The show, titled “Wine Cabaret,” is running at Bely Mys. It premiered Sept. 12, with the final performance scheduled for Oct. 10. The event combines cabaret, wine tasting, and a gastronomic dinner:

“Wine reveals itself onstage through music, dance, circus arts, acrobatics, live vocals, lighting, visual imagery, and gastronomy,” according to the description on the show’s website.

Tickets cost between 25,000 and 60,000 rubles ($295 to just over $700).

The wine center itself has previously been linked to Putin’s inner circle. The Bely Mys website domain is owned by a company belonging to a friend of Putin’s from his youth at the Yavara-Neva judo club, The Insider reported this past June. The editorial team also established a link between the new show and other figures close to Putin: the company organizing it is owned by Svetlana Krivonogikh, who was named in a 2020 investigation by the independent outlet Proekt as being the mother of one of Putin’s daughters. In 2016, before the past romantic connection between Putin and Krivonogikh had become known, The Insider identified her as one of the “close acquaintances” who accompanied the then-FSB Director on flights between Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1999.

The current show has been organized by the team behind Leningrad Center, an entertainment venue and performing arts theater housed in the historic former Leningrad cinema building in St. Petersburg’s Tavrichesky Garden. The center’s legal entity is the aptly named LLC Profit (ООО «Профит»). Three-quarters of the company is owned by LLC Relax (ООО «Релакс»), which is wholly owned by Krivonogikh.

Leningrad Center has repeatedly faced criticism over what some viewers described as excessive sexualization in its productions. Its 2021 show LoveSick was billed as the “most provocative and explicit” production staged at the venue, promising audiences “the aftertaste of encounters with a seductive 1930s cabaret dancer, a Victorian courtesan, or a model from Andy Warhol’s studio.” Another production, “Favorites of the Moon,” starred the American actress and former Playboy model Carmen Electra, who had previously performed with the erotic revue Crazy Horse Paris at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Audience reviews complained that the show mixed “theater, circus, musical, and striptease, but all of them half-baked,” as well as featuring “unjustified bare breasts” among the performers. Social media posts from “Wine Cabaret” indirectly suggest that the same style has been retained.

Bely Mys, Russia’s largest wine-themed entertainment complex, is located on the waterfront in Gelendzhik. It includes a wine museum, an enoteca boasting the country’s largest collection of Russian wines, more than 10 restaurants, a movie theater, a Wine Academy, and even a civil registry office where marriage certificates can be signed. The complex also has its own yacht marina.

In 2024, the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo reported that companies linked to Vladimir Putin were involved in building the complex. Developer Veles-Stroy had worked on the reconstruction of “Putin’s palace” at Cape Idokopas, while Alexei Borodin, director contractor Politekhstroy-Svargo, had previously served as an aide to the presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District. The project’s main investor is Bank Rossiya — which is controlled by billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk, another one of Putin’s close personal friends. Bely Mys uses the wine.ru domain, which belongs to Bastion, a company whose beneficiary until the end of 2023 was Taimuraz Bolloyev, a friend of Putin’s from the Yavara-Neva judo club.

The remaining restrictions were extended for three years, through Sept. 22, 2029. The existing measures cover more than 3,000 individuals and entities that Brussels says are linked to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The document separately notes that the council “decided not to renew the listings of three individuals and one entity.” The council statement did not name those delisted, but their identities appear in a document published in the EU’s Official Journal. They are:

• Alisher Usmanov, founder of USM Holdings;
• Mikhail Fridman, co-founder of Alfa Group;
• Andrei Falaleev, former rector of Vernadsky Crimean Federal University;
• and Redbird Corporate Services Ltd, a company linked to a vessel belonging to Russia’s “shadow fleet,” the network of ships used to transport Russian oil and other cargo while evading Western sanctions and a price cap designed to limit the Kremlin’s revenue amid the ongoing war.

Multiple media outlets and international news agencies had previously reported that EU countries were discussing the removal of the 62-year-old Fridman and 73-year-old Usmanov from the sanctions list, with reports appearing in The Guardian, Euronews, and Reuters. France and Slovakia had sought Usmanov’s removal, according to the Financial Times, while Luxembourg supported lifting sanctions on Fridman. Latvia was among the countries that opposed the moves.

A spokesperson for Ireland, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council, told The Guardian that the decision was the result of a “difficult compromise” — one that saw the above-mentioned figures removed from the list in exchange for a procedural switch that will significantly extend the time between renewals of the larger sanctions regime:

“Until now, these listings have been reviewed and assessed on a six-monthly basis; today’s decision to renew on a 36-month basis enhances the durability and predictability of the EU sanctions framework.”

Uzbekistan-born Usmanov, who according to Forbes has a net worth of $14 billion (placing him 224th on its list of global billionaires as of Sept. 23), amassed his wealth in the mining, industry, telecoms, and media sectors. He was sanctioned by both the EU and the U.S., as well as Canada, the UK, and multiple other countries in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In its sanctions announcement, the EU described Usmanov as having “particularly close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin” and referred to him as “one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite oligarchs.” Usmanov has denied any association with Putin.

A number of court cases involving Usmanov in Germany have seen the oligarch get the upper hand, with a court in Hamburg upholding a libel lawsuit filed by the billionaire against the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) this past January. Prosecutors in Munich dropped an investigation into suspected sanctions violations by Usmanov after he made a sizeable charitable payment in 2025, while the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor’s office closed a separate money laundering investigation into the billionaire in November 2024 after he paid a fine of €4 million.

The Ukraine-born Fridman, co-founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest privately owned bank, has an estimated net worth of $16.6 billion, according to Forbes, which puts him 175th on in its list of global billionaires. Fridman, who also holds Israeli citizenship, was first sanctioned by the European Union on Feb. 28, 2022, four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was added to the same sanctions list as Usmanov. The UK followed on March 15, 2022, while the United States designated him on Aug. 11, 2023.

After the invasion, Fridman stepped down from his Luxembourg-based holding company LetterOne and also reduced his stake. British authorities have frozen his London properties, including the Athlone House estate, valued at around $100 million.

Fridman founded commodities trader Alfa-Eco in 1989 with entrepreneurs German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev. The group later formed oil venture TNK-BP by uniting with British energy giant BP in 2003 before selling its stake in 2013 in a deal that brought Fridman about $5.1 billion in cash. Ukraine opened a criminal case against Fridman in August 2023 over alleged fraud linked to Alfa Bank Ukraine and placed him on an international wanted list that December.

In the latest incident, a farmer discovered a drone broken into several pieces near the Wunstorf military airfield. A few days later, police discovered a suspicious substance just a few meters away. According to German journalists, investigators are operating on the assumption that they are dealing with explosive material; however, forensic analysis of the substance has not yet been completed.

The drone found at Wunstorf is similar in design to those used in the attempted attack on Leipzig/Halle Airport. At least one of its components was made on a 3D printer. Investigators also suspect that the drone may have been lying near the base for an extended period of time — potentially as long as two years.

Wunstorf is a key base for Germany’s military transport aviation, hosting the 62nd Air Transport Wing and all 53 of the German Air Force’s Airbus A400M aircraft, according to Bundeswehr data. Germany received its 53rd and final A400M in April 2026. The Bundeswehr itself describes the A400M as the backbone of Germany’s military transport aviation.

It remains to be determined whether the two drone incidents are connected. Overnight into Aug. 5, a drone carrying explosives and a detonator was discovered in Leipzig. Investigators believe the target may have been Ukrainian cargo planes. In early September, the German government officially blamed Russia for the attempted attack, citing the results of a police investigation and intelligence data. Moscow denied any involvement.

Investigators have identified two suspects in the Leipzig case. One of them, Oleg L., a Latvian citizen with a Russian passport, had maintained contact with Russian military intelligence for years, including with Colonel Denis Smolyaninov of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), according to reporting by Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR.

A spokesperson for the Federal Prosecutor General’s Office declined to comment on details of the investigation into the more recent Wunstorf incident. Nevertheless, the drone discovered there was discussed on Tuesday at the weekly meeting of the heads of Germany’s security services at the Federal Chancellery.

Officials are also discussing cutting Saxony-Anhalt off from intelligence on Russian subversive activity in Europe and from investigations into far-right groups, including the AfD itself. German law enforcement authorities have officially classified the AfD branch in Saxony-Anhalt as “right-wing extremist,” and it is being monitored, including by undercover agents.

According to the Times, Germany’s allies — including Poland and some of the Nordic countries — have voiced concerns about the potential for the AfD to leak sensitive information to Moscow. Berlin assured them that it is preparing restrictions, but did not specify exactly which data the state would stop receiving. Germany’s Defense Ministry said it is assessing what information needs to be protected.

Meanwhile, AfD spokesperson Jork Herrmann said: “It would be utterly undemocratic and impossible to justify to voters to withhold intelligence information from the party based on unsubstantiated and unprovable allegations.”

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius had promised even before the election not to share military intelligence with an AfD-led government.

As The Insider previously found, a week before the decree JSC L.E.V. was headed by former Ministry of Internal Affairs general Andrei Krayushkin, while the JSC itself was still listed among the ready-made shell companies available for purchase for 450,000 rubles ($5,340) — with the option to replace the CEO and complete the deal “same-day.”

The business outlet Kommersant reported Berdnikov’s appointment, citing Auchan’s press service. The previous CEO, Asya Balabai, will remain with the company as executive director.

Berdnikov held the post of executive director at Rosimushchestvo starting from December 2024, the paper writes, citing information from his social media accounts. Previously, he worked at the X5 retail group, the Georgian winemaker Askaneli, and the Canadian construction company Bothwell Accurate Co., and also developed the startup SolidRobots in Canada.

A Kommersant source in the retail market claims that previous CEO Balabai will in fact continue to run day-to-day operations, while Berdnikov will oversee the company. L.E.V. Management head Andrei Krayushkin, meanwhile, will manage the overall process without a formal job title at Auchan.

On Sept. 17, Putin placed the Russian assets of Auchan and Nestlé (along with those of several other companies) under the temporary authority of L.E.V. Management. The Insider found that L.E.V. Management was registered only in October 2024, with charter capital of 15,000 rubles ($178). In 2025 it had no revenue, posted a net loss of 15,000 rubles ($178), and had an average headcount of one employee.

On Sept. 10, one week before Putin’s decree, Andrei Krayushkin — the former first deputy head of Russia’s Main Directorate for Migration Affairs and a police major general — became CEO of L.E.V. Management.

After the assets were transferred, L.E.V. Management said it intended to keep Auchan operating as a single retail chain and to ensure that stores continued running without interruption. No leadership changes have yet been reported at the other companies placed under L.E.V.’s management. At Lemana PRO (formerly Leroy Merlin), the temporary administrator promised to preserve the existing management system and current senior leadership. Nestlé’s Russian division also continues to operate under executive director Denis Voityuk.

The mechanism for placing foreign assets under temporary management has been in effect in Russia since April 2023. Formally, the foreign owner retains ownership rights, but the structure appointed by Russian authorities receives broad powers to manage the assets. This scheme was previously applied to the Russian businesses of Danone and Carlsberg, which subsequently lost control of their companies in Russia.

Precinct commission No. 8158 covered voting locations in the coastal cities of Paphos and Limassol, as well as the Russian Embassy in the country’s capital, Nicosia. According to official data from the Russian Central Election Commission, 15,843 people voted at the precinct, where the ruling United Russia party received 10,897 votes — 68.78% overall. The LDPR came second with 1,095 votes (6.91%), the Communist Party was third with 954 (6.02%), New People was fourth with 785 (5.95%), and A Just Russia was fifth with 695 (4.39%).

Those results differ sharply from the independent Vote Abroad exit poll, which showed New People receiving 46.3% of the vote at the Cyprus polling locations, with United Russia taking just 12.8%. The exit poll’s organizers told The Insider that the discrepancy could only be explained by fraud. One of the organizers, Margarita Kuchusheva, said:

“At the three locations, we surveyed most of the people who came to vote and counted 945 people. We were there for almost 80% of the voting period. From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday in Paphos, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday in Limassol [voting in those cities took place only on Sept. 18 and 19], and on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the embassy in Nicosia from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., except during a heavy thunderstorm Friday morning and for two hours Saturday. During the storm, I was sitting in a car outside the embassy and recorded zero turnout.

All the polling places had one entrance and one exit. We counted turnout. How could the official turnout be about 10 times higher? The only major period we did not cover was Friday in Limassol. But that was a workday — it is impossible that 90% of voters came specifically during those hours, specifically in Limassol, on a working Friday. These are fantastical results. Even if you include embassy employees and their families, the numbers still do not add up. That means at least 10,000 ballots were stuffed. And they were added not only for United Russia, but also for A Just Russia and the LDPR.”

Voting in Cyprus also took place at precinct commission No. 8439 in Nicosia at the Russian Center for Science and Culture. That polling station was not covered by the independent exit poll, but it still remains statistically all but impossible that the official election results published for the country correspond to reality.

The Insider previously analyzed Central Election Commission data from overseas polling stations at Russian embassies worldwide, finding that New People’s share of the vote abroad was over three times higher than its official result inside Russia, while United Russia’s was about 18 percentage points lower. Russian voters abroad also produced results that differed significantly from the nationwide totals in the 2024 presidential election.

Cyprus, particularly Nicosia, stood out as one of the biggest anomalies in Russia’s 2024 presidential election abroad. Official results showed more than 53,000 votes cast in Cyprus (compared to just 5,276 in 2018), including about 42,000 at one Nicosia polling station, while independent monitors estimated actual turnout may have been closer to 13,000 and that roughly 40,000 official votes could have been fictitious or otherwise manipulated. Russian Election Monitor called the presidential vote in 2024 the “largest overseas electoral fraud in Russia's modern history.”

Czech police confirmed that procedural steps had been taken involving Chashchukhin but declined to disclose the outcome. 

“We performed procedural acts with the mentioned person. Unfortunately, it is not possible to inform third parties about their result,” Ondřej Moravčík, spokesman for the Police Presidium, told Seznam Zprávy.

According to Seznam Zprávy’s sources, cameraman Igor Dolmatov received the same order to leave the country. The expulsion orders came after both of the Russians said during questioning that they worked for the Russian outlet Izvestia, a media organization that is also under European Union sanctions.

Filming organizer Boris Dvorkin, who was not physically present in Prague, told journalists that Chashchukhin was questioned for about nine hours. 

“Vitaliy was interrogated by the Czech police for approximately nine hours. Subsequently, he was issued a document ordering him to leave the Czech Republic, after which he returned to Germany, where he legally resides. He obeyed this order,” Dvorkin said.

According to his own words during the hidden camera conversation he had with Czech journalists after his arrival in Prague, Chashchukhin has held permanent residency in Germany for about a decade and has performed work there for sanctioned Russian media outlets Izvestia, Channel Five, and REN TV. In his reports, he portrays Germany as a country in economic decline and argues that an end to arms supplies to Ukraine and a restoration of relations with Russia would remedy the situation. According to Seznam Zprávy’s sources, Czech security agencies are continuing to review Chashchukhin’s activities and have already informed their German counterparts.

Meanwhile, André Lenz, a spokesperson for Germany’s General Customs Directorate, told journalists that it is impossible to determine in advance whether working as a journalist for a sanctioned Russian media outlet constitutes a crime.

“Specific facts indicating a possible violation of sanctions are carefully reviewed in all individual cases. The competent public prosecutor's office decides on the initiation of investigative proceedings,” Lenz explained.

Seznam Zprávy’s operation to lure in the propagandists to Prague

Seznam Zprávy  published an investigation on Sept. 22 describing how its journalists set a trap for participants in Rybar’s European influence operation. Representatives of the sanctioned Russian project had approached Czech media literacy and disinformation expert Bohumil Kartous and asked him to give an interview for a documentary series about the political and economic situation in Europe. Kartous agreed, and the Czech journalists then arranged a hidden-camera recording.

Chashchukhin and Dolmatov traveled from Berlin to Prague for the meeting. During the conversation, Chashchukhin acknowledged on hidden camera that: “It’s the Rybar project. You might know it. It’s Rybar.” Then, when Seznam Zprávy journalists approached, identified themselves, and began asking questions, both of the Russians ran off in different directions.

Journalists established that the filming was organized by Moscow-based documentary filmmaker Boris Dvorkin, who had not previously been publicly linked to Rybar. One of Dvorkin’s past projects was funded by the History of the Fatherland Foundation — an organization created by the decree of Vladimir Putin and chaired by Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

After the first investigation, Dvorkin claimed that Chashchukhin had only helped him with one interview in his spare time and had not been paid. However, journalists found that Rybar representatives had organized filming in other European countries and had tried to recruit politicians, experts, and public figures to take part as subjects.

Rybar founder Mikhail Zvinchuk is under European Union sanctions, and official documents state that he is a member of a working group created by Vladimir Putin to coordinate Russia’s mobilization efforts in support of the war against Ukraine. Rybar’s main Telegram channel has more than 1.5 million subscribers. In 2024, the United States offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about the project’s employees as part of an effort to combat Kremlin-backed influence operations.

The latest known case is that of former Belgorod mayor and Belgorod Region deputy governor Konstantin Polezhayev. The Kremlin-aligned media outlet Kommersant reported his death on Sept. 22, citing two people close to the former official. One said Polezhayev had served in an assault unit and was killed in a missile strike in the Kharkiv Region.

Polezhayev served as mayor of Belgorod from 2015 to 2019 before becoming a deputy governor. He was detained in 2023 on charges of bribery, with state investigators alleging that a construction company gave him two luxury SUVs, a Porsche Panamera, and a Range Rover worth a combined 18 million rubles ($214,000) in exchange for favorable treatment connected to government contracts. In August 2024, a court sentenced Polezhayev to five years in prison, after which he signed a contract with Russia’s Ministry of Defense.

In April 2025, the independent Belgorod-based outlet Pepel reported that Polezhayev was allegedly only formally listed with a BARS reserve unit and was in fact still living at home. It is not clear when he was actually first sent to the front.

The other casualties

Of the 16 cases of officials’ deaths identified by The Insider, three involved figures who had held positions at the deputy governor level. Sergei Efremov, who was then serving as deputy governor of Primorsky Krai, was killed in early 2025 in Russia’s Kursk Region. He had overseen domestic policy in the region while also commanding the Tiger volunteer unit. Former Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug deputy governor Alexei Zolotukhin, who had been responsible for security in the regional government, volunteered for the war after leaving office and was killed in 2026. The third was Polezhayev.

The Insider found three more cases involving senior city officials. Former first deputy head of Yugorsk Dmitry Krylov signed a contract with the military and commanded an assault platoon before being killed in battles for Avdiivka in February 2024. Former Chelyabinsk Deputy Mayor Sergei Reprintsev went to war after being arrested in a 10 million-ruble ($119,000) bribery case and was killed in May 2025. Former Magnitogorsk Deputy Mayor Dmitry Gavrilov, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for bribery, also signed a contract with Russia’s MoD and was subsequently killed in Ukraine. His death became public only in September 2026.

Another 10 cases involved the heads and deputy heads of districts and urban districts. Igor Ustyuzhanin, the former head of Manturovo, was killed after going to war after receiving an 8.5-year prison sentence for corruption. The former head of the Ketovsky District in the Kurgan Region, Alexander Noskov, also joined the Russian army from prison, where he was serving a six-year sentence for abuse of office; he was killed in Ukraine in February 2024. The former head of the Tsimlyansky District in the Rostov Region, Vladimir Svetlichny, had been convicted of abuse and exceeding his authority; he was also killed after being deployed to the front.

Former first deputy head and acting head of the Kortkerossky District in the Komi Republic Alexander Arteyev, who had received an 11-year prison sentence for bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of office, was killed in June 2024. The former head of the Perm Region’s Gornozavodsky District, Alexander Afanasyev, who was sentenced to three years for abuse of authority, signed a contract in December 2024 and was later killed. The former head of the Tselinny District in the Kurgan region, Alexander Sytov, was declared dead in summer 2026. Before the war, he had been sentenced to seven years in prison for bribery, fraud, and embezzlement, including the theft of 100,000 rubles ($1,200) collected for mobilized soldiers.

Fyodor Ivashchuk, head of the Ulchsky District in the Khabarovsk Region, resigned in March 2025, voluntarily signed a contract with the Russian army, and joined the BARS-8 Khabarovsk unit. He was killed that August while carrying out a combat mission. Aidar Zagirov, deputy head of the Uchalinsky District in Bashkortostan, was also serving under contract and was killed during a combat mission. The former deputy head of Novorossiysk’s intracity district, Oleg Skornyakov, signed a contract with Russia’s Ministry of Defense in spring 2025, went missing several months later, and was officially confirmed dead in March 2026.

Former deputy head of the Tugulymsky Urban District in the Sverdlovsk Region Sergei Utkin, who had been sentenced to eight years in prison for taking an especially large bribe, signed a contract with the Russian army while incarcerated and was also killed at the front.

Ten of the 16 were involved in criminal cases

Ten of the 16 officials The Insider identified had faced criminal prosecution before going to war. Nine — Polezhayev, Gavrilov, Ustyuzhanin, Noskov, Svetlichny, Arteyev, Afanasyev, Sytov and Utkin — had been convicted. Reprintsev was under investigation on charges of bribery when he signed his contract.

The Insider reported in 2024 that the war had allowed some former officials to leave prison or put criminal cases on hold,  former Vladivostok Mayor Oleg Gumenyuk and former Khakassia Deputy Governor Sergei Novikov prominent among them. Some later returned to Russia after serving their allotted time in the military.

The tally does not, however, include former Krasnodar Region Deputy Governor Sergei Vlasov. Reports of his death surfaced in spring 2026, but Kommersant found that Vlasov was officially listed as missing and that his body had not been found.

The Insider also excluded judges, security officials, election commission members, heads of individual administrative departments, members of parliaments at all levels, and officials killed by shelling or mines while performing their civilian duties. The count includes only serving or former executive officials at the level of deputy district head or higher who entered military service or joined volunteer formations.

A broader count now includes at least 51 dead

If the count is expanded beyond senior executive officials, the number is significantly higher. In February 2025, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty counted at least 32 Russian government officials who had been killed in Ukraine. That category included election commission officials, members of parliament at various levels, and a federal judge in addition to government officials.

In June 2026, the independent outlet Meduza found open-source reports of at least 16 additional deaths that were published after RFE/RL had completed its project, bringing the minimum estimate to 48. Since the Meduza study was published, at least three more deaths have become publicly known: those of Alexander Sytov in July, Dmitry Gavrilov in September, and Konstantin Polezhayev on Sept. 22. Using the broader definition of “government representatives,” the minimum toll now stands at at least 51, according to The Insider’s calculations.

Aptar Vladimir’s financial statements, which have been reviewed by The Insider’s editorial team, indicate that the company remains highly profitable. Revenue totaled about 1.75 billion rubles in 2025, virtually unchanged from the previous year, while net profit rose about 7%, from 502 million rubles ($5.9 million) to 537 million rubles ($6.4 million). Its net profit margin was close to 31%.

The Vladimir plant manufactures plastic packaging products. Russian certification registries list lids, caps, and dispensers among its products. Aptar itself includes the Vladimir facility in its Beauty division and lists it among the group’s Russian manufacturing sites.

Aptar Europe Holding is the French subsidiary of U.S.-based AptarGroup. The group operates in more than 20 countries and reported sales of about $3.8 billion in 2025. Its Russian business has operated since 2003.

H&N JSC, which has now been given control of the Aptar plant, itself came under Russian government control through the same temporary-management mechanism. In July 2023, Putin placed Danone’s Russian business under the control of Rosimushchestvo, Russia’s federal property management agency. After that, Zakriev was appointed head of the company.

In March 2024, Putin removed the assets from temporary management, and Danone later sold its Russian business to Vamin R. As The Insider previously reported, citing an investigation by the investigative project Sistema, assets worth more than 1 billion euros ultimately went to structures linked to Kadyrov’s circle, with a significant portion of the purchase financed using money from the former Danone business itself.

Russia’s temporary management mechanism for foreign-owned assets has been in place since April 2023. Formally, the foreign owner retains legal ownership while a manager appointed by Russian authorities receives broad powers to run the business. In practice, the arrangement has already preceded foreign companies losing control of their Russian assets, as occurred with Danone. On Sept. 17, Putin used the same mechanism to place the Russian businesses of Auchan, Nestlé, and FM Logistic under the management of L.E.V. Management. The Insider found that at the time, the company was still listed on a registrar’s website among ready-made joint-stock companies being offered for sale — the price was 450,000 rubles ($5,340).

According to Seznam Zprávy, the operation began with an attempt by Rybar to interview Czech media literacy expert Bohumil Kartous, a representative of the Czech Elves volunteer group, which monitors and counters disinformation online. A person using a Russian phone number contacted Kartous on WhatsApp and introduced himself as a producer for the project.

“My name is Boris. I am a producer at the Rybar analytical center,” he wrote. Seznam Zprávy’s journalists decided to use the invitation and arranged a meeting together with Kartous.

Vitaliy and Igor arrive from Berlin

The interview was scheduled in Prague’s Letná district, near the site where a monument to Stalin once stood. The film crew was not there at the agreed time, but Kartous soon received a message from a German number saying the team had been delayed on the road from Berlin.

Two men soon appeared and introduced themselves as Vitaliy and Igor. One of them made a point of telling Kartous that he had held a German residence permit for more than 10 years.

Vitaliy did not want to say much more about himself or who had commissioned the filming. “I don’t know. I was hired to do an interview,” he repeated, not knowing that the conversation was already being recorded by a hidden camera. At one point, however, he directly named the client: “It’s the Rybar project. You might know it. It’s Rybar.”

Seznam Zprávy journalists then approached the crew. They identified themselves and asked the men to give their full names and to explain why they had come to Prague. The reaction was unexpected: neither answered, and both ran off in different directions.

One of the men who fled was a correspondent for Russian TV channels

Using photographs, the journalists later identified both men. The cameraman was Igor Dolmatov, and his colleague was Vitaliy Chashchukhin, a Russian living in Germany. Chashchukhin works with the pro-Kremlin Izvestia, Channel Five, and REN TV — Russian media outlets that are under EU sanctions.

In his reports from Germany, Chashchukhin has portrayed the country as being in economic decline, reporting on empty store shelves and presenting an end to Berlin’s military aid to Ukraine and its restoration of relations with Russia as solutions to the economic problems he purports to show. It was Chashchukhin who confirmed on hidden camera in Prague that the filming was being done on behalf of Rybar, a major Russian pro-war Telegram project with more than 1.5 million subscribers.

Rybar openly describes its work as participation in an information war:

“Our team is at the forefront of the information war today and defends the interests of the Russian Federation. We know how to wage an information war easily and effectively and to present Russia in the correct light.”

Rybar founder Mikhail Zvinchuk is under EU sanctions, and the European documents note that Vladimir Putin appointed Zvinchuk to a working group created in December 2022 to coordinate Russia’s mobilization efforts for the war against Ukraine. In 2024, the U.S. Rewards for Justice program offered up to $10 million for information about Rybar employees over their role in influence operations and interference in the U.S. presidential election. According to the U.S. authorities, the project was previously funded by entities linked to Wagner Group co-founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and later received funding from Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec.

Filming organizer had ties to a foundation headed by SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin

Seznam Zprávy identified the person who organized the interviews as “Boris.” The profile picture on his WhatsApp account showed a smiling young man, and using leaked Russian databases, the journalists determined that the account belonged to Boris Dvorkin, a Moscow-based documentary filmmaker who had not previously been publicly linked to Rybar.

Dvorkin presents himself primarily as a producer of historical projects, but Seznam Zprávy found that he had ties to the History of the Fatherland Foundation, which supported an exhibition he organized titled “The Proletarian Flies Over Europe.” The foundation was established by decree of Vladimir Putin and is chaired by Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR.

Dvorkin’s questions for Czech interviewees, however, were not about history. He planned to ask Kartous, for example, whether right-wing and Euroskeptic ideas were becoming more popular in the Czech Republic, whether relations with Russia could be normalized, and what the Czech Republic and “the Western world as a whole” would have to do to make that happen.

He was also particularly interested in disinformation. “Anything that does not fit into one’s personal information bubble or system of specific political values is declared to be disinformation,” he argued. Kartous said the questions appeared designed to portray disinformation as a universal phenomenon “on both sides of the border,” rather than something directly linked to Russian propaganda, and to cast doubt on the Czech Republic’s sovereignty within the EU.

The Russian film crews traveled across Europe

After the Prague meeting, the Czech journalists established that this was not a one-off shoot. Even before the operation was exposed, Dvorkin had written to Kartous: “Our film crew was delayed in Slovakia, so we won’t be returning to the Czech Republic until next week.” Seznam Zprávy obtained a list of seven other Czech interviewees whom the project planned to approach. Some confirmed that filming had taken place.

Among them was Andor Šándor, a former head of Czech military intelligence who now works as a security expert. He said a man and a woman came to interview him and introduced themselves as people from Berlin. They did not tell him about any connection to Rybar.

“They told me they were from Berlin. I was surprised that they were willing to come for a quick visit. A man and a woman. They arrived and I had the feeling that their English had a Russian accent. They wanted to talk about the EU and the Czech Republic’s stance, but suddenly they started firing off questions about the Ukraine-Russia war,” Šándor said. After the filming, he withdrew permission to use the interview because he feared his remarks could be edited in a biased manner.

Šándor remembered the woman in the film crew by name: Margarita Kostiv. Journalists determined that she works with Chashchukhin and has worked for sanctioned Russian media outlets. Two months earlier, for example, Kostiv had produced a report for REN TV from Paris about Ukrainian troops taking part in the Bastille Day parade.

Kostiv did not respond to questions from Seznam Zprávy.

Rybar’s list of interviewees included an MEP, a political scientist, and a former intelligence chief

Other prominent Czechs appeared on the list of potential or completed interview subjects. They included sociologist Petr Hampl, who said Rybar representatives had not contacted him and that he had “not spoken to journalists from Russia for years.”

Also on the list were SPD member of the European Parliament Ivan David and political scientist Petr Drulák. They declined to say whether they had given interviews to the film crew. “Write whatever you like. Goodbye,” David told the journalists.

Energy expert Vladimir Štěpán, who has repeatedly spoken out in opposition to European sanctions against Russia and in favor of importing Russian energy supplies, confirmed that filming had taken place. He said the interviewers introduced themselves as “international television,” though a text message sent before the meeting said they were from Rybar.

“They were filming in nine or 10 countries. They came from Vienna and travelled to Bratislava. It was an international team. A kind of boss and a couple of young guys,” Štěpán said.

Another potential interviewee was found in Slovakia, where journalist and translator Samo Marec was invited to take part but declined. “I didn’t respond to their email. I’m familiar with Rybar; I know what it writes. Sometimes it’s even interesting, but the overall tone is very pro-Russian, and that’s not something I’d want to be associated with,” he said.

Marec’s invitation was signed directly by sanctioned Rybar founder Mikhail Zvinchuk. The interview was being organized by a producer who called herself Tanya Petrova. Journalists were unable to establish her true identity.

“Just helping out a colleague”

When Seznam Zprávy contacted Dvorkin after the Prague meeting, he sent a response that ran to around 30 paragraphs. In it, he claimed Chashchukhin was simply a colleague who had agreed to help with one interview in his spare time. Because the interview ultimately did not take place and Chashchukhin allegedly received no payment, Dvorkin argued that no sanctions violation had occurred.

He also denied sending other film crews around Europe. However, that statement contradicted both his own messages before the exposure and accounts from people who had already been interviewed.

Work for Rybar could violate sanctions

A separate question is whether the film crews’ activities were legal.

The Czech Financial Analytical Office, or FAÚ, which is responsible for sanctions enforcement, declined to comment on the specific case. However, Czech Finance Ministry spokesperson Gabriela Krušinová said that if a sanctioned individual controls an organization, then providing services to that organization can be considered an indirect provision of economic resources to the sanctioned person.

Violating sanctions in the Czech Republic can carry criminal liability and result in a fine of up to 50 million Czech koruna.

Sanctions expert Jiří Skuhrovec of DatLab said a court’s decision could not be predicted in advance but that “given the scale, it could constitute a criminal offense.” In the most serious scenario, participants in the operation could theoretically face up to eight years in prison, according to Seznam Zprávy.

The Russians identified by the journalists as taking part in the filming did not have to enter the EU specifically for the assignment. Chashchukhin said he had held a German residence permit for more than 10 years, while other participants were also based in Europe. That allowed the crews to travel freely within the Schengen Area and to gather material in several countries for a project whose founder is under EU sanctions.

People are entered into Ukraine’s missing-persons register as the result of reports from relatives or fellow service members. As of Aug. 8, 2026, 249 people covered by the study remained on the register, another 17 had previously been listed as missing but were later removed, seven were taken off the list after being released in prisoner exchanges, and one was officially declared dead.

Nearly 90% of the known disappearances (239 out of 266) occurred in Ukrainian territories that are under Russian military occupation. The most common last known locations were Melitopol, Nova Kakhovka, Kherson, Donetsk, Berdiansk, Enerhodar, Tokmak, Oleshky, and Skadovsk. Overall, 454 of the 555 people in the study — 81.8% — were first detained in Ukraine. Another 100 were detained within Russia’s internationally recognized borders, and one was taken into custody in Kazakhstan.

As of the time the study was completed, Russian courts had sentenced 402 Ukrainians on treason, espionage, and related charges . Courts in occupied Ukrainian territories handed down 241 of those sentences — 60.1%. Among individual courts, the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don issued the largest number of convictions, with 65.

Sentences are known in only 382 of the cases. Of those, seven received life terms, while the rest were sentenced to prison terms ranging from five years to 27 years and nine months. The median sentence was 14 years. In cases where treason or espionage charges were combined with terrorism or sabotage charges, the median sentence rose to 18 years.

In 323 cases, researchers from Pervy Otdel and Parubets Analytics were able to determine certain specifics of the accusations. Just over half of those cases — 176, or 54.5% — involved allegations of collecting and passing information to Ukraine about Russian troops, military equipment, and infrastructure. Another 37 people were accused of preparing or carrying out terrorist attacks, making assassination attempts, or successfully carrying out a killing. Additionally, 34 were accused of providing financial assistance to Ukraine, 15 of sabotage targeting transportation or infrastructure, and another 15 of serving in or attempting to join the Ukrainian armed forces or other Ukrainian formations.

As of the time of the study, 534 of the 555 people remained in custody, though researchers were able to determine the exact place of detention for only 360 of them. Of those whose locations were known, 236 were being held in facilities inside Russia and another 124 in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies in occupied Ukrainian territories. Researchers said Ukrainians have also been transferred to prisons in Siberia, the Russian Far East, and the Far North.

The report’s authors stressed that 555 is not a complete count. They estimated that the names of about 30% of defendants in such cases remain unknown due to the fact that proceedings are closed and court records often omit identifying information. The study’s data are current as of Aug. 8, 2026.

Over the past four years, Russian retail has outperformed the economy as a whole. After 2022, when retail turnover plunged 6.7% versus a 1.2% drop in GDP, the picture has changed completely. For the past few years, retail turnover has begun to outpace the growth of total output of goods and services.

In 2023–2024, the country saw phenomenal retail turnover growth. The trend slowed in 2025 but was still 2.5 times as high as GDP growth. This year, as GDP stagnates, retail sales have accelerated again. In the first half of the year, they were up 5.4% in real terms year-on-year, even though GDP growth over the same period was estimated at just 0.3% and growth in real disposable income at 1.5%.

The consumption boom in a struggling wartime economy is the result of two factors. First, since 2022 resources in the Russian economy have been rapidly shifting away from entrepreneurs and capital investment toward wage earners, translating into growth in consumer spending. The state supports this process, sacrificing the future to ease the nation’s discontent right now. 

The Kremlin is sacrificing the future to ease the nation’s discontent right now

Second, the war coincided with the rapid growth of marketplaces and the rollout of new retail technologies, especially for nonfood products. Online purchases have grown exponentially, and logistics has become cheaper and more centralized, encouraging sellers to step out of the shadow economy and pay more in taxes while remaining profitable. Labor’s share of GDP has risen over the course of four years from 40% to 55%, and the share of retail turnover coming from online sales has jumped from 5% to 17%.

Specifics of Russian retail

The internet has transformed retail around the world, especially since the arrival of smartphones. Some countries experienced a genuine revolution, while others have seen only a modest shift — a difference explained by the local specifics of online retail.

In medium- to low-income countries such as Russia and China, labor-intensive formats spread widely, with armies of couriers delivering purchases to the customers’ door or to pickup points set up by major marketplaces on almost every city block. Dense urban housing only reinforced this modality. China has significantly outpaced Russia in e-commerce penetration, with the share of online purchases standing at about 28% for three consecutive years. In Russia, the analogous share is approximately 16%.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is characterized by high labor costs, and its consumers are spread across suburbs and accustomed to shopping at hypermarkets. As a result, online sales are less popular (despite still growing faster than the rise in retail overall). In some cases, orders placed online are simply carried out to the offline store’s parking lot. The share of e-commerce in total retail sales is 16–17%, which is very close to the Russian level.

Continental Europe and Japan are highly urbanized — like Russia — but also feature high labor costs, like the U.S. In addition to expensive labor, strict regulation and labor unions often hinder innovation. The UK has none of the EU’s restrictions, and its share of online retail reaches 28%, roughly on the same level as China and substantially higher than in other developed countries.

Retail is usually divided into offline and e-commerce, but conventional offline stores are also represented online. Within e-commerce, it makes sense to distinguish courier delivery, pickup-point self-collection, and in-store self-collection — a U.S.-style format in which the customer visits the physical store but is spared the hassle of checkout lines and counters.

In recent years, Russia saw a boom in couriers and pickup points. They were ubiquitous, but were only part of a system that also included huge sorting and warehouse complexes in suburbs and industrial zones. The main pillars of this system were Ozon and Wildberries, which together control 73% of Russia’s e-commerce sector. In the first half of 2026, they processed 3.8 billion orders — 84% of all parcels received in Russia.

How marketplaces hid the war

In 2025, online sales in Russia reached13 trillion rubles, according to the Association of Internet Trade Companies (AKIT). This figure includes not only physical goods but digital ones as well, though the latter account for only 3.7% (0.48 trillion rubles). Food accounted for 14.8% (1.96 trillion rubles). The bulk of turnover — 10.8 trillion rubles — comes from nonfood goods. The most important categories are clothing, footwear, furniture, and home goods. Sales in each exceeded 2 trillion rubles for the year, up 29% year-over-year for clothing and footwear and 35% for furniture and home goods. Another key category is digital and home appliances, with annual turnover of 1.76 trillion rubles, up 13%.

Russians were buying more than half of their clothing and footwear online as early as 2024. That share reached 62% in 2025, and it is expected to reach 68% in 2026. One in four rubles Russians spend on clothing or footwear goes through Wildberries, and another 11% goes through Ozon. Meanwhile, traditional brand-name stores are losing market share: 230 such outlets closed in 2025, and the largest offline retailer in this segment, Sportmaster, has seen its profit drop from 23 billion rubles in 2023 to just 5 billion in 2025.

Marketplaces have undergone a genuine revolution in distribution and logistics, achieving an inventory turnover rate that is three times as fast as that of traditional retail. Previously, a hoodie took roughly 100 days to get from the manufacturer to a buyer: four to six weeks in a distribution center and another 8-12 weeks in the store. At Wildberries the process takes 30–40 days: 20 to 30 days in the warehouse and a few more en route to the pickup point plus a few hours at the point itself. Wildberries’ digital storefronts simply let buyers find what they want much faster than physical storefronts allow.

Marketplace inventory turnover is roughly three times as fast as that of conventional retail

Moreover, a day of storage in a giant, densely packed marketplace warehouse costs a fraction of what a day on a shelf on a spacious sales floor does, and the savings offered via online retail also come from cutting sales staff and cashiers. Additionally, the ecosystem sharpens competition among suppliers, forcing them to reduce their margins.

The marketplace model has also opened market access to a great many small manufacturers who are willing to give substantial discounts in exchange for a broader audience. These suppliers often use the simplified tax system or a 5–7% VAT rate, which lets them save on taxes too.

As a result, a hypothetical hoodie costs approximately 2,200 rubles on Wildberries, versus 3,200 rubles in traditional retail. And in the market for home goods and consumer electronics and appliances, the effect is smaller but nevertheless substantial.

That difference was enough to offset the harm done by sanctions, higher tax rates, breakdowns in the rules of the game, and other war-related losses. In effect, the catastrophic consequences of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” were mitigated by the organizational and technological revolution in Russian retail.

In the absence of war, this revolution would have happened anyway — as part of a worldwide technological advance bringing major benefit to huge numbers of people. As it actually played out, the shift only masked profound problems, letting consumers ignore what the war had taken from them.

What the drones burned down

Marketplaces’ huge regional warehouses are the nerve centers of the whole system. They make centralized logistics possible, cutting out unnecessary links in the chain. Goods usually arrive at these mega-hubs straight from the manufacturer or customs and travel on to the pickup point near the customer’s home. That’s the essence of the most cost-efficient model, FBO (fulfillment by operator).

There is also an alternative model, FBS (fulfillment by seller), in which the supplier stores goods on their own premises and the marketplace provides a digital storefront and a network of pickup points — a setup that suits large merchants better. That is why systematic Ukrainian drone attacks on Wildberries warehouses dealt such a heavy blow — both to the company’s core business model and to its smaller partners.

The first strikes on the marketplace’s logistics centers occurred on July 18, right after Ukraine changed defense ministers. A total of 23 attacks that have happened since then killed 14 people while destroying warehouses in Novosemeykino, Samara Region, and in Kotovsk near Tambov. As a result, nine facilities have been forced to suspend operations and six to scale back, while another six facilities quickly returned to business as usual. 

According to Russian business media estimates, by the start of August Wildberries had lost 17% of its warehouse space, and by Aug. 24 22% (1.8 million square meters). The independent outlet Verstka, meanwhile, put the figure as high as 43%. The marketplace’s financial losses were estimated at around 200 billion rubles,those of its partner sellers at about 450–500 billion rubles, of which 200–300 billion is the cost of the goods that burned while the rest corresponds to lost profit.

How badly are these strikes hurting the company? The impact goes beyond financial indicators to touch on the specifics of the Wildberries group’s corporate governance, which has changed dramatically over the past five years.

In 2021 — the most successful of its prewar years — the company’s net profit (14.1 billion rubles) nearly matched its net cash flow from operations (13.6 billion rubles). Wildberries had posted negative operating cash flow in 2016, 2019, and 2020, and in the first years of the full-scale war cash flow was already negative (–17 billion and –8 billion rubles, respectively), with the company growing exclusively through borrowed money. Short-term debt quadrupled over two years, from 40 billion to 164 billion rubles, while total debt tripled to reach 282 billion rubles.

The balance-sheet structure of Wildberries LLC — the group’s main company prior to the reorganization, fully controlled by Tatyana Kim (Bakalchuk) — experienced a few telling shifts. Over two years, the share of inventory in assets fell from 57% to 28%, while the share of accounts receivable rose from 19% to 36%; the share of other assets (mostly financial investments) also quadrupled. On the liabilities side, the share of equity fell from 20% to 16%, and accounts payable likewise fell from 42% to 27%. Meanwhile, combined short- and long-term bank debt rose from 35% to 56% of the balance-sheet total.

In 2022–2023, Wildberries LLC still reported net profit, but only because it increasingly counted unpaid orders — which boosted accounts receivable rather than cash — as part of revenue.

In simple terms, once the war began, the company stopped generating cash and lost 25 billion rubles over two years, having borrowed 140 billion rubles and plowed 93 billion into aggressive expansion. Wildberries had a strong brand and ample access to other people’s money, but given its heavy debt burden, the company’s overall profile made it an ideal target for a hostile takeover.

Billion-dollar debt, asset stripping, and near-bankruptcy

Whether that term applies to what happened to Wildberries in 2024 is debatable. Almost immediately after the news broke of Wildberries’ merger with the outdoor-advertising operator Russ Outdoor LLC, it emerged that the marketplace’s owner couple was divorcing amid accusations of a hostile corporate raid. The merger went through — punctuated by a literal shootout outside the head office that left two people dead. No one was charged over their deaths, though declarations of a blood feud were exchanged between the head of Chechnya and a senator from Dagestan.

In the combined entity RVB LLC, Wildberries received 65%, and Stinn LLC (the ownership structure behind Russ) received 35%. In the year before the merger, Wildberries posted revenue 20 times that of Russ. Its net profit was four times as high, and equity was seven times larger. However, Wildberries’ debts were also around seven times higher. 

In the year before the merger, Wildberries posted revenue 20 times that of Russ

These numbers suggest the deal was likely unfavorable for Wildberries’ owner Tatyana Kim, who nevertheless maintained that she was acting voluntarily and had no grievances against her new partners. Most importantly, Russ generated not just paper profit but positive operating cash flow as well: 2 billion rubles in 2022 and 5 billion in 2023.

In the two years between the merger and the start of drone strikes on its warehouses, Wildberries did not improve its financial position. Whereas the marketplace’s operating cash flow was –8 billion rubles in the last year before the merger, the combined company RVB posted –30 billion rubles for 2024 and –377 billion for 2025. Even before the Ukrainian attacks began, the company had become little more than an empty shell through which trillions in other people’s money passed. This is evidenced by RVB’s financial statements and explanatory notes under Russian accounting standards. 

In 2024, RVB’s equity tripled compared to the combined equity of Wildberries and Russ, reaching 179 billion rubles, but it evaporated in 2025, leaving only 2.4 billion rubles. Debt, meanwhile, reached 1.3 trillion rubles — 534 times its equity. Of that debt, 1.25 trillion rubles is short-term. About 70% of the debt was taken on in 2025, and it was only thanks to this borrowing that RVB remained solvent at all.

Not only did creditors’ money cover the shortfall in operating cash flow, it also produced a surplus of several hundred billion rubles, which was immediately siphoned out.

The statements reveal how this was done: unimaginable volumes of money moving through opaque transactions with RVB’s founding companies, subsidiary business entities, and other affiliated parties. RVB borrowed 492 billion rubles from these entities and repaid them 567 billion. It lent them 151 billion rubles and got back 80 billion. Purchases from these organizations totaled 506 billion rubles, while counter-purchases came to 271 billion rubles. Accounts receivable from related entities grew from 170 to 422 billion rubles, while RVB’s accounts payable to them fell from 111 billion to 80 billion rubles. Another 51 billion rubles went to dividends, all of which was received by the entity belonging to Russ’s original owners despite their mere 35% stake in RVB. 

In total, 715 billion rubles were siphoned out over the course of the year. A smaller part of that outflow — approximately 175 billion rubles — repaid the founders’ contributions, who withdrew from the company’s equity everything they had put in before 2025. The larger part — 540 billion rubles — came from banks, which will never get that money back in real terms. After all, the RVB shareholder companies that took the money are shell companies.

Tatyana Kim’s holding entity, which owns 65% of the combined company, has charter capital of 10 million rubles and equity of 67 billion, of which just over half is illiquid fixed assets and the rest is unreliable obligations from other shell companies.

Stinn LLC, which owns the remaining 35% and belongs to Russ’s shareholders, is in even worse shape: charter capital of 29,000 rubles, negative equity, 28 billion rubles in debt, no cash, and assets limited to obligations owed by parties unknown — while the 51 billion rubles in dividends siphoned out of RVB went straight to Stinn’s founders.

Wildberries’ key performance indicators under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) do not improve the picture either. The consolidated figures for 2025 were never published in full, nor were they audited — even revenue was not disclosed. The company limited itself to mailing a few selected figures as its “IFRS results” to news agencies, which published their own summaries on April 1, 2026. It is hard to understand why a successful, growing company — even a private one — would disclose its IFRS statements in such a fragmented and unconvincing manner.

According to these figures, goods worth 6.1 trillion rubles were sold through the platform, up 49% from 2024. Net profit is reported at 175 billion rubles (+68%), investment at 300 billion rubles, and the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio at no more than two. If these figures are taken at face value, it would mean that in just over a month, Ukrainian strikes cost RVB an amount comparable to a full year’s profit of the marketplace and the advertising agency combined — not counting its partners’ losses.

Taken together, the RAS statements and the KPIs under IFRS show that Wildberries had been struggling even before the drones began hitting its warehouses. The marketplace had operated at a loss for years and had been growing only through borrowing. In the past year, negative cash flow came to 377 billion rubles, while net borrowing totaled 700 billion rubles. Nearly the entire difference between these two figures was siphoned out of the company — and also out of the reach of RVB’s creditors.

An explanatory note to RVB’s financial statements reads:

“Some loan agreements contain restrictive conditions (covenants) related to financial and non-financial indicators. The Company’s failure to comply with a number of them may give the lender the right to demand early repayment of the outstanding debt. As of Dec. 31, 2025, the Company was in breach of a number of financial covenants set out in its loan agreements. The breach of covenants did not result in the closure of credit lines or in banks demanding early repayment of obligations, and did not affect the deterioration of the Company’s liquidity position.”

Had the creditor banks exercised their right to demand early repayment, RVB would have been insolvent, and that scandalous outcome would have raised the question: how could such large sums have been extended to such an unreliable borrower in the first place? Who personally made those decisions?

VTB, the white knight

The name of the bank that extended RVB upwards of 700 billion rubles in unsecured loans is not disclosed in open sources. It was likely a consortium, since such a sum is too large even for the biggest banks. Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests VTB played a key role.

First, on May 26, VTB announced a strategic partnership with Wildberries, including the purchase of a minority stake in the marketplace’s digital assets and the prospect of “large-scale investment.” VTB’s supervisory board even announced an additional share issue, with the number of shares set to grow by 50%. Mere months earlier, Tatyana Kim had categorically denied the possibility of such a deal, and yet, its details soon emerged: VTB planned to buy a 5% stake in WB Bank and several other fintech assets of the Wildberries group.

Second, VTB deputy chairman Dmitry Pyanov takes particular pride in how skillfully the bank uses additional lending conditions (covenants). Answering a question about the risks of VTB’s corporate loans, he said: “Additional protection comes from the unique expertise of our corporate division’s team in structuring deals, using covenants, and modeling stress scenarios.”

VTB plans to issue new shares worth 314 billion rubles at par value, or 547 billion if sold at 87 rubles apiece, as the bank’s management intends. That is far too much to buy a 5% stake in WB Bank, whose assets total only 186 billion rubles — even if all of RVB’s fintech assets were transferred to WB Bank and the stake being acquired were increased to 50% (in an interview on June 5, Pyanov used the phrases “everything will go in” and “up to a noncontrolling stake”).

The picture that emerges is as follows: Wildberries was operating at a loss and suffered from poor corporate governance, inflating its balance sheet with debt owed by shell companies. VTB rescued it by lending hundreds of billions of rubles, with almost all of these loans unsecured, even though RVB could have pledged some of its own assets against them.

The bank, however, is not prepared to write these loans off as a loss. The anticipated deal would let it acquire not just fintech but essentially all of Wildberries’ real assets. Investment is unlikely to pay off within any reasonable timeframe, since the marketplace’s operating cash flow was already negative even before the airstrikes. Still, Wildberries is a strong brand, and control over a six-trillion-ruble payment flow on the marketplace has value. 

The deal VTB is planning would let it acquire not just fintech but essentially all of Wildberries’ real assets

In the end, the takeover would be fairly reasonable, though still too expensive for VTB. The bank would recoup a significant share of the money spent through an additional share issue worth 300–400 billion rubles and might even quietly negotiate the return of some of the funds siphoned out of RVB to entities belonging to Tatyana Kim and the Russ shareholders.

The losses from the desperate dumping the marketplace had engaged in for years based on borrowed money would then fall on the buyers of VTB’s new shares. And this would not be the first time Russia’s second-largest state bank solved its problems this way. In 2007, VTB’s “People’s IPO” took place with the personal involvement of Vladimir Putin. Soon after the offering, the shares crashed, and investor losses exceeded 100 billion rubles. This time, there are no plans to bring in retail buyers for the deal. Whose participation is envisioned in their place, however, remains a mystery.

The stock market views VTB management’s actions extremely negatively: the bank’s shares collapsed from 96 rubles in April to 50 rubles in September 2026. Other Russian banks’ shares did not fall nearly as sharply. Additionally, Sber has also stopped treating the loans it extended to Wildberries as reliable and has increased its corresponding provisions.

What’s next for Wildberries?

Russian consumer spending on marketplaces in recent weeks “has been 15% lower than a month or two ago,” according to Sber. Volumes are higher than a year ago, but growth has halved, “and these are still just the first signs.”

Online trading platforms have responded to their rising costs and risks by raising their already-high commission fees: from 19% to 48% at Ozon, from 32% to 43% at Wildberries, and from 25% to 40% at Yandex Market. More expensive logistics and insurance are forcing sellers to raise their prices on marketplaces as well — by as much as 15%, according to some estimates. The popularity of the FBS model, in which the supplier uses its own warehouse instead of logistics centers, has grown by a factor of ten.

Even the Bank of Russia, in its latest “Talking Trends” bulletin, noted that the problems at Wildberries and Ozon are driving prices up:

“The disruptions at the largest marketplaces create risks of localized price increases for certain nonfood goods due to reduced supply, the elimination of discounts, and more expensive logistics.”

The central bank warns that, “due to the temporary loss of production and logistics capacity,” Russian economic growth could slow again (after an already very modest figure of 0.6% in the first half of the year). Rosstat’s numbers for August showed that in that month alone, smartphones rose in price by 3.55%, diapers for newborns by 1.5%, and children’s tracksuits and men’s T-shirts by more than 1%.

In response to the drone strikes on logistics centers, the authorities have announced multiple, if poorly coordinated, relief measures. At the Finance Ministry’s request, the government granted a 12-month deferral on payment of major taxes for businesses that lost more than 5% of their annual income.

The Bank of Russia, for its part, recommends that lenders restructure the debts of small and medium businesses affected “by terrorist acts on the premises of logistics centers, warehouses, production facilities, retail spaces, offices, and other properties,” not charge such businesses penalties for late debt payments, not demand early loan repayment, and not raise interest rates on them. They also recommend that credit bureaus not lower the ratings of borrowers who have undergone such restructuring. Meanwhile, the government does not take the size of the affected companies into account, and the central bank is indifferent to the scale of the damage.

Putin, for his part, signed a decree letting the government place objects of “critical infrastructure” under the Kremlin’s “temporary management” in the event that the owners fail to take sufficient measures to protect them (the government, of course, decides which owners have failed to live up to their obligations). 

The resulting uncertainty and opportunities for abuse of power have added to the general pessimism of big business, an RBC survey showed. As if in compensation, the Russian leader promised that starting from Oct. 1, public educational institutions would be able to “procure goods directly from domestic marketplaces — so to speak, straight off the shelf.”

Local relief measures are unlikely to outweigh the systemic distress. Russia’s retail miracle was an anomaly, and now the fairy tale is coming to an end.

The method compares turnout with party results at individual polling stations. As the outlet explains, stations without pronounced statistical anomalies form a relatively even “core” on a graph, while a simultaneous rise in turnout and votes for one party at polling stations that submit manipulated results produces a distinctive “comet tail.” 

Based on the available results, Novaya Gazeta Europe calculated that the center of the “core” of polling stations that submitted actual results showed an average of about 34% support for United Russia.

For its calculations, the publication assumed that votes cast for all parties other than United Russia had been counted correctly. It then compared the ratio of votes for United Russia with votes for the other parties at polling stations classified as part of the “honest core.”

Moscow was excluded from the analysis due to the fact that a large share of voters there cast ballots remotely, making the results difficult to compare with the broader pattern. The outlet also excluded several regions where it suspects United Russia was credited on a large scale with votes actually cast for other parties. Novaya Gazeta Europe noted that the Shpilkin method it used is primarily designed to identify statistical signs consistent with ballot stuffing.

ITG announced on Sept. 18 that it would review its international strategy. According to the company, Dutch authorities forcibly cut power to its infrastructure on Sept. 15, the same day the ITGLOBAL.COM NL director was detained. ITG said that for more than 72 hours neither company representatives nor the lawyers it hired were able to contact the detained executive. The corporation turned to the Russian Embassy for assistance.

Industry publication ComNews identified the detained executive as German Leontyev, CEO of Amsterdam-registered ITGLOBAL.COM NL B.V. According to the outlet, he was still in custody as of the evening of Sept. 20. The company’s infrastructure was located at Equinix’s AM2 data center in Amsterdam.

After the incidents, ITG announced that it would remove its infrastructure from the Netherlands and carry out a planned withdrawal from the United States and Canada. The physical equipment, however, is not being moved out of those countries. ITG’s press service told ComNews that the company is ending agreements with partners and offering clients the option of moving their data to other countries and data centers. In the Netherlands, data is being restored from backups at new sites without waiting for access to the disconnected equipment to be restored. Equipment in the United States and Canada remains operational, while data migration is being coordinated with clients. ITG expects the process to be completed within the next several months.

“Nothing is physically moving. We are simply migrating workloads,” the company explained, adding that it plans to redirect key investments and development teams to the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.

Gachko said the developments showed that legal protections for businesses linked to Russia had effectively disappeared. “We believed and hoped that everything in Europe was fair and governed by the law,” he said. Instead, he claimed, “the rule of force” now applies there, describing the actions of Dutch authorities as “a regime of lawlessness.”

In a separate statement, Gachko linked the events to the origin and citizenship of business owners:

“For many years, global business, including Russia’s IT sector, was brought up in a paradigm in which the West was seen as a safe territory with ideal legal standards. But the bitter reality brings us back to history, which shows that during periods of geopolitical confrontation in Europe, the basic rights and property of entire groups of people and businesses have always been canceled simply because of their origin or citizenship.”

After the incident, he said, the company made an “uncompromising decision to completely stop providing services in NATO countries.”

The code-theft case

ITGLOBAL.COM’s Dutch subsidiary had previously been involved in legal proceedings with U.S.-based ServiceNow over the alleged theft of software code by Russian software developer SimpleOne — which, like ITGLOBAL.COM, is also part of the ITG corporation (ITGLOBAL.COM serves as an integrator for SimpleOne products).

According to SimpleOne, the claims cited similarities between user interface and API method names of both the SimpleOne ServiceNow platforms. SimpleOne denies the allegations that it copied SimpleOne and says its product was developed independently using a different technology stack.

The proceedings had already led to action against ITGLOBAL.COM NL. According to SimpleOne, the Amsterdam District Court authorized the temporary seizure of company data in order to preserve potential evidence. Data was copied from ITGLOBAL.COM NL’s corporate devices and systems, including emails and business correspondence. Through an appointed enforcement officer, the court later requested portions of SimpleOne’s source code from ITGLOBAL.COM NL. The developer said it learned of the request in December 2025 and provided the requested materials. ITGLOBAL.COM NL subsequently removed SimpleOne from its portfolio pending a final court ruling.

It is not known whether Leontyev’s Sept. 15 detention is connected to the ServiceNow claims. There has been no public confirmation of such a link. The Insider sent inquiries to Dutch prosecutors and ServiceNow.

ITG’s owner was involved in developing Russia’s SORM surveillance system

Gachko’s comments on “basic rights” came two months after the European Union sanctioned him over his involvement in human rights abuses in Russia. In an EU Council decision dated July 13, 2026, Gachko is identified as the CEO and ultimate owner of VAS Experts — a company that manufactures, develops, and sells hardware and software for Russia’s System for Operative Investigative Activities, known by its Russian acronym SORM.

SORM is used to monitor internet and mobile communications in Russia, including phone calls, email, internet traffic, messages, and social media. Russian telecommunications operators are required to install the relevant equipment, and traffic can be routed to servers accessible to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the country’s domestic intelligence agency.

The EU Council described VAS Experts as a key SORM supplier, saying the company provides equipment that meets FSB requirements for intercepting communications. The EU said SORM has been used against journalists, opposition figures, protest organizers, critics of the Russian government, and activists opposing the invasion of Ukraine. It concluded that Gachko materially supported serious human rights abuses and the repression of the country’s civil society and democratic opposition.

VAS Experts acknowledged that its inclusion on the EU sanctions list was based on its production of SORM-class solutions but said those products were technologies for “lawful interception and data retention” that allow telecommunications operators to comply with Russia’s legal requirements.

At the same time, Gachko has continued expanding his business in annexed Crimea. He is the founder of IT PARK RUS, a technology park that is part of the ITG ecosystem. In 2024, it was in Sevastopol that Gachko announced the consolidation under the ITG brand of the Russian operations of ITGLOBAL.COM, SimpleOne, vStack, and IT PARK RUS. He now plans to build a third phase of the technology park at a cost of around 4 billion rubles ($47.8 million) and to increase the number of specialists working there to 5,000.

In Marseille, only 118 people voted, with United Russia receiving 35.59%, or 42 votes. New People received 33 votes and the Communist Party 18. By comparison, 506 people voted in Marseille in the 2024 presidential election, meaning turnout at the polling station fell by about 77%. At the time, the Russian Embassy published turnout figures for all polling stations in France.

The difference is particularly striking when compared with Paris. The Russian Embassy said more than 1,300 people voted there on Sept. 20, and New People finished first at the polling station with 42.88%, while United Russia received 21.59% and the Communist Party 18.68%.

United Russia recorded its strongest result among the nine cities it won in Sofia, with 40.8%. A reported 652 people cast ballots there. The party received 39.18% in Canberra, 37.15% in Riga, 36.07% in Istanbul, 35.96% in Bishkek, 35.59% in Marseille, 34.74% in Hanoi, and 34.63% in Baku.

The result in Sydney was almost tied: United Russia received 31.66% and New People 31.35%. The gap was just 0.31 percentage points — the narrowest margin between the first- and second-place parties among the nine cities where, according to official results, United Russia finished first.

In the other 18 of the 27 cities, New People finished first. These locations included Almaty, Bangkok, Barcelona, Warsaw, Vienna, Vilnius, The Hague, Da Nang, Salzburg, Ljubljana, Paris, Prague, Phuket, Strasbourg, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Helsinki, and Ho Chi Minh City.

In several cities, the gap was wide. In Ljubljana, New People received 61.47% to United Russia’s 8.23%; in Salzburg, 60.79% to 9.71%; in The Hague, 57.93% to 6.65%; in Barcelona, 55.44% to 5.56%; and in Prague, 54.35% to 7.72%. In the Vietnamese city of Da Nang, United Russia received a mere 3.94%, compared with 50.81% for New People.

In 15 of the 18 cities where United Russia did not finish first, it was also beaten by the Communist Party, leaving the ruling party in third place. United Russia finished second in Paris, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.

The overseas results differed markedly from the nationwide vote inside Russia. As of 2 p.m. on Sept. 21, United Russia had received 39.58% of ballots cast abroad, New People 24.49% and the Communist Party 16.99%. Across Russia, with more than 95% of ballots processed, United Russia had received an official 57.83% and New People 7.96%.

New People’s share abroad was more than three times its nationwide result, while United Russia’s was about 18 percentage points lower, according to The Insider’s calculations. Russians voting abroad also produced results that differed significantly from the nationwide totals in the 2024 presidential election.

Voting in Transnistria stood out in the opposite direction. Seventeen polling stations were in operation in the breakaway Moldovan region, including six in its largest city, Tiraspol. According to their combined reported results, United Russia received 77.76% of the vote, or 39,733 of 51,092 ballots. The Communist Party received 6.32% and New People 3.25%.

Shipping Urals to China via the Suez Canal costs an estimated $20 a barrel – about $2 more than the route to India. Freight rates to India, meanwhile, surged in August because of risks to shipping.

Where Urals came from

The name of the grade comes from the historic oil-producing region around Russia's Ural Mountains (although the crude itself is produced mainly in Western Siberia and in the Volga-Ural basin). Urals is not an oil field but an artificial blend. Since the 1970s, it has been produced by a unified system of trunk oil pipelines, and today the system is operated by pipeline monopoly Transneft; in Soviet times, it was run by its predecessor, Glavtransneft.

The trunk pipelines simultaneously carry light, low-sulfur crude from the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area (Siberian Light, about 36° API and less than 0.6% sulfur) and heavy, high-sulfur crude from fields in the Urals and Volga regions (including Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Perm Krai and Samara Oblast). Oil has been extracted there for decades and has had time to “age,” reaching sulfur content of up to 3%. As the two streams mix in the pipeline on their way to ports and export branches, they form a blended grade with an API gravity of 31–32° and sulfur content of 1.2–1.4%.

For comparison, Brent and WTI have API gravities of 38–40° and sulfur content of 0.2–0.4% or less, while Middle Eastern crude is similar to Russian oil when it comes to both measures. The Soviet Union began exporting the blend in the 1960s as a practical solution to the challenge of shipping dozens of different grades from widely scattered fields to various buyers. The standardization allowed Moscow to sell a uniform product while passing the cost of refining heavy, high-sulfur crude on to the end customer.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Urals not only survived as an export brand but also became the fiscal backbone of Russia’s entire oil industry. Its price was used to calculate the mineral extraction tax (and, until 2024, the export duty as well). Since 2016, Urals futures have been traded on the St. Petersburg Exchange.

The key producers of the blend are Rosneft, Lukoil, Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegas, and Tatneft. A significant share of the crude produced remains in Russia and is processed by domestic refineries. Most exports go through seaborne terminals – the Baltic ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga, along with Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. The rest goes to Belarus, Hungary, and Slovakia via the southern branch of the Druzhba oil pipeline, built between 1960 and 1964 and expanded with a second line in 1974.

For decades, Urals was a grade tailored to European refineries built specifically to process this type of crude — an arrangement that proved a liability for Russia after 2022. Shipments to Poland and Germany ended in 2023, and the Czech Republic stopped importing Russian crude in April 2025, switching entirely to the TAL and IKL pipelines.

Who sets the Urals price, and why it matters to the Finance Ministry

Until 2022, the price agency Argus assessed Urals based on a survey of traders involved in CIF deals in Rotterdam and Augusta, Italy – that is, with delivery to the destination port rather than the loading port. This was the assessment used by the Finance Ministry. The average Urals price has been used in the formula for calculating Russia's mineral extraction tax (MET) since its introduction in 2002, and it later became the basis of the budget rule determining how much oil and gas revenue goes toward current budget spending and how much is saved in the National Wealth Fund (NWF) against a possible fall in prices.

After the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Urals pricing methodology gradually lost its relevance. An EU embargo on seaborne imports of Russian crude came into force on Dec. 5, 2022, but even before that, Argus announced that it would switch to an FOB assessment at Primorsk, Ust-Luga and Novorossiysk, while the CIF price in European ports would be calculated by adding estimated freight and insurance. In other words, the market for actual transactions shifted to the loading ports, while the familiar European benchmark became a theoretical construct.

From mid-January 2023, Argus competitor Platts, a division of S&P Global Energy, began publishing its own Urals assessment at Indian ports on a DAP basis, giving both the market and Russian officials an alternative price reference.

The tax formula was also changed. Starting from April 2023, the mineral extraction tax (MET) was calculated based on the actual Urals price, but with a floating floor set by the price of Brent crude. The discount fell from $34 a barrel in spring 2023 to $20 by September, and then to a projected $6 by 2026. The complicated formula was intended to prevent the Urals price used for tax purposes from falling too far.

From 2025, this mechanism was replaced altogether. The Urals price for tax purposes is now calculated as a weighted average of Urals FOB assessments at Primorsk and Novorossiysk, with a 0.78 coefficient, and the ESPO FOB Kozmino assessment, with a 0.22 coefficient. In effect, the Finance Ministry's formula serves as an acknowledgement that a genuine Urals market in the old, “European” sense no longer exists.

Urals and Brent: the history of a discount

Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Urals discount to Brent was modest and easy to explain. A $1–3-per-barrel gap reflected the grade’s higher sulfur content and lower gasoline yield when refining heavier crude.

At times, however, the discount nearly vanished or even turned into a premium. In June 2020, for example, amid record OPEC+ production cuts and a local shortage of heavy grades in northwestern Europe, Urals traded at $2.35 a barrel above Brent. It was the largest premium recorded since September 1994, when price assessments were first published. 

After February 24, 2022, Western buyers began avoiding Russian crude even before their governments imposed a formal embargo. As a result, by April the discount had exceeded $30 a barrel on a CIF Rotterdam basis, according to Argus, with some deals reaching a price difference of $35.

After February 24, 2022, Western buyers began avoiding Russian oil, fearing reputational risks

Starting from December 2022, when the EU’s seaborne embargo and the G7’s $60-per-barrel price cap took effect, the discount initially held at around $30–34, but as Russia built up a “shadow fleet” of tankers operating without Western insurance and redirected exports to India and China, the discount gradually narrowed. By the end of 2024, according to the Finance Ministry, the average Urals price was above $63 a barrel, while Brent traded at around $75.

Nevertheless, the gap widened again in late 2025. That October, the U.S. and UK imposed blocking sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, anb by Nov. 10 the discount had widened to $19.4 before rising to $24–25 by mid-December. The Urals price in Novorossiysk fell below $35, the lowest level since early 2022, according to Bloomberg. 

Prices then swung from around $41–45 a barrel in January–February 2026 to $77–95 in March–April amid the Middle East crisis and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. The discount, however, remained. According to Argus, by Aug. 21 it stood at $24.8 in the Baltic ports and $25.2–26.15 in Novorossiysk – roughly the same level as in December 2025.

Media reports often created confusion, as headlines frequently claimed that Urals had become more expensive than Brent. The problem is that the figures being compared were often not like-for-like. In one case, examined in detail by Fontanka in an Aug. 26 article, the OilPrice.com aggregator listed Urals at $86.5 a barrel versus $85.7 for Brent. But this incorrectly compared a spot Urals price quoted with a two-day delay against an October Brent futures contract reflecting market expectations rather than the current price. It was also unclear what basis OilPrice.com used to assess the Urals price. In any case, Russian oil continues to trade at a discount (no matter what a few sloppy headlines might have led some readers to believe).

A more common misunderstanding concerns shipments to India. The “Indian” Urals price reflects the price paid by a refinery, which includes outlays for freight, insurance, and the risk premium for transporting the oil on “shadow fleet” of vessels. Nevertheless, this figure is sometimes compared directly with Brent, whose price does not include such logistics costs. On a comparable basis at the Russian loading port, Urals is still sold at a discount, with much of the difference in the final price going to compensate carriers, traders, and insurers rather than Russian oil exporters.

Who needs Urals: the consumer’s perspective

Urals has a technical limitation that is often overlooked amid discussions of sanctions. It is heavy, high-sulfur crude, and not every refinery can process it efficiently. The task is best suited to complex refineries equipped with hydrotreating and hydrocracking units of the sort that refineries in Germany, Poland, and other Eastern European countries were built with over decades in order to process Urals crude supplied via the Druzhba pipeline and through the Baltic. A simple refinery with a topping configuration, by contrast, cannot make much money from this type of crude.

The second, more obvious limitation is political. As noted above, the EU’s embargo on seaborne imports, introduced in December 2022, closed almost the entire traditional European market to Urals, and the overland route now continues to operate under an exemption only for Hungary and Slovakia. For the remaining major buyers, particularly China and India, multiple G7 price caps apply, ranging from $44.1 a barrel in the EU, UK, and Canada to the unchanged $60 in the U.S. Western insurance, freight, and financing services are available only if these caps are observed. (The price cap was what ultimately prompted the rise of the “shadow” tanker fleet.)

The blocking sanctions imposed on Rosneft and Lukoil added a third filter. Indian refiners – both state-owned plants and private companies such as Reliance – began looking for ways to buy oil that did not require dealing with the sanctioned subsidiaries of these companies, fearing that their dollar transactions with other clients could be blocked and that they could lose access to the Western financial system.

As a result, the pool of actual Urals buyers has narrowed to a small group of players who are willing to work through intermediaries and traders, use the “shadow” fleet, bear additional logistical costs, and run the risk of coming under secondary sanctions. They include independent Chinese refineries – the so-called “teapots” in Shandong – and private companies such as India’s Nayara Energy, which is already under EU and UK sanctions and is 49.13% owned by Rosneft.

Notably, when the U.S. Treasury began issuing general licenses waiving some restrictions amid the war in Iran, several major Chinese and Indian importers returned to the market for Russian crude.

Not just Urals: other Russian crude grades

Urals is the largest, but far from the only Russian export grade of crude oil. Its eastern counterpart is ESPO Blend, which is transported through the East Siberia–Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to the Far Eastern port of Kozmino. It is a light, low-sulfur crude (about 34.7–35° API, with sulfur content below 0.6%) priced against the Middle Eastern Dubai benchmark rather than Brent. It serves the Asian rather than the European market.

ESPO has become the most sought-after grade among independent Chinese refineries in Shandong province. They value its short shipping distance and consistent quality more than the nominal discount to the benchmark. At times (such as in late 2024), ESPO even traded at a premium to Dubai.

Urals’ eastern counterpart, ESPO Blend, has become the most sought-after grade among independent Chinese refineries in Shandong province

There are also rarer grades. Sokol, produced at the Sakhalin-1 offshore project, is a light, low-sulfur crude and usually the most expensive Russian grade. It traditionally went to Japan and South Korea but now flows mainly to China and India. In late 2023 and early 2024, the grade was caught up in a saga involving tankers stranded at sea after India was hesitant to accept them  — China eventually bought the cargoes.

The Arctic trio – Novy Port and Varandey, produced by Gazprom Neft and Lukoil, along with ARCO – are also low-sulfur, medium-density grades. Before the war, a significant share went to the U.S. and Europe. Their share of seaborne exports is now estimated at around 10%.

Given the objectively inferior quality of Urals crude when compared with other Russian grades, why does it dominate both the country's exports and its fiscal system? The answer lies in the geography of production and the pipeline infrastructure already in place. Most Russian oil is still produced in Western Siberia and the Volga-Ural region and is exported westward through Transneft’s extensive pipeline network rather than toward the Pacific coast — i.e., most of the oil Russia produces is Urals crude.

As a result, Urals remains the fiscal benchmark for the entire industry, meaning even companies producing other grades pay taxes based on its price. And so, when ESPO, Sokol, or Arctic grades sell above the benchmark used for tax calculations, exporters can legally keep the difference as additional profit.

The report describes cases of violence against a total of 1,004 people. Twenty of the cases included in the report occurred before Feb. 24, 2022, and had not previously been recorded by OHCHR. In UN terminology, one documented “case” refers to a single survivor, who may have experienced multiple episodes of sexual violence.

Russian military personnel and security forces committed 89% of the sexual violence acts documented by the UN. In total, the UN attributes 892 cases to the Russian side, including 20 that occurred before the full-scale invasion. Among victims are 725 men, 151 women, 14 girls, and two boys. The report states that sexual violence was used by Russian service members, officials of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), the Federal Security Service (FSB), and other Russian agencies against prisoners of war and detained civilians as a form of torture, humiliation, punishment, and coercion.

Such violence was especially common against Ukrainian prisoners of war. The UN interviewed 915 Ukrainian service members and detained medical personnel released from Russian captivity, and 572 of them, or 63%, gave detailed accounts of sexual violence. Among them were 545 men and 27 women. Eight men and three women were raped, and one of the women was raped by multiple people.

Of these 572 people, 155, or 27%, were subjected to electric shocks to the genitals, 246 (43%) to beatings on the genitals, and 372 (65%) to forced nudity. 348 people (61%) were beaten or subjected to electric shocks while naked. Three-quarters of survivors experienced multiple forms of sexual violence, and 72% experienced it more than once. Nearly half — 274 people — faced such violence at multiple places of detention.

The UN recorded sexual violence against Ukrainian captives at 83 official places of detention and 81 unofficial or transit facilities — in occupied territory across six regions of Ukraine and in 25 regions of Russia. At 26 official facilities, OHCHR documented ten or more cases.

Another 205 confirmed cases involve Ukrainian civilians whom Russian authorities held in detention after the start of the full-scale invasion. Among them were 156 men, 48 women, and one boy. Thirteen people were raped, including two women who were gang-raped. In 50 cases, victims were subjected to electric shocks to the genitals or nipples, 40 people were beaten on the genitals, and 76 people were subjected to forced nudity.

Outside places of detention in occupied territories, the UN documented sexual violence against 95 civilians: 72 women, eight men, 14 girls, and one boy. Fifty-seven people described being raped by Russian service members, 15 of them in gang rapes. The oldest survivor was 82, the youngest was four. Three women gave birth to children as a result of rape.

The UN attributes 112 cases of sexual violence to the Ukrainian side — against 98 men and 14 women. Among 881 Russian and foreign prisoners of war interviewed, 63 people, or 7%, reported sexual violence by Ukrainian authorities. OHCHR did not document any cases of rape or attempted rape of Russian prisoners of war, but it did record electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, forced nudity, and threats of rape or castration.

Another 49 of 656 people interviewed who had been detained on war-related charges reported sexual violence by Ukrainian authorities. The UN did not record any rapes among them, but it did document two attempted rapes and two incidents of sexual assault. Nearly half of all the violations attributed to the Ukrainian side consisted solely of threats of sexual violence.

OHCHR stresses that these figures do not reflect the true scale of the violence. Russia does not grant UN observers access to occupied territories or to Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees, and many survivors do not report what happened to them out of trauma, fear of stigma, and fear of retaliation. According to the report, Russia has taken no discernible steps to investigate or punish such crimes. Ukraine grants the UN access to prisoners and detainees and has taken measures to prevent such violations, but OHCHR is not aware of any case of sexual violence by Ukrainian officials that, as of July 2026, had advanced beyond the investigation stage.

In a press release issued on Sept. 21, DIICOT stated that the directorate’s prosecutors are conducting searches in a case involving fraud with particularly serious consequences and the formation of an organized criminal group. The searches are taking place at five addresses in Bucharest, Mogoșoaia, Ciolpani, and Buftea.

According to investigators, two Romanians and an Italian national formed an organized criminal group in September 2021 with the aim of defrauding businesspeople. DIICOT does not name the suspects, noting only that the criminal organization was headed by a 64-year-old Romanian national (Călin Georgescu is 64). The group’s leader allegedly introduced his two accomplices as “successful businessmen and executives of foreign companies who supposedly had large sums of money available to lend to entrepreneurs looking to expand their business in Romania, on condition that a cash deposit was put up.”

According to the case file, the perpetrators convinced one businessman to transfer them €1.1 million, promising to arrange a large loan from a foreign bank.

Georgescu has previously faced investigations on other charges, including  spreading false information, forming an antisemitic organization, and attempting to undermine the constitutional order.

Georgescu, a right-wing populist, ran as an independent candidate in Romania’s presidential election in November 2024, taking first place in the first round vote with 23% overall support. However, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the results and ordered a new vote based on suspicions of Russian interference in the election, as Romania’s intelligence services published documents indicating that around 25,000 bot accounts on TikTok may have campaigned in Georgescu’s favor. The politician himself denied any connection to Russia.

This September, the Romanian outlet Snoop, working together with The Insider and several Eastern European publications, found that the AdNow advertising network collects data on millions of users in Romania and transmits it to servers in Novosibirsk, Russia. In late May, IAB Europe revoked AdNow’s right to place ads through its centralized real-time bidding system. AdNow ads nevertheless continue to be distributed through undeclared servers. Snoop had previously reported that money from this kind of Russian advertising activity was going to websites that promoted far-right candidate Georgescu and the AUR party.

The operation was dubbed “Poseidon.” The hackers said they obtained scientific, technical, design, testing, and operational documentation from Russian companies developing systems for the navy. They said the cache includes documents marked “secret” and “top secret.” The full scale and contents of the documents could not be independently verified.

Screenshots published by Ukrainian Militant show documents from the Rubin Central Design Bureau for Marine Engineering, among others. One example from 2024 concerns development work on the Andoga-M2 navigation system with “advanced positional correction capabilities” for Project 636.3 submarines. Another, dated 2025, concerns development of a modified navigation system for Project 955M nuclear-powered submarines.

Another published document, dated March 2026, concerns the results of interagency testing of the Simfoniya-PM navigation system. Among other things, it says the stability of navigation data generated by the onboard inertial navigation system after maneuvers needs to be improved, as does the system’s interaction with other onboard equipment.

The published materials also include a test program for the Chardash-22350 automated navigation and gyro-stabilization system for a Project 22350 frigate, as well as documentation for the KAMA integrated marine navigation and stabilization system.

Despite the terminology, these are not simply shipboard “navigation devices.” A submarine that is underwater cannot rely on GPS, meaning it has to calculate its position independently and periodically correct its coordinates by other means. Some of the published documents concern newer methods of correcting navigation data.

Ukrainian Militant said the full cache is far broader than the excerpts released publicly and that the larger trove includes technical specifications and requirements, operating manuals, structural and functional diagrams, algorithms, accuracy and reliability parameters, test programs and results, and acceptance documents.

According to the group, the obtained documents cover not only navigation but also sonar, digital hydrography, marine robotics, and autonomous navigation for underwater vehicles. The systems mentioned include Simfoniya, Chardash, KAMA-NS-VK, Sprut-N1, Priliv, and 14Ts217, among others.

The hackers also said the documentation as a whole makes it possible to trace the work of Russian specialists across 70 projects involving ships, vessels, and submarines under construction or modernization. Organizations whose materials were said to be included in the cache include the Rubin Central Design Bureau for Marine Engineering, the Malachite Marine Engineering Bureau, the Elektropribor Central Research Institute, the Okeanpribor concern, Elara, the Vega concern, and the State Research Navigation and Hydrographic Institute.

For products covered by the quota, the export duty will be set at zero rubles per metric ton. Russia’s standard export duty on sunflower oil in September is 14,377.7 rubles per ton ($170), nearly twice the August rate. If the full 6,000-ton quota is used, exporters could save upwards of 86.3 million rubles ($1 million) compared with the September rate. The actual value of the exemption will depend on the duty rates in effect during the months when the oil is exported.

The decree establishes a separate procedure for the exports. The quota will be distributed among foreign-trade companies by the Russian-appointed head of the Zaporizhzhia Region or an authorized official no lower than a deputy chair of the regional government. The distribution rules must be coordinated with Russia’s ministries of Economic Development, Agriculture and Industry, as well as the Ministry of Trade. Once an exporter receives part of the quota, it will need a one-time license from the Industry and Trade Ministry. The Federal Customs Service has been instructed to process shipments on the basis of those licenses.

The decree itself does not identify which companies will receive portions of the 6,000-ton quota. The official allocation form requires the Russia-installed authorities in Zaporizhzhia to list each company’s name, taxpayer identification number, the type of product, and its allocated volume.

One of the largest producers of sunflower oil in the Russian-occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia Region is the Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant, or MMEZ. The company is listed under taxpayer number 9001005262 and state registration number 1229000009435 in Russia’s corporate register, with oil and fat production designated as its main line of business. Serhiy Zhelev is listed as owning 60% and Liudmyla Zheleva 40%, while Svetlana Chernykh is listed as general director. In 2024, the Russian legal entity reported revenue of 571 million rubles ($6.8 million) and a net profit of 73 million rubles ($870,000).

The plant itself has said it produces and sells 30,000 to 35,000 metric tons of oil a year. The new 6,000-ton quota therefore amounts to roughly one-fifth of its stated annual output. The Insider has not found documents showing that MMEZ has received or will receive the new quota.

The same owners before and after Russian occupation

The history of MMEZ differs from many other cases in which Ukrainian assets came under Russian control after the start of the occupation, as Serhiy and Liudmyla Zhelev were connected to the Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant long before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Liudmyla served as a member of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Council for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, and Serhiy at various times sought election to Ukraine’s parliament and to the Zaporizhzhia Regional Council. In 2018, he was appointed Honorary Consul of Bulgaria in Ukraine for a consular district covering the Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions (an appointment confirmed by Bulgaria’s Foreign Ministry).

Serhiy Zhelev’s declaration in Ukraine’s public asset registry states that he and his wife owned shares in PJSC Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant. It also records their investments in LLC Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant. According to current data from Ukraine’s corporate register, Serhiy and Liudmyla Zhelev are still listed as the ultimate beneficiaries of the joint-stock company and hold large stakes in the enterprise.

After the occupation of Melitopol, the company also appeared under Russian jurisdiction. The owners of the Russian LLC were again the Zhelevs, with Serhiy receiving 60% and Liudmyla 40%.

Ukrainian law enforcement authorities are examining the circumstances of the re-registration. A March 3, 2026, ruling by Kyiv’s Solomianskyi District Court cites investigators as alleging that Serhiy Zhelev, together with his wife and another person, worked with representatives of the Russian occupation authorities to re-register a number of Ukrainian companies in the Russian tax system.

Investigators specifically named the Ukrainian LLC Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant and its corresponding Russian entity, LLC Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant, registered under state number 1229000009435. The criminal case is being investigated under an article covering assistance to an aggressor state.

From Melitopol to the international market under the Russian flag

After the occupation, the company did not limit itself to the Russian domestic market. In February 2024, the Melitopol Oil Extraction Plant appeared at the Gulfood international food exhibition in Dubai as part of the Russian exhibition.

Photos from the stand showed the name Melitopol and the company’s logo. Ukrainian media reported that the plant took part in the Russian Export Center’s Made in Russia pavilion. Ukrainian publication LIGA.net also noted that Serhiy and Liudmyla Zhelev were listed as the owners of the relevant companies in both Ukrainian and Russian corporate registers.

The Russian legal entity later registered the Zdravoliya trademark, which is now used for the plant’s products.

This is not the first duty-free quota

The Zaporizhzhia Region was a major center of sunflower oil production before Russia unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, companies in the region produced approximately 544,000 metric tons of unrefined sunflower oil and an additional 61,000 metric tons of refined sunflower and safflower oil. The current Russian duty-free quota of 6,000 tons therefore amounts to only about 1% of the region’s prewar annual production.

The latest government decision is not the first time Russia has introduced a special export regime for agricultural products from occupied Ukrainian territories. For 2025, the Russian government established separate duty-free export quotas for four occupied Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims as Russian territory — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. The quotas for the Zaporizhzhia Region were especially large: up to 1 million metric tons of wheat, barley, and corn, 25,000 tons of sunflower oil, and 35,000 tons of sunflower meal.

The quotas were in effect from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2025. As under the current system, the right to distribute the exemptions among exporters was given to Russian-appointed regional authorities, while each shipment required a one-time license from the Industry and Trade Ministry. In March 2025, Russian-installed Zaporizhzhia governor Yevgeny Balitsky approved separate rules for distributing those volumes.

The other parties set to enter the regional legislature are:

• United Russia (38.37%)
• The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (14.54%)
• The Liberal Democratic Party (12.01%)
• New People (9.87%)
• A Just Russia (7.7%)
• Party of Pensioners (5.55%)

The Communists of Russia party — not to be confused with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation — failed to clear the 5% threshold, taking 3.3%

The Novgorod Regional Duma has 32 seats: 20 are elected in single-member districts and 12 are allocated proportionally based on votes cast for regional party lists.

Yabloko also applied to run in elections to seven other regional legislatures, but its party lists were denied registration in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, while courts removed its lists in Karelia and the Kaliningrad, Sverdlovsk, Tomsk, and Pskov regions following lawsuits filed by other parties.

Yabloko was also barred from the nationwide election for Russia’s State Duma. A court removed the party from the race on Aug. 10 following a lawsuit filed by the Rodina party, which alleged that Yabloko’s use of photographs showing the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima violated the U.S. Army’s copyright protections.

Yabloko was the only registered party running on an anti-war platform, campaigning under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom.” The court ruling blocking its participation in the vote also cited the party’s advertising on blocked social media platforms (such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube) and its receipt of money transfers from abroad.

No official information about the case has been made public. However, The Insider’s source says Olimov may have staged his kidnapping in France as part of an effort to portray his former employer and adversary in a financial dispute, Batyr Rakhimov, as the organizer of the crime.

In November 2025, The Insider and French magazine L’Express identified numerous contradictions in Olimov’s account — troubling signs that the financier’s alleged kidnapping may have been staged. Among other things, after his purported release, Olimov exchanged friendly messages with a man he later described as one of his captors, then warned him about police activity and instructed him on how to avoid arrest.

Olimov now stands accused of falsely accusing Rakhimov of organizing his kidnapping. More than that, however, it is also suspected that Olimov conspired with Uzbek security officials to arrange for Rakhimov’s actual abduction in order to pressure him into dropping financial claims. Rakhimov had previously accused Olimov of taking control of business assets belonging to him and demanded more than $200 million in compensation.

A new power plant and the arrest of Uzbekistan’s energy minister

Attention has also turned to a combined-cycle power plant project in Uzbekistan’s Surkhandarya Region that involves QuWatt B.V., a company linked to Olimov. On July 27, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev criticized the project, saying the site had been poorly chosen and that connecting it to the country’s gas network would cost an additional $300 million. He also said the investor agreement had not been reviewed carefully enough, meaning further unexpected costs were possible.

At the same meeting, Mirziyoyev dismissed Mirzamakhmudov as energy minister, citing “serious shortcomings” in the sector. Two days later, Mirzamakhmudov was detained, and on July 30 a court ordered that he be held in custody. Uzbek media outlet Ozodlik, part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, cited several independent law enforcement sources while  reporting that the former cabinet minister is suspected of the abuse of office and embezzlement.

The project, worth around $1.2 billion, was originally developed through the Netherlands-registered Stone City Energy B.V. From its creation in 2019 until March 2024, Olimov was its sole ultimate beneficial owner. Then, after a restructuring agreement, Olimov still retained an economic interest in the project through QuWatt B.V., which remains fully controlled by him and is among the owners of project company SCE-Quvvat LLC (alongside EDF, Siemens Energy, and Qatar’s Nebras Power).

The staged kidnapping

In the summer of 2025, Olimov claimed that he had been kidnapped in central Paris and taken to an unknown location before being moved to a villa near Nice, where he said he was beaten, tortured, and ordered to pay $10 million. According to Olimov’s account, the kidnappers released him after he agreed to sign an IOU for $5 million and hand over $200,000. After returning to Paris, Olimov went to the police.

However, a joint investigation by The Insider and L’Express found several inconsistencies in Olimov’s account. The villa where he said he was held had been rented through an intermediary using documents belonging to a close associate. After his reported release, a first-class ticket back to Paris was paid for by the driver of a man identified only as M., whom Olimov described as having been directly involved in the kidnapping. Olimov continued exchanging friendly messages with M. even after contacting police; during a lengthy police interview, he discussed the transfer of $200,000 to M.

The correspondence continued afterward. When M. asked Olimov whether the police had realized that the incident had been staged, Olimov did not respond. Several days later, Olimov wrote that there was “no enmity” between them and expressed relief that M. had not been arrested. A medical examination that took place eight days after the alleged torture Olimov said he endured while in captivity documented only minor bruises and abrasions of unknown origin.

Notably, the investigation also established that Olimov had been involved in a yearslong financial dispute with his former employer, Batyr Rakhimov. After Rakhimov left Uzbekistan for Turkey in 2016, a significant portion of his business came under Olimov’s management as part of a deal that Rakhimov later considered to be highly unfavorable.

After returning to Uzbekistan, Rakhimov sought to renegotiate the terms and demanded more than $200 million from Olimov. Olimov’s kidnapping allegations emerged in the summer of 2025 amid that dispute.

Israel's upcoming election will be the first since the series of wars that followed the massacre carried out by the Hamas terrorist group on October 7, 2023. Despite ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon and the end of active hostilities with Iran, the war is not over for Israel. IDF soldiers remain in Gaza and Lebanon, the military remains on heightened alert over Iran, and tensions remain high in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Netanyahu’s promised “total victory” (at least over Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah) has not been achieved, even if both groups have suffered heavy losses.

Against this backdrop, one of the key questions ahead of the election is whether Benjamin Netanyahu can remain in power after the security failure that led to the October 7 tragedy. The campaign has raised questions about the responsibility of the political leadership and security agencies for the Hamas attack, the military’s condition and readiness, the aims and results of the recent wave of wars, and the issue of extending mandatory military service to students at ultra-Orthodox yeshivas.

Netanyahu argues that the army and intelligence chiefs failed to warn him of the impending attack, instead portraying Hamas as a contained force. At the same time, the prime minister says he should be judged by the results of the subsequent wars, which led to the elimination of much of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, the killing of Iran’s top military commanders, and strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu's main rivals – Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan – hold the government politically responsible for the catastrophe and are calling for a state commission of inquiry into the events before, during, and after October 7. They also accuse Netanyahu’s government of damaging Israel’s international standing and weakening its support in the West, including in the United States.

Still, the issue of October 7 stands out. Haaretz recently reported that roughly 10 days before the Hamas attacks, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu of a major attack being planned by Yahya Sinwar, who was then leading Hamas in Gaza. According to the newspaper, however, the prime minister did not pass the information on to the heads of the security agencies. Netanyahu’s office called the report “an absolute lie,” saying no such conversation ever took place. Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, and Golan issued a joint statement demanding an immediate and comprehensive investigation and promising to establish a state commission under the next government. Bennett himself said that he knew Netanyahu had received the warning. The following day, the prime minister instructed his lawyers to prepare a lawsuit against the newspaper and the authors of the report.

The events of October 7 feature not only in politicians’ statements but have also shaped electoral lists of major parties, virtually all of which include veterans of the recent wars, relatives of those killed or taken hostage, and activists from organizations that emerged after the Hamas attack. Just hours before registration closed, Netanyahu announced that Talik Gvili, the mother of police officer Ran Gvili — who was killed fighting terrorists on the morning of October 7, and whose body was then taken to Gaza — would join the Likud list, taking ninth place. Reservist Elisha Medan, who lost both legs fighting in the Gaza Strip, took 15th place, while attorney Itzik Buncel, the father of soldier Amit Buncel, who was killed in Gaza in December 2023, took 29th.

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, gave second place on his party's list to Rafi Ben-Shitrit, the former mayor of Beit She’an. His son Elroy was also killed on October 7.

Ben-Shitrit is one of the founders of the October Council, which brings together families of those killed or taken hostage, survivors of the attack, and reservists. The organization is campaigning for a state commission of inquiry into the events of October 7. In August 2026, it published a report on the persistence among the political leadership and security establishment of the belief that Hamas could be contained.

Sharon Sharabi took sixth place on the Yisrael Beiteinu list. His brother Yossi was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and died in captivity, while another brother, Eli, was released after 491 days in Gaza. Sharon Sharabi became one of the most prominent figures in the campaign to free the hostages.

The events of October 7 have also become part of the political biographies of leaders of several parties. On the morning of October 7, Yair Golan, a reserve major general and leader of the left-wing Democrats party, went south on his own initiative, evacuating people from the fighting. Ofer Winter, a reserve brigadier general and leader of the right-wing Amha Israel party, likewise made his own way to the Gaza border, joined soldiers near Kibbutz Be’eri, and took part in the fighting.

The Reservists party, which submitted a joint list with Yaron Zelicha’s Economic Party, is led by reserve Lt. Col. Yoaz Hendel. After the war began, he returned to active duty and fought in the Gaza Strip, later forming and commanding the Be’eri reserve battalion. Reservist Shlomi Demari, who lost his brother on October 7, took seventh place on the joint list.

On the “Together” (Beyahad) joint list of Bennett and Lapid, sixth place went to reserve Major General Noam Tibon, who on the morning of October 7 traveled south from Tel Aviv, helping Nova festival survivors and wounded soldiers along the way. He took part in the fighting before reaching Nahal Oz, where he evacuated his son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters from a besieged home.

Netanyahu’s main rival in the race for prime minister is Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, a reserve lieutenant general and former IDF chief of staff. During the war, he lost his son Gal and nephew Maor Cohen Eisenkot, who were killed in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu’s main rival is Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, a reserve lieutenant general and former IDF chief of staff

Even the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which has consistently opposed mandatory military service for yeshiva students, placed reserve officer Dror Amos sixth on its list.

Other major fault lines in the campaign include judicial reform, the future of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria, and the related question of establishing a Palestinian state. Equally contentious is the debate over Israel’s very character: the balance between its Jewish and democratic identities, the relationship between religion and state, and whether the country needs a constitution. These issues divide not only Netanyahu’s supporters and opponents but also the parties within each camp. Reaching compromise will be difficult. First though, the people will have their say.

How Israel’s elections work

The first poll conducted after the party lists closed and published by the Walla news portal on Sept. 9 shows how heavily the outcome depends on parties that are currently hovering around the electoral threshold of 3.5%. According to the poll, Eisenkot’s Yashar would win 25 seats, Likud 21, the joint Bennett-Lapid list 14, and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Golan’s Democrats nine each. Winter’s Amha Israel, with exactly 3.5% of the vote, would clear the threshold and win four seats, while the joint Hendel-Zelicha list, at 2.8%, would fall short. The parties in the current coalition, together with Winter, would have 51 seats, the Zionist opposition parties 57, and the Arab parties 12. Neither camp would have the 61 seats needed for a majority, although the figures could still shift in either direction as the campaign progresses.

Israel is a single nationwide constituency, with all 120 Knesset seats allocated proportionally among party lists according to the number of votes they receive. Votes cast for lists that do not clear 3.5% are not transferred to any other party but are excluded from the calculations. As a result, the share of seats won by parties that clear the threshold increases, meaning the number of small parties falling just short of the threshold can change the balance of power between the camps.

Israeli voters do not vote for a prime minister but for a party list. After the results are announced, the president consults with all factions that have entered the Knesset, each of which says whom it recommends be tasked with forming a government. The president then gives the mandate to the Knesset member whom he or she believes has the best chance of forming a government capable of winning the body's confidence.

The first candidate is given 28 days, after which the president can extend the period by another 14 days. If the attempt fails, the mandate can be given to another member of Knesset. If all the subsequent options provided by law are exhausted, the Knesset is dissolved and new elections are held – as has happened more than once under Netanyahu. To take office, the incoming prime minister must present the cabinet and its main policy priorities to the Knesset and win a vote of confidence.

The leader of the largest party does not automatically become prime minister. After the 2009 election, for example, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima won 28 seats, while Netanyahu’s Likud won 27. However, most right-wing and religious factions backed Netanyahu, and President Shimon Peres asked him to form the government. Netanyahu assembled a coalition, while Livni, who led the largest faction, remained in the opposition.

Another precedent was set in 2021. After Netanyahu failed to form a government, the mandate was given to Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid. Lapid assembled a coalition of eight parties, ranging from the right-wing Yamina to the left-wing Labor and Meretz and even including the Islamist Ra’am, and he agreed with Yamina leader Naftali Bennett on a rotation arrangement. Bennett became prime minister first, even though his party was one of the smallest in the coalition, with just six seats. The new government won the confidence vote 60 to 59, with one abstention.

The law does not require 61 members to vote in favor of a government for it to be approved. It is enough to receive more votes in favor than against. This makes it possible to form a minority government – a cabinet formed by parties with fewer than 61 seats that relies on the support or abstention of other factions during confidence votes.

Under the numbers recorded in the Walla poll, Netanyahu’s Zionist opponents could theoretically try to form a minority government with the external support or neutrality of the Arab parties. But such a scenario would require the agreement not only of the Arab factions but also of potential coalition partners, and some of those parties refuse to rely on Arab votes. Another possible route would be to redraw the boundaries of the current camps and bring in some parties that had belonged to the opposing bloc before the election.

Netanyahu’s opponents could try to form a minority government with the support or neutrality of Arab parties

Failure to reach an agreement could lead to another election. After the April 2019 vote, Netanyahu was five seats short of a coalition majority. Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Lieberman controlled five seats but was unwilling to join a government that planned to concede to the demands of religious parties by amending the law on ultra-Orthodox military service. No compromise was reached, and the Knesset voted to dissolve itself.

After the September 2019 election, neither Netanyahu nor Benny Gantz managed to form a government. A third election was held in March 2020, after which they formed a rotation-based national unity government. It collapsed after the state budget failed to pass, and in March 2021, Israelis went to the polls for a fourth time in less than two years. That cycle ended with the formation of the Bennett-Lapid government.

The threat of another election after the October vote remains, but it is only one possible scenario. The polls are still volatile, and the balance of power could shift in response to both external events and domestic political crises. At the very least, some parties hovering around the electoral threshold may withdraw before election day to prevent votes for their party from being lost to the larger political camp they associate with.

Israel’s political camps

The division of Israeli politics into right and left predates the state itself, emerging within the Yishuv – the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine and its self-governing institutions. On one side was the socialist Labor Zionist movement, which dominated the leadership of the Yishuv and the of Israel for decades.

Its main political heir was the Labor Party, which later merged with Meretz to form today’s Democrats. On the other was Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, which advocated a tougher struggle for a Jewish state and laid claim to the entire historic Land of Israel. It gave rise to Menachem Begin’s Herut party, which became the foundation of Likud, established in 1973.

After the 1967 Six-Day War, one of the central issues in Israeli politics became the future of the territories captured during the fighting – the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights. The UN and most countries consider them occupied territories (Sinai was returned to Egypt under a peace treaty).

Broadly speaking, the right favored maintaining Israeli control over the territories and expanding Jewish settlements, while the left supported territorial compromise in exchange for peace. But the divide was never absolute. It was right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin who agreed to return the entire Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 peace treaty, while Ariel Sharon’s government carried out a unilateral disengagement in 2005, withdrawing Israeli forces and dismantling all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank.

After Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority was established and granted limited self-government in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The political divide increasingly focused on whether to establish or prevent a Palestinian state, its possible borders, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of the settlements, and the risks of transferring territory to Palestinian control.

Religion and state became another major political divide. In Israel, “liberal” does not neatly correspond either to the right-left divide over the Palestinian issue or to economic liberalism. The left-wing Democrats, centrist parties, and some secular right-wing politicians describe themselves as liberal, and they are united by support for individual and civil liberties, civil marriage, the operation of public transportation and businesses on Saturdays, and equal obligations to the state. Thus Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which is right-wing on security and the Palestinian issue, can be closer on religion-state questions to the Democrats and the secular center than to the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties in the right-wing bloc.

Parties that describe themselves as centrist occupy a space between the traditional camps. They generally seek to combine a tough approach to security with a willingness to compromise politically, and a secular, liberal agenda with a rejection of a left-wing identity. But Israel’s center is not a single ideological movement. At different times, the label has been applied to parties with substantially different platforms, often built around a particular leader or a demand to replace the existing political elite.

Since 2019, another divide has become firmly entrenched in Israeli politics – one between Netanyahu’s supporters and the parties seeking to remove him from power. It overlaps with the traditional right-left divide but does not coincide with it: right-wing politicians Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have been among Netanyahu’s opponents, while ultra-Orthodox parties and representatives of the religious Zionist right have remained his staunch allies.

The split emerged alongside Netanyahu’s criminal prosecution. In November 2019, he was indicted on charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. Netanyahu denies the charges and has called the investigations politically motivated.

Israeli law does not require a prime minister to resign automatically after being indicted, and he can remain in office while on trial. By contrast, under Supreme Court rulings, a minister or deputy minister who is not prime minister must step down after being charged with a serious offense. An ordinary Knesset member, however, is likewise not automatically required to give up their seat.

Netanyahu’s opponents have argued that the criminal cases gave him an additional personal incentive to remain prime minister — and to use his power to pursue changes to the judicial and law-enforcement systems. Netanyahu denies this.

His trial began in May 2020. He gave evidence from December 2024 through June 2026. After 98 hearings, his testimony was completed. The defense must now present its other witnesses, after which the sides will move to closing arguments. No verdict has been issued, and Netanyahu retains the presumption of innocence. In June 2026, the judges again recommended that prosecutors drop the bribery charge. The prosecution did not withdraw it, however, and proceedings on the remaining charges continue.

The series of elections from 2019 to 2021 showed that attitudes toward Netanyahu can override the importance of ideological proximity between parties. In 2021, right-wing, centrist, and left-wing parties joined with the Islamist Ra’am to form a coalition whose main common goal was to replace the prime minister.

Attitudes toward Netanyahu can outweigh ideological proximity between parties

Bennett assumed the role first. A former director general of the Yesha Council, he opposed a Palestinian state and supported extending Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied territories. Before the election, he pledged neither to make Yair Lapid prime minister under a rotation deal nor to form a government dependent on Ra’am. But he later broke both promises before subsequently insisting that his views on security and the Palestinian issue had not changed and that his decision was driven by the need to end the political crisis.

The judicial overhaul pursued by Netanyahu’s government since 2023 has deepened the divide. Supporters argued that the changes were needed in order to limit the Supreme Court’s influence over decisions by elected authorities. Opponents saw them as an attempt to weaken independent judicial review and the system of checks and balances. The dispute over Netanyahu and his criminal cases was thus joined by a fundamental disagreement over the powers of the government, the Knesset, and the Supreme Court.

In election polls, parties are generally grouped into the Netanyahu bloc, the Zionist parties seeking to replace the government, and the Arab lists, which are counted separately. These are not unified ideological camps but potential coalition groupings. Within each, disagreements persist over the Palestinian issue, the judiciary, the relationship between religion and state, and obligations of military service.

Polls place Netanyahu’s Likud, the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, Itamar Ben-Gvir's far-right Otzma Yehudit, and the joint Religious Zionism-Zehut list of Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin in the Netanyahu bloc. Ofer Winter’s right-wing Amha Israel is also counted as a member, and its leader has said he belongs to the right-wing camp and will recommend only Netanyahu for prime minister. At the same time, Winter has refused to join forces with politicians he holds responsible for the October 7 security failure.

However, this bloc cannot be treated as a ready-made future coalition. The ultra-Orthodox parties have made their participation in government conditional on the passage of a law regulating the status of yeshiva students and allowing many of them to avoid military service. The dispute over the legislation has already triggered a crisis in their relations with Likud. Winter, by contrast, is demanding that before the government is formed a law be passed that, in his words, will “put an end to draft evasion” and require all young Israelis to serve in the military or otherwise contribute to the state. In short, their mutual support for Netanyahu is not enough to resolve the fundamental conflict between the incumbent prime minister's potential post-election coalition partners.

Ahead of the 2022 vote, Netanyahu succeeded in uniting three competing right-wing lists – Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, and Avi Maoz’s Noam – so they could clear the electoral threshold together. This time, it proved impossible to create a single list of Likud’s potential right-wing partners, although Smotrich did reach an agreement with Feiglin. Depending on the poll, the Smotrich-Feiglin and Winter lists either clear the threshold by a narrow margin or fall just short. Maoz’s separate list fails to clear the threshold and therefore also acts to siphon votes from other right-wing parties.

New alliances are no longer possible now that the lists have closed, but individual parties can still withdraw from the race. Netanyahu is therefore likely to continue pressuring parties and candidates hovering around the threshold.

Polls place Eisenkot’s Yashar, the joint Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid list, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and Yair Golan’s Democrats among the Zionist parties opposed to the current government. Eisenkot refers to these four parties as the “camp of change,” but their commitments vary. Bennett and Lieberman have explicitly said they will not join a Netanyahu government. Golan has consistently called for Netanyahu’s removal. And Eisenkot is demanding a change of government and is himself seeking the prime minister’s post, even if he has not made an equally categorical commitment never to join a coalition with Netanyahu.

There are also significant differences within the camp opposed to Netanyahu. Bennett and Lieberman remain unmistakably right-wing on security and the Palestinian issue, while the Democrats represent the left. Yisrael Beiteinu calls for mandatory military or civilian service for all citizens and rules out a government dependent on ultra-Orthodox or Arab parties. Some center-right politicians are unwilling to work with the Democrats. As a result, there is still no agreement on what kind of government Netanyahu’s opponents should form should they be given the opportunity.

Separate from these four parties is Benny Gantz’s Blue and White. After the 2023 Hamas attack, Gantz’s State Camp bloc reached as many as 35 seats in some polls, putting it in contention to become the country’s largest political force. But Eisenkot and other partners subsequently left the bloc, and what remained of Gantz’s party fell well below the electoral threshold. The “camp of change” is therefore urging Gantz to withdraw, fearing that votes cast for him will be wasted. He has so far said he will continue his campaign.

Pollsters usually count the Arab lists – the Hadash-Ta’al-Balad United List and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am – separately. They could join a coalition, support a government from outside, abstain in the confidence vote, or remain in opposition. Each option depends not only on the Arab parties themselves but also on whether the Zionist factions are willing to accept their support. Ra’am was already part of the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021–22, but since October 7, some right-wing parties have ruled out any government dependent on Arab lawmakers.

Outside the two main camps is the joint Reservists-Economic Party list of Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelicha – provided it clears the electoral threshold. Hendel says he will not give Netanyahu the votes he needs to form a narrow coalition, but at the same time, he is open to joining a broad government with Netanyahu provided that it is backed by 70–80 members of Zionist parties. He also rules out joining a cabinet dependent on Arab or ultra-Orthodox factions.

Both Netanyahu and his opponents are now calling for a “broad Zionist government,” but there is no agreement on what it should look like. Such a coalition would clearly exclude the Arab and ultra-Orthodox parties, but questions remain. Some are open to serving in a government with Netanyahu, while others would work with Likud only after a change of the party's leader. Some would also refuse to sit in the same government with the Democrats, Otzma Yehudit, and Religious Zionism.

The main contenders

Coalition arithmetic does not answer the campaign’s central question: who will head the next government? In one of the latest polls asking voters who is best suited to serve as prime minister (conducted by the Kantar Institute for the public broadcaster Kan and published on September 6), 38% of respondents chose Eisenkot over Netanyahu, while 35% chose the incumbent. When asked to choose between Netanyahu and Bennett, the incumbent led 37% to 32%, while in a head-to-head matchup between Eisenkot and Bennett, the former IDF chief of staff led 36% to 17%. The results vary depending on the pair presented, but at the time of the poll, Eisenkot was the only candidate ahead of Netanyahu in a head-to-head comparison.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Likud’s indispensable leader

Gadi Eisenkot: the general who became Netanyahu’s main challenger

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: together again

Naftali Bennett is 54. An entrepreneur and former special forces officer, he began his political career in Netanyahu’s circle. He later served as director general of the Yesha Council and led the religious Zionist Jewish Home party. Bennett went on to serve as economy, education, and defense minister before becoming prime minister in 2021 with just six Knesset seats, leading a coalition of right-wing, centrist, and left-wing parties that included Ra’am.

Yair Lapid is 62. A former television host, he founded the centrist Yesh Atid party in 2012 and later served as finance and foreign minister. Under the 2021 coalition agreement, Bennett and Lapid agreed to rotate the premiership: Bennett would serve first, and after the Knesset was dissolved early in summer 2022, Lapid briefly became prime minister.

They are running together in this election on the Beyahad joint list, which Bennett leads. He is also its candidate for prime minister.

Avigdor Lieberman: “Now it’s my turn”

Yair Golan: the general leading the left

Benny Gantz: from frontrunner to fighting for survival

Ofer Winter: a new challenger on the right

Partners with strings attached

Beyond the candidates for prime minister, the makeup of the next government will be determined by the parties controlling the final handful of seats needed to form a majority. The collection of potential kingmakers includes far-right parties, ultra-Orthodox factions, and Arab lists alike.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich: rivals on the far right

Itamar Ben-Gvir is 50. He leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party and has served as national security minister, with authority over the police, since late 2022. Before entering the Knesset, Ben-Gvir was an activist in Kach, a movement banned in Israel, and a lawyer for people accused of nationalist offenses. In 2007, a court convicted him of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He later sought to distance himself from some of his earlier views but retained a platform calling for the annexation of Judea and Samaria, the expansion of settlements, harsher conditions for Palestinian prisoners, and the widespread arming of civilians.

In the run-up to this election, Ben-Gvir has added another coalition demand, unveiling a seven-year plan for the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza residents and saying that in the next government, Otzma Yehudit will demand the creation of a separate Ministry of Emigration.

On Sept. 9, the party also petitioned the Central Elections Committee to bar Ra’am and its leader, Mansour Abbas, from running, arguing that the party rejects Israel’s character as a Jewish state and supports armed struggle against it. The committee has yet to consider the claims, and its decision can in any case be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Bezalel Smotrich is 46. The leader of Religious Zionism serves as finance minister and also as a minister in the Defense Ministry, where he oversees matters related to the Civil Administration and settlement development in Judea and Samaria. Smotrich opposes a Palestinian state and supports extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. His supporters see settlement expansion as the party’s main promise fulfilled, while opponents accuse him of effectively annexing the territories without a formal government decision.

Smotrich is running jointly with the Zehut party of 64-year-old Moshe Feiglin, who holds second place on the list. Feiglin is a former Likud lawmaker and the founder of a movement opposed to the Oslo Accords. His platform combines territorial annexation and an expanded Jewish presence on the Temple Mount with liberal economic policies, less government regulation, and cannabis legalization.

The ultra-Orthodox: allies who can no longer be taken at their word

Shas is an ultra-Orthodox party whose full name translates as “World Sephardi Union – Guardians of the Torah.” It was established primarily to represent religious Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Aryeh Deri remains Shas’s political leader, but the party makes key decisions after consulting the Council of Torah Sages, a group of the most influential Sephardi rabbis.

United Torah Judaism represents the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community. For the first time since 1992, it is running under that name as an alliance of three, rather than two, formally independent parties: Degel HaTorah (representing the Lithuanian stream), the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael, and the new Homat Torat Yisrael (“Bulwark of Israel’s Torah”). Degel HaTorah’s Yaakov Asher heads the list, and Agudat Yisrael representative Yitzhak Goldknopf is second. Here too, lawmakers answer to rabbinical councils and the leaders of the largest Hasidic communities. 

The emergence of a third party within United Torah Judaism stems from an internal dispute in Agudat Yisrael. Representatives of several Hasidic groups accused the Gur community, the alliance’s largest, of wielding too much influence over the allocation of seats and budgets. The creation of Homat Torat Yisrael gives the dissenters their own party funding and the option of eventually breaking away from the joint list. For now though, they describe the move as technical and remain within United Torah Judaism.

The main grievance Shas and United Torah Judaism share with Netanyahu is that his government has failed to pass the promised law regulating yeshiva students’ exemption from military service. Following a Supreme Court ruling, the state must draft them under the existing law and halt funding to institutions whose students evade the draft. The Haredi parties want to preserve the special status of Torah study and limit penalties against yeshiva students who choose not to serve. 

The decision to join a future coalition will be made not only by Deri, Asher, or Goldknopf, but above all by the parties’ rabbinical leadership. Shas representatives have floated the idea of refusing to join Netanyahu’s next government until an agreed law is passed, but Deri has made no final commitment. United Torah Judaism has put it more bluntly: it will not join a coalition that fails to resolve the status of yeshiva students. Their traditional alliance with Likud therefore does not guarantee unconditional support for Netanyahu after the election.

The traditional Haredi parties also face a new challenger in this election: the Ha-Tzibur Ha-Haredi (“Haredi Public”) list, led by Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Moti Leitner, which is aimed primarily at working Haredim and others who feel unrepresented by Shas and United Torah Judaism. American-born Haredim are seen as a potential source of support, as they are more likely to combine a religious lifestyle with solid jobs and secular education. The party advocates teaching math and English, expanding employment, and drafting those who are not actually engaged in Torah study: “Those who do not study must serve.”

Two women are among the list’s top six candidates. This sharply distinguishes the new party from Shas and United Torah Judaism, which do not include women on their lists. Leitner presents the party as an alternative to the existing Haredi leadership, accusing it of perpetuating poverty, opposing secular education, and protecting draft exemptions even for those who do not study at yeshivas. At the same time, Ha-Tzibur Ha-Haredi retains its ultra-Orthodox identity and says it is committed to protecting the right to full-time Torah study. The party may nevertheless fail to clear the electoral threshold.

Two Arab paths

Two major Arab lists are running in the election. The first is a joint list of three parties – Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad. It is headed by Hadash’s Yousef Jabareen, followed by Ta’al leader Ahmad Tibi in second place and Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh in third.

Hadash is an Arab-Jewish left-wing bloc centered on the Communist Party of Israel. Ta’al is a secular Arab party built around Tibi. Balad represents the Palestinian national movement and calls for transforming Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens.” In the 2022 election, Hadash and Ta’al won five seats, while Balad, which ran separately, failed to clear the threshold.

The second list is Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, an Islamist Arab party and the parliamentary arm of the Islamic Movement’s southern branch in Israel. The movement split in 1996 over participation in elections, with the northern branch rejecting Israel’s state institutions (it was banned in 2015) while the southern branch chose parliamentary politics and remained legal. In 2021, Ra’am became the first independent Arab party to join a governing coalition, entering the Bennett-Lapid government. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, focused negotiations on funding for Arab municipalities, fighting crime, improving infrastructure, and gaining recognition for Bedouin villages.

In August 2026, Abbas said that Arab parties had been forced to accept the state’s Jewish character as a reality in order to participate in elections. Avi Maoz, followed by Ben-Gvir, then called for Ra’am to be barred from the vote. Otzma Yehudit also cites alleged ties between the Islamic Movement-affiliated Aid 48 foundation and organizations linked to Hamas, but Ben-Gvir’s main concern is that Ra’am could provide the seats needed to form a governing coalition made up of Netanyahu’s opponents.

A notable feature of the current Ra’am list is the second-place candidacy of former Deputy Minister for Internal Security Yoav Segalovich, a retired police major general and the first Jewish candidate in Ra’am’s history. Under the Bennett-Lapid government, he coordinated the fight against crime in the Arab sector.

Ra’am is seeking to return to pragmatic cooperation with Zionist parties. The United List includes both supporters of backing a government from outside to replace Netanyahu and opponents of any coalition that continues military operations and the occupation of Palestinian territories. That is why pollsters count Arab seats separately: it is impossible to know in advance whether Arab lawmakers will join the government, support it from outside, abstain in the confidence vote, or remain in opposition.

Either way, the sheer diversity of party lists and campaign platforms shows how deeply divided Israeli society has become. Yet whoever wins the election and whatever government emerges, there is little reason to expect the country’s internal crisis to end. According to a study published in June 2026 by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), 55% of Israelis consider internal polarization and divisions the country’s greatest existential threat – more serious than Iran’s nuclear program or the Palestinian conflict. Six in 10 respondents see a real danger of bloodshed and physical violence within Israel, potentially escalating into civil war.

55% of Israelis consider internal polarization and divisions the country’s greatest existential threat

The next government will therefore have to do more than decide how to wage the war and shape the country’s postwar future. It will also have to govern a deeply divided society in which a significant share of citizens no longer see their political opponents as rivals but as a threat to the country’s future.

On Sept. 3, Moscow sent Tokyo a formal note of protest over the deployment, Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced earlier today. The ministry called the deployment of the systems in Japan “unacceptable under any pretext” and demanded their removal from the country regardless of how long they are stationed there or the terms of their deployment.

The Typhon systems have been at the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Kanoya Air Base in Kagoshima Prefecture since June, when the U.S. military deployed them there in advance of the Valiant Shield 2026 exercises which ran from June 22 to July 1. The systems are also being used in the Orient Shield 26 exercises running from Sept. 8 to 24, which involve ground forces from Japan, the United States, and Australia. Japanese military officials have described this year’s Orient Shield as the largest in the exercise’s history.

This is the first time Typhon has been deployed directly at a facility of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. The system was temporarily stationed in Japan in September 2025, but at that time it was deployed at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. This year also marks the first deployment of Typhon to Kyushu.

The ground-based Typhon system can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 multipurpose missiles. Tomahawks have a range of about 1,600 kilometers, which would allow them to strike targets along a large portion of China’s eastern coast if fired from southern Japan. The U.S. and Japanese militaries have not disclosed how many launchers were moved to Kanoya Air Base.

Japan has stressed that the deployment is temporary. The country’s defense minister said in June that after the September exercises wrap up, the launchers are expected to leave Kanoya for storage at a U.S. military facility elsewhere in Japan. He said the United States had assured Tokyo that Typhon was not being permanently deployed in the country.

Moscow had objected to the deployment even before the system arrived. In May, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the presence of Typhon in Japan posed a “direct threat” to Russia’s Far Eastern borders.

In late August, a week before Orient Shield began, Russia’s Foreign Ministry protested the exercises once again. Relations between Moscow and Tokyo deteriorated further in August after Vladimir Putin visited Iturup, one of the disputed southern Kuril Islands.

Japan lodged a protest with Russia, calling the trip to the island “utterly unacceptable.” Tokyo considers the southern Kuril Islands (which it calls the Northern Territories) to be Japanese territory. Russia controls the islands and disputes Japan’s claim to sovereignty.

The Insider previously reported that in August 2025, Russia formally abandoned a voluntary moratorium on the deployment of ground-based intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. Russia’s Foreign Ministry cited the appearance of U.S. Typhon systems in the Asia-Pacific region among the reasons for the decision.

Roldugin, the artistic director of the St. Petersburg House of Music and a longtime friend of Putin, received the award “for major contributions to culture and the arts and many years of fruitful work.” Putin had already awarded him the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 4th Class, in 2021.

The Order of Merit to the Fatherland is one of Russia’s highest state decorations. It has four classes, with 1st Class being the highest.

Roldugin’s name has repeatedly appeared in investigations into the assets of people close to Putin. The 2016 Panama Papers showed that offshore structures linked to the cellist had handled more than $2 billion in transactions.

In 2023, a Zurich court convicted four managers at the Swiss subsidiary of Gazprombank who had helped open accounts for companies linked to Roldugin. The Insider reported at the time that the Swiss prosecutors’ case materials indicated the musician was only the nominal beneficiary of the companies and was acting on behalf of third parties.

In March 2026, Putin transferred shares in the nationalized Muzyka sheet-music publishing house to the Talent and Success Foundation, which Roldugin co-founded and currently chairs. Putin himself heads the foundation’s board of trustees.

A month later, it emerged that the same foundation had received a 4.99% stake in energy company En+ worth about 14 billion rubles ($166.2 million).

The block of 31.9 million shares was transferred to the foundation as a “donation.” Independent outlet Verstka reported that the stake amounted to 5% minus one share — just below the threshold at which a shareholder is required to notify the Russian Central Bank and publicly disclose the holding.

Among the Channel One employees named in the decree, four received the Order of Honor, four received the Order of Friendship, and 19 were awarded the Medal of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 2nd Class.

All were honored “for their contributions to the media and many years of dedicated service.”

Those on the list included television presenters Anton Vernitsky, Vitaly Yeliseyev, and Anatoly Kuzichev, as well as Sergei Titinkov, Channel One’s chief producer for film programming and production.

Before she disappeared, Kuznetsova denied that she had withdrawn her election observers from polling stations and said that a document purporting to show that she had done so was forged. Nevertheless, when the voting began on the morning of Sept. 18, her observers were removed from Moscow precinct election commissions Nos. 1263, 1273, and 514, based on statements allegedly signed by Kuznetsova, the legal aid project Slovo Zashchite (lit. “A Word for the Defense”) reported. Kuznetsova herself still could not be reached.

The Telegram channel of Slovo Zashchite subsequently published a recording of a conversation with Kuznetsova’s mother, who explained that her daughter had called her and said she had run into problems and had to leave urgently for three days without her phone. Kuznetsova did not say where she had gone. Her mother said she was worried.

Later, a source in Kuznetsova’s campaign team told Slovo Zashchite that she was being held at a police station in Moscow’s Central Administrative District. According to the source, Kuznetsova had relayed to relatives that she was safe and had “gone away for three days so as not to frighten the family.” There has been no direct confirmation of that account from Kuznetsova or her husband.

Nikolai Toropov, head of the Moscow branch of Rassvet (lit. “Dawn”), an unregistered anti-war political movement founded by former presidential hopeful Yekaterina Duntsova, had earlier said that Kuznetsova and her husband were safe. He later withdrew that statement. “There is still no concrete information about their whereabouts,” he wrote, adding that he would publish further updates only after receiving confirmation directly from Kuznetsova or her husband.

An initiative group supporting Duntsova reported that it had drafted an appeal to state prosecutors, encouraging its followers to contact the authorities and demand an investigation into Kuznetsova and her husband’s disappearance.

“We prepared a complaint to the prosecutor’s office asking it to investigate the circumstances of Yulia and her husband Vadim’s disappearance, determine their whereabouts and, if they have been detained, verify that their procedural rights are being respected,” the group wrote on Telegram.

On the evening of Sept. 17, Kuznetsova held a meeting focused on internet freedom with voters in Moscow’s Sokolniki District. Afterward, she told her acquaintances that she was taking a taxi home and was about 15 minutes away, according to the independent channel SotaVision. At about 9 p.m., the phones of Kuznetsova and her husband, Vadim, were switched off. Neither was found at home.

Kuznetsova is running for the State Duma from “The Greens” in Moscow’s Babushkinsky single-member district No. 195. She previously worked on campaigns for opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin, who recently left Russia after suspending his bid to run in the elections amid mounting pressure from the authorities. Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and the team of opposition politician Maxim Katz both included her on their lists of recommended candidates for Russian voters to support.

According to Bild, Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office has taken over the investigation into the incident around Wunstorf due to the possible link to the Leipzig incident. On Sept. 1, the German government officially accused Russia of a hybrid attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. At a press conference, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that, in response to Russia’s actions, Germany is closing the Russian House in Berlin and the Russian Consulate General in Bonn.

Russia, for its part, withdrew its consent for the operation of Germany’s Consulate General in St. Petersburg and demanded that the German Goethe-Institut cultural centers in the country cease operations.

German investigators later identified two suspects in the Leipzig/Halle Airport sabotage: Russian national Oleg L. and Belarusian national Andrei K. According to Welt am Sonntag, Oleg L., who was responsible for planning and logistics, is linked to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).

A day earlier, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asserted that Russia is planning “hybrid” drone and missile strikes on countries that support Ukraine — including NATO member Poland itself. The war, he said, is entering its most critical phase.

In Tyumen, pharmacies were advised to limit bulk sales of zelyonka, iodine, and other colored antiseptics. One pharmacist told local outlet 72.RU that police had asked pharmacies not to sell five or more packages of such products to a single customer. Pharmacy staff said they received no formal ban or written order.

The Insider found similar measures in at least two other regions.

In Surgut, in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the restrictions were written directly into the official election preparation plan, which was obtained by The Insider’s editorial team. It says polling stations should post lists of prohibited items at their entrances, specifically including staining liquids and flammable substances that “may be used as part of a protest action.” Local officials were also instructed to install additional lockers for voters’ belongings.

In the Kostroma Region, police said voters would not be allowed to bring staining or flammable liquids into polling stations. Sharp objects will also be banned, and all 448 polling stations in the region will be equipped with metal detectors. About 700 police officers, more than 100 National Guard personnel, and around 80 private security employees are set to guard them during the vote.

Similar restrictions were introduced in the Chelyabinsk Region, where police warned that weapons, ammunition, and sharp objects would be barred from polling stations. They separately listed staining substances among the prohibited items.

The measures follow a series of incidents during Russia’s 2024 presidential election in which zelyonka, ink, and other liquids were poured into ballot boxes in several regions. Some also lit urns of ballots on fire. The Insider reported at the time that such incidents occurred in Moscow, the Voronezh Region, Rostov-on-Don, and Karachay-Cherkessia, among other regions. Attempts to set fire to or pour liquids into ballot boxes were recorded at 29 polling stations across 20 regions.

Several regions are also offering up prizes to local residents during the election period as an incentive to show up at the polls. Prize campaigns and election-day giveaways have become a recurring feature of Russian elections, with regional authorities using lotteries, quiz competitions, and other incentives to encourage turnout.

In Moscow, the “Million Prizes” program promises those who vote online or use electronic terminals at polling stations at least 1,000 “city points” each, with one point equal to one ruble. Participants will also be entered to win prizes worth 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, and 50,000 points.

In the Krasnoyarsk Region, a local-history quiz titled “Viktorina-2026” will run in parallel to the elections. Among the 369 prizes are three apartments, six cars, 90 smartphones, 90 smart speakers, 90 smartwatches, and 90 pairs of wireless headphones. Quiz forms will be handed out near polling stations, though casting a ballot is not required to qualify for a prize.

Even more prizes are being offered in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug through a quiz called “Yugra — vmeste!” (“Yugra [stands] together!”). Organizers say several thousand prizes will be awarded, including six apartments, three cars, 14 all-terrain vehicles, and an untold number of bicycles, televisions, smartphones, and household appliances. To take part, participants must answer at least three out of five questions correctly.

The debate over a new mobilization comes down to a simple question: does the Russian army actually lack manpower? Different methods of counting produce very different estimates of both the potential number of new soldiers and they extent to which they would actually expand the armed forces rather than simply replacing losses.

According to calculations by IStories based on federal budget expenditures for one-time enlistment bonuses, 71,200 people signed contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry in the first quarter of 2026 and another 60,100 in the second. That puts the six-month total at 131,300 recruits, or an average of about 720 a day. This is almost the same as in the first half of 2025 (127,500), but it is roughly 20% below the 2024 figure. After falling in late 2025 and early 2026, the flow of contract recruits therefore appears to have stabilized.

However, economist Janis Kluge, who tracks regional budget spending, arrived at significantly higher figures: around 79,000 new contract soldiers in the first quarter of 2026 and about 93,000 in the second, or roughly 172,000 over six months — around 1,000 new contract soldiers a day in the second quarter. Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, meanwhile, cited an even higher figure: more than 200,000 contracts in the first half of the year.

The discrepancy between official statements and budget-based estimates has of course been seen before, and it is true that federal data on one-time payments probably do not capture the full scale of recruitment. For the calculations that follow, it therefore makes more sense to use a range rather than a single precise figure: roughly 700–1,000 new contract soldiers a day, or 20,000–30,000 a month.

The current rate of recruitment into the Russian armed forces is between 20,000 and 30,000 people a month

New calculations by Kluge published in September confirm this general estimate. According to regional budget data, approximately 234,000 contracts had been signed by the end of August 2026, compared with 260,000 over the same period in 2025. In August, the recruitment rate remained at around 1,000 people a day — a figure that was about 20% lower than a year earlier, despite higher payments and an increase in coercive recruitment.

Actual recruitment rates are probably still below the target set for regional authorities. As the Financial Times reported, the regions have been tasked with securing 409,000 new contracts by the end of 2026. Meeting that target would require an average of about 34,000 new contract soldiers a month, or 1,120 a day.

By itself, the current pace of recruitment is no longer enough to sustain the growth in the size of the Russian armed forces that was seen during the first years of the full-scale war. As military analysts Michael Kofman and Greg Wehner note, in 2023 the Russian military managed to replace its losses while significantly expanding its force, forming two new combined-arms armies, two motor-rifle divisions, and 27 new brigades and regiments. However, in 2024 the growth slowed, and by 2025 it had virtually stopped.

In September and December 2025, Vladimir Putin gave the same figure for the size of the force in the combat zone – around 700,000 troops. According to Kofman and Wehner, this suggests that the force had barely grown over the roughly 18 months since mid-2024. In June 2026, Putin again put the size of the Joint Grouping of Forces at 700,000.

It is difficult to assess the balance between reinforcements and departures more precisely. While estimates of the number of new contract soldiers differ by tens of thousands, estimates of Russian military casualties vary even more widely.

Using budgetary spending on compensation for the families of fallen soldiers, Kluge estimated Russian battlefield deaths in 2026 at roughly 9,000 a month — when compared with recruitment of 20,000–30,000 people a month, that would suggest no manpower shortfall at all.

However, fatalities account for only part of Russia's irreversible losses. They must be supplemented by severely wounded soldiers, those who are no longer medically fit to return to the front, and troops who are missing, captured, deserting, or otherwise removed from active service. Simply adding the numbers of dead and wounded would also be misleading, since a significant share of wounded soldiers return to duty after treatment.

According to The Guardian the number of Russian killed and wounded reached around 30,000 in April 2026. At a recruitment rate of roughly 1,000 people a day, a substantial share of new recruits would go towards simply maintaining the existing strength of military units. The figures cannot, however, be compared directly without accounting for the proportion of wounded soldiers who return to duty.

The Ukrainian General Staff, for its part, puts the Russian army's personnel losses over the summer at 124,200 — 39,300 in June, 42,900 in July, and 42,000 in August – about 26% more than during the three months of the spring and significantly above the current rate of contract recruitment. However, Ukrainian statistics count all personnel losses, not just irreversible ones, meaning the 124,200 figure cannot be directly compared with the number of new contract soldiers either.

The Financial Times reports that the Russian military command is sending most new contract recruits to existing units rather than using them to build a trained reserve. The current pace of contract recruitment is therefore probably somewhat below the target set for the regions.

There is another constraint that gets lost in the aggregate statistics: 30,000 recruits do not equal 30,000 soldiers with the skills the military needs. This is particularly evident in the Unmanned Systems Forces, established in late 2025. According to IStories, the Defense Ministry planned to recruit around 78,800 people for the new branch by the end of 2026. Most were not expected to come from ordinary contract recruits, with a target of 58,000 to be recruited from among students, graduates of DOSAAFtraining courses, former aviation personnel, and “women” with the necessary training. Another 10,800 were to be conscripts transferred to contract service, while only around 10,000 were to be transferred from other military units.

However, on July 17, 2026, Deputy Defense Minister Alexey Krivoruchko said that just over 8,000 specialists had been trained for the Unmanned Systems Forces in the first half of the year. The Conflict Intelligence Team noted that, if the annual target were being met evenly, the figure should have been roughly four times higher by that point. Analysts attribute part of the shortfall to the failure of the campaign to recruit students despite reports from Novaya Gazeta Europe that at least 47 of Russia’s 50 leading universities had campaigned to persuade students to sign such contracts.

After the mass call-up in the fall of 2022, the Russian authorities effectively built an alternative system of continuous military recruitment. The state tried dozens of methods for recruiting people, from advertising contract service and offering large bonuses to using paid intermediaries, conducting raids, targeting men with debts and financial problems, recruiting foreigners, and pressuring conscripts, prisoners, and defendants to sign up for contract service. This system has so far allowed the Russian military command to avoid a second wave of mass mobilization.

Nevertheless, maintaining the previous flow of recruits has become increasingly expensive. Higher payments can indeed temporarily boost recruitment, and after Tyumen region raised its one-time enlistment bonus to 3 million rubles ($35,600), a local military recruitment official reported that the number of inquiries had doubled. However, the need to keep raising both enlistment bonuses and payments to recruiters suggests that the previous level of financial incentives is no longer sufficient to meet recruitment targets. In Moscow, for example, according to sources cited by IStories and Verstka, the flow of recruits fell by roughly a third in the spring compared with the previous year.

The pool of potential recruits is also expanding. In September 2026, Irkutsk region cut the enlistment bonus for Russian citizens from 2.1 million ($24,850) to 1.8 million rubles ($21,300), while introducing a 900,000-ruble ($10,650) payment for foreign citizens and stateless people.

In August, authorities in Zabaykalsky Krai raised the regional payment for foreign citizens and stateless people from 400,000 rubles to 900,000 rubles ($4,750 to $10,650). However, at the same time, they cut the payment for mobilized soldiers who sign contracts from 2 million rubles to 400,000 rubles ($23,650 to $4,750). The contrast illustrates the logic of the current system: regional authorities have little reason to pay as much for someone already serving in the Russian armed forces as they do to bring in a new recruit.

At the same time, the Russian authorities are removing legal barriers to another source of manpower. In August, Putin signed a law expanding the categories of convicts who can sign contracts with the Defense Ministry during periods of mobilization, martial law, or wartime. During the bill’s consideration, Deputy Defense Minister Viktor Goremykin explicitly linked the change to the need to meet the military’s 2026 recruitment target. Kluge views such measures as an additional way to sustain the current recruitment rate.

Here it is important to distinguish between having enough people to replenish infantry units and having enough young, healthy, and trainable recruits for more specialized roles. According to sources cited by Important Stories and Verstka, the share of older recruits and men with serious health problems is growing.

In spring 2026, a source in one military unit claimed that contract recruits had “literally been scraped out of all the villages around here,” forcing recruiters to look for people in other regions. Such accounts cannot be extrapolated to the Russian army as a whole, but they point to another possible limit of the current model: not a shortage of people in general, but a dwindling pool of suitable recruits.

Russian statistics make it possible to count debtors, unemployed people, and those with criminal records, but they cannot show how many are actually fit for military service. It is therefore impossible to calculate mechanically how many months of war Russia can sustain by recruiting from among the poor and indebted.

The extent to which this pool is being depleted can, however, be assessed indirectly by looking at the cost of each next recruit and the effort required to find him. If maintaining roughly the same recruitment rate requires higher payments, more paid intermediaries, searches outside the region, and lower age and health requirements, that suggests the marginal cost of each additional recruit is rising.

That alone, however, does not prove that potential contract soldiers are running out: bonuses of several million rubles remain an enormous incentive for many Russian families.

Why might Putin need mobilization?

What matters is not so much the number of soldiers as the task the Russian military command expects them to perform. Replacing losses may be enough to sustain the current slow advance, but significantly accelerating the offensive, creating an operational reserve, or forming new force groupings would require a much larger pool of troops.

Over the past two years, the Russian military has adapted its offensive tactics in order to fit its limited capabilities. As early as 2024, Russian forces had already largely abandoned attempts to launch repeated attacks with large mechanized formations, instead shifting to small infantry assaults. In 2025, this tactic evolved further — into what has been described as “infiltration,” allowing Russian forces to maintain continuous pressure along a broad front using extremely slow advances that are difficult to turn into an operational breakthrough.

Kofman and Wehner note a paradox: as the Russian force grew, the size of the force the command could deploy simultaneously in direct attacks actually declined. The reason is the battlefield’s saturation with minefields, artillery, prepared defensive positions, and drones of both the reconnaissance and strike variety,  all of which combine to make large concentrations of troops highly visible and extremely vulnerable.

As a result, brigades numbering several thousand troops can spend months advancing along a single ravine or toward one or two villages, even as very few of them can take part simultaneously in assaults. The Russian command has numerical superiority across the theater but cannot fully translate it into local superiority on the battlefield.

This is particularly important when assessing the prospects of an offensive against the Ukrainian-held cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which form the northern part of a larger fortified belt of cities that also includes Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka. The towns are separated by rivers, high ground, and wooded areas.

As of early September, the nearest Russian positions on the Lyman axis were 7–10 kilometers from Sloviansk — close enough for Russian artillery to shell the city. According to an officer with the 11th Army Corps of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russian command has reinforced the sector with the 123rd Motor Rifle Brigade (which was previously involved in fighting around the Siversk salient), giving it the ability to threaten Ukrainian logistics. The Russian army has therefore moved closer to direct fighting for the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk urban area, while Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, is effectively restructuring the defense command system around the expected battle for the area.

Ukraine’s military command system is being reshaped for the coming battle for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk

If the current model remains in place, the most likely first scenario is a continuation of the slow advance without a new mobilization. The Russian command could continue sending reinforcements directly to active units, replenishing assault infantry and gradually attempting to encircle the urban area from several directions while simultaneously degrading Ukrainian logistics and positions with drones, artillery, and airstrikes.

Kofman, however, described the 2026 campaign as significantly less successful for the Russian military than those of previous years. He stressed that the current rate of advance cannot simply be extrapolated to a date when the entire Donetsk region would be captured, as the outcome depends not only on Russian resources but also on the effectiveness of Ukrainian defenses.

Additional mobilization is not a prerequisite for continuing the offensive. The Russian army has sustained its advance for several years with virtually no operational pauses: newly formed or rebuilt units are generally not held in reserve but sent directly to different sectors of the front. Even Russia’s airborne forces and naval infantry are typically pulled from one sector, rapidly replenished, and redeployed to another rather than being kept as a permanent operational reserve. This system allows the Russian command to maintain pressure, but also makes it difficult to accumulate forces for a separate large-scale operation.

The second scenario is an attempt to sharply accelerate the capture of the remaining part of the Donetsk region by deploying a larger mass of infantry. At first glance, a new mobilization might seem the most obvious solution.

Kofman, however, considers this approach unlikely to be effective. In his assessment, if the Russian command simply adds several regiments or divisions to sectors already crowded with troops and continues to use them in the same way, the result will be higher casualties more than anything else. Even 100,000 additional troops would not automatically translate into 100,000 assault troops who could be deployed simultaneously to capture Sloviansk and Kramatorsk quickly.

A radical acceleration of the offensive would require not just more troops, but the ability to conduct larger, coordinated operations. This means a sufficient numbers of trained junior commanders and specialists, engineering support and logistics, and the ability to concentrate forces without allowing Ukrainian reconnaissance and drones to destroy them before they enter the fight.

Linear growth in troop numbers will not work without changes in tactics and organizational support

The third scenario better explains why the Russian leadership might need mobilization: not to reinforce existing assault units, but to form new ones and thereby change the geography of the war.

Kofman considers the most dangerous option to be the creation of additional regiments and several new corps that could be deployed, for example, in the Kharkiv, Sumy, or Chernihiv directions. Even without an immediate objective of capturing major cities, the emergence of substantial Russian troops there would force the Ukrainian command to keep additional brigades in the north and northeast instead of deploying them in Donbas or Zaporizhzhia. In this scenario, mobilization would not be about sending another 100,000 troops toward Kramatorsk, but about creating a shortage of reserves for the Ukrainian Armed Forces across several fronts at once.

This may be the purpose behind the 300,000–500,000 additional troops discussed, among other places, in an analytical memo published by the Black Mirror hacker group. The memo describes a mobilization on this scale as being potentially part of a much more ambitious scenario aimed at achieving a “decisive military advantage” that would allow Russia to establish control over the entire territory of the four annexed regions and Kharkiv region before forcing the Ukrainian authorities into negotiations. The authors consider 300,000–500,000 mobilized troops insufficient on their own, however, as the Russian military would also need to expand air support, strengthen defenses in the rear, and develop its drone capabilities.

Even if a mobilization decision is made, it will not determine the outcome of the 2026 campaign. Mobilized troops have to be assembled, assigned to units, given at least basic training, provided with commanders and equipment, and deployed to the front. And forming new units takes even longer.

Kofman estimates the minimum cycle for building such forces at roughly three months and notes that, in order to significantly accelerate the offensive in 2026, mobilization would have had to begin around May. An autumn mobilization – if it happens at all – would therefore primarily be a decision focused on influencing the 2027 campaign.

What could Putin achieve by expanding the army in 2027?

There is no definitive answer to where Putin’s war aims end. His territorial demands have shifted with the negotiating context. In summer 2024, Putin demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entire territory of the four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — as a condition for a ceasefire (while Russian-annexed Crimea remained non-negotiable).

During U.S.-mediated negotiations in 2025, according to Reuters, he was reportedly prepared to halt fighting along the existing front line in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions but continued to demand the entire Donbas. This did not, however, mean that he had abandoned his claims to the other territories: in late June 2026, Putin again publicly described full control of Donbas, plus Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as the goal of the “special military operation.”

After capturing the remaining part of Donetsk region, the Russian military would therefore face a much more difficult task in the south. To fully occupy Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, Russian forces would have to capture the major city of Zaporizhzhia, cross the Dnipro, and retake Kherson (which Russian troops abandoned in fall 2022). These would be operations on an entirely different scale from the current advance by small assault groups in Donbas.

So far, there are no clear signs that such operations are being prepared. In summer 2026, the pace of the Russian advance remained slow. Russian forces are positioned south of Zaporizhzhia, but Ukrainian defenses have so far prevented them from advancing toward the city. There are even fewer signs of preparations for a major operation across the Dnipro to retake Kherson. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have stepped up strikes on Russian logistics in the south, including on the port of Mariupol and the Chongar Bridge linking the occupied territories with Crimea.

If Putin intends to use military force to gain full control over all the Ukrainian territories he has incorporated into Russia’s constitution, the Russian military would have to continue its offensive in the south while holding a front more than 1,000 kilometers long. This would seem difficult without recruiting hundreds of thousands of additional troops for next year’s campaign.

But the Russian military’s potential objectives do not end with the territories incorporated into the constitution. Putin also seeks to expand a “security zone” along the Russian-Ukrainian border. Initially, Russian authorities linked the creation of such a zone to protecting the Belgorod region, and later, they invoked Ukraine’s 2024-2025 operation in the Kursk region as justification.

In June 2026, Putin stated explicitly that the Russian military’s objective in the Sumy and Vovchansk sectors was to seize Ukrainian territory along the border, presenting the loss of this territory as Ukraine’s price for its incursion into the Kursk region. In July, following an intensification of Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, Putin again said that additional territory beyond Donbas needed to be seized in order to expand Russia's “buffer zone.”

There is no predetermined geographic boundary to such an objective. The greater the range of Ukrainian drones and other strike capabilities, the less realistic it becomes to secure Russia’s border regions simply by pushing the front line farther away. Nevertheless, the concept of a “security zone” provides the Russian authorities with a rationale for military operations in Ukraine's Kharkiv and Sumy regions, which Moscow has not formally declared part of Russia.

Still, this does not mean that Putin has decided to pursue such a widespread campaign. For now, the most concrete near-term territorial objective remains the part of Donetsk region that Russia does not yet control, and the timeline for achieving it remains unclear, even if Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that the Russian command aims to do so by the end of 2026. In August, Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, said that this deadline was included in the Russian General Staff’s plans, and in late August, Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Pavlo Palisa made a similar claim. However, there is no independent confirmation that such an order exists. 

The Institute for the Study of War contends that the Russian command has repeatedly missed projected deadlines for capturing Donetsk region. The Conflict Intelligence Team, neverthless, argues that reports of yet another deadline allegedly set by Putin for the capture of Donbas should not be taken too seriously. In their analysts’ view, Putin is satisfied with the current pace of fighting, meaning a new mobilization is unlikely to be necessary.

The cost of avoiding mobilization – and the cost of carrying it out

Avoiding mobilization is becoming increasingly expensive for the Russian authorities. In addition to the federal payment of 400,000 rubles ($4,750), new contract recruits receive a regional bonus. According to economist Janis Kluge’s estimate, its average size reached a record 1.65 million rubles ($19,500) by August, up from 1.47 million ($17,400) in March, while the regions’ actual spending on such payments rose by about 30%. Including payments to intermediaries, the regional cost of recruiting a single contract soldier increased from roughly 1.4 million rubles ($16,550) in mid-2025 to 1.8–1.9 million ($21,900) in 2026. Including the federal payment, the state is therefore paying roughly 2.2–2.3 million rubles ($26,600) to recruit each new contract soldier.

At least 11 Russian regions (plus occupied Sevastopol) raised their enlistment bonuses over the summer. In early fall, a number of southern Russian regions followed suit. As Kluge notes, some regions are funding the higher bonuses by cutting other areas of spending, from pay increases for public-sector workers to regional payments to the families of fallen soldiers.

The increase in payments to recruits has been accompanied by an expansion of the recruitment machinery itself. By August 2026, 56 Russian regions were offering rewards for bringing in a new contract soldier, compared with 31 in fall 2025. According to The Moscow Times, at least 38 regions have formally established such payments through regional or municipal regulations. The state has effectively created a market of intermediaries that are paid to find new soldiers.

IStories calculated that in 2026, the regions’ average monthly spending on recruiter bonuses had more than doubled, from 358 million rubles ($4.2 million) to 802 million ($9.5 million). By mid-May, regional authorities had spent at least 7.7 billion rubles ($91.1 million) on such payments. In some regions, recruiters receive 100,000 rubles or more for each contract recruit they bring in.

At current payment levels, recruiting an additional 100,000 people would require roughly 220–230 billion rubles ($2.7 billion) in one-time bonuses; 300,000 would cost 660–690 billion ($8.0 billion), and 500,000 would cost 1.1–1.15 trillion rubles ($13.6 billion). This is a rough estimate: payments vary widely between regions and are frequently changed. But the scale makes the key point clear: building an additional force of 300,000–500,000 contract soldiers would cost around a trillion rubles before the state even begins paying them their regular salaries.

Mobilization saves money specifically on buying people’s consent. The state does not have to offer a conscript several million rubles to sign a contract, and it does not have to pay recruiters to find them. However, that is where the savings end. Mobilized soldiers must be trained, clothed, armed, housed, transported to the front, and then paid and maintained like other service members. Simply paying 300,000 mobilized soldiers the minimum monthly allowance of around 195,000 ($2,300) rubles would cost more than 700 billion rubles ($8.3 billion) a year.

Mobilization saves money on buying people’s consent

Finally, mobilization carries a cost that cannot be captured in any budget line. The first wave turned out to be one of the Russian government’s most unpopular decisions since the start of the war and triggered a mass exodus of men from the country numbering in the hundreds of thousands. A new mobilization would exacerbate labor shortages in two ways: several hundred thousand more men would be taken into the army, while countless others would try to evade the draft.

Additional spending would come at a time when the budget is in significantly worse shape than it was in 2022. Beginning in 2026, the government raised VAT from 20% to 22%, with the Finance Ministry explicitly citing the need to finance defense and security, including military pay and support for soldiers’ families, as a reason for the additional trillion rubles in revenue. In the first eight months of 2026, the federal budget deficit reached 5.8 trillion rubles ($68.6 billion), while the government’s ability to cover it with reserves and cheap borrowing has diminished.

The contract system, by contrast, allows the economic and social cost of drawing people into the military to be spread over time. Instead of drafting several hundred thousand people simultaneously, the state recruits hundreds of volunteers every day, many of them from groups for whom several million rubles is worth more than the income they would otherwise earn.

In other words, contract recruitment does not necessarily remove every new recruit from an already tight labor market. Russian authorities can continue recruiting among homeless people, people with alcohol or drug dependencies, and other socially disadvantaged groups, some of whom have no regular employment. The size of this pool, however, is unknown. The official 2020 census counted only 11,000 homeless people, while experts in 2024 estimated the actual number at around 2 million, including roughly 1.1 million men. In 2024, about 980,000 Russians were registered as having alcohol dependence and 208,000 as having drug dependence. It is not known, however, what proportion of these people are fit for military service, have not already been recruited, and are willing to sign a contract.

Notably, the threat of mobilization itself helps sustain the contract recruitment system. As The Guardian reports, recruiters use it as an argument: it is better to sign a contract now and get paid than risk being drafted into the army later without receiving a bonus. The result is a paradox: fear of a new mobilization helps the Russian authorities recruit more people than they otherwise would have, thereby allowing them to postpone mobilization.

What is known about preparations for mobilization

The Russian authorities are far better prepared technically for a new mobilization than they were in the fall of 2022. The clearest example is the Unified Register of Military Registration, created after the first wave.

As IStories found in a leak of documents from Mikord, one of the companies that developed the system, mobilization was built into it from the outset as a separate scenario. The register allows authorities to identify people liable for military service, send out draft notices (without any limit on their number), track the potential number of mobilized troops, and transmit information for imposing travel bans and other restrictions. The system’s capacity is currently designed to send up to one million draft notices a year.

In summer 2026, more explicit signs of mobilization-readiness testing emerged. In June, officials from the administrations of neighboring regions took part in mass-mobilization exercises in Volzhsky, Volgograd region. They practiced setting up a preliminary assembly point, notifying citizens, receiving military equipment, and operating a mobilization headquarters. In July, according to The Wall Street Journal (citing Western intelligence agencies), the military conducted a similar exercise in Kaliningrad region, practicing the accommodation, feeding, and arming of mobilized troops. The newspaper’s sources claim that similar exercises are being held in other regions. 

The organizers of the Volzhsky exercises, however, offered a more prosaic explanation: mobilization preparedness is a “peacetime process,” and such drills are held every year.

At the same time, mobilization has become more prominent in the government’s dealings with employers. In July, three professional publications for accountants, HR specialists, and business executives published or updated guidelines on what employers should do in the event of mobilization. According to a source at the Alabuga industrial complex, the management there also received mobilization instructions in August. There were reports that major companies were compiling lists of employees exempt from mobilization, as well as an alleged order for a mobilization drill at a Gazprom facility. The Alabuga account and the authenticity of the document attributed to Gazprom could not be independently verified. 

At the same time, the surge in guidance for employers does not in itself prove that a new mobilization is being prepared. Since 2022, requirements for military registration and the liability of organizations have been steadily tightened.

On September 4, Sberbank held an internal meeting on reserving employees against mobilization, according to sources at the state-owned bank cited by Mozhem Obyasnit. According to the sources, beginning September 10, Sberbank would begin cross-checking the military-registration records of all its employees. Notably, this was the first time the bank had held such a meeting.

The Russian authorities are also continuing to build out the administrative infrastructure that could be used in a mobilization. In August, the government introduced Bill No. 1322096-8, which would establish administrative penalties for failing to comply with decisions by regional governors and operational headquarters. The bill’s explanatory note explicitly lists mobilization measures and meeting the needs of the armed forces among the tasks of these bodies.

Earlier, the Prosecutor General’s Office updated its procedures for overseeing military registration, including the transfer of information on people liable for military service, employee exemptions, and deferments. None of these measures necessarily points to preparations for a new wave of mobilization on its own. Taken together, however, they show that the state continues to keep the mobilization machinery operational.

Russia is steadily strengthening its administrative infrastructure for mobilization

This is the main difference from September 2022. Back then, the authorities first announced the call-up of 300,000 people, but many of the mechanisms for registration, notification, and oversight had to be created or reworked after mobilization had already begun. Military recruitment office databases were incomplete, businesses and regional authorities often had to work out the rules as the campaign unfolded, and there was no electronic draft-notice register. Now, by contrast, much of this infrastructure exists on a permanent basis.

Still, this does not mean that a decision on a new mobilization has already been made, and as The Wall Street Journal's intelligence sources say, no such decision has yet been made. The Guardian reached the same conclusion: in mid-August, two people familiar with discussions in Moscow, plus a Western official, saw no sign that Putin had decided to launch a new mass call-up. For now, the Russian authorities’ actions can be interpreted equally plausibly as preparations for creating the option of future mobilization, or as an effort to put everything in place in order to avoid actually having to mobilize.

In recent months, Russian officials have conspicuously denied that a new call-up is being considered. In July, Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called reports of mobilization a “lying provocation.” On Aug. 20, Russia’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said that it was “neither planned nor expected.” On August 25, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the reports as “information hoaxes,” while three days later Medvedev again said that mobilization was unnecessary because there were enough contract soldiers. Then, on Sept. 1 and 3, Putin joined them, calling the mobilization rumors (1, 2) “complete crap” and an “information attack.” For now, however, these repeated denials are the strongest public indication that the authorities are concerned enough about the mobilization issue to address it repeatedly.

In any case, the state is maintaining and refining the infrastructure needed to carry out a mass call-up quickly while simultaneously spending ever more money and resources to replenishing the army without one.

So, are the Russian authorities preparing for a new mobilization? The answer is: they are preparing for the possibility. The electronic register, system of restrictions, mobilization exercises, work with employers, and legal framework make a repeat of the organizational chaos of September 2022 less likely. The decision will depend primarily on whether Putin wants to expand military operations in 2027 or if he limit his aims to eventually capturing Donbas. In other words, it will depend on whether he has a military objective important enough to justify the political and economic cost of forcibly recruiting several hundred thousand more Russians quickly.

In February 2025, Kronshtadt issued a tender for the production and delivery of components. Items in the procurement documents carried the designation S8000, the same index used by HUR for the Banderol missile.

The tender listed inertial navigation modules, onboard computers, power units, pressure sensors, cables, and other parts. Ukraine later found the same components in wreckage from Banderol missiles, including the Kometa-M8 anti-jamming antenna and the RFD900x telemetry module.

Nordsint focused its analysis on components that are required at a rate of one unit per missile, such as cable assemblies for the Kometa-M8, the missile’s radio modem, and the mechanism used to deploy the missile’s folding wings. For April 2025, Kronshtadt ordered 200 sets of each of those components. The procurement volume then rose to 250 sets a month and remained at that level through the end of October.

Nordsint said the figures point to an initial production plan of about 250 Banderol missiles a month. If the company had actually reached that rate and maintained it after October 2025, Russia could have produced about 4,450 missiles by the end of September 2026, the analysts estimated.

Available estimates of actual production are significantly lower. In August, HUR reported that Russian manufacturers were only capable of producing up to 80 Banderol missiles a month, even with production running around the clock. HUR also estimated that Russia’s production plan for 2026 totaled close to 1,000 of these missiles.

Moscow began using the Banderol — whose name translates to “parcel” in Russian — against Ukraine in spring 2025. HUR released details of the missile’s design in May of that year.

The S8000 is produced by Kronshtadt, which is also known for manufacturing Orion drones. The missile has a range of about 500 kilometers and a maximum speed of 620 to 650 kilometers per hour. It carries a 114.3-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation warhead.

The Banderol makes extensive use of foreign components. HUR identified a Chinese Swiwin turbojet engine, Japanese Murata batteries, South Korean Dynamixel servos, an Australian RF Design radio modem, and microchips made in the United States, China, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea.

Another Kronshtadt tender, this one published in January 2025, called for the development of equipment to test Chinese SWIWIN SW400Pro and SW800Pro jet engines, as well as the TJ-800A2 engine made by Xi’an Sky Phantom Power Technology. (The SW800Pro is the engine used in the Banderol.)

Russian forces have used Banderol missiles much more frequently in recent months. The Insider reported that two Banderol missiles struck the center of the town of Pechenihy in Ukraine’s Kharkiv Region on the morning of Aug. 18, killing 10 people and wounding 17. In September, the S8000 appeared almost daily in Ukrainian Air Force reports on Russian aerial attacks.

In early September, Ukraine’s defense technology cluster Brave1 said Ukrainian developers had created a lower-cost system to intercept Banderol missiles and that it was already in use.

The report was published shortly after the official launch of the first stage of Vostok Oil. On Sept. 5, Putin marked the project’s first oil shipment, calling it “a landmark event for the Arctic region and for all of Russia.” Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin has claimed that all equipment used at Vostok Oil is manufactured in Russia. According to the company, total investment in the project has reached 4 trillion rubles ($47.3 billion).

However, Arctida and Sistema have found that after foreign oilfield service companies withdrew from Russia, their former subsidiaries and related entities in the country continued receiving money from the project — for example, the Russian business of U.S.-based Baker Hughes now operates as OFS Technologies («Технологии ОФС») after being sold to local management. From 2023 through mid-2026, the company received more than 13.6 billion rubles ($161 million) through projects with Rosneft, including some payments under contracts Baker Hughes had signed before leaving Russia.

Baker Hughes said it does not control OFS Technologies, does not receive any economic benefit from its contracts with Rosneft or Vostok Oil, and does not provide equipment, technology, or services to those companies in cases when doing so would constitute a violation of sanctions or export-control rules. OFS Technologies did not respond to requests for comment.

Halliburton exited Russia in a similar way, transferring its business to local management. Its former Russian subsidiary, Burservice LLC (ООО «Бурсервис»), received more than 8 billion rubles ($94.7 million) in contracts from Vostok Oil between late 2023 and spring 2026, according to the investigation.

Additionally, Weatherford and Schlumberger (now known as SLB) announced after the start of the war that they were suspending new investments and deliveries to Russia; however, entities related to both oilfield service companies continued operating in the country. Weatherford’s Russian subsidiary received three payments totaling 58 million rubles ($686,000) from Vostok Oil between May 2022 and February 2023 for work on one well. In 2026, it also transferred an 8 million ruble ($94,700) advance payment to Vostok Oil under a new contract. The investigators were unable to determine what that contract covered. Entities linked to SLB imported more than 5.7 billion rubles ($67.5 million) worth of high-tech equipment into Russia between January 2024 and the end of 2025, mainly from China and India. 

The journalists noted that SLB brand names have largely disappeared from customs declarations of goods entering Russia. For example, shipments of specialized chemicals from India stopped identifying the M-I SWACO brand, which belongs to Schlumberger, even though the product specifications of imported goods remain nearly identical to the originals.

In October 2023, Vostok Oil also signed a direct contract with the Moscow branch of Panama-registered Schlumberger Logelco for technical support in directional drilling. Financial documents reviewed by the investigators show that work and payments under the contract continued through 2026.

More than 20% of Bashneftegeofizika, a company carrying out exploration work at Vostok Oil sites, is owned by Netherlands-based Schlumberger Investment Services B.V. Between 2021 and 2025, Bashneftegeofizika received nearly 13 billion rubles ($153.9 million) from Vostok Oil’s projects. Neither SLB nor the company responded to Arctida and Sistema’s questions.

Another major contractor is Taimyr Invest LLC (ООО «Таймыр Инвест»). In early 2026, Marat Kabaev, the father of Putin’s partner Alina Kabaeva, acquired a 25% stake in the company. After the deal, Kabaev said in an interview that he had decided to invest after a conversation with Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to the Russian president and the former secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

Taimyr Invest handles logistics and cargo deliveries for Vostok Oil. According to financial documents reviewed as part of the investigation, it received just shy of 200 million rubles directly from Vostok Oil between 2024 and 2026 ($2.4 million). However, its main source of revenue was Sinarastroikomplekt, the largest private contractor on the megaproject and a company linked to billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky.

According to the investigation, Sinarastroikomplekt received nearly 900 billion rubles ($10.6 billion) from Vostok Oil between June 2021 and April 2026. The company supplies metal products to the project, including pipes. Vostok Oil and Sinarastroikomplekt publicly announced an agreement on supplies of metallurgical products for the project in 2021.

The investigators also examined Taimyr Invest’s tax disputes. Following audits for 2023 and 2024, Russia’s tax service assessed more than 3 billion rubles ($35.5 million) in additional taxes against the company, along with around 800 million rubles ($9.5 million) in penalties. Court documents show that the company reduced its taxable profits in part through transactions with organizations that showed characteristics of shell companies, Russia’s Federal Tax Service concluded.

In June 2026, a court upheld an additional 1.5 billion rubles ($17.8 million) in profit tax from one audit while canceling a 154 million ruble ($1.8 million) penalty. In a separate case, the court fully sided with the tax authorities, leaving in place claims for 1.6 billion rubles ($18.9 million) in taxes and 646 million rubles ($7.6 million) in penalties. Taimyr Invest appealed both rulings.

Vostok Oil has been under U.S. sanctions since January 2025, when Washington also imposed restrictions on project operator RN-Vankor and Vostok Oil director Vladimir Chernov. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the project has faced the loss of Western financing and reduced access to imported technologies ranging from drilling equipment and software to ice-class tankers.

At the project’s launch, Putin specifically said Vostok Oil was being developed “with due regard for modern environmental standards and requirements for preserving the unique nature of the Arctic.” However, in a July analysis, Arctida noted that a significant part of the project’s infrastructure is being built in highly sensitive tundra areas and on permafrost whose stability is being reduced by climate change.

According to estimates cited by Arctida, about 45% of hydrocarbon fields in the Russian Arctic are located in areas where thawing permafrost could seriously damage infrastructure. Experts associated with the project also warn that oil pollution in the Arctic has especially severe consequences due to low temperatures, the remoteness of the region, and the long recovery time of its ecosystems.

Davankov himself wrote in August 2025 that Kovalev had been his adviser for “more than a year,” describing him as a supporter of New People, an entrepreneur, and a med tech investor. Together they visited the longevity laboratory at Volgograd State Medical University (VolgSMU), and Kovalev, according to Davankov, was tasked with promoting the university’s products in the region. Davankov’s post was also shared by VolgSMU’s official channel.

Kovalev was nominated to run for the State Duma with New People. However, when the party’s federal list was certified on July 10, the state-controlled Vedomosti newspaper reported that Kovalev had been removed from regional group No. 18, which included Kalmykia and the Astrakhan and Volgograd regions. Kovalev’s is no longer among the 298 names on the list that was ultimately registered by the Central Election Commission.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is seeking Vitaly Nikolayevich Kovalev, born June 23, 1988. German investigators believe that under the aliases Stern and Ben, he founded and led the Trickbot hacker group. His wanted notice also lists other aliases: Grave, Vincent, Bentley, Bergen, and Alex Konor. The BKA believes Kovalev is in Russia.

According to the BKA, Trickbot had been operating since at least 2016 and, at various points, boasted more than 100 members, who used its infrastructure for spreading malware of the same name, as well as the Bazarloader, SystemBC, IcedID, Ryuk, Conti, and Diavol tools. The group has infected hundreds of thousands of computer systems worldwide, earning hundreds of millions of euros from its criminal activity. Its victims have included hospitals, government agencies, companies, and private individuals.

In May 2025, German authorities obtained international arrest warrants for members of various cybercriminal groups as part of Operation Endgame. The BKA stated that international warrants had been issued for 20 suspects and that an Interpol Red Notice was also issued for Kovalev, obligating law enforcement agencies in other countries to locate him and, if possible, provisionally detain him pending an extradition decision.

In July 2026, the Council of the EU added Kovalev to its sanctions list over his involvement in cyberattacks. The document lists Kovalev’s full name, date of birth, and the aliases Bentley, Bergen, Alex Konor, Benny, Ben, and Stern. The EU describes Kovalev as a senior figure linked to the Trickbot group and Conti malware and holds him responsible for cyberattacks that caused significant economic damage.

Trickbot was used for initial access into computer systems, theft of banking and personal data, and the subsequent deployment of ransomware. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that Trickbot had infected millions of computers, including at hospitals, schools, and companies, and that its infrastructure was used to spread Conti.

Conti became one of the largest ransomware operations in history. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, it was used in more than a thousand attacks worldwide, and ransoms paid by victims exceeded $150 million. The FBI recorded at least 16 Conti attacks on U.S. medical and emergency networks, including ambulance services, police, and 911 dispatch centers. Worldwide, more than 400 organizations were affected.

Ransomware linked to Trickbot’s infrastructure caused especially severe damage to healthcare systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials from a U.S. Senate hearing state that more than 200 attacks using Ryuk, which is closely tied to the Trickbot and Conti ecosystem, resulted in nearly $100 million in lost revenue for medical organizations and roughly $500 million in system recovery costs.

A federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, handed down the sentence after finding Sharifullah guilty of participating for nearly a decade in a conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. According to prosecutors, he was part of the ISIS-K structure from 2016 until his capture in 2025 and was involved in more than a dozen attacks — conducting surveillance, relaying messages between militants, transporting suicide bombers and weapons, and filming videos of the bombings for the group’s propaganda apparatus.

The central episode in the case was the bombing at Kabul’s airport on Aug. 26, 2021, during the evacuation of American military personnel and civilians. According to court records, the ISIS-K leadership tasked Sharifullah with checking that the road to the airport was clear of Taliban checkpoints. After confirming the route was indeed clear, he reported the information to his handlers. Several hours later, at 5:36 p.m., ISIS-K operative Abdul Rahman al-Logari, whom Sharifullah knew from their time together in an Afghan prison, detonated a body-worn bomb. Thirteen U.S. service members and approximately 160 civilians were killed.

In addition to Kabul and Crocus City Hall, investigators established that Sharifullah was involved in the attack on Nepali guards at the Canadian embassy in Kabul on June 20, 2016 — he prepared the suicide bomber and transported him to the attack site. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said Sharifullah “spent nearly a decade at the heart of a horrific campaign of terror” and contributed to the deaths of dozens of people.

The case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, with the prosecution handled by attorneys from the Eastern District of Virginia and the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The report estimates that as many as 25,000 North Koreans are employed in Russia’s drone industry, including at facilities in the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, where Geran-type attack drones, modeled on Iran’s Shahed series, are assembled. Russia gains a new pool of workers for industries supporting its war against Ukraine while further eroding a sanctions regime against Pyongyang that Moscow itself once helped enforce.

According to the MSMT, North Korean workers in Russia are often categorized as students under a special visa arrangement that allows sanctions to be circumvented without the need for a formal breach. One “student” worker earns an average of about $7,500 a year, the report said, with most of that money confiscated by the North Korean government.

Monthly pay in Russia can be up to five times higher than in China, making Russia an increasingly attractive destination for Pyongyang to send such laborers. Still, as of the end of 2025, between 20,000 and 70,000 North Koreans were working in China, compared with 15,000 to 30,000 in Russia.

“DPRKauthorities also exercise extreme control over labourers’ movement and interactions with outsiders in order to prevent defections, while labourers who do defect risk reprisals against family members remaining in North Korea,” the report said.

It was previously reported that North Korean workers at construction sites in three Russian cities were working up to 16 hours a day with virtually no days off and receiving no more than $10 a month after deductions. Their passports were confiscated by representatives of North Korean security services, and the workers often did not know who their actual employer was because Russian companies hired them in violation of UN sanctions.

The MSMT, which includes the United States, South Korea, Japan and eight other countries, was established in 2024 after Russia blocked the renewal of the mandate for a UN panel that had monitored compliance with sanctions against Pyongyang for 15 years.

According to the Russian ministry, the incident occurred at 2:22 p.m. on Sept. 14 while the Baltic Fleet corvette was in international waters in the southwestern portion of the Baltic Sea. The ministry said a Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter was approaching the ship and allegedly failed to respond to calls on an international communications channel. The ship’s commander then ordered the launch of two red signal flares, after which, according to the Russian account, the helicopter left the area.

The Danish military said the helicopter was carrying out routine photography of the Russian ship in international waters near the town of Gedser in southern Denmark. According to Denmark’s Armed Forces, the Russian vessel fired two flares toward the helicopter, with one passing at close range. The Danish military said the flares were pyrotechnic devices normally used for signaling at sea.

Following the incident, Russian Ambassador Vladimir Barbin was summoned to Denmark’s Foreign Ministry, where Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the incident “unacceptable.” 

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen linked the Russian ship’s actions to what she described as an intensifying hybrid campaign against Europe, saying Moscow was testing NATO while trying to intimidate Europeans and sow division.

Russian pilots were also decorated after 2023 incident with U.S. drone

The Insider found that in March 2023, Russia’s then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu similarly awarded Orders of Courage to Su-27 pilots following an incident involving aircraft from a NATO country — a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea. According to U.S. European Command, one of the Russian fighters struck and damaged the drone’s propeller during the encounter, forcing the U.S. military to bring the aircraft down in international waters.

Russia’s Defense Ministry denied that a collision had occurred and said the drone crashed as a result of its own sharp maneuvering. The ministry said the pilots were decorated for preventing a violation of the boundaries of an area where Russia had imposed temporary restrictions on airspace use after the start of the full-scale war.

John Kirby, then a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, mocked the Russian ministry’s decision at the time:

“I don’t know of another military in the world, another Air Force in the world, that would award a pilot for smashing into a drone. If that’s bravery, then I guess they’ve got a different definition of it. It's ludicrous, it's insulting.”

At the same time, the Natural Resources Ministry insists that 20–30 bear attacks a year is normal and that in recent years, only 2014 — when 166 cases were recorded — has been anomalous. But the current wave is nevertheless unusual in both intensity and geography: bears have been reported near populated areas in 41 regions, including places where they had not been seen for years. In late August, for example, a bear attacked a woman near Novosibirsk – a rare occurrence for the region.

The issue received widespread attention after a bear burst into a tent at the Istok tourist camp near the village of Artybash in Altai on the night of August 19 and, in full view of her fiancé, dragged 29-year-old Snezhanа Koroleva, an Emergency Situations Ministry employee from Novosibirsk, into the forest. She had accepted her boyfriend’s marriage proposal the day before. The woman was killed.

Chronicle of incidents

Russian media subsequently began reporting extensively on bear attacks:

• August 26, Novosibirsk Region. A bear mauled a cow and then charged at a woman who had gone to check on the herd near the village of Malchikha in Kolyvan District. She survived.
• August 30, Novgorod Region. A female bear attacked a hunter who had fired in her direction. The man survived with injuries to his head, arms, and legs.
• August 30, Kemerovo Region. A bear attacked a 68-year-old woman in Novokuznetsk. A police officer who arrived at the scene shot the bear.
• August 31–September 2, Krasnoyarsk Krai. Two women, aged 67 and 73, went missing in the forest near the settlement of Podtyosovo while picking mushrooms. They were later found dead, and investigators documented signs of a bear attack.
• September 6, Krasnoyarsk Krai. A bear mauled a 40-year-old shift worker in a forest near the settlement of Yuzhno-Yeniseysky. He died at the scene.
• September 7, Buryatia. A bear attacked a man who was accompanying his wife to the bus and stopped to check on livestock in the forest near Khurtaga. Despite surgeons’ efforts, he died in the hospital.
• September 16, Krasnoyarsk Krai. A bear attacked a 66-year-old woman outside her home in the village of Verkhny Kebezh. The bear fled, and the woman died at the scene.

By mid-September, journalists had counted at least 12 people killed in bear attacks since the beginning of the year, along with more than 530 bears shot across the country after being deemed dangerous by authorities and hunters.

Measures introduced by the regions

Authorities largely see mass culling as the main solution to the problem. By mid-September, more than 530 bears deemed dangerous had been killed across the country. In Krasnoyarsk Krai, which has recorded the most incidents, regional authorities introduced a 36,500-ruble reward ($430) for every bear killed in hunting grounds, while shooting bears within populated areas remains the exclusive authority of the police. In Irkutsk Region, authorities formed 81 task forces comprising 209 specialists and hunters, with 142 vehicles, and approved measures to regulate the population of 250 bears. In Buryatia, 149 bears have been shot this season. Local agencies, however, avoid words such as “shot” or “killed” in their reports, instead using the euphemism “regulated.”

At the same time, regions are restricting access to forests and public spaces. In Altai’s Turochaksky District, authorities imposed a curfew from 8 p.m. to 10 a.m. following the death of a tourist. The Krasnoyarsk Pillars national park and some trails in the Ergaki nature reserve have been closed to visitors, while in Irkutsk Region’s Slyudyansky District authorities postponed school ceremonies on Sept. 1 and tightened security measures at educational institutions. In Buryatia, where the republican environmental watchdog receives as many as 32 reports of bears entering populated areas on some days, two schools and a technical college in Zakamensk, as well as schools in the Barguzinsky and Khorinsky districts, have been switched to remote learning.

At the federal level, the Natural Resources Ministry is collecting proposals from the regions on amendments to legislation governing the bear population. Under current rules, regions may reduce the population by no more than 30% a year. Magadan Region Governor Sergei Nosov has already proposed his own approach: establishing sanitary buffer zones around populated areas that bears would be prohibited from entering, with any predators crossing the boundary to be shot without additional approvals.

Why is this happening?

Biologists and wildlife experts attribute the increase in bears venturing into populated areas to a combination of factors: a growing population (according to the Natural Resources Ministry, it has more than doubled since 1990, reaching 307,900 bears), poor harvests of pine nuts and berries, wildfires in Siberia, and bears becoming accustomed to dumps and tourist camps.

In a comment to The Insider, an expert with the Environmental Communications Agency (KEA) who asked to remain anonymous identified two broad groups of causes:

“The increase in bear attacks on people needs to be divided into two types: attacks in and around populated areas, and attacks in remote wilderness areas.

Geography also matters: the causes can vary significantly from one region to another. But generally speaking, in the first case, predators venturing into populated areas – not only bears, but also tigers in the Far East – are linked to a whole range of problems.

Climate change, logging – both legal and illegal – partly uncontrolled hunting, poaching of fish, and what is effectively industrial-scale harvesting of everything in the forest that serves as food for bears – berries, nuts, mushrooms and so on – are all destroying their food supply. As a result, bears start looking for food near populated areas.

The second group of causes is the lack of outreach to local residents and funding for it, the absence of a system for processing food waste, pets kept on chains, and livestock left unprotected from predators. As a result, people have neither the information nor the resources to reduce the number of conflicts.

The second type involves conflicts with bears in the wild. Tourism is growing, while tourists themselves are becoming less prepared; at the same time, conservation programs are being scaled back, pressure on environmentalists is increasing, and funding is directed almost exclusively toward developing tourism in natural areas.

A systematic effort is needed to accurately assess what is happening, but that is currently impossible. Based on my personal experience and analysis of the situation, I believe the number of attacks will increase, and the predators will end up being blamed for it – animals that the state knows how to deal with only by shooting them.”

The Japanese experience

Japan has been experiencing a similar situation for several years. The number of victims there reached a record in 2025: bears killed 13 people and injured more than 100, with 235 attacks recorded and more than 20,000 bear sightings. Predators entered supermarkets and residential neighborhoods and carried out unprovoked attacks.

Experts cite the same causes as their Russian counterparts: poor acorn and beech-nut harvests forced bears to expand their search for food, compounded by a long-term population increase – from 15,000 animals in 2012 to around 54,000 in 2025 – the decline of rural areas, which has left abandoned orchards for bears to forage in, and a shortage of hunters, whose numbers are falling year by year.

To address the problem, Japanese authorities have taken measures that Russia is not yet discussing even as a last resort: in autumn 2025, the army was deployed to Akita Prefecture to assist hunters, police were authorized to use firearms within populated areas, and a record 13,499 bears were shot or captured over the year.

In March 2026, the government approved a roadmap for dealing with the predators through 2030, including regional culling targets. In April, it officially changed its policy toward bears, shifting from treating them as a “protected species” to “actively regulating” their numbers, and allowing bears to be killed in residential and agricultural areas as a standard measure.

The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against five individuals whom investigators believe worked for Russian intelligence. They are Yuri Khrameev, 63, a former colonel in the Russian intelligence services; his son Kirill Khrameev, 27, an FSB officer; Cuban national Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, 35; Cuban Yaidel Delgado Suarez, 35, known as Viking; and Venezuelan national Angel Eduardo Castro, 22. Commenting on the case, Attorney General Todd Blanche said:

“It is our job to stop America’s adversaries from unleashing violence and terror on American soil.”

According to Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg, the perpetrators attempted to “recruit U.S. citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin.” Over the summer, the network recruited a U.S. resident to surveil a well-known Russian dissident, identified in the published documents as “Victim-1.” Suarez promised the recruit between $1,000 and $1,500 to take photographs and video of locations associated with the potential victim. After the assignment was completed, the recruit was offered $40,000 to kill the dissident. When the U.S. resident declined to carry out the killing himself, he was asked to recommend “someone [who] can do the work.”

As The Insider found, Russian intelligence deliberately used Cubans and Venezuelans living in Russia to recruit a Venezuelan living in the United States. Angel Eduardo Castro, who had previously played baseball in Venezuela, served as the go-between.

In late July, Castro contacted a fellow countryman living in the U.S. and instructed him to surveil a Russian dissident in Washington. They communicated in code: the surveillance assignment referred to the need to “measure the plot of land and provide the measurements,” while the killing itself was called “construction.”

The same network, the U.S. Department of Justice notes, recruited a U.S. citizen in 2025 to surveil another Russian dissident — “Victim-2,” who lived in Lithuania. In that episode, the father and son Khrameev played the leading role. The younger Khrameev asked the recruit to take photographs at the potential victim’s address, and the elder Khrameev offered him $25,000 to carry out the murder. The Justice Department’s statement describes:

“Yuri Khrameev further told U.S. Citizen-1 that they wanted Victim-2 dead because he was ‘spreading dirt about my country’ and ‘distorting history.’ Yuri Khrameev then sent U.S. Citizen-1 a photograph of Victim-2 and described that he could be murdered by ‘throwing a bottle of gasoline’ or ‘sticking a knife’ in him. After U.S. Citizen-1 declined to carry out the murder, Yuri Khrameev offered to give him a ‘simpler job’ which could include ‘set[ting] fire to a warehouse of property or food’ or ‘throw[ing] a bottle of gasoline at an electrical substation.’ Yuri Khrameev made clear to U.S. Citizen-1 that the purpose was to target ‘all the countries that are helping Ukraine’ and that he was offering ‘serious money for serious work.’ Finally, Yuri Khrameev confirmed that he was a ‘colonel of Russian intelligence agencies.’”

The Justice Department notes that the network likely recruited other individuals to carry out acts of sabotage in Europe. According to the department, Cuban national Durruthy coordinated an attack in Czechia in June 2024 and another in Lithuania in September 2024.

All five individuals have been charged with participating in a conspiracy to finance terrorism. Yuri Khrameev, Suarez, and Castro are also charged with conspiracy to commit murder for hire. The first charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, the second up to 10 years. All of them remain at large.

One of the sharpest cuts happened in Mordovia. On Aug. 18, the republic’s authorities set the lump-sum payment for new contract soldiers at 3 million rubles, but by Sept. 15 they had already cut it back down to 800,000 rubles. In other words, the increased payment lasted less than a month.

Mordovia has had trouble financing these payments. In June, when head of the republic Artem Zdunov publicly looked into reasons why payments to some service members had been suspended since the start of the year, the regional finance ministry explained its position by citing “limited budget resources.” Zdunov nevertheless demanded the payments be resumed.

In September, the Irkutsk Region cut its signing bonus from 2.1 million to 1.8 million rubles, with governor Igor Kobzev pointing to the need to meet military recruitment targets despite “the challenging task of executing the region’s 2026 budget.” Notably, the region decided to spend more money directly on recruitment, raising the fee for a middleman who brings in a foreign national to 1.5 million rubles, and 800,000 for a Russian from another region.

The Irkutsk Region had also cut payments in early 2026: contract soldiers who signed up in January were entitled to 1.4 million rubles in additional payments, while those who enlisted in February and March got 1 million. A similar situation occurred in Kuzbass, where payments were lowered amid a regional budget deficit. However, in March, The Insider counted at least ten other regions that kept raising their payments.

This past May, the Sverdlovsk Region reduced its regional payment from 2.7 million to 2.5 million rubles. Regional authorities did not give a specific reason, saying only that the decision had been based on “a combination of factors.”

The mass reduction of bonuses was first observed back in the fall of 2025, when at least nine regions cut payments in October alone, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe’s estimates. In Tatarstan, the regional bonus fell from 2.7 million to 400,000 rubles; in Mari El, from 2.6 million to 400,000; in Chuvashia, from 2.1 million to 400,000. Cuts also occurred in the Nizhny Novgorod, Ulyanovsk, and Orenburg regions, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and Bashkortostan. In the Samara Region, bonus payments had reached 3.6 million rubles in early 2025, but before October it had already dropped to 400,000.

Today, the situation with contract military service is markedly different from 2024 and the first half of 2025, when regions competed for recruits by steadily raising enlistment bonuses. Now some regions are lowering them to initial levels, despite persistent personnel shortages at the front.

According to an estimate by economist Janis Kluge, cited by the Conflict Intelligence Team, some 234,000 people signed Defense Ministry contracts between January and August 2026, compared with 260,000 in the same period of 2025 — roughly 10% fewer. This estimate is based on budget data, not official Defense Ministry statistics.

Previous investigations found that more than 10 million bullets made in NATO countries were imported into Russia between March 2022 and February 2024. A significant share were high-precision bullets in .338 Lapua Magnum and .375 CheyTac calibers, which are designed for long-range shooting. Those quantities are small compared with the overall scale of the war, but the imported bullets are nonetheless important for Russian snipers.

Promtekhnologiya was founded by Russian oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev, who built the weapons company with the backing of two key officials: Dmitry Rogozin, then the Kremlin’s key figure overseeing the defense industry, and FSB General Sergei Beseda.

Nikolaev’s businesses produce weapons in Russia and import ammunition from the European Union and United States through sanctions-evasion channels. And yet, he has continued to develop business interests in Italy, where his Tuscan winery has not been seized and even continued receiving subsidies from the European Union during the full-scale war.

Finnish Lapua and American Hornady bullets for Russian snipers

On April 6, 2026, the pro-war Telegram channel Bolshoy Panda (lit. “Big Panda”) reported that Russian snipers had begun receiving ammunition for ORSIS rifles from the Russian Defense Ministry that had been made with American Peterson cartridge cases and American Hornady bullets.

“The cartridges are formally considered hunting ammunition because they do not have a GRAU index, but these are the rounds supplied with the ORSIS 5000 rifles as standard ammunition for our guys. The bullet is a 178-grain Hornady OTM weighing 11.53 grams, the case is Peterson, I don’t know whose powder it is, and the manufacturer is Promtekhnologiya LLC.”

After testing the rounds at a firing range, the channel’s author praised their accuracy and consistency:

“At 300 meters from my Volkodav, 10 bullets went into the head-sized gong like kids going to school, practically one on top of another. Consistency is at a high level, with minimal variation in velocity. ... In principle, these are among the few more or less factory-made cartridges that honestly deliver 0.5 MOA from my Volkodav.”

A grouping of 0.5 MOA, or half a minute of angle, means that at 300 meters the shots in a carefully aimed series landed within a circle about 4.5 centimeters, or 1.8 inches, across.

Three days later, the channel published a clarification:

“There are currently extremely few cartridges in the configuration described above. At the moment, 6V12 sniper rifles are supplied with ammunition using Scenar bullets” — made by Finnish company Lapua — “weighing 11.53 grams, Irbis 570 powder and cases marked ORSIS.”

The post indicates that because there were not enough American bullets to supply the Russian military, Promtekhnologiya turned to Finnish components to continue producing sniper ammunition.

From Austrian Glocks to Finnish bullets

The first official evidence that Promtekhnologiya was using Finnish bullets and cartridge cases dates to December 2019 — five years after the European arms embargo on Russia was imposed. At the time, journalists from Kalashnikov magazine tested a new ORSIS .308 Winchester cartridge at a shooting range. The ammunition used 12-gram Lapua Scenar HPBT precision bullets and Lapua cartridge cases, both made by the Finnish manufacturer.

The journalists noted that assembling the ammunition in Russia from foreign-made components reduced the cost:

“The ORSIS cartridge, assembled entirely from high-quality foreign components, costs an impressive 400 rubles at the Bars store in St. Petersburg — more than the vast majority of its competitors on the shelf, but less than Norma or RWS cartridges, some versions of which cost more than 500 rubles.”

Unofficial reports of Russian precision ammunition go back to 2014, when firearms forums began advertising ORSIS cartridges made with Finnish Lapua cases, Lapua Scenar bullets, and Finnish VihtaVuori powder.

Promtekhnologiya, founded in 2009, was built with extensive European and American expertise. Between 2012 and 2015, the company pursued three projects aimed at localizing foreign weapons production in Russia.

In July 2012, it signed an agreement with Austria’s Glock GmbH to assemble fourth-generation Glock 17, 34, and 35 pistols from Austrian components. The first trial batch assembled in Russia totaled more than 2,000 pistols. Although the localization project was officially terminated after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Podolsk plant continued receiving products from its former Austrian partner for years afterwards. The latest known shipment came in November 2023, when Promtekhnologiya imported 100 Glock 43 pistols and 100 Glock 19 Gen5 pistols.

In 2013, Promtekhnologiya announced cooperation with the American company ArmaLite. The plan was to assemble semiautomatic AR-10 and M-15 rifles in .223 and .308 calibers using American components and Russian-made barrels. Although the agreement with the U.S. company was terminated, several years later the Moscow Region plant said it had fully localized production of its own AR-10 version.

After the 2014 arms embargo on Russia was announced, the factory also began assembling Marocchi Si 12 inertia-operated shotguns in Podolsk made with components supplied from Italy. The Italian manufacturer’s loose sanctions compliance may have been influenced by the fact that one of its vice presidents was a Russian citizen, Oleg Benedichuk.

Who brings American and Finnish bullets into Russia

The Soviet defense industry, and later Russia’s, focused on mass-produced weapons and did not manufacture high-precision bullets, which are made to tighter tolerances for weight, shape, and balance than bullets made for assault rifles and machine guns. As a result, sniper bullets show less variation in trajectory from shot to shot.

They also typically have more advanced aerodynamics, including a higher ballistic coefficient, and higher-quality jackets, allowing them to retain velocity at longer ranges and reducing the effects of wind. As a result, they produce tighter shot groups and more predictable ballistics than standard military bullets, which are optimized primarily for reliability and cost rather than maximum accuracy.

The Insider has found evidence of American and Finnish bullets being used in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine by both Wagner mercenaries and regular Russian military units.

In Russia, precision rifle bullets in .308 Winchester and .338 Lapua Magnum are produced by the Barnaul Cartridge Plant, the Novosibirsk Cartridge Plant, and Tekhkrim, among others. But both sniper-rifle manufacturers and shooters themselves say American and Finnish bullets provide better accuracy than those made in Russia.

Previous investigations by The Insider found that more than 10 million bullets made in NATO countries entered Russia between March 2022 and February 2024. A significant number were precision long-range bullets in .338 Lapua Magnum and .375 CheyTac calibers. The bullets are critically important for Russian snipers.

There are indirect signs that some shipments of American bullets reached Russia through the European Union.

For example, on June 8, 2022, the Russian company LLC IF Tetis (ООО «ИФ „Тетис“») received a Russian declaration of conformity covering a shipment of American Hornady bullets. The declaration stated that testing documents for the bullets had been issued on April 28, 2022, by Finland’s Lapua Test Shooting Lab under protocol No. 393/16.

After a series of reports by The Insider revealed the large-scale smuggling of European weapons, Russia’s Federal Accreditation Service stopped publishing declarations for a number of customs codes, making it more difficult to calculate precisely how many weapons and rounds of ammunition are imported into Russia. Numerous social media and specialized forum posts, however, indicate that new shipments are continuing.

On Jan. 28, 2026, the Orel weapons retailer announced a new shipment of Hornady ammunition on Telegram. The store is part of a group of companies controlled by arms businessman Mikhail Khubutia, a partner of Italy’s Beretta Holding.

In the Milya group for ammunition sales, seven advertisements from five users offering Hornady bullets were posted between Aug. 31 and Sept. 4 alone.

EU subsidies for an FSB-linked businessman

The technology and equipment for the weapons plant in Podolsk came from Europe despite the company receiving political backing at the highest levels of the Russian state. Until 2012, Promtekhnologiya’s deputy chief executive was Alexei Rogozin, the son of Dmitry Rogozin, who was then the deputy prime minister responsible for Russia’s defense industry and state arms procurement. (After public accusations of a conflict of interest, Alexei Rogozin left the company. He was later replaced by the deputy prime minister’s nephew, Roman Rogozin.)

A 2018 investigation by the independent outlet Novaya Gazeta linked Promtekhnologiya owner Konstantin Nikolaev to the family of FSB General Sergei Beseda. A Panama-based company linked to the general’s son, Alexei Beseda, received 187 million rubles from Nikolaev-controlled entities and a 25% stake in a joint venture producing thermal-imaging sensor arrays.

In 2013, the same year Nikolaev’s Cyprus offshore company paid more than $5 million to the son of the FSB general and Promtekhnologiya signed its rifle-assembly agreement with ArmaLite, Nikolaev bought the La Madonnina winery in Tuscany’s Bolgheri wine region.

The winery is located near the renowned Italian estates Sassicaia and Ornellaia, whose standing in the wine world can be compared with Ferrari and Lamborghini in the automotive industry. Nikolaev invested about €40 million in La Madonnina.

The winery is owned by the Cyprus company Cetrezza Trading, which until recently belonged to British Virgin Islands-based Cedar Circle Holding Limited, whose beneficial owner was Nikolaev himself.

Ownership of Cetrezza has since passed to the Magic Forest Trust, whose owners are not publicly disclosed. The Cyprus company nevertheless retained links to the oligarch even after the formal sale. Cetrezza owned an 85% stake in the Enoteca Tognoni wine boutique in Livorno, while Nikolaev himself held 5% of the company’s share capital until 2024.

While Nikolaev-linked companies manufacture weapons in Russia and bring ammunition into the country from the United States and European Union, his Tuscan winery has not only avoided seizure but continued receiving EU subsidies.

Over the past 10 years, La Madonnina received €135,600 in subsidies from European Union agricultural funds, including €107,800 paid after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In theory, EU rules require member states to identify the ultimate beneficiaries of public funding. In practice, however, inquiries to Italy’s Financial Intelligence Unit and to the National Anti-Corruption Authority found that the databases used by regulators do not contain information on the ultimate owners even of some Italian companies, let alone foreign entities.

As a result, Italian oversight agencies are effectively unable to establish the connection between the Tuscan winery and a man who has publicly described himself as its owner in multiple interviews.

At the Sept. 16 hearing, the judges rejected a request from the Investigative Committee to extend the drivers’ detention until Oct. 12. The investigators alleged that the truckers transported explosives as part of an organized group and that they had effectively “committed a terrorist attack.” They were charged under provisions covering illegal trafficking of explosives by an organized group and terrorism resulting in major damage.

The Investigative Committee alleged that the men were part of a group including Ukrainian-born Artyom and Ekaterina Timofeyev and a wanted man identified as “Borisovsky,” who investigators say were recruited by the SBU. Some of the drivers were formally employed by a sole proprietorship registered to Timofeyev, while others dealt with him simply as a customer who ordered routine freight transport.

The case materials indicate that the defendants left Chelyabinsk driving trailers trucks carrying prefabricated frame houses. However, unbeknownst to the drivers, Ukrainian drones that had been concealed in the roof of each structure.

On June 1, 2025, when the trucks were positioned near military airfields in the Ivanovo, Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ryazan and Amur regions — where drivers had been instructed to make their deliveries — SBU personnel remotely activated the drones, which then attacked the Russian military facilities. The investigation estimated the damage to Russia’s Defense Ministry at 2 billion rubles ($23.7 million). The investigation lasted more than a year and ultimately filled more than 90 volumes before being sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office. The Insider previously reported on the claimed damage.

Kommersant reported that last week First Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin refused to approve the indictment, saying that investigators had failed to find direct evidence of the drivers’ guilt and that the circumstantial evidence was not enough to send the case to trial. He returned the case to the Investigative Committee for further investigation. The Investigative Committee disagreed and appealed Razinkin’s decision to Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan.

While the dispute between the agencies remains unresolved, the Moscow City Court ruled that there were no longer any legal grounds to keep the defendants in pretrial detention, and the four drivers were released Sept. 16. The men deny any wrongdoing and describe themselves as “Russian patriots,” adding that after the drones emerged from their trucks, they themselves called the police, tried to shoot down the drones, and attempted to minimize the damage caused to the airfields.

The circumstances of Grunis’ death currently remain unclear. Important Stories noted that leaked records appeared to place him in Alchevsk, in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk Region. On Sept. 13, a few days before the reports began appearing, Ukrainian forces struck multiple locations across the city. Ukraine said the strikes destroyed a supply depot and a location where Russian forces stored weapons and military equipment.

Around the same time, according to the Exilenova+ monitoring channel, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) attacked military equipment in the settlement of Karpaty near Alchevsk. It is not known whether Grunis’ death was connected to those strikes.

Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Grunis took part in Russian military campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria. He also participated in the annexation of Crimea.

More recently, Grunis commanded a brigade advancing toward Kostyantynivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region. In July, the Major General reported to Vladimir Putin that the city had been captured, and a month later he was awarded the title Hero of Russia, the country’s highest honorary distinction.

Kostyantynivka, however, has still not come fully under Russian control. The open-source intelligence project Black Bird Group and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) continue to report fighting inside the city.

The pro-war Russian Telegram channel Rybar also indicates that Ukrainian positions in the area remain, marking the territory as a contested “gray zone” that is not firmly controlled by either side.

The Russia-installed government of Sevastopol adopted a resolution on Sept. 15 transferring such property to the city treasury. The list includes six companies and five individuals whose assets were taken. Russia-appointed governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said the cases were reviewed by a working group of the local Anti-Terrorism Commission together with Russia’s financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring, the FSB, and other government bodies.

The authorities claim that everyone on the list either helped Ukraine’s armed forces or acted “to the detriment of Russia’s security.”

However, Razvozhayev’s own explanations justifying the confiscations show that the grounds vary widely, from alleged transfers of information about Russian military personnel to simply having relatives in Ukraine.

The most striking case involves 56-year-old Olena Vasylenko. Razvozhayev said she is the wife of a judge on the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal in Kyiv and that apartments in one of Sevastopol’s apartment buildings are registered in her name. The official did not state any other accusations against Vasylenko and did not allege that she had transferred money to Ukraine’s armed forces, nor that she cooperated with Ukrainian intelligence services or passed any information to Ukraine. There have been no reports of a criminal case against her.

Nevertheless, Vasylenko’s real estate was transferred to the city treasury alongside the property of people whom the Russian security services accuse of treason.

A relative serving in Ukraine’s armed forces was also cited to justify the seizure of property belonging to Rifer LLC. Since 2015, the company has been headed by a man identified as A.B. Authorities said he holds an “anti-Russian position” but did not explain what that meant.

They did, however, specifically note that Gerashchenko’s son serves in Ukraine’s armed forces. Razvozhayev did not say that Gerashchenko himself or his company had transferred money to the Ukrainian military or provided it with other assistance.

A local businessman with a father in Kyiv

The Russian authorities linked three other companies — KETZ Saturn, Atlantis-LTD, and Rosttrade — to Sevastopol businessman Viktor Rozhmanov. Officials also made accusations against Rozhmanov personally, with the Russian Anti-Terrorism Commission saying he belongs to “pro-Ukrainian groups,” spreads information supporting Ukraine’s armed forces, and posts content that Russian authorities consider to be “discrediting” to the Russian military. The authorities did not cite any specific posts.

Another allegation concerned Rozhmanov’s relationship with his father. Russia-appointed  Sevastopol governor Razvozhayev said the businessman’s father is a former member of Ukraine’s armed forces who lives in Kyiv. Through him, Rozhmanov allegedly “maintains contacts with representatives of the Ukrainian regime.”

The Insider found no previous reports accusing Rozhmanov of supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine or of having ties to Ukrainian authorities. Those purported connections became public only when the decision to seize his assets was announced.

The Rozhmanov family’s connection to Kyiv, however, can be traced through older Russian court records. Arbitration cases involving Saturn and Atlantis mention the businessman’s father, Vitaly Gennadievich Rozhmanov. One document says that a 2018 power of attorney listed his registered residence as Kyiv.

Still, The Insider found no open-source confirmation that the elder Rozhmanov served in Ukraine’s armed forces nor that his son communicated with Ukrainian authorities through him.

Viktor Rozhmanov himself had long been part of Sevastopol’s Russian business establishment. The website of the Sevastopol Entrepreneurs Council lists him as a board member and director of Atlantis-LTD. He also heads the council’s committee on small and medium-sized business and the development of youth entrepreneurship.

Authorities also cited a family connection to a Ukrainian intelligence officer in the case of 72-year-old Viktor Piskunov. Russian officials say his son-in-law works for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR.In this case, however, the accusations go beyond the family relationship. Authorities allege that Piskunov regularly sent his son-in-law money earned from renting out an apartment, and a criminal case has been opened against him under a statute on the illegal trafficking of explosives. Governor Razvozhayev did not explain why the alleged money transfers to a relative were connected to that charge.

Authorities disclosed even less about Andrei Krivobokov, born in 1972. In his general description, Razvozhayev included Krivobokov among those who allegedly helped Ukrainian armed formations or acted “to the detriment of Russia’s security.” However, when discussing Krivobokov specifically, the governor said only that he is a Ukrainian citizen. Authorities did not publicly say what actions led to the confiscation of his property, and there was no mention of a criminal case against him.

Not everyone on the latest list had property seized because of relatives or formal connections to Ukraine. The same resolution includes the names of Yevhen and Svitlana Kharchenko, a married couple facing much more serious accusations from the Russian security services. According to the FSB, the couple began cooperating with Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) in February 2024 and passed it information about the locations of Black Sea Fleet ships, as well as routes used by Russian troops and military equipment. The Russian authorities say the information could have been used to prepare missile strikes and acts of sabotage.

The Kharchenkos face a criminal case on treason charges, meaning the property of people accused of directly working for Ukrainian intelligence was placed on the same list as apartments belonging to a woman whose husband is a judge in Kyiv.

Among the companies whose property was seized Sept. 15 was the Sevastopol instrument-making plant Parus. The Russia-installed officials claim the company is controlled by people in Cyprus, France, and Luxembourg, and that its main beneficiary is a man identified as A.A. Dreyev. The Anti-Terrorism Commission alleges that the plant is linked to Ukrainian foundations that finance the country’s military. Authorities did not name the foundations or provide details of any money transfers.

Another company, TBI LLC, is effectively owned by Ukrainian citizen G.K. Lutsai, founder of Kyiv-based Interrybflot, according to the commission. Authorities say Lutsai publicly stated that “Interrybflot helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Property seized without a court conviction

Confiscations of this kind do not require Russian authorities to obtain a criminal conviction against the property owner. Instead, they use a special mechanism introduced after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The framework is based on Sevastopol government Resolution No. 123-PP, adopted Feb. 28, 2015. The document was originally titled “On Certain Issues of Property Nationalization.” In 2024, it was renamed “On Issues of Managing the Property of the City of Sevastopol” and amended to include provisions on “terrorism prevention.”

The process works as follows: security agencies and other government bodies collect information, the Anti-Terrorism Commission reviews it, and the Sevastopol government then issues a resolution placing the property into the city treasury. There is no requirement to wait for a court to find the owner guilty of a crime.

In the current list, criminal cases are mentioned only for some of those affected. Razvozhayev did not report the existence of such cases against Vasilenko, Krivobokov, Rozhmanov, or Gerashchenko.

Earlier seizures focused mainly on financing Ukraine

Sevastopol has used the mechanism for several years, but authorities previously justified the largest confiscations primarily by alleging financial support for Ukraine or direct ties between owners and Ukrainian institutions.

For example, in October 2024, the city seized Sevastopolgaz PJSC. Razvozhayev said at the time that the company’s profits had been routed through a chain of front people to Ukrainian businessmen who financed Ukraine’s armed forces.

In March 2025, authorities seized seven businesses and property belonging to 13 people connected to the Kozlovsky-Miroshnikov family. The assets included the Mayak marine lighting plant and the companies Plosk, Tinos, Tekhnotron, and Technical Operations Center No. 1. Authorities said the owners were connected to a Polish foundation and had transferred large sums to support Ukraine’s armed forces. Some of those companies had previously benefited from tax and other incentives under Russia’s Sevastopol free economic zone before they were nationalized.

The city also took control of glamping sites at Fiolent that had previously received a construction grant. After the seizure, they were transferred to the state-owned company Sevastopol Boarding Houses.

In December 2025, authorities seized Sevastopol’s largest local internet provider, Sevstar, along with affiliated companies Lancom, Sevtelecomservice, Freenet Crimea, Digital Innovations, and Spetstekhservice. The city also took ownership of the Glechik restaurant and property belonging to people connected to those companies. In those instances, Razvozhayev again cited alleged financing of Ukraine and links to Ukrainian intelligence services.

On the afternoon of Sept. 15, the Ukrainian offensive in this sector was publicly confirmed for the first time. In a video address posted to Telegram, Andriy Biletsky, the commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, announced that operation was codenamed Vivaldi, adding that while it was operating under conditions of information silence, the corps’ units eliminated pockets of Russian infiltration across 75 square kilometers and deoccupied a further 10 square kilometers in the areas of Novoselivka, Oleksandrivka, Yarova, and Korovii Yar. In addition to clearing the territory, Biletsky noted that Ukrainian drone units had also cut the enemy’s logistics, forcing Russian troops to relocate their fuel and lubricant depots and dismantle a pipeline, shifting their supply lines into Russia’s Voronezh Region. Biletsky estimated the personnel losses of Russia’s 20th and 25th armies at roughly 1,500 soldiers, while equipment losses totaled more than 12,000 drones and hundreds of armored vehicles, along with artillery pieces and other vehicles.

At the same time, Biletsky cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the operation’s ultimate goal, saying rumors about Ukrainian troops aiming to reach the Chornyi Zherebets River were premature. “Our operation is called ‘Vivaldi.’ And Vivaldi, as everyone knows, has four seasons. This is only the first of them,” Biletsky said, promising further official updates on the corps’ progress.

The scale of the operation had previously been reported by independent OSINT analysts who had been following the situation near Lyman for several months. In particular, French analyst Clément Molin noted that Ukrainian units had launched a counteroffensive north of the city back in late May, but information about it was deliberately withheld until now. By Molin’s estimate, Ukrainian forces used that time to cut off the Russian salient north of Lyman and liberate more than 200 square kilometers of land, pushing the enemy back across the Zherebets River.

Molin called the operation one of Ukraine’s most significant victories of 2026, noting that its success could complicate further Russian advances on Lyman, Izium, and Sloviansk, thereby delaying the occupying forces’ progress in northern Donbas. Similar assessments came from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). As its experts wrote, Russian military bloggers are already acknowledging Ukrainian counterattacks in the Lyman sector and are increasingly criticizing the Russian command for masking territorial losses with fabricated reports of success.

Movlaev left a suicide note asking that help be given to Russian activist Yulia Yemelyanova, who is also being held in pretrial detention in Kazakhstan and faces possible extradition:

“I ask forgiveness from all my friends, relatives, lawyers, the embassies of the European Union, the Netherlands and France, and the UN Committee, who tried to save my life. Forgive me, I am tired of injustice! Neither the court nor the prosecutor’s office hears us!

They will torment me, torture me and kill me, and then they will say I did it myself... I will not let them torture me again! For 16 months I lived with the fear of being extradited and with hope... Now there is only fear!

I ask Kazakhstan for only one thing: bury me here, in Kazakhstan. So that they do not even get my body!

Please at least save Yulia!”

Kuchusheva confirmed to The Insider that Movlaev had attempted suicide. She said doctors stitched up his wounds and saved his life.

“Mansur is alive. But his blood is on the hands of the Kazakh authorities. I cannot even imagine how much pain and fear they — both Mansur and Yulia — are living through there. We will keep fighting for them. An appeal has now been filed with Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court.”

Despite the Supreme Court appeal, following the cassation ruling there is currently no legal barrier preventing Kazakhstan from extraditing Movlaev to Russia. Kuchusheva previously said he could be extradited “as soon as they agree with the Russian side on the crossing point where he will be handed over.”

Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office approved Movlaev’s extradition in early 2026.

As The Insider reported in July, Russian activists Yulia Yemelyanova and Mansur Movlaev, both detained by Kazakh authorities, appealed to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev directly asking him to stop their extradition to Russia. The Consuls of the Antiwar Committee, the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR/IGFM), and the Kovcheg (“Ark”) project also called on Tokayev to halt both extraditions, to release the activists, and to allow them to travel safely to third countries.

This past spring, The Insider published a detailed report on the worsening situation facing anti-war Russians seeking asylum or refuge in Western countries and in former Soviet states close to Russia. Human rights advocates interviewed for the report said Kazakhstan had become one of the countries that stood out most negatively, and advised Russians at risk of political persecution not to travel there even in transit.

Movlaev faces criminal charges in Russia involving accusations of extortion and extremism. Yemelyanova, a former volunteer at the late Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, is wanted on a theft charge.

The Danish Armed Forces said the Russian vessel fired two flares toward one of its helicopters, which was carrying out a routine photographic survey of the frigate in international waters off Gedser.

“One of the flares fired passed within a short distance of the helicopter,” read the statemenent, which was followed by an explanatory note saying “Flares are pyrotechnic devices. They are normally used as a warning signal at sea.”

Frederiksen said the Russian ship’s actions “is part of the pattern we are seeing across Europe.”

“Russia is behaving increasingly aggressively and assertively and has intensified its hybrid war against Europe,” she said. “Russia is testing NATO and challenging it. Russia wants to intimidate us and sow division. Our response is to stand even more closely together and strengthen the defense of Denmark and Europe.”

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the incident “unacceptable” and said Russian Ambassador Vladimir Barbin had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen.

Reporting on the incident, German newspaper Die Zeit placed the Danish helicopter incident in the context of a failed attack that took place on Aug. 5 at Leipzig/Halle airport, where a drone with a detonator was found near a Ukrainian transport plane.

The German government has formally accused Russia of carrying out a hybrid attack following the incident in Leipzig, with Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announcing at a recent news conference that Germany would respond by closing the Russian House in Berlin and Russia’s consulate general in Bonn. Russia, in turn, withdrew its consent for the German consulate general in St. Petersburg to continue operating and shut down Germany’s Goethe Institut cultural centers nationwide.

According to German investigators, one of the people involved in the failed Leipzig airport sabotage was a Russian citizen identified as Oleg L., who allegedly worked for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

An unlikely recovery

North Korea’s recovery began, in part, by simply reopening the country. Trade with China had collapsed from nearly $2.8 billion in 2019 to $539 million in 2020—  and it was just $318 million in 2021 after Pyongyang responded to COVID-19 by virtually sealing its borders. However, freight traffic gradually resumed in 2022, and by 2023 bilateral trade had recovered to around $2.3 billion. That reopening restored supplies of fuel, fertilizer, machinery, and consumer goods while allowing North Korean exports back onto the Chinese market. At the same time, the state poured resources into construction and industry, and improvements in agricultural production also helped pull the economy out of its pandemic slump. Russia would soon add an entirely new source of demand and foreign revenue, but North Korea’s recovery was already far from dependent on the wartime relationship with Moscow alone.

The domestic component of North Korea’s sudden relative prosperity has been remarkably visible. Since 2021, Kim Jong Un has made construction and regional development a central priority for the government, combining a five-year program to build 50,000 new apartments in Pyongyang with an extensive rural housing drive. With even grander ambition, in 2024 the DPRK’s Supreme Leader launched the “Regional Development 20x10 Policy,” calling for the modernization of factories in 20 cities and counties every year for a decade, with an emphasis on food processing, clothing, and everyday consumer goods. This represents a notable turn away from the focus on heavy industry traditionally favored by the state. Even more worrying for its neighbor to the south (and for the power of UNSC sanctions more broadly), however, is the fact that these programs are difficult to dismiss as propaganda. Satellite imagery has shown construction beginning within weeks of its announcement, and factories were installed in all 20 communities targeted during its first year. Building on its initial success, in 2025 the 20x10 program expanded into hospitals, leisure facilities, farming infrastructure, and other local projects, again opening all of its intended projects before the end of the year.

This headline policy represents a significant shift for a nation that has historically experienced extremely uneven economic development, with the capital, Pyongyang, and strategic heavy industries absorbing a disproportionate share of state investment while much of the country’s provincial economy remained dependent on Cold War-era factories or the nation’s growing informal economy. The 20x10 program, by contrast, is an explicit attempt to narrow that divide and invest in creating local provincial centers capable of processing regional materials into basic consumer products. It also seeks improvements in food production, agricultural mechanization, and housing. Whether these new industries can survive the country’s harsh shortages of electricity, machinery, and several raw inputs remains to be seen, but its focus on provincial economies and light industry is a significant departure from traditional party doctrine and seems to have borne early fruit.

That shift in emphasis, however, has not come at Pyongyang’s expense. At the same time the government has redirected investment toward provincial cities, it has continued an enormous reconstruction of the capital. In February, the government announced the completion of the aforementioned program to construct 50,000 new housing units, much of it concentrated in the brand new Hwasong district, where the program transformed former agricultural land into dense high-rise neighborhoods. The more striking changes, however, are taking place at the street level rather than on Pyongyang’s prominent skyline (which itself has long been a Kim family prestige project). Foreign visitors returning after the pandemic described the city as shockingly different from its pre-COVID self, with app-based taxis, QR-code payments, food and medicine delivery services, new storefronts and restaurants, and a far more visible smartphone economy. For the first time, the city’s wide streets and parking lots have been tested to capacity as the country experiences an influx of largely Chinese vehicles, imported despite UN sanctions. The most important new source of resources behind this expansion, however, came from outside the country.

Beginning in the summer of 2023, Pyongyang became a major supplier of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles to Russia, eventually providing more than 15 million artillery rounds, according to South Korean intelligence estimates.

The resources for North Korea’s economic upturn largely came from military cooperation with Moscow

The Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s intelligence service, estimates that weapons exports alone earned North Korea more than $10 billion between mid-2023 and the end of 2025 — an extraordinary sum for a country whose entire annual GDP is estimated at only around $27 billion. The subsequent deployment of roughly 15,000 North Korean soldiers to Russia added hundreds of millions more, even if INSS says only a fraction of the proceeds has been confirmed as payment in kind, while much of the remainder may consist of sensitive military technology, components or materials, or may still be owed.

More consequential than the scale of the payments themselves, however, is the extent to which the relationship has begun to dismantle the economic constraints imposed on North Korea over the previous decade. The sanctions adopted after 2016 derived much of their force from the unusual willingness of both Russia and China to participate in isolating Pyongyang — restricting its access to fuel, machinery, foreign currency, overseas labor, and many of the export markets on which it had previously depended. Russia has now reversed that situation by becoming a major customer for the same military-industrial complex that the sanctions were intended to constrain while simultaneously supplying North Korea with many of the resources those measures sought to keep out. In short, the DPRK’s recent recovery is not simply a rebound from the extraordinary deprivation of the pandemic years, but the result of a much larger change in the country’s international position.

Pyongyang’s place in the new world

North Korea’s problem was never a lack of powerful backers. When it was nearly destroyed by the U.S.-led coalition during the Korean War, Communist China intervened in large part out of fear of having an American-aligned state and military presence on its border, and to this day the DPRK-PRC alliance remains China’s only mutual-defense commitment. What it couldn’t secure were powerful friends that truly needed anything it could provide. For most of the post-Cold War era, Pyongyang had little to offer in exchange for its dependence on Chinese and Russian trade and diplomatic protection — a meagre workforce, a domestic market too poor to absorb high-end imports, and an endless stream of diplomatic liabilities generated by its nuclear program and recurring foreign provocations. However, the war in Ukraine has begun to reverse that imbalance, turning qualities that had made North Korea a diplomatic liability into assets that its allies increasingly covet.

The shift is clearest in relations with Moscow. In 2017, Putin insisted that Russia “unequivocally condemned” North Korea’s nuclear tests and pledged “fully complied with the UN Security Council resolutions” imposed on the DPRK. And yet, by 2024 he was in Pyongyang signing a mutual-defense treaty as Russia purchased billions of dollars’ worth of North Korean munitions. The change soon reverberated to international institutions that had been designed to constrain the DPRK. In March of that year, Russia vetoed the renewal of the UN Panel of Experts responsible for monitoring sanctions on North Korea, dismantling one of the central mechanisms through which the Security Council could apply pressure on the country.  

In March 2024, Russia vetoed one of the central mechanisms through which the UN Security Council could apply pressure on the DPRK

Of course, for Pyongyang the benefits go far beyond munitions export revenue and diplomatic protection. North Korea also receives access to fuel, materials, and advanced military equipment. According to some South Korean and Western assessments, the partnership also includes transfers of military technology in areas ranging from air defense to missile and satellite development. For the Korean People’s Army (KPA), which is still overwhelmingly reliant on Cold War-era Soviet designs and indigenous attempts at their modernization, such cooperation offers one of the few plausible routes toward modernizing the capabilities that North Korea cannot readily develop on its own.

The benefits of friendship with Russia also affect North Korea’s other international relationships.  If anything, Pyongyang’s growing independence from Beijing appears to have made China more attentive when it comes to preserving its own influence. After starting to cool off during the pandemic, relations with Beijing grew dramatically closer starting in late 2025. As a result, in June 2026, Xi Jinping made his first visit to Pyongyang in seven years, pledging that China would not waver in its support for North Korea and agreeing to deepen cooperation in various fields. Rather than displacing Beijing, Russia’s entry has made North Korea more valuable to China by giving Pyongyang a realistic alternative source of support. Kim is now in a position to draw economic backing from Beijing and military and diplomatic benefits from Moscow while reducing the degree to which either power can take its influence over the DPRK for granted.

By the time Trump returned to office, he found the conditions that had enabled his famous first negotiations with North Korea largely absent. Back then, the DPRK was largely isolated from the rest of the world, and Western offers of sanctions relief and moves toward normalization were actually enticing. Now, Pyongyang has retained its nuclear arsenal, expanded its missile program, rebuilt much of its foreign trade, and secured relationships with Moscow and Beijing that are far more economically valuable than the recognition America once promised. While none of this removes negotiations or even potential steps to rapprochement from the table, it has shifted the starting point decisively in Kim’s favor. Trump’s America is still interested in talking to North Korea, but Kim’s North Korea has less of an incentive to reciprocate.

Trump’s gambit

Trump’s most consequential move toward Pyongyang so far took place on August 16. Only hours before the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises were scheduled to begin, the president ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” America’s participation, arguing that the drills were costly and that they sent a “totally inappropriate and hostile” signal to North Korea, a country he described as having been “unthreatening and respectful” during his first term. The eleven-day exercise was subsequently cut to five days and its field component reduced; Washington later cancelled a separate upcoming joint Marine Corps exercise. For Pyongyang, which has spent decades portraying the exercises as rehearsals for an invasion and demanding their termination — along with the end of America’s presence in South Korea — Trump demonstrated immense goodwill without even requiring Kim to meet him.

Trump has shown readiness to engage with Pyongyang since returning to the White House

While it’s unclear how much Trump’s apparent frustration with South Korea’s lack of backing for American action in Iran contributed to the cancellation, the move itself isn’t entirely unprecedented. Days after his first summit with Kim in Singapore in 2018, Trump announced the suspension of Ulchi Freedom Guardian and several smaller exercises, similarly adopting Pyongyang’s description of the drills as “provocative” while arguing that their cancellation would save the U.S. money. However, the circumstances surrounding the two decisions could hardly be more different. In 2018, Trump’s suspension came amid perhaps the most dramatic thaw in inter-Korean relations since the division of the peninsula, with Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un having already met at Panmunjom, where they declared that “there will be no more war” between the two Koreas and that reconciliation, economic cooperation, and even the eventual reunification of the peninsula were desirable. 

Today, nearly every condition that made such a gesture logical in 2018 has disappeared. The inter-Korean rapprochement surrounding Singapore has given way to Pyongyang’s formal abandonment of reunification, its designation of the ROK as a hostile state, and even the destruction of sections of the road and railway links that Moon and Kim had once promised to reconnect. At the same time, North Korea would enter any renewed negotiations with a growing nuclear arsenal, a mutual-defense treaty with Russia, and considerably less dependence on the sanctions relief that once formed Washington’s principal bargaining chip.

Despite offering little in return, Pyongyang does not appear to have ruled out renewed talks. Following Trump’s move, South Korean intelligence assessed that another Trump-Kim summit could be arranged “at any time.” However, unlike in 2018, North Korea now treats its nuclear arsenal as a permanent component of the state and the ultimate guarantor of its sovereignty. Analysts argue that, from Pyongyang’s perspective, America’s war against Iran vindicated a lesson already drawn from Libya and earlier attacks on Tehran: a credible nuclear deterrent is a necessary guarantee against potential American attack. This leaves any renewed summit with a much narrower window for discussion, particularly given Washington’s enduring policy calling for the complete denuclearization of North Korea (which is mirrored by South Korea).

Regardless of whether Trump’s gambit produces another summit, the larger reversal has already taken place. Less than a decade ago, North Korea faced a sanctions regime endorsed by Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, and the country depended almost entirely on China for its economic survival while remaining a liability even to the powers most interested in keeping it alive. Today, Pyongyang has already hosted two of the three most powerful leaders on Earth and is within reach of another meeting with the third. For the beleaguered hermit kingdom, it is a break in the storm clouds perhaps unmatched at any point this millennium.

A shrinking peninsula

For all of North Korea’s vast newfound advantages, the peninsula clearly leans in South Korea’s favor. For the DPRK, the enormous Korean People’s Army  KPA remains central to the state, but the South Korean armed forces are still judged to hold the conventional advantage, as they are built around cutting-edge technology as opposed to the North’s heavily aged stockpiles. The economic imbalance is even more lopsided, with South Korea’s nominal GNI coming in at 56 times that of the North’s in 2025. Seoul’s annual defense budget alone now exceeds the estimated value of North Korea’s entire economy, giving the South a capacity to modernize, replace losses, and sustain high-end weapons systems on a scale Pyongyang cannot realistically match.

The one area where this overwhelming disparity is beginning to matter less, however, is manpower. South Korea’s fertility rate stood at just 0.80 children per woman in 2025, and the demographic collapse which for decades loomed as a distant economic problem has now reached the pool from which the ROK draws its soldiers. Between 2019 and 2025, the number of 20-year-old men fell by roughly 30%, while the active-duty military shrank by a fifth (to around 450,000 personnel), leaving a manpower shortfall estimated at roughly 50,000 troops. Seoul has been able to soften the consequences through force restructuring, expanded recruitment of women and career personnel, and a growing reliance on technology, but none of these measures change the arithmetic behind a conscription system which is drawing each successive intake from a substantially smaller generation than the last.

From 2019 to 2025, the number of young men in South Korea fell by 30%, and the size of the active-duty military by 20%

North Korea has also struggled demographically, though not as severely as its neighbor. The UN estimates its fertility rate at 1.8 children per woman in 2025, far above the South’s but still below replacement level. As the much smaller generation born during and after the famine of the 1990s reached enlistment age, the government reportedly loosened physical requirements for military service and also drew increasingly heavily on women. The country’s working-age population is estimated to have begun shrinking by almost 1% annually after 2020, and similar shortages have appeared outside the military, leading the state to increasingly direct young people toward mines and farms and mobilizing married women into factories and other production sites where the supply of workers has begun to thin.

The demographic balance between the Koreas is consequently moving in two directions at once. In the near term, South Korea is losing military-age manpower far faster, allowing Pyongyang to preserve one of the few quantitative advantages which Seoul’s economic ascent never completely eliminated. Over a longer horizon, however, the North is facing the same problem, only with much less room to absorb it. A smaller South Korean generation still enters an economy capable of sustaining increasingly capital-intensive production and defense, whereas a smaller North Korean generation has to be divided between an oversized military and a civilian economy in which agriculture, mining, construction, and large parts of manufacturing remain unusually dependent on labor. What currently looks like a durable Northern advantage is therefore better understood as a delayed disadvantage, albeit one which may matter considerably for the military balance during the decades before the DPRK’s own demographic contraction fully catches up with it.

Over a longer horizon, however, the North is also facing a demographic decline, only with much less room to absorb it

That reversal extends far beyond the demographic balance. North Korea’s reinvigorated economic growth, wartime partnership with Russia, renewed importance to China, and reduced dependence on what Washington can offer have together placed Pyongyang in perhaps its strongest international position since before the end of the Cold War. The country remains vastly poorer and conventionally weaker than the South, and its own demographic decline may ultimately prove more difficult to absorb, but it no longer approaches the outside world from the position of near-total dependence which shaped Trump’s first negotiations with Kim. If the two return to the negotiating table, Trump will therefore confront not the isolated North Korea he encountered in Singapore, but a state which has found in the unraveling of the post-Cold War order considerably more room to survive on its own terms.

According to a 74-page indictment outlined by Der Spiegel, German prosecutors have accused Ilona W. of acting on behalf of a Russian intelligence service. The charges were filed nearly eight months after her arrest.

Investigators say that in November 2023 the businesswoman began passing information to a contact at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. German counterintelligence identified that contact as GRU officer Andrei Mayorov, who worked under diplomatic cover as a deputy military attaché. Mayorov was expelled from Germany earlier this year.

Der Spiegel reported that Ilona W. deliberately gathered information about participants in political events, including a “NATO Talk” held at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon in November 2023 and the German-Ukrainian Business Forum in Berlin in December 2025. At the latter, Wiener sat a few meters from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Prosecutors also allege that in February 2024, Ilona W. used a false name to bring her suspected handler, Mayorov, into a meeting of Bundeswehr reservists. Der Spiegel characterized her as a prominent figure “considered extremely active” in Berlin who headed an association dedicated to “promoting international understanding” and regularly attended receptions and events with ambassadors, senior diplomats, and well-known politicians. The advisory board of her organization included prominent businesspeople and former lawmakers from Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

In the spring, Wiener’s defense challenged her detention and criticized prosecutors for what they called a “broad interpretation” of the criminal provision covering intelligence activity on behalf of a foreign state.

News of Wiener’s arrest first emerged in January.

Kremlev’s team helped organize the event, while the payments were made through IB Challenger, a Dubai-based company linked to the IBA. The boxing association, which Kremlev leads, was previously financed by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom.

Among the roughly 50 wedding guests were Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, his brother Eric Trump, and Kremlev himself, along with a group of Russian-speaking guests whose presence “puzzled other attendees,” according to ProPublica. Two people who spoke to the outlet said the group largely kept to itself and spoke Russian. The Russian guests are barely visible in photos and videos published after the wedding.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not deny that Kremlev had paid for wedding expenses, describing him as a “personal friend of Don.” The spokesperson said the two “met through a mutual friend in the hunting world” and “bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.”

Kremlev’s press office also confirmed that the two men had a “friendly relationship” and said the businessman had “never discussed political matters” with his American acquaintances.

Former FBI officials interviewed by ProPublica called the situation concerning. “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story,” retired career FBI officer Frank Montoya Jr. told the publication.

Kremlev is known to have close ties to Vladimir Putin. In April, Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, a Russian state honor, and in the days before the wedding Kremlev accompanied Putin on a trip to China.

Ukraine has imposed personal sanctions on Kremlev, citing his ties to Putin and to Russian security agencies.

On Sept. 6, a religious procession held in Moscow drew upwards of 100,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry. The procession, which travelled from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to the Novodevichy Convent, was led by Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyaev). Notable attendees also included federal officials and far-right activists from several organizations.

Public preparations for the procession began a month before the event. An official Telegram channel was launched in late July, with its first posts appearing on Aug. 3. These stressed that the procession had Kirill’s blessing and the approval of Moscow authorities. Organizers also set up a dedicated website and a free mobile app while promising to provide transportation from some churches.

Far-right and nationalist organizations joined the campaign around the same time. The Malofeev-linked Two-Headed Eagle reposted the announcement on Aug. 3, while the far-right nationalist Russian Community published its own announcement the following day. By the end of the month, the Russian Community was urging supporters not only to attend but to bring friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors, as well as to distribute promotional posters in group chats, coordinate with parish priests, and organize separate groups.

The procession was promoted particularly heavily by Tsargrad, Malofeev's Orthodox nationalist television channel, which devoted a separate page on its website to the event. In the two days before the procession, the outlet repeatedly described it as a “Russian March.” One post called it “the real nationwide Russian March,” while in another, blogger Petya Pervy described it as “a genuine peaceful Russian march, with no political slogans or divisions.” On the eve of the event, Tsargrad again wrote that Moscow would see “not just a religious procession, but a real Russian March” — one featuring prayers for Russian soldiers and Russian “Victory.” Actress Yana Poplavskaya used the same formulation in a Tsargrad video.

During the procession, Patriarch Kirill directly linked the event to support for the authorities and of the Russian military. In two official speeches, he said that people should pray “for our Orthodox president and for our armed forces,” describing Russia as a country once again becoming “invincible.” The procession was accompanied by the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God and an ark containing a fragment of the relics of 14th century prince Dmitry Donskoy.

We must work for the good of our Fatherland, for the good of our Church, and not slacken in our prayers for our President, for the authorities, for our armed forces and for our people.

The procession also drew sitting government officials and politicians. The Moscow Diocese listed Industry and Trade Minister Anton Alikhanov, State Duma Deputy Speaker Anna Kuznetsova, LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky, Moscow Department of National Policy head Vitaly Suchkov, and Accounts Chamber auditor Irina Kagramanyan as being among the participants. Representatives of the World Russian People’s Council, various Cossack organizations, and public groups affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church also took part.

Far-right and nationalist elements were also visibly represented, although the Sova Center estimated their combined presence at only around 2,000 people, or 2% of the total attendance estimated by the Interior Ministry. The Russian Community claimed it had formed “the largest and most striking” column and helped “maintain order,” though these claims could not be independently verified. The group nevertheless made its presence conspicuous, marching behind banners dedicated to Alexander Nevsky.

The procession was also attended by the Two-Headed Eagle and the far-right student group Brotherhood of Academicians — as well as by Konstantin Malofeev himself, under whose auspices both organizations were created. He attended with his wife, Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over allegations of abducting Ukrainian children.

Malofeev is a billionaire who has repeatedly been accused of corporate raiding and fraud. In 2014, The Insider established his role in financing the armed seizure of parts of the Donbas. Igor Girkin, a separatist commander who had previously headed the security department at a Malofeev-owned company, reported directly to Malofeev after his fighters' capture of Sloviansk. In 2025, Malofeev’s name also surfaced in connection with the disappearance of around $450 million from the WEX cryptocurrency exchange. Its former technical director, Alexey Bilyuchenko, claimed that at Malofeev’s request he handed FSB representatives the keys to the exchange’s cryptocurrency wallets. Malofeev has denied any involvement with the missing funds.

After the Sept. 6 march in Moscow, the Brotherhood of Academicians wrote that participants were united by “one idea, one faith, one identity” — wording reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s slogan “One people, one Reich, one leader” (“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”). The group also described the slogan “We are Russian — God is with us” as part of a “new reality”:

“If anyone has questions about this phrase, they will have to accept this mainstream, this new reality, in which Russians are strong and united in their faith.”

Other nationalist movements also organized their own groups and columns. The Northern Man reported that its Moscow and Moscow Region branches had marched "in a single formation" as “one powerful column.” The nationalist movement "Society. Future," founded by Roman Yuneman, also participated, and prominent nationalist writer and commentator Yegor Kholmogorov was among those in attendance.

After the procession, Malofeev wrote that Moscow had shown a “living Russia, walking shoulder to shoulder” — one that, “despite the fifth year of the war,” remained united. He described the procession as a prayer “for our soldiers” and “for a Russian Victory.” The Russian Community likewise ended its report by declaring that “Holy Rus is alive and being reborn” and that “Victory will be ours.”

Irkutsk: Less pro-war rhetoric and fewer far-right groups

Also on Sept. 6, a religious procession going under the name “The Radiance of Russia” was held in Irkutsk to open the nationwide Days of Russian Spirituality and Culture. According to the Irkutsk regional government and the Russian Orthodox Church, more than 15,000 people took part in the procession, which carried the relics of Saints Spyridon of Trimythous and Innocent of Irkutsk. The relics were brought to the city by the Irkutsk Diocese, while the festival itself was organized jointly with the regional authorities.

The procession was attended by Irkutsk Region Governor Igor Kobzev and regional Legislative Assembly Chairman Alexander Vedernikov, as well as representatives of the Cossacks, security agencies, and military educational institutions. OMON riot police inspected the venues in advance, while access controls were introduced on the day of the procession. The Interior Ministry and the National Guard provided security, while traffic was restricted in central Irkutsk and public transport routes were altered.

The festival also received organizational support from the state: a procurement worth 552,500 rubles ($6,530) was announced to provide technical equipment for one of the “Radiance of Russia” events. Unlike the Moscow procession, however, official statements by Irkutsk authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church did not feature rhetoric about supporting the war or praying for the president and the military. Governor Kobzev focused instead on Orthodoxy, Russian culture, “traditional Russian values,” and spiritual unity.

The Irkutsk branch of the Russian Community also invited its supporters to join the procession. Afterward, it reported that its “squad” had helped “maintain public order.” The group did not disclose the size of its contingent, and a video published by the far-right organization shows only a handful of Russian Community flags.

Elista: With Malofeev “in the name of victory”

On Sept. 10, a religious procession was held in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, as part of celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the Appearance of Christ the Savior, a purported 1946 miracle in which Christ himself is said to have visited the city. According to the official anniversary website, more than 2,000 people took part in the procession from the Kazan Cathedral to the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross. 

The anniversary was organized by the Kalmyk authorities in cooperation with the Elista Diocese. The organizing committee was headed by Kalmykia head Batu Khasikov, who joined the procession alongside Astrakhan Region Governor Igor Babushkin, Metropolitan Matthew of Pskov and Porkhov, and other government and church officials. Khasikov also reported that Construction Minister Irek Fayzullin and Ataman Sergei Bodryakov of the Great Don Cossack Host took part.

Military and state-patriotic rhetoric featured in the anniversary program even before the procession. On Sept. 9, Elista hosted events organized by the Kalmyk Cossack District of the Great Don Cossack Host, which were attended by government officials, Cossacks, and members of the security forces. Archbishop Justinian held a prayer service “for the defenders and builders of the Fatherland,” including servicemen “fulfilling their duty” and Cossacks “guarding the borders.” The Kalmyk Cossack District was then presented with a consecrated military banner.

The 80th anniversary of the “Appearance of Christ the Savior in Elista” was promoted particularly heavily by  Malofeev’s Tsargrad. Beginning Sept. 7, the outlet put out a series of reports on the “Elista miracle,” portraying Russia as an “Empire” that is “invincible” — a “Katechon holding the world back from evil.” The reports were accompanied by AI-generated images. One illustration depicts Soviet soldiers and modern Russian servicemen bearing Russian symbols before an image of Christ.

Malofeev himself arrived in Kalmykia the day before the procession and appeared alongside Khasikov at the launch of the regional “2050 Club.” The two also jointly presented “Tsargrad Crosses” to participants in the war in Ukraine. Malofeev called Kalmykia a “southern outpost of the Russian World,” adding that its residents were “bravely fighting the enemy in the special military operation zone.” He ended his post: “For four centuries, Kalmyks have been victorious alongside Russians and dozens of other peoples. They will be victorious this time, too.”

The following day, Malofeev directly linked the procession to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, writing that “in the fifth year of the war,” the relics of Dmitry Donskoy had “appeared” in Russia, while even in Buddhist Kalmykia, regional governor Khasikov carried an Orthodox relic through Elista.

During the celebrations, Khasikov described Russia as a “sacred power” whose destiny was to “protect the world from evil.” In a speech following the procession, he directly linked the anniversary to “Victory”:

“Our country is a sacred power, and Russia’s destiny is to protect the world from evil... The time has come to say this. To say it with love, in the name of good, in the name of Victory.”

St. Petersburg: Nationalists in their most organized form

On Sept. 12, St. Petersburg held its annual Alexander Nevsky religious procession from Kazan Cathedral to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. According to the Interior Ministry, more than 90,000 people took part. The procession moved along Nevsky Prospect with the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God and an ark containing a fragment of the relics of Dmitry Donskoy, which were brought from Moscow. At the same time, a smaller procession carrying the relics of Alexander Nevsky set out from the lavra, while a separate water procession took place on the Neva.

The event was held with the blessing of Metropolitan Barsanuphius of St. Petersburg and Ladoga — and with the direct involvement of the city authorities. A preparatory press conference was attended by Fyodor Boltin, head of the city’s culture committee, along with a representative of the Committee on Law, officials from the transport and media committees, and representatives of the St. Petersburg Diocese. For the procession, the authorities closed a large section of Nevsky Prospect and adjacent streets to traffic.

The celebrations were financed using the St. Petersburg city budget. On June 29, the city’s culture committee announced a tender for an event marking the Feast of the Translation of the Relics of Alexander Nevsky and the Treaty of Nystad, with an initial budget of 14.4 million rubles ($170,000). The amount covered the entire program of festivities, not the procession alone.

Nationalist groups had a particularly prominent presence in the procession. The Russian Community marched in a separate column under its own flags, while some participants carried the imperial black-yellow-white flag. Russian Community activists chanted “We are Russian — God is with us,” among other slogans. The organization described its participation as a being part of a “celebration of unity.” Its St. Petersburg spiritual adviser, Priest Alexander Bashkin, said afterward that “when we are united, we are invincible” and that “no enemy can overcome our unifying Russian strength.”

Malofeev’s organizations were even more organized. The Two-Headed Eagle claimed that its column had teamed up with the Brotherhood of Academicians and “led the public organizations.” According to the group, around 300 young people marched under a banner reading “The Russian Land has stood and will stand on this,” and the slogan “We are Russian! God is with us!” The Academicians described their contingent as the “Orthodox vanguard” and called the procession a “march of youth” allowing them to “openly proclaim our ideas.”

During the procession, the Two-Headed Eagle recorded a separate address to the Serbian far-right groups Srpska Akcija (“Serbian Action”) and Narodna Patrola (“People’s Patrol”), whose participants carried a Serbian flag. The group expressed support for Serbian nationalists who had recently attended the funeral of Ratko Mladić, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska. Srpska Akcija responded by calling the Two-Headed Eagle activists its “Russian friends” and publishing the slogan “Russians and Serbs — brothers forever.”

Tsargrad also extensively covered the St. Petersburg procession, contrasting it with an LGBT pride march held in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv the same day, writing that Russia was “carrying the banner of Orthodoxy,” which contained “the seed of inevitable victory.” The post also expressed hope that a similar procession would be held in Kharkiv after its “liberation.”

Alexander Belsky, speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said after the procession: “We showed the whole world what Rus is, what a Russian person is.” That same day, Governor Alexander Beglov linked the celebrations to the current war, saying that Russian servicemen were “continuing the feat of their ancestors” by defending “the lands and the Orthodox faith.”

The participation of Malofeev-linked organizations in the St. Petersburg processions is nothing new. On Sept. 12, 2025, activists from Tsargrad, the Two-Headed Eagle, and the Brotherhood of Academicians took part, alongside representatives of at least two foreign far-right groups — Hungary’s Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement and Belgium’s Nation. That same day, Malofeev organized an international gathering of far-right and neo-Nazi groups at the Mariinsky Palace, which resulted in the creation of the “Paladins” International League of Anti-Globalists. Representatives of the Sixty-Four Counties later said that the Two-Headed Eagle and the Academicians were among the gathering’s organizers. Both groups are part of the Tsargrad network.

In his video message, Kravchenko addressed the NABU/SAPO investigation that led to the searches at his office, alleging that its real aim was to seize evidence that the prosecutor general had gathered against the country’s anti-corruption bodies:

“Its real goal was to gain access to the materials of criminal proceedings against the leadership and staff of NABU and SAPO. And after that — to remove the prosecutor general and halt procedural decisions in these cases.

Right now, the Prosecutor General’s Office is providing procedural oversight in dozens of criminal proceedings investigating grave and especially grave crimes committed by NABU and SAPO staff. Based on the evidence gathered, I signed a notice of suspicion for NABU Director Semen Kryvonos.”

The prosecutor general claims Kryvonos is guilty of “forging official documents to obtain an especially large unlawful benefit” and of a “sham adoption of a child intended to create grounds for evading liability in court.” Kravchenko said NABU and SAPO had gained access to legally protected case materials and had copied and stolen some of the documents.

NABU and SAPO noted that no one had officially served the suspicion notice against Kryvonos and called Kravchenko’s statements “a continuation of the systemic attack on independent anti-corruption bodies.”

In his address, Kravchenko also said that Zelensky had “politically held him back” from making a decision on Kryvonos, and that NABU representatives had offered him a deal: drop the charges against the bureau’s director in exchange for guarantees of immunity.

Zelensky responded to these remarks on his Telegram channel:

“This prosecutor general has only one way out: dismissal from office. That’s exactly what I told him. Ukraine has seen all the reasons. If he considers this political pressure, let him call it that. I ask members of parliament to support this dismissal without delay.”

On Sept. 4, Ukrainska Pravda reported on the searches by NABU and SAPO at the Prosecutor General’s Office, as well as at the offices of his deputy Mariia Vdovychenko and of Oleh Kiper, head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration. The next day, NABU and SAPO confirmed the searches. The anti-corruption authorities detained Serhiy Kropyva, deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s International Legal Cooperation Department, announcing the exposure of a criminal organization headed by a high-profile Prosecutor General’s Office representative. Amid the scandal, Kravchenko filed a letter of resignation on Sept. 7.

Ukrainska Pravda established that overnight into Sept. 14, Kravchenko left Ukraine in an official car. He later confirmed his departure, insisting that he was on a “foreign business trip,” during which he intended to “inform international partners about the real state of affairs in the anti-corruption system, signs that it is concentrating uncontrolled influence, and the risks that such practices pose to state sovereignty, the rule of law, and Ukraine’s democratic institutions.”

David Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People parliamentary faction, announced that the Rada will vote on the Prosecutor General’s dismissal on Sept. 15.