This week, fighting continued to rage all along the front lines. Russia continued to pound Ukrainian cities and towns deep in the rear with missiles and drones. Russia has failed to capture any big cities during its offensive in spring and summer 2025. The campaign has yielded no major results, Ukraine’s General Staff said. About 2,000 North Korean troops have been killed fighting for Russia, South Korean lawmakers said on Tuesday, citing the country’s intelligence agency.
In August, Russia launched less drones at Ukraine, but hit more targets, according to analysis by Ukrainian news outlet Novynarnya. Russia carried out a mass missile and drone attack on Ukraine overnight into Wednesday, killing one person in the region of Khmelnytskyi and causing destruction across the country. Ukraine has started using AI-powered drone swarms to attack Russian positions, the WSJ said.
Ukraine continues to strike targets deep inside Russia, using its own weapons. On Saturday, it struck patrol boats and an outpost for Russia’s FSB security service near Armyansk, in Crimea, with Flamingo missiles, Ukrainian news site Militarnyi said Sunday.
The leaders from the Coalition of the Willing met in Paris on Thursday. Twenty-six nations have pledged to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, including an international force on land, sea and in the air, French President Emmanuel Macron said after the summit. U.S. contributions to the guarantees would be finalized in the coming days, he added.
The UK used frozen Russian assets to fund more than £1 billion worth of military support for Ukraine, British Defence Secretary, John Healey, announced during a visit to Kyiv on Wednesday. Ukraine’s territorial concessions will open the way for Putin to attack Europe, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi told French magazine Le Point in an interview published on Wednesday.
Negotiations stalling as Russia prepares to further attack Ukraine, Bloomberg News says.
European leaders are increasingly concerned that Russia will mount a new offensive on Ukraine as they sit down with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss security guarantees for his country, Bloomberg News said on Thursday. The paragraphs below are quoted from the article.
At their security council meeting in Toulon last week, German and French officials discussed the Russian troops massing outside Pokrovsk, a Ukrainian-held stronghold in the eastern Donetsk region, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named.
Zelenskiy said on Friday that Russia had relocated 100,000 soldiers to the frontline outside the city, which the Kremlin’s forces have tried to encircle and seize without success for more than a year.
Capturing Pokrovsk would open the way to a Russian assault on the much larger cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk as Moscow seeks control over the entire Donetsk region.
The French want the gathering to convey a message that Europe has done its part to support Ukraine and it’s up to the US president to deliver on his threat to increase pressure on the Kremlin.
Still, a senior European diplomat said the momentum seen early last month on diplomatic efforts has tapered, with negotiations stalling as Russia prepares to further attack Ukrainian territory.
In the absence of any sign that Russia plans to end its war, Zelenskiy and his foreign backers are working on bolstering the Ukrainian army — a drive which Chancellor Friedrich Merz described as “the most important security guarantee we can give.”
The Russian military command reportedly redeployed relatively “elite” naval infantry and airborne (VDV) forces to Donetsk Oblast from northern Sumy Oblast and the Kherson direction, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in an update on September 1. The reported redeployments suggest that the Russian Fall 2025 offensive will focus on efforts to seize the remainder of Donetsk Oblast, particularly in the Dobropillya, Pokrovsk, and Kostyantynivka areas, ISW added.
