July 29, 2026
Prepared by Diana Bozhyk
Russian missiles hit Kyiv again overnight, killing at least one person, hours after a 20-year-old man died of wounds from last week’s strike on a defense industry exhibition — bringing that single attack’s death toll to 12. A Russian drone deliberately targeted a bread delivery van in Kherson, killing its driver, part of a day that left at least one dead and 30 wounded across six regions. And Ukraine’s General Staff launched an audit of how the military distributes its own soldiers, the clearest sign yet that Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi intends to fix what critics say his predecessor broke.
THE DAY’S RECKONING
Zelensky had warned Ukrainians the night before to take their air raid alerts seriously, and by the early hours of Thursday, the warning had proven right. Missiles hit Kyiv again, sparking fires in two districts and killing at least one person before dawn — the capital’s fourth Russian strike in five days. A few hours later came word from a hospital: a 20-year-old man who’d been clinging to life since a ballistic missile hit a defense exhibition outside the city the previous Friday had died of his wounds, pushing that single strike’s toll to 12. In Kherson, a Russian drone operator did something almost too deliberate to be called anything but murder: aimed straight through a windshield at a van with the word “BREAD” painted in letters large enough that no one could plausibly claim not to have seen them. And in Kyiv’s military headquarters, a quieter kind of news broke — the General Staff ordered an audit of exactly how Ukraine’s soldiers get distributed across its units, the clearest sign yet that the man who replaced Oleksandr Syrskyi intends to fix what produced scandals like the one still unfolding inside the Skelia regiment.
President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Lublin, Poland. (President’s Office)
KYIV STRUCK AGAIN, AND LAST WEEK’S TOLL RISES TO TWELVE
Russian missiles hit Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday, sparking fires in the Sviatoshynskyi and Obolonskyi districts and killing at least one person, city officials confirmed shortly before 3 a.m. Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported blazes at a non-residential site and a garage cooperative in Sviatoshynskyi, plus a separate fire in Obolon; Ukraine’s air force had earlier warned that missiles were tracking toward Kyiv, Dnipro, and Kryvyi Rih, urging residents into shelters as the attack unfolded. It was the fourth time Russian missiles have reached the capital in five days.
Hours later, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed a second, delayed casualty from an entirely different strike: a 20-year-old man who had been critically wounded in the July 24 ballistic missile attack on a defense industry exhibition in Bucha Raion died in hospital, bringing that single attack’s death toll to 12, with more than 100 others wounded. Investigators have said the event’s organizer, an industry association called Armada, held the gathering without coordinating with military or regional authorities, at a venue whose only nearby shelter measured just 34 square meters. The organizer remains under guard at a medical facility, charged with official negligence, while investigators continue examining whether the way the event was arranged made it easier for Russia to target.
A BREAD VAN IN KHERSON: ONE KILLED, THIRTY WOUNDED
Russia launched 80 drones at Ukraine overnight, of which air defenses downed or suppressed 65; the 14 that got through hit 10 locations across six regions, leaving at least one dead and 30 wounded. The single death came during Thursday morning’s rush hour in Kherson, when a Russian drone struck a bread delivery van dead-on. “The word ‘BREAD’ was clearly written in large letters on the vehicle. The Russian operator could not have failed to see it, but still directed the drone straight into the windshield. Another deliberate attack on civilians,” Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. Hours earlier, Shahed-type drones had hit a residential district in the same city, wounding three men aged 44, 48, and 50 with blast and shrapnel injuries.
A bread delivery van struck by a Russian drone in central Kherson. (Oleksandr Prokudin/Telegram)
The rest of the day’s toll spread evenly across the map: 11 wounded in Kharkiv Oblast, six in Donetsk, five in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast including a 3-year-old child, four in Zaporizhzhia, and one in Sumy. A day earlier, in Maksymivka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian forces had struck rescue workers a second time as they worked to extinguish a fire from an earlier strike — the same “double-tap” pattern that has become a recognizable feature of this war rather than an aberration in it. None of these individual numbers make international headlines on their own. Stacked together, day after day, they’re the actual shape of what this war does to the people living inside it.
AN F-16 DOWN, PILOT SAFE
Ukraine’s Air Force confirmed it lost contact with an F-16 fighter jet during a combat mission on Wednesday after the aircraft suffered an in-flight emergency mid-mission, forcing the pilot to eject over the front line. “The pilot is currently safe. He was successfully evacuated and taken to a medical facility for examination and diagnostic tests,” the Air Force said, adding that he had been flying a mission to intercept Russian aerial targets when the emergency occurred. No civilian casualties or ground damage were reported, and the cause remains under investigation.
It’s the kind of incident that would barely register as news in most militaries’ air forces, but Ukraine doesn’t have F-16s to spare. The country has flown the jets since 2024, when allied nations began deliveries specifically to bolster air defense against Russia’s missile and drone campaigns; earlier this year, Ukrainian pilots went more than three weeks without US-made air-to-air missiles for the aircraft, a shortage that briefly left the jets far less capable than intended.
ZELENSKY IN LUBLIN: MENDING FENCES WITH POLAND
Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Lublin to meet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk — his first visit to Poland since President Karol Nawrocki stripped him of an honorary Polish award in June, after Zelensky named a Ukrainian military unit for the World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a group Poland holds responsible for the mass killing of Polish civilians in Volhynia. “Anti-ballistic defense is the key priority,” Zelensky wrote afterward, adding that “the security and protection of Ukraine is also the security and protection of Poland.” The two also discussed the safety of Ukrainian refugees living in Poland, with Zelensky saying it was important that “Ukrainians who left their homes and found shelter in Poland feel safe.”
That safety has been increasingly in question. Polish police logged 180 hate crime reports against Ukrainians in the first half of the year, up more than 30 percent from the same period in 2025, and a new poll published the same day found 52 percent of Poles now oppose backing Ukraine’s EU membership bid, while 65 percent reject the idea of Polish troops helping oversee any postwar ceasefire. On the narrower question of whether the historical dispute itself should affect military aid, opinion splits almost evenly — 44 percent favor suspending support over the row, 41 percent want it to continue. Zelensky had already tried to get ahead of the damage on July 17, announcing a five-point plan that included giving Poland access to Ukraine’s Volhynia-era archival files. Wednesday’s meeting was the first real test of whether that plan is working.
KOSTIANTYNIVKA’S AIR WAR: WHY GLIDE BOMBS ARE WINNING GROUND
Analysts who track the war offered a blunt explanation this week for why Russia keeps grinding forward in Kostiantynivka despite months of failing to actually seize it: Russian aircraft still dominate the skies there, and glide bombs — satellite-guided bombs dropped from a safe distance — are doing what Russian infantry alone cannot. A Ukrainian drone unit commander operating in the area said the bombs are the single biggest driver of Russian success, turning city blocks to rubble that then conceals infiltrating Russian soldiers and destroys the Ukrainian control stations that coordinate drone defense. It’s the same tactic Russia used to first seize Avdiivka in 2024, refined since through Vuhledar, Kurakhove, and Toretsk — Ukrainian cities that fell not to mass infantry assaults but to systematic aerial demolition that made holding them impossible.
The good news, if there is any, is that this dependency is also a weakness. Ukraine has already degraded Russian ground-based air defenses significantly in parts of the theater through a sustained suppression campaign since late 2025, and continued Western support for Ukraine’s F-16 and Gripen fleets could erode Russia’s aviation advantage further. For now, though, urban combat continues block by block inside Kostiantynivka itself, with Ukrainian and Russian positions genuinely intermixed; a Ukrainian commander told local media that Russian infiltrators keep complicating the defense, but that Ukrainian forces are still rotating troops through the city and face no encirclement risk for at least several more weeks. Just north of the city, Russian forces have essentially taken the small settlement of Molocharka and are pushing into neighboring Izhevka — a reminder that even a city that hasn’t fallen can still be slowly surrounded.
DRAPATYI ORDERS AN AUDIT: FIXING WHAT SYRSKYI LEFT BEHIND
Ukraine’s General Staff announced an audit of how combat units are staffed and how manpower gets distributed across the military — the clearest sign yet that new Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi intends to address one of the sharpest criticisms of his predecessor. “The key goal is to assess the actual state of manning in brigades, regiments, and corps, analyze the effectiveness of personnel distribution among units, and identify ways to improve personnel management,” the announcement read, adding a line that reads almost like a rebuke of how things worked before: “Any systemic changes in the army begin with a change in attitude towards a person.”
Oleksandr Syrskyi, nicknamed “the butcher” since his defense of Bakhmut, spent his final year in command expanding assault units into oversized regiments numbering in the thousands, even as ordinary mechanized brigades went chronically understaffed. One of those units, the 425th Assault Regiment known as Skelia, has become the starkest example of what that policy cost: a Ukrainian media investigation found dozens of noncombat deaths among its recruits, and this week brought fresh torture charges against two of its own servicemen. Drapatyi, who built his reputation on more human-centered leadership as Ground Forces commander, isn’t the first to attempt this kind of review — a presidential advisor led a similar effort in November, and Fedorov’s own audit of battlefield losses was reportedly part of what put him on a collision course with Syrskyi in the first place. Whether Drapatyi’s version produces real change or simply another report remains, for now, an open question.
DEEP STRIKES: RYAZAN AND PERM’S REFINERIES BURN AGAIN
Ukraine’s long-range campaign hit two of Russia’s largest oil refineries in a single night. Drones struck the Ryazan Oil Refinery, roughly 465 kilometers inside Russia and one of the country’s largest with a processing capacity of 17 million tons a year; the same wave hit a Wildberries logistics hub in the same city, forcing an evacuation. Ukraine’s Security Service separately claimed a strike on the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery in Perm, nearly 1,500 kilometers from Ukraine’s border, describing it as a special operation ordered by Zelensky; Russian analysts noted the refinery sits just 600 meters from a defense plant that makes engine components for MiG-31 jets and Ka-52 and Mi-8 helicopters. Six people were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries in Ryazan; officials in Rostov Oblast separately reported that a strike on Taganrog overnight killed a woman and injured a man when debris hit their apartment building.
Reuters reported that Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries since the start of the year have pushed gasoline production down to roughly 65 percent of average summer demand. Russia, for its part, is trying to extend the reach of its own weapons: photos circulating on Russian military channels this week showed a new mobile, ground-based launcher for the S8000 Banderol drone-missile — a weapon previously fired only from aircraft — small enough, Ukrainian analysts say, that it could plausibly be mounted on an ordinary pickup truck.
Closer to the front, Ukrainian forces kept up an intermediate-range campaign against occupied Donetsk Oblast, striking a military warehouse, a road bridge, a drone storage point, and an ammunition depot and gas station in occupied Mariupol itself. A Mariupol mayoral advisor reported the overnight strikes cut power completely in neighboring Manhush and partially inside Mariupol — a reminder that Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign reaches just as often into occupied Ukrainian land as it does into Russia proper.
UKRAINE’S NEW STRIKE DOCTRINE: HIT THE SAME SPOT TWICE
Ukraine has quietly changed how it targets Russian oil infrastructure, according to Financial Times reporting citing military planners, drone operators, and energy specialists. Rather than striking refineries broadly, Ukrainian units are now targeting the specific components inside each facility that are hardest to replace — briefed in advance by energy engineers and industry experts on exactly which parts would take longest to source and rebuild. Drone operators told the paper that Ukrainian forces have begun deliberately striking the same critical equipment again before Russian repair crews can finish fixing it the first time, turning individual refineries into recurring targets rather than one-off hits.
It’s a shift from breadth to precision — fewer facilities hit, perhaps, but each one kept offline longer and at greater cost to rebuild. For a campaign explicitly aimed at draining the revenue funding Russia’s war, repeat strikes on the same irreplaceable part may do more lasting damage than spreading the same number of drones across new targets every night.
WILDBERRIES RETREATS TO KAZAKHSTAN
Russia’s largest online retailer is looking for an exit, at least partially. Wildberries is seeking up to 100,000 square meters of warehouse space in Kazakhstan, with one source telling Kommersant the company is prepared to lease virtually all available logistics capacity there; it’s already building centers exceeding 100,000 and 160,000 square meters in Almaty and Astana respectively. The company insists the move is part of a long-term strategy rather than a retreat, but it comes as Russian landlords grow increasingly reluctant to lease Wildberries warehouse space at all, given the now-obvious risk of Ukrainian strikes — standard warehouse insurance doesn’t even cover drone damage.
The financial toll behind that reluctance keeps mounting. Goods destroyed in warehouse fires in just the Moscow and Tambov regions were worth an estimated $2.1 to $2.9 billion, according to one Russian e-commerce analyst, and sellers have complained that Wildberries’ own compensation has covered as little as 3 to 5 percent of what they lost. Together with rival Ozon, Wildberries accounts for roughly 8.5 percent of Russia’s entire GDP and more than 5 percent of its workforce — which is exactly why Ukraine keeps treating its warehouses as legitimate military-economic targets rather than ordinary retail.
THE KREMLIN DENIES WHAT EVERYONE SEES COMING
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev insisted this week that reports of an impending mobilization are false, calling them Ukrainian propaganda designed to destabilize Russia ahead of September’s parliamentary elections. Medvedev claimed Russia has fully met its recruitment needs — roughly 200,000 contract soldiers and 16,000 volunteers in the first half of the year alone — and dismissed online recruitment ads urging Russians to sign up “before mobilization” as fake. That claim contradicts at least one prominent, Kremlin-aligned military blogger, who has himself been urging Russians to enlist voluntarily before the Kremlin forces the issue.
The denials arrived pointedly one day after Zelensky told Sky News that Ukrainian intelligence expects Putin to mobilize as many as 500,000 troops this autumn. Behind the public denial, Russia’s own bureaucracy keeps preparing anyway: state-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation has reportedly tightened which specialists qualify for exemption from a reserve call-up, effectively freeing up more workers for mobilization if it comes. Separately, Russia’s FSB charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with aiding terrorism, accusing the platform of failing to remove channels used to coordinate “sabotage and terrorism”; a Russian lawyer insisted the charge doesn’t amount to a Telegram ban, but a State Duma defense committee member suggested the same day that authorities could still declare the app a terrorist resource outright — a pressure campaign against one of the last open channels Russians could use to organize resistance to a mobilization the Kremlin insists isn’t coming.
ZELENSKY’S WINTER ASK: 300 PATRIOTS BY CHRISTMAS
In an interview with Axios, Zelensky said he asked Trump directly for an emergency “winter package” of 300 Patriot interceptors, warning that Ukraine’s existing stockpile is nearly depleted and that without it, Russian strikes could destroy enough of Ukraine’s power infrastructure by winter to cut heating for millions of people. “We needed the Patriots yesterday,” he said. Trump, according to Zelensky, promised to try to help but was candid about the difficulty, given how much of America’s own interceptor supply is now tied up in its war with Iran.
Zelensky said Ukraine is exploring a faster, cheaper alternative in the meantime: modifying its own domestically produced ballistic missiles into interceptors with capabilities similar to the Patriot. He described US-Ukraine relations as “much better and more constructive” than earlier in the war, and said one concrete outcome of his Washington trip is a planned visit to Kyiv within two weeks by Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — their first trip to Ukraine itself, after multiple visits to Moscow. He remained skeptical of Putin’s intentions regardless, warning that Russia may be angling toward a fresh provocation elsewhere in the region: “It’s not the signal that he wants to stop the war.”
A SANCTIONS BILL WITH BUILT-IN EXITS
The Russia sanctions bill the Senate advanced this week carries real teeth on paper — asset freezes, SWIFT cutoffs, tariffs up to 100 percent on top buyers of Russian energy — but comes with carve-outs wide enough to blunt much of its force. The bill exempts countries importing less than 15 percent of their natural gas from Russia if they’re taking steps to reduce dependence, a clause that leaves major European buyers like France, Belgium, and Italy untouched, while Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria remain free to keep buying Russian pipeline gas entirely. Third-party sanctions evasion — oil rerouted through shell companies in third countries — triggers penalties only once specific evaders are identified, a bar Ukrainian and Western officials know is easy for temporary shell companies to slip beneath.
China and India together buy 85 to 90 percent of Russia’s seaborne crude; China’s foreign ministry has already called the bill’s approach “bullying” and threatened to restrict rare earth exports if Washington tries to enforce it against Chinese buyers, while India’s foreign minister has said energy purchasing decisions rest on “availability, costs, and risks” rather than political pressure. Whether the bill meaningfully constrains Moscow’s oil revenue, in other words, depends heavily on enforcement choices a White House that has spent much of the past 18 months avoiding sustained pressure on Russia would now have to make consistently — against two of the world’s largest economies, simultaneously.
FRANCE EXPELS A KREMLIN PROPAGANDIST
French authorities ordered Xenia Fedorova, the former head of RT France, to leave the country, accusing her of serving as “a conduit for disinformation campaigns orchestrated by the Russian authorities” aimed at destabilizing French public order. Fedorova, now confined to house arrest and required to report to police daily, has spent years as a commentator across media outlets owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, despite President Emmanuel Macron publicly questioning her credibility as far back as 2017. “I hold the same opinion,” Macron said when asked again in June, though he noted revoking her decade-long residence permit wasn’t simply his call to make.
Her employers — Canal+, CNews, and Lagardère — called the expulsion a blow to free expression; her lawyer says she’ll appeal immediately. French authorities, for their part, say the broken diplomatic relationship with Moscow may make actually deporting her difficult to enforce, even with the order in place. It’s a small illustration of a larger problem Western democracies keep running into: platforms built to protect open debate are hard to close off to people using that same openness to spread the views of a government at war with a European neighbor.
Belarus supplied its own reminder of how many fronts this war actually has. Lithuanian border guards discovered an incomplete tunnel running from Belarus into southeastern Lithuania after detecting ground vibrations from digging, the latest in a pattern of migrant- and goods-smuggling tunnels Lithuania says Belarus has used before as a tool of pressure against NATO’s eastern border.
AN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN TULA
Andrey Cherezov, head of a Tula-based drone manufacturer called Ovod, was shot three times in his own apartment building entrance and hospitalized in serious condition, Russian media reported; his attacker fled and remains at large. Ovod builds FPV drones for Russian forces and recently secured contracts worth roughly $376,000 to supply drone kits to a Russian technical university. Russia’s Investigative Committee opened an attempted murder case but hasn’t confirmed a motive.
It’s the latest in a pattern of attacks on people connected to Russia’s war effort inside Russia itself — a quieter, harder-to-verify front where responsibility is rarely claimed and even less often proven, but where the targets keep sharing one thing in common: some direct role in keeping the war supplied.
NAVAL STANDOFF: RUSSIA’S SHIPS WON’T LEAVE PORT
Ukraine’s navy says its long-range strike campaign has effectively pinned much of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in place. Spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk said Russian cruise missile carriers are no longer leaving harbor to launch strikes on Ukraine at all, resorting instead to firing missiles directly from port for the first time in the war — only Russian coast guard vessels still venture into open water. Reuters separately reported that Russia has redirected grain exports away from Sea of Azov ports toward the Black Sea, while export terminals at Novorossiysk and Taman have restricted truck deliveries entirely because of the strike risk.
Overnight, Ukrainian forces added to that pressure directly, striking a Russian Black Sea Fleet fast-attack craft base near occupied Mizhvodne and hitting 10 more electrical substations across occupied Crimea — Commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi puts the year’s total energy strikes at 164 since July 1 alone. A fleet that can’t safely leave its own harbors isn’t a fleet in any meaningful sense anymore — it’s a target list that happens to still be floating.
Russia, meanwhile, kept up its own pressure on Ukraine’s shipping. A Liberian-flagged vessel in the Black Sea was struck for the third time this month, after earlier attacks on July 21 and 24, Odesa Oblast officials said. Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for sanctions policy said Russia has now hit Odesa Oblast port infrastructure 16 times in June and July combined, using Banderol loitering munitions in 80 percent of those strikes.
WHAT THURSDAY CONFIRMED
By the time Thursday’s fires were out, Ukraine had a new death to add to an old strike, a new commander quietly auditing the army his predecessor built, and two of Russia’s largest refineries burning at once. Nothing about the war’s basic shape moved today — Kostiantynivka is still nobody’s city, Kyiv is still not safe, and winter is still coming faster than the Patriots Ukraine needs to survive it. But Thursday added its own honest accounting anyway: one bread van, one audit, two refineries, twelve names now attached to a single strike that started as ten.
A PRAYER FOR UKRAINE
1. For the Twelfth Name Added to Friday’s List
Lord, a twenty-year-old man held on for five days after a missile found him at an exhibition he’d only come to attend, and tonight his name joins eleven others already grieved. Receive him gently, and comfort a family that has now waited through both the worst night and this slower, second loss. Let his name be remembered alongside the rest, not folded quietly into an updated number.
2. For the Driver Who Delivered Bread
Father, a man drove bread through his own city on an ordinary Thursday morning, in a van marked plainly enough that no one could mistake it for anything else, and was killed anyway. Hold his family in the particular cruelty of a death that was clearly, deliberately chosen. Let his work — feeding his neighbors — be remembered longer than the drone that ended it.
3. For the Soldiers of Molocharka and Izhevka
Lord of the front line, Ukrainian defenders are being slowly surrounded in villages most of the world will never learn the names of, holding ground that matters enormously to the people fighting for it and almost invisibly to everyone else. Protect them as the ground beneath them keeps shifting. Let their sacrifice not be forgotten simply because the map is hard to read.
4. For an Army Learning to Count Its Own People Rightly
God of justice, a military is beginning to ask honestly how it has been treating its own soldiers, after months of scandal and loss inside units that were supposed to protect them. Give Commander Drapatyi wisdom and courage to finish what this audit starts. Let every soldier in Ukraine’s ranks be valued as a person first, not simply as a number to be distributed.
5. For a Country Asking for Missiles It May Not Get in Time
God of provision, tonight Ukraine has asked, plainly and publicly, for three hundred interceptors before winter arrives, unsure whether the asking will be enough or whether other wars elsewhere will keep those missiles from ever reaching Ukrainian soil. Move the hearts of those with the power to send them, and give Ukraine’s people endurance for a winter that may still come before the missiles do.
In Your mercy, in Your justice, in Your time — bring this war to its end, and let the ending be worthy of what Ukraine has endured.