The Home Fronts

Russia's Supreme Court upheld the removal of Yabloko — the only registered party calling for an end to the war — from September's State Duma elections on August 17, and a court in Pskov jailed its deputy chair, Lev Shlosberg, for eleven years and one month for discrediting the armed forces. Dozens of supporters and journalists were detained outside the courtroom. The vote it clears is the one Ukrainian military intelligence has named as the point after which it expects a new Russian mobilisation wave — a warning repeated since July, and one no published decree yet supports. The ballot was cleared as Russia's own pollsters measured consent eroding. Levada put support for the armed forces' actions at 66% in July, its lowest since February 2022 and twelve points down in a year, while the share who think the operation is going well fell nineteen points to half, with those unable to say at a record 22%. Sixty-two percent want negotiations, but only a quarter would accept concessions and 56% favour heavier strikes — appetite for an end to the war, not for a settlement on any terms but Russia's. The state-aligned pollsters move in the same direction, and all of it carries the constraints of surveying a country at war under an authoritarian government. Ukraine's side of the ledger is solvent now and short later. External financing reached $23.5bn in the first half of the year, $18bn of it in the second quarter as the Ukraine Support Loan came online and began paying a military component. But the Kyiv School of Economics projects a $19.5bn gap in 2027 even after this year's surplus carries forward, and names the slowing pace of reform — not the donors' willingness — as the main risk to the money arriving. Brussels, meanwhile, is preparing rather than enacting: Kaja Kallas says roughly 1,600 new listings go to member states in September for adoption in October, which she claims would lift the number of sanctioned Russian entities by a third.

The Whole Story

An attrition war is decided as much behind the lines as at the front. Russia and Ukraine are both spending down finite stocks — money, men, and the public's willingness to keep going — and the side that runs short first loses the ability to continue whatever is happening on the battlefield. This is the ledger of that spending on both sides: each country's budget and funding sources, its manpower decisions and the economics behind them, the evidence about what its population will tolerate, and the governance moves that reveal strain or consolidation. Nothing here is a reading of morale or a forecast of collapse; it is the record of what each state has actually decided, spent and been told by its own numbers.

Russia is fighting a war it can fund but no longer fund comfortably. Oil and gas, roughly half the federal budget before the invasion, have fallen sharply year on year, and the budget has run a deficit that by mid-2026 exceeded the whole of the previous year's. The state has reached progressively further for money — a value-added tax raised to 22%, suspended bond auctions, and draft legislation to move private pension savings — while the Kremlin's public position, stated by Vladimir Putin himself, remains that the economy is stable. On manpower, Moscow has so far avoided a second formal mobilisation since September 2022, relying instead on contract recruitment at rising cost; Ukrainian intelligence has warned repeatedly that a new wave is being prepared, and senior Russian figures including Dmitry Medvedev have denied it. Consent is the quietest of the three ledgers and the hardest to read: Russia's independent pollsters record support for the war drifting down and economic pessimism spreading, while the space to express any of it has narrowed to the point that the only registered party opposing the war has been struck from the ballot and its deputy leader imprisoned.

Ukraine's constraint is the mirror image. Its own revenues cover the war but not the state: essentially all civilian budget spending is financed from abroad, which makes the reliability of external partners a war-fighting variable rather than a diplomatic one. That money now arrives through an increasingly institutional architecture — the IMF's Extended Fund Facility, the EU's Ukraine Facility, and the Ukraine Support Loan drawing on profits from immobilised Russian assets — and each of those channels attaches conditions, so reform progress in Kyiv translates directly into whether the next tranche lands. Manpower is the harder ledger. Ukraine has lowered the conscription age, tightened penalties for draft evasion, and repeatedly reworked the rules that let critical enterprises exempt employees, balancing an economy that needs workers against an army that needs soldiers; mobilisation remains its most politically costly subject. Its wartime politics have been strained rather than closed: elections are suspended under martial law, and the sacking of a defence minister in July 2026 produced street protests and the largest shake-up of the military command of the war.

The two ledgers are not converging on the same timetable, and that asymmetry is the substance of the story. Russia's pressure is internal and gradual — a widening deficit, a shrinking energy windfall, and a slow erosion of stated public support, none of it yet forcing a decision. Ukraine's is external and scheduled: its financing is projected to hold through 2026 and to fall short in 2027, on a gap that donors could close and that reform delays could widen. Three questions remain genuinely open. Whether Russia orders a formal mobilisation, and what its politics look like if it does. Whether the sanctions architecture — the enacted packages, the US bill moving through Congress, and the listings Brussels says are coming — measurably changes Russia's capacity to pay rather than merely its cost of doing business. And whether Ukraine's partners fund the gap they have already been shown.

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Russia Strikes the Only Anti-War Party From the Ballot and Jails Its Deputy Chair

Aug 17, 2026 · aljazeera.com · france24.com · themoscowtimes.com

The Appeals Chamber of Russia's Supreme Court rejected Yabloko's appeal on August 17 and upheld the revocation of the party's federal candidate list, confirming its exclusion from September's State Duma elections. Yabloko is the only registered political party in Russia calling for an end to the war in Ukraine. The original ruling came a week earlier, on August 10, in a case brought by Rodina, a small pro-Kremlin nationalist party, which accused Yabloko of being backed by Western states and of seeking to undermine both the election and the country; Yabloko rejected the accusations, said it represented the views of millions of Russians, and has said it will seek a supervisory review. Hours before the appeal failed, a court in Pskov sentenced the party's deputy chair, Lev Shlosberg, to eleven years and one month in a penal colony for discrediting the armed forces and spreading false information about them — offences created by legislation passed after the February 2022 invasion, under which few groups have since criticised the war openly. In a closing statement Shlosberg called the war a catastrophe for Russia and said that when the full death toll was eventually published, "the entire nation will shudder at this list of martyrs." Police detained dozens of supporters and journalists who had come to hear the decision; the party's leader, Nikolay Rybakov, called the detentions intimidation. The removal comes weeks before a vote that Ukrainian military intelligence has publicly named as the point after which it expects Russia to order a new wave of mobilisation.

Ukraine Is Overfunded This Year and Twenty Billion Short Next

Aug 17, 2026 · kse.ua

Ukraine received $18bn in external financing in the second quarter of 2026 — more than three-quarters of everything that arrived in the first half — bringing the half-year total to $23.5bn, 13.8% above the same period of 2025, according to the Kyiv School of Economics Institute's quarterly financial-support tracker. The quarter's structural change was the Ukraine Support Loan becoming operational: a first macro-financial tranche of $3.7bn on June 25, followed by $8.5bn from its military component across June and July, with up to $52bn expected through the mechanism during 2026. Of the quarter's total, $4.3bn came as loans, $9.2bn as grants and $4.5bn as military support under the new instrument. Two older channels are closing. The Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration mechanism is roughly 98% delivered, with only a final $1.2bn Japanese tranche outstanding and not expected until 2027. The IMF paid nothing in the quarter, releasing $690m in July after its board approved the first review of the new Extended Fund Facility: Ukraine met every end-March quantitative criterion but missed the end-June target on net international reserves, and the Fund noted that reform implementation had slowed, with several benchmarks delayed or unmet. A separate $3.2bn arrived in June under the Ukraine Facility after long delays, released once methodological revisions let the European Commission count four indicators Ukraine had completed ahead of their deadlines. The institute estimates external support will total $76bn in 2026 and $61.4bn in 2027, and projects a financing gap of $19.5bn in 2027 even after $4bn of this year's overfinancing is carried forward, with a further $47.9bn potentially opening across 2028 and 2029 — projections that rest on its own assumption that full-scale war continues into the second half of 2027. It names the slowing pace of reform as the principal risk to the money actually arriving: the backlog of unmet indicators under the Ukraine Facility keeps growing while the requirements become more demanding, and a significant share of future financing is conditional on meeting them.

EU sanctions have already cost Russia dearly, depriving Russia's war machine of over EUR 1 trillion ($1.16 trillion) and for autumn I am putting forward the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war. Once adopted, they would immediately raise the total number of sanctioned Russian entities by a third.^?

— Kaja Kallas · Aug 17, 2026

Context: Unverified — the listings do not yet exist. EU services are preparing roughly 1,600 designations for member-state ambassadors in early September, with adoption targeted for October, so the "by a third" claim is checkable only on adoption. The EUR 1 trillion figure is Kallas's own assertion, not an audited total; "autumn" is read here as on or before 30 November 2026.

Russians' Stated Support for the War Falls to Its Lowest Since the Invasion

Aug 16, 2026 · levada.ru · russiapost.info

Levada Center's July survey recorded 66% of Russians supporting the actions of their armed forces in Ukraine — its lowest reading since February 2022, and twelve points below the 78% it measured in July 2025. The sharper movement is in perceived success: half of respondents said the operation was progressing successfully, down nineteen points in a year, while the share saying it was going badly rose eleven points to 28% and the share unable to say reached 22%, the highest since the question was first asked. Appetite for talks is steady rather than growing — 62% favour moving to negotiations against 28% for continuing to fight — and it does not extend to concessions: a quarter would accept concessions to Ukraine and the West to reach a settlement, while 56% support intensifying strikes. Asked who is responsible for the absence of a peace deal, 32% named the European Union, 20% Ukraine, 19% the United States and 10% Russia. Economic sentiment moved in the same direction, Levada's consumer sentiment index falling to 94 in June, below the neutral 100 for the first time since October 2022. Stated readiness to protest rose over the year, from 13% to 16% on economic grievances and from 8% to 12% on political ones, but remains below the wartime peaks recorded in July 2024. The state-aligned pollsters register the same direction: VTsIOM's measure of support for the military as an institution fell from 76% to 65% across the year, and FOM found 54% describing the mood around them as anxious against 39% calm — a reversal of its June 2025 reading. Every one of these figures carries the constraints of polling in wartime Russia. Levada's director, Denis Volkov, has published on how the political context shapes what respondents will say, arguing the larger distortion is the absence of competing public positions rather than fear of the interviewer; VTsIOM switched from telephone to in-person door-to-door interviewing in spring 2026, a change it attributes to call-screening and distrust of unknown numbers and which the political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann reads instead as a way of keeping its ratings from falling. The levels are therefore weaker evidence than the direction, which is why the year-on-year comparisons are given here. Levada's July fieldwork covered 1,612 adults in 137 localities across 50 federal subjects between July 21 and 28, conducted as in-home personal interviews and weighted to Rosstat data, with a stated margin of error of up to 3.4 points on values near 50%.

The Confirmed Russian Death Toll Passes 239,000 — and Falls Further Behind the War

Aug 14, 2026 · en.zona.media · kyivindependent.com

Mediazona, working with the BBC Russian service and a team of volunteers, has now confirmed by name 239,354 Russian military personnel killed between February 24, 2022 and August 13, 2026. The list is built only from publicly verifiable material — obituaries, relatives' social-media posts, local media, and statements by regional authorities — and its compilers stress it is not exhaustive, because not every death is publicly reported. Among those identified are 87,749 volunteers who signed contracts after the invasion began, 26,416 recruited prisoners, 19,778 mobilised men and 7,533 officers; volunteers have been the largest single category of the dead since September 2024, and the officer share of fatalities has fallen from around 10% early in the war to between 2% and 3%. A date of death is known in 221,500 cases, about 93% of the total. The more consequential finding is how far the count now lags the fighting. Of more than 77,000 deaths confirmed since the start of 2026, no more than a tenth occurred in 2026; the rest died between 2022 and 2025. Mediazona attributes the widening delay to the shape of the current war rather than to any slowdown in losses: the drone-controlled "grey zone" between the armies now runs for tens of kilometres and bodies frequently cannot be recovered from it, small-group infiltration tactics leave the dead where they fall until the front moves twelve to twenty kilometres beyond them, and in 2026 the front has barely moved at all. Without a body or a court ruling declaring a missing man dead there is no death certificate, and therefore no obituary to find. The team adds 5,000 to 6,000 unique records a month in normal conditions, and has taken to cross-checking leaked unit rosters and missing-persons appeals to close the gap. Separately, it maintains an excess-mortality estimate built with Meduza from the national Probate Registry, last updated on May 9, 2026 and covering deaths only to late December 2025. The figure is therefore a floor on Russian deaths, not a measure of them, and by construction it is least complete for the months that matter most to the question of whether Russia can replace its losses. Claimed totals are far higher and are not comparable: Ukraine's General Staff put cumulative Russian personnel losses at about 1,467,320 as of August 17 without separating the killed from the wounded, missing and captured, and on July 31 Volodymyr Zelensky put Russian casualties at roughly 1.6 million including some 700,000 killed.

Russia's Budget Swings Back to Deficit in July as the Oil Windfall Vanishes and the State Reaches for Households

Aug 12, 2026 · euromaidanpress.com · minfin.gov.ru

Russia's federal budget swung back into deficit in July 2026 after a rare June surplus — an $8.8 billion monthly shortfall despite the spring's Iran-war oil-price windfall — so that the seven-month deficit already exceeds the whole of 2025's with five months of the year still to run. Finance Ministry figures for January-July put oil-and-gas revenue down about a sixth year-on-year to 4.6 trillion roubles (about $56 billion), with spending outpacing revenue; the hole was plugged largely by value-added tax, whose receipts jumped by a quarter after Moscow raised the rate to 22% at the start of the year — a levy on ordinary Russians' spending rather than on oil prices. Much of the windfall never reached the budget because it went to subsidising the refiners whose plants Ukrainian drones keep hitting. Borrowing, the other fallback, has jammed: Russia suspended government bond auctions in July after investors balked. So the burden is shifting onto households: a draft law would let the state move about $40 billion from private pension accounts, the Communist leader has urged Putin to tap Russians' bank savings, and through the first half of 2026 Russians withdrew cash from the banking system at the fastest pace since the pandemic. Analysts quoted expect the full-year deficit to approach double last year's. This is the same fiscal squeeze the August 4 mid-year assessments described, now carried past the half-year mark by the July execution data — recorded here as the whole-system take-away, distinct from the strike-by-strike refinery damage tracked on the strike-campaign page.

Putin's plan is not particularly complicated… after the so-called elections, he plans an additional rapid mobilization of several hundred thousand Russians by the end of the year, plus the same number for the year after.^?

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy · Aug 11, 2026

Context: Unverified — a Ukrainian-intelligence warning whose internal-documents basis cannot be independently checked, and no mobilisation decree has issued. It sharpens the dated test already on this timeline: the July 24 prediction resolves on a published decree by November 30, after the September 18-20 Duma elections. Russia has ordered only one 'partial mobilisation' in the war, in September 2022, which triggered protests and an exodus.

The Senate Passes the Graham Sanctions Bill, 86-11, and the House Takes It Up

Jul 28, 2026 · rferl.org · mccaul.house.gov · npr.org · axios.com · atlanticcouncil.org · kyivindependent.com · rferl.org · time.com · blumenthal.senate.gov · senate.gov · democrats-foreignaffairs.house.gov · npr.org

The bipartisan sanctions bill Senator Lindsey Graham spent a year assembling cleared its first real hurdle on July 28, seventeen days after his death and hours after his funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The Senate voted 86-12 to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed — a procedural step carrying a three-fifths threshold, not passage. Nothing has become law, and nothing is close to it: the measure still faces final Senate passage and then the House, which does not return until after the August recess. Zelenskyy, in Washington for the funeral and for his Oval Office meeting the same day, appealed to senators behind closed doors and then watched the vote from the chamber, alongside Finnish President Alexander Stubb. Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote no; the independent Bernie Sanders and ten Democrats joined him, all of them objecting not to sanctioning Russia but to the tariff authority the bill would hand the President. Senator Maggie Hassan, who voted no, said the bill "gives the President new authority to impose tariffs, even on our allies" and that she hoped an amendment process would let her support the final version — a reminder that the twelve are not a bloc. The text itself is easy to misread, and this record had it wrong. The operative version, an amendment in the nature of a substitute dated July 27, does not cut the 500 percent tariff to 100 percent; it carries both. Section 112 directs the President, within thirty days of enactment, to raise duties on all goods imported from Russia — oil, gas, LNG, petroleum and petrochemical products, coal — to a rate of up to 500 percent ad valorem. Section 113 separately directs duties of up to 100 percent on goods from countries that purchase Russian-origin crude or gas or facilitate sanctions evasion, a rate the US Trade Representative may then move anywhere between zero and 100 percent. Section 115 lets the President waive any of it on certifying to Congress that the waiver is in "the national interests of the United States" and explaining why. The bill has also grown: its short title is now the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, after Trump posted on July 19 that "Republicans should add Iran to the Russian Sanctions Bill." Its sponsors and its critics describe the same pages incompatibly. Senator Richard Blumenthal, its principal Democratic author, says it "authorizes — but does not require" the third-country tariffs and is "carefully crafted to make sure we are not hitting our allies", naming China and India as the targets; Section 113 says the President shall impose them. Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on House Foreign Affairs, wrote on July 14 that it "is not so much a sanctions bill as it is a massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs" and that its sanctions are "entirely at Donald Trump's discretion" — the clearest sign of where the House trouble lies. The Atlantic Council's reading from the previous cycle still holds: most major Russian financial and energy entities are already designated, so the bill's material effect is to write them into statute beyond a future administration's unilateral reach. One oddity is worth recording for anyone trying to follow it. The operative text carries no Senate bill number of its own — the Senate's roll call shows the cloture motion attaching to H.R. 5334, a House-passed measure on the educator expense deduction, with the sanctions language riding on it as a substitute. Three days on, the story was delay rather than passage. NPR reported on August 1 that the measure — which it identified as the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, S.5025 — will not be finalised until after Labor Day: the House is away until after the August recess and Senate Democrats are still seeking assurances over the tariff authority, with the up-to-100 percent duty on the largest importers of Russian oil and gas (India, China and likely Turkey) the sticking point. NPR reported the White House has agreed to the bill in principle. Passage is now expected no earlier than September. (The bill number and short title NPR uses differ from the operative July 27 substitute recorded above, which carried the Iran provisions and rode on H.R. 5334 — outlets are labelling the same sanctions package inconsistently as it moves between legislative vehicles.) The Senate then passed the bill on Friday, August 7, by 86-11 — ten days after the 86-12 cloture vote — under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 (S.5025). NPR reported the measure would sanction top Russian officials and let the President impose tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas such as China and India, and extends sanctions on Iran; Darline Graham, appointed to fill her late brother's seat, spoke for it on the floor. Passage is not enactment: the bill still needs the House, which does not return until after the Labor Day recess and where some Democrats object to the new tariff authority. Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have signalled support, but it is expected to reach the President's desk no earlier than the autumn. The Senate roll-call for the August 7 vote and the congress.gov text of S.5025 were both unreachable this cycle (congress.gov returns HTTP 403), so the tally is carried on wire and institutional reporting; Al Jazeera, the Guardian, PBS and Reuters reported the same 86-11 result the same day. The House then took it up faster than the recess timeline implied: on August 10, days after the Senate vote and while the House was still in its August recess, Representatives Michael McCaul and Brian Fitzpatrick, senior Democrat Steny Hoyer and a bipartisan group introduced a House companion identical to the Senate measure — McCaul, a former House Foreign Affairs chairman, said he had promised Graham before his death to carry it in the House. The bill would target Russian banks, energy revenues, oligarchs, the shadow fleet and sanctions-evasion networks, authorize tariffs on buyers of Russian energy, and extend Iran sanctions through 2031. Hoyer, backing it, flagged a limitation that maps the coming fight: the package omits provisions in the separate Ukraine Support Act, including $8 billion in military and reconstruction aid and measures on the deportation of Ukrainian children, and the tariff authority remains the flashpoint for House debate. Introduction is not a vote; the measure still has to move through a House that does not fully return until after Labor Day.

Russia's War Economy Books a Record Half-Year Deficit as the Windfall Fails to Reach the Budget

Aug 4, 2026 · kse.ua · atlanticcouncil.org

Two mid-year assessments published within a day of each other put hard figures on the strain inside Russia's war economy — a picture distinct from the strike-by-strike damage: this is the fiscal and structural state of the whole system. The KSE Institute's biannual review (August 4) records a federal budget deficit of 5.7 trillion roubles, or 2.7% of GDP, for the first half of 2026 — larger than the deficit for all of 2025, 51% above the initial budget plan and 19% above the revised target — against an economy in stagnation, contracting 0.6% quarter-on-quarter and 0.2% year-on-year in the first quarter. The Strait-of-Hormuz price spike delivered a windfall (oil-export earnings rose from about $10.4 billion a month in January-February to roughly $20 billion in the spring), but far less of it reached the treasury than headline earnings imply: Russia spent around 620 billion roubles in April-June holding down domestic fuel prices, so a 1.6-trillion-rouble rise in base oil-and-gas revenue added only about 0.8 trillion to the budget. The Atlantic Council (August 5) frames the same squeeze from the revenue side — oil and gas earnings from January to June fell to 64% of their level two years earlier — and from the financing side: the liquid portion of the National Wealth Fund is largely depleted, VAT was raised from 20% to 22% in January, and late in the half rising borrowing costs and weak demand from domestic banks produced failed or cancelled government bond auctions. A European intelligence estimate puts problem loans at around 10%, which both institutions read as a banking-crisis warning, while the central bank keeps cutting its key rate (to 14%, a tenth straight cut) even as household inflation expectations hold at 13% against official inflation of 6%. KSE's own conclusion is that the windfall bought time without removing Russia's fundamental fiscal and structural vulnerabilities.

Let me note at the outset of our meeting that the state of the Russian economy, and of its key sectors, remains stable despite external attempts to destabilise the fuel and energy sector and certain other industries.^±

— Vladimir Putin · Jul 22, 2026

Context: Mixed. The headline aggregates Putin cited are undisputed — 0.3% GDP growth in May, a 196-billion-rouble June surplus — but the sectors he called stable are not: refineries had failed to fill over 81% of gasoline purchase requests, and KSE puts the first-half federal deficit at 5.7 trillion roubles, 2.7% of GDP, above the whole of 2025 and 51% over plan, with the liquid National Wealth Fund largely depleted. "Stable" holds on the aggregates, not on fuel or the fiscal path.

Attempts by the enemy to spout all sorts of drivel about mobilisation being prepared in the country are nothing more than a lying provocation. It is part of the propaganda ahead of the elections. They are trying, naturally, to destabilise the situation.^±

— Dmitry Medvedev · Jul 28, 2026

Context: Mixed. No mobilisation decree has been issued, so the denial's core still stands. But Medvedev's own figure — about 200,000 Defence Ministry contracts in the first half of 2026 — implies roughly 1,100 signings a day where Janis Kluge counts 800–1,000 for the first quarter, and against the 409,000 recruitment plan it leaves Russia short at a constant rate. Preparation short of a call-up is on the record: conscription moved to a year-round cycle at the end of 2025.

We have clear intelligence that Russia is preparing a new and quite significant wave of mobilization for the fall. Currently, the Russians are losing more troops on the front than they are recruiting.^?

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy · Jul 24, 2026

Context: Unverified — the horizon has not passed. "The fall" is read as on or before November 30, 2026, the most charitable concrete reading of an undated horizon, and that reading is what fixes this prediction's resolveBy. No mobilisation decree has been issued; the July 27 decree raising authorised end strength to 2,426,130 is a different instrument and does not resolve it. ISW assesses Putin would likely wait until after the mid-September Duma elections.

Zelenskyy Overhauls Military Command — but the Defence Ministry Is Still Acting

Jul 21, 2026 · understandingwar.org · theguardian.com · npr.org · understandingwar.org · en.interfax.com.ua · english.nv.ua · cfr.org · kyivindependent.com · aljazeera.com

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy overhauled Ukraine's military and defense leadership on July 21, resolving the political crisis touched off by his July 16 sacking of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and days of street protests. In a late-night address he dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi — the general who led the 2022 defense of Kyiv and the 2024 Kursk incursion — and appointed Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43, a commander of the joint forces group seen as a Fedorov ally, to run the armed forces, tasking him not with battlefield command but with reorganising the corps structure, speeding weapon and drone deliveries, strengthening air defense, and clarifying an unpopular mobilisation drive. Ukraine has no confirmed defence minister. Maj. Gen. Yevhen Khmara, the former special-operations commander whom the Guardian reported as the new minister, holds the post only in an acting capacity: the Verkhovna Rada approved a new government on July 16 without appointing either a defence or a foreign minister, and Cabinet orders No. 722 and No. 723 of July 17 made Khmara deputy minister and then acting minister, with Interfax-Ukraine reporting he took charge on July 20. No nomination has been submitted to parliament. MP Fedir Venislavskyi told NV on July 23 that Khmara cannot simply be confirmed, because the law requires a civilian minister rather than a serving officer; the two routes open are for Khmara to enter the reserve or for parliament to amend the law to allow a serving officer to hold the post in wartime. Fedorov, rather than being reinstated, was offered a senior government role unifying Ukraine's technology sector. The reshuffle marked the largest wartime shake-up of Ukraine's top brass and the resolution of its biggest domestic political crisis since 2022, though it was not immediately clear the moves would fully quiet the protests. The overhaul continued the next day: on July 22 Zelenskyy appointed General Staff deputy chief Maj. Gen. Ihor Skybyuk — commander of the Airborne Assault Forces from February 2024 to June 2025 — as chief of the General Staff, replacing Maj. Gen. Andriy Hnatov. Six days on, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that the episode is not closed: Zelenskyy has offered Fedorov escalating alternatives — most recently deputy prime minister for military innovation together with a senior national-security advisory role — and Fedorov has publicly refused anything other than the defence ministry, while Ukraine still has only an acting defence minister and Drapatyi has yet to establish his own authority. CFR reads the protests as having forced a correction rather than as having been settled, and notes there could be further changes; this entry's original claim that the reshuffle ended the crisis is corrected accordingly. The protests were about Fedorov's dismissal and his procurement-reform agenda, not about anti-corruption legislation — the NABU and SAPO independence fight was a separate episode in 2025. Drapatyi took charge of a manpower problem before he took charge of a front. His first act as Commander-in-Chief was to order an assessment of how combat units are staffed and how personnel are distributed across the force, and the Kyiv Independent's account of what he inherited explains why: over the past year standard mechanised manoeuvre brigades were receiving a few dozen new recruits a month while assault units such as the 425th Skelia Regiment — which often operated outside its corps and answered directly to Syrskyi — frequently received more than a thousand. The corps reform announced in February 2025 remains half-finished, with some corps built around strong formations working well and most others short of the assault, artillery and drone units a corps needs, so responsibility for failures still stops at brigade level. Moscow's reaction was dismissive: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on July 22 that he did not "think that this would lead to any changes on the front lines", adding that Russian forces were advancing along the entire front — a claim the ISW's own assessments contradicted at the time, having recorded four consecutive days on which neither side made a confirmed advance anywhere. Ukrainian analysts read the appointment as a partial fix rather than a resolution. Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta think tank said it "only partially removes political tensions. The Fedorov problem remains, although it may have become smaller, less acute"; Fedorov, offered a post as presidential adviser for technological reform in the military, declined it and publicly congratulated Drapatyi. Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy head of the General Staff, said the appointment leaves untouched the structural contradiction between the General Staff and the Defence Ministry that Ukraine inherited from the Soviet system, and that it "will remain [in Ukraine] until we finish the reforms according to NATO standards".

EU Adopts Its Largest Sanctions Package in Four Years

Jul 23, 2026 · consilium.europa.eu · dw.com

The Council of the European Union adopted its 21st package of restrictive measures against Russia on July 23, carrying 218 individual listings — 48 people and 170 entities — which the Council describes as the largest batch of listings in four years. The financial measures freeze the assets of 94 banks and major financial institutions and extend the EU's transaction ban to 33 further Russian credit and financial institutions, to 14 crypto-service platforms based in Georgia, Panama, the UAE, the Marshall Islands, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, and — for the first time — create the possibility of a blanket third-country ban on crypto services used by Russia. On energy, 41 more shadow-fleet tankers were listed on top of the 632 already sanctioned, bringing the total to 673, alongside three Russian refineries, a major Belarusian refinery, and a transaction ban on a Georgian refinery at Kulevi that takes effect in six months. Fifty-six listings target the military-industrial complex, 37 of them tied directly to long-range drone production, and 51 entities were added to tighter dual-use export controls — including firms in China and Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Türkiye and the UAE — over circumvention in microelectronics, CNC machine tools and semiconductor-processing equipment. The package also pauses the automatic adjustment of the Russian oil price cap until July 15, 2027, citing the market shock from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and lays the legal basis for a visa ban on Russian combatants that the Council has not yet brought into force. DW reported, citing two unnamed EU diplomats, that weeks of deadlock broke after Greece secured an exemption allowing one of its shipping firms to keep carrying Russian LNG from the Arctic; the Council's own release mentions no such exemption.