have come to accept that Davyd plays his own game, but that it usually runs alongside Zelenskyy's interests rather than against them.

Several other personalities around the president occupy a similar space. Foremost among them is Rustem Umierov, Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council (NSDC), who appears to have retained Zelenskyy's trust despite featuring in the "Mindich tapes" released by the anti-corruption agencies as part of the Operation Midas investigation into corruption in Ukraine's energy sector. Umierov continues to oversee the peace talks and agreements with Gulf states and other countries on Drone Deals and related issues.

Denys Shmyhal beavers away quietly, staying in lockstep with the President's Office. He has held so many posts over the years that it's easy to lose track of which one he occupies now. Shmyhal has cast himself as the president's "hands" – someone who can be sent wherever he is needed. Politically, he barely registers, and that's a conscious choice.

Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko holds the highest office in the executive branch, but she seems uninterested in becoming an independent political player. Her focus is the economy: drafting development strategies and finding the money for the next round of "Zelenskyy's thousands" – the president's one-off cash handouts that the government then has to fund and administer. As far as possible, she stays out of political infighting.

"Yuliia has one objective: to avoid any scandal," a senior figure in Zelenskyy's team said of the prime minister's ambitions. "She certainly isn't involved in corruption; she won't be caught with dirty money, because she doesn't have any. If she wants to leave politics later and give lectures and sit on boards, she just needs to serve out her term cleanly. And that's exactly the path she is taking."

Someone else who poses little political threat to the president is Oleh Tatarov, a deputy head of the President's Office – a controversial official whom civil society groups have been trying, unsuccessfully, to push out for years.

In recent months, Yermak had been working systematically to gradually neutralise Tatarov's influence over the law enforcement system – and it paid off. Zelenskyy's deputy for security affairs has indeed lost a significant share of his leverage.

"The SSU has long been out of Oleh's hands," a senior member of Team Zelenskyy told Ukrainska Pravda. "Yermak let him down in the case with the Prosecutor General's Office and pushed [Ruslan] Kravchenko through. Tatarov still has influence over the Investigation Bureau and certain individuals in the Interior Ministry. But the overall trajectory is difficult for Tatarov."

Moreover, even after Yermak's resignation, Tatarov's troubles were far from over.

One recent example is the exposure of some police officers who were alleged to have taken bribes for covering up illegal pornography studios. The regional Interior Ministry chiefs who came under fire from the SSU and the Prosecutor General's Office are those commonly associated with Tatarov in government circles.

Sources from the President's Office told Ukrainska Pravda that Tatarov himself saw the case as a message from Andrii Yermak – that the former chief is using people inside the law enforcement system who are still loyal to him to erode his ex-deputy's influence.

Other members of the government team, however, offer a simpler explanation: Prosecutor General Kravchenko's desire to remind the president of his own effectiveness.

Either way, Tatarov today is looking less and less like his 2021-2022 self.

The result is that a kind of "inner circle" of loyalists has solidified around Zelenskyy – one intended to collectively replace the loss of Yermak as a single dominant figure. Of that group, Arakhamiia alone appears capable of the bold, unpredictable moves that could meaningfully reshape the system.

He increasingly resembles a classic playmaker in a football team: someone with no ambition to be the star, yet without whom the system cannot function.

But the same sword of Damocles that hung over the previous generation of "five or six managers" – the prospect of trouble with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) – hangs over him too.

During the so-called "wages in envelopes" investigation, anti-corruption officers searched not only the homes of MPs, but also Arakhamiia's aide's and his office in the party headquarters. Those searches have so far yielded no results, but the fact that they took place at all sent a signal.

It is therefore unlikely that the Servant of the People leader will ever become the public face of a major political project. The role of grey eminence, however, appears set to remain his for the foreseeable future.

The "insider rivals"

Sociologists who track changes in approval ratings and are in regular contact with Ukrainska Pravda assert that Zelenskyy managed to weather the first wave of negative sentiment following Mindichgate in large part because he surrounded himself with figures who command strong public support.

Chief among them are Kyrylo Budanov and Mykhailo Fedorov.

"People saw those appointments and placed their trust not so much in the president as in the figures they already trusted. There was an expectation that those figures would be able to change the situation within the government and influence Zelenskyy himself," one sociologist explains.

Yet a closer look at the internal situation reveals something considerably more complex.

When Budanov first joined the President's Office, he genuinely believed in a swift diplomatic process to end the war. He approached his new role more as if it was a start-up expected to deliver fast results than a long-term investment project measured in years.

In conversations with team members, he didn't hide the fact that he was aware of his own approval ratings and had a clear understanding of his prospects in any future elections – and not just parliamentary ones.

Polling data tracked regularly by leading research centres and reviewed by Ukrainska Pravda shows two significant trends over recent months.

The first is a gradual but consistent decline in Zaluzhnyi's approval ratings. The second is an equally steady rise in Budanov's.

Were a presidential run-off to be modelled today, both Zaluzhnyi and Budanov would defeat Zelenskyy. But while not so long ago the gap between the two generals was vast, it has since narrowed rapidly – from double digits to a single figure.

So any excessive political activity on Budanov's part inevitably unsettles the president. Zelenskyy reads it as potential groundwork for a future political project.

Notably, until recently the relationship between the president and his chief of staff was largely formal – one or two briefings a day, after which each returned to his own office.

In recent weeks, however, that has changed. Budanov appears to have convinced Zelenskyy that if they are to work together, they ought to do so in earnest.

The creation of the National Pantheon is one example of this new approach. The president did not support the idea at first, but later he agreed to personally lead the project and make it part of his own agenda.

A similar dynamic played out with the meeting of governors and parliamentary committee chairs. Zelenskyy initially blocked Budanov from convening it, then the following week he chaired and opened the gathering himself.

The tension has not gone away. But Zelenskyy appears to have grasped the simple fact that without a properly functioning President's Office, governing the country effectively will be difficult.

So partly for this reason, at meetings with parliamentary factions and regional elites, Budanov is increasingly being positioned as the person responsible for domestic policy, relations with regional governors and engagement with parliament.

This may also be because the prospects of a swift diplomatic settlement to the war are receding, and so, too, are the prospects of holding elections.

Budanov's involvement in arranging Zelenskyy's meetings with faction leaders – and his personal presence throughout all five-plus hours of those sessions – is a significant indicator that the president and the chief of staff have found a workable model of collaboration.

The dynamic between Zelenskyy and Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov is developing along rather different lines.

During his time at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Fedorov was one of the president's closest favourites – the source of much of the positive news the government could point to. That reservoir of trust carried over into his move to the Defence Ministry, but in recent weeks a noticeable chill has descended on the relationship between the supreme commander-in-chief and his defence minister.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, there are several reasons for this.

The first is tied to the events surrounding Mindichgate and the notice of suspicion served on Andrii Yermak. There's a widespread belief in political circles that last autumn, Fedorov attempted to act as an intermediary between the government and the anti-corruption bodies, and for a time those close to the president believed Fedorov could guarantee that certain things would not happen – such as Yermak being served with a notice of suspicion. When that happened anyway, the president began directing grievances towards Fedorov.

But even within Zelenskyy's own circle, people realise that those grievances are, to put it mildly, overstated.

"Misha couldn't have guaranteed anything. The way NABU operates, even its leadership sometimes has no advance knowledge of forthcoming investigative actions. Investigators are fairly autonomous and often simply present everyone with a fait accompli. What exactly could Fedorov have guaranteed? It is a little naive," a source told Ukrainska Pravda.

The second reason for the tension between Zelenskyy and Fedorov is the minister's own political views.

In December, at the height of Mindichgate, Fedorov presented his vision for reforming the government and the President's Office. It was the contents of that proposal that cost him the chief of staff position – his plan was seen as too radical and too "Soros-style".

"Misha brought together in a single document everything we had spent years pushing back against," a source close to the president's inner circle told Ukrainska Pravda. "Open competitive selection procedures for the State Bureau of Investigation and the Prosecutor General's Office, the dismissal of the entire President's Office, a government reset and so on. So they sent him to the Defence Ministry. Especially since he was the only one who had his own vision for the war. Nobody else had one."

Fedorov's team are still firmly convinced that had his ideas been implemented at the time, the crises now unfolding in the wake of the latest batch of Mindich tapes would not have posed a serious problem for the government.

The president's circle, however, reacted rather differently to his proposals.

"It looked as if Misha wanted to take charge and run everything – without elections, purely on the back of our fear," said a source within the president's team.

Fedorov came under increasingly close scrutiny, with suspicions multiplying around him. One question that Zelenskyy's team started to ask was why, after moving to the Defence Ministry, he did not disband the team of political strategists and communications experts who had previously worked on relaunching Servant of the People and running Zelenskyy's campaign.

Fedorov's explanation was straightforward: running the Defence Ministry during wartime – handling mobilisation, enlistment offices, and army reform – would be impossible without robust communications support.

But the doubts linger on. The president periodically raises the question of whether Fedorov is attempting to build his own political project.

A further source of tension complicates the picture. Fedorov is currently preparing one of the most significant reforms of the Ukrainian armed forces since the war began – overhauling the command structure, procurement and personnel appointments, and potentially reshuffling the military leadership.

It all looks promising in the presentations and strategic documents. But Zelenskyy understands perfectly well that in practice, such a reform could generate enormous conflict within the system.

That, too, is part of the reason why he has been keeping a degree of distance from the defence minister of late – so that in the event of failure, he will have the option of not absorbing the fallout himself.

***

Despite all these contradictions, Budanov, Fedorov and Arakhamiia remain among the few people in government who are capable of trying to convert their approval ratings, resources and influence into tangible change rather than just going with the flow.

They understand one thing clearly: whatever the internal conflicts and mutual suspicions, they are still part of the same political team.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, in recent weeks Arakhamiia has been persistently pushing the idea of a major "strategic session" on the government's top leadership.

The idea is simple: bring together the five or six people who actually make decisions in the country and ask them honestly where they see themselves in a year or two.

"Not to produce a presentation," explains one person who has already been approached by Arakhamiia about the idea. "But so that we understand whether we can still function as a team. Perhaps some people don't see themselves alongside the others – that's fine. But it's better to say so openly right now than to pretend nothing is happening.

Though preferably not at Mindich's apartment," the potential strategic session participant jokes.

Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Anna Briedova, Anastasiia Yankina

Edited by Teresa Pearce

Beijing speaks of so-called "peaceful reunification" – the official strategy of the Chinese government for annexing Taiwan, based on the "one country, two systems" formula. Beijing offers Taiwan the preservation of its self-governance, current socio-economic model and own authorities in exchange for recognising mainland China's rule over the island. Meanwhile, however, it is rehearsing a scenario that may look anything but peaceful: Chinese military aircraft already regularly enter Taiwan's air defence identification zone, while warships patrol around its waters.

Joseph Wen has spent years thinking about exactly that scenario. A co-founder of Taiwan Defense Studies Initiative (a Taiwanese civil society organisation working to strengthen defence research and strategic awareness among Taiwan's academic community and the broader public), Wen is part of a new generation of security thinkers trying to answer the question: what would a Chinese attack on Taiwan actually look like?

In conversation with Ukrainska Pravda, Wen explains why Taiwan matters more to Washington than many Americans admit, why Beijing may prefer a blockade to an invasion, what China has learned from Russia's failures in Ukraine – and why, despite facing a very different battlefield, Taiwan sees Ukraine's experience in civil resilience as one of its most valuable lessons.

This article is produced in partnership with Lviv Media Forum 2026 and features a speaker from this year's conference.

"Taiwan is far more critical to US national interests than Ukraine"

Taiwan and Ukraine are often compared in geopolitical discussions. Do you think the comparison is accurate?

If we are analysing the military environment, I would say the comparison is not quite accurate. Ukraine is a closed battlefield (primarily ground-based warfare), whereas Taiwan is an open battlefield (primarily sea and air warfare). Therefore, the two cannot truly be compared on equal terms.

​From a geopolitical standpoint, I believe Taiwan is far more critical to US national interests than Ukraine. This ties directly to America's interests in the Pacific since World War II. If Taiwan were to be occupied by China, it would signify a total failure of US China policy since 1949. Unless the US decides to abdicate its leadership of the global order, it cannot tacitly allow China to invade Taiwan. By contrast, Russia's invasion of Ukraine feels more like an internal European affair to the present-day United States.

Some voices in the United States actually argue Washington should focus more on Taiwan than on Ukraine. Do you feel US support for Taiwan has strengthened since 2022?

I believe that while the US remains unchanged at the strategic level, its tactical support for Taiwan has significantly increased.

​For instance, we are seeing a growing number of US military instructors arriving in Taiwan, and the volume of Taiwanese servicemen sent to the United States for advanced training has risen noticeably. These are tangible proofs of stronger tactical backing.

Donald Trump recently visited China and then said that the US won't defend Taiwan and are halting weapons deliveries to the island because Taiwan wants to start a war against China. Do you still trust the US while Trump is president?

I actually believe that for Taiwan, trusting the US is not a matter of choosing "to trust" or "not to trust". The US is currently the only nation in the world that sells weapons to Taiwan, our sole military ally, and our only "powerful" ally.

Consequently, we do not have much leverage or choice – this is the destiny of a small nation. However, positioned between the US and China, Taiwan is also presented with numerous opportunities and possibilities, which ultimately tests the wisdom of Taiwan's leadership.

​I believe that as a n independent nation (or one that prides itself on being so), Taiwan cannot expect other countries to offer unconditional aid simply because we refuse to be ruled by China or because we possess a democratic system. Nor can we take American support for granted or view it as an obligation.

In other words, Taiwan must bolster its societal resilience and demonstrate a firm commitment to self-defence to the democratic world. To put it bluntly, given Trump's background as a businessman, I would say we need to "play to his interests".

At the same time, we must not be overly provocative toward China, nor should we completely sever all forms of exchange. This approach allows us to manage the risk of conflict with China while maintaining strong ties with the democratic world, all while waiting for strategic opportunities that favour Taiwan to emerge.

"Current China's policy towards Taiwan remains focused primarily on 'peaceful unification'"

How serious do you think the risk of military conflict over Taiwan is in the near future?

If "military conflict" refers to a full-scale war, I would argue it is highly unlikely to happen. However, if it refers to an "unintentional or accidental conflict", I believe the probability is quite high.

​The reasoning is that Beijing does not have a rigid timetable for a military unification of Taiwan; its current policy toward Taiwan remains focused primarily on "peaceful unification".

However, China regularly exerts military pressure on Taiwan, compressing its maritime and air space. As a result, encounters between the maritime and air forces of both sides are becoming increasingly frequent. While this may not escalate into a full-scale war, the probability of an unpredictable, sudden military clash is actively rising.

This is actually a form of strategic waiting – essentially holding their ground until a situation emerges that is absolutely advantageous to them.

​During this waiting period, their primary strategy is to gain wider international recognition for their "One China" policy while maintaining continuous military pressure on Taiwan. They are attempting to "accumulate small victories into a major victory". Because the stakes of a full-scale war are incredibly high, I agree that this "grey zone" approach is indeed the best strategy China can pursue at the moment.

​Some analysts argue China is preparing not necessarily for an invasion, but for a blockade. How seriously does Taiwan take that possibility?

Taiwan's Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs) are absolutely vital. If Taiwan's external maritime trade routes are severed, the island will immediately face a critical energy crisis.

​Because of this vulnerability, Taiwan has begun developing its own indigenous submarine programme in recent years, alongside deploying land-based anti-ship missiles, largely because the Taiwanese Navy cannot currently acquire adequate regional air-defence vessels. These initiatives have already achieved preliminary results, so I would say the Taiwanese government takes this possibility very seriously.

Could China attempt a "decapitation strike" targeting Taiwan's political and military leadership first?

I think that would be extremely difficult. Unlike Venezuela, Taiwan is a robust democracy with an established system for leadership succession, meaning the strategic utility of a decapitation strike is not very high.

​Consequently, I do not believe China would attempt this prior to a war. Instead, they are more likely to utilise legal warfare – such as unilaterally declaring Taiwan's leaders as "separatist criminals" – to seize the moral high ground and shape the international narrative that China is merely exercising domestic law enforcement over Taiwan.

"A surprise blitzkrieg is highly unlikely"

Which Chinese military capability has improved most dramatically in recent years and worries Taiwanese defence planners the most?

The weapon system that has given the Taiwanese military the biggest headache in recent years is China's long-range rocket artillery. The PLA (People's Liberation Army) has heavily expanded its long-range rocket artillery units recently.

​These weapons are incredibly cheap and available in massive quantities. In a conflict, they could be used to rapidly deplete Taiwan's highly expensive air-defence ammunition in a very short window, and Taiwan currently lacks a highly cost-effective strategy to counter this.

In your view, what is China learning from Russia's war against Ukraine?

It's not just China; every country in the world has witnessed the sheer power and vital importance of drones in the war in Ukraine.

​From my own observations, since the outbreak of the war, the PLA has frequently initiated small-scale drone training operations, and in April 2024, they officially incorporated small-scale drone operations into the PLA's official training syllabus.

How do you think Beijing reacted to the Russian military's performance?

I think everyone shares the exact same view regarding the Russian military's performance: it was terrible.

​This display has undoubtedly made Beijing far more conservative regarding the potential use of force against Taiwan. For example, the war in Ukraine proved that relying solely on ballistic missile strikes to permanently knock out enemy airfields is not nearly as effective as previously assumed.

​Putin threatened to take Kyiv in three days. What would the first 24-72 hours of a Chinese operation against Taiwan likely look like?

​Because the Taiwan Strait is primarily a sea and air battlefield, a surprise blitzkrieg is highly unlikely – military movements on that scale are simply impossible to hide.

​Therefore, I believe that in the days leading up to an attack, China would use "military exercises" as a pretext to legitimise its troop deployments around Taiwan and mask its actual force mobilisation.

"Ukraine's experience in building civil defence is invaluable to Taiwan"

Yes, we've already seen such "military exercises", when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. What lessons did Taiwan immediately draw from it?

The core lesson was the critical importance of societal defence resilience. Initially, many people (including myself) assumed Kyiv was doomed. But the Ukrainian people proved that their will to resist was far more powerful than anyone anticipated.

​Of course, this resilience didn't happen by accident; since Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine began building a comprehensive civil defence system and public education programme. This is a crucial lesson Taiwan must learn. China will not act like Russia by seizing one piece of territory and waiting years before launching a full invasion; if a war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, it will be a full-scale conflict from day one. Because there will be very little reaction time, Ukraine's experience in building civil defence is invaluable to Taiwan.

Does Taiwan cooperate with Ukraine in studying modern warfare lessons?

At the official military level, the possibility of cooperation is currently zero. This is partly due to Taiwan's lack of formal diplomatic recognition, and partly because Ukraine's foreign policy toward Taiwan has historically been very conservative. Therefore, I believe any meaningful engagement needs to start by deepening civil society and NGO exchanges.

Taiwan often talks about an "asymmetric defence strategy". What does that mean in practice?

In reality, there isn't a 100% consensus within Taiwan regarding what asymmetric warfare should look like. The most controversial component is the domestic submarine programme, which consumes a massive portion of the defence budget, and there is ongoing debate about whether it will yield an effective combat capability.

​However, areas with little to no controversy include the development of drones and land-based anti-ship missiles.

Your organisation focuses on strengthening civil society's understanding of defence. Why is that as important as military preparedness?

Military and PLA studies are incredibly niche and unpopular fields among Taiwanese youth. Compared to the ruling party and the military leadership, young people do not easily perceive the immediate threat posed by China.

​Our goal is to build a defence-focused discussion community specifically for Taiwan's youth. Older generations are difficult to persuade, so starting with the youth is a much more viable path. Almost no one has tried this in Taiwan before, but it is our mission.

​However, many NGOs are working incredibly hard to promote civil education. Their primary focus is pushing for "China literacy" – helping young Taiwanese truly understand what kind of regime the Chinese Communist Party actually is, so that their first introduction to China isn't coming strictly from TikTok.

Isn't TikTok banned in Taiwan?​

TikTok is not banned in Taiwan, though the Xiaohongshu app [the Chinese alternative to Instagram – UP] is. TikTok in Taiwan is rife with misinformation, and I believe adolescents are the most heavily impacted – as is likely the case in every country.

Because Taiwan is a democracy, the legal procedures required to ban an app are incredibly complex. Therefore, I believe what we can do instead is foster students' China literacy. During my school years, our textbooks only taught us about the traditional separation of powers and Taiwan's five-branch democratic system, while offering very little content on the Chinese Communist Party. I believe we must enable students to better understand China through their school curriculum.

What does "whole-of-society defence" mean in Taiwan in practical terms?

"Whole-of-Society Defence Resilience" is a cornerstone policy introduced by the [President] Lai Ching-te administration. The most critical objective of this policy is to ensure that ordinary citizens do not become a burden to society during a national emergency and, ideally, are equipped to help others.

​Even if a nation possesses superior military hardware, if the public panics and society fractures, military operations lose the domestic momentum required to sustain themselves.

If China never invades Taiwan, but Taiwan spends decades preparing for it, would that still count as success?

No one can truly answer whether China will definitely invade Taiwan one day. However, I have always believed that when it comes to a Chinese invasion, "if you prepare for it, it won't happen; if you don't, it will".

​We can go a hundred years without a war, but we cannot afford a single day without defence readiness. We live in a realistic and brutal world; how much weight you carry at the negotiating table depends entirely on your military strength and your economic leverage.