Ukraine shoots down 53 of 56 drones that Russia launches in a major attack targeting Kyiv region. Russia has sold almost one billion dollars in stolen Ukrainian grain, according to WSJ. This coming winter may become a breaking point for Ukraine as Russia adapts the tactics to strike at its energy system, according to Politico.
Ukraine shoots down 53 of 56 drones that Russia launches in major attack targeting Kyiv region
Ukrainian air defenses shot down 53 out of 56 Shahed-131/136 drones that Russian forces launched from Kursk and Yeysk between 8 p.m. on Sunday and 6 a.m. on Monday, Ukraine’s Air Force said in a statement Monday. Three more drones disappeared off radar, it added.
Kyiv region was the main target of the attack. The Air Force and other branches of the Ukrainian military deployed aircraft, surface-to-air missile troops, electronic warfare units and mobile groups to repel the strike.
Serhiy Popko, head of the Kyiv city military administration, said on Telegram that Ukrainian air defenses shot down nearly two dozen drones over Kyiv, but that there were no reports of damage or casualties. The attack was the eighth against Ukraine’s capital this month.
Air defenses were also called into action in the regions of Cherkasy, Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, Mykolayiv, Poltava, Sumy, Vinnytsya, and Zaporizhzhia.
The drone strike injured one person and damaged five homes in Kyiv region, the regional military administration said. There was no damage to critical infrastructure in the region surrounding the capital, the regional authorities said.
Russia has sold almost one billion dollars in stolen Ukrainian grain, according to WSJ
Beyond the bombs and gunfire of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a parallel economic war is raging. Its front line is on occupied Ukrainian farmlands, from which Russia and its partners have sold almost $1 billion in stolen grain on a burgeoning black market, according to The Wall Street Journal. The paragraphs below are quoted from the article.
The business involves a wide network of clients who benefit from Moscow’s wartime patronage system, including a Russian shipyard equipping the invasion, a company affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a Crimean businessman [Mikhail Ganaga] who trades with Syria and Israel. Another company sells through the United Arab Emirates.
The exact commercial value of Russia’s pilferage is difficult to determine amid the war’s chaos and Moscow’s subterfuge, but it is large. Since 2022, the operation has directly shipped at least 4 million tons of grain and other produce from occupied Ukraine to international markets, generating revenue of $800 million, said Markiyan Dmytrasevych, Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister.
It’s like the war is feeding itself,” said Pascal Turlan, legal director at rights organization Project Expedite Justice, which is helping Ukrainian prosecutors investigate grain theft. “The illicit trade brings revenue to a Kremlin-sponsored patronage system, which in turn helps the conflict and the occupation to continue.”
Much more has been exported by land or small ships, according to Ukrainian nonprofit organization Texty, which estimates the total value of grain taken by Russia in occupied territories could be as high as $6.4 billion.
The patronage takes many forms. Three bulk vessels that export large volumes of illicit grain are owned through a chain of corporate entities by Russia’s state-run United Shipbuilding Corp., which also produced warships used to shell Ukrainian cities, according to the U.S. government.
A Russian company that exclusively sold grain from the occupied region of Zaporizhzhia donated 10 million rubles, or $111,000, to a battalion fighting in the province, according to a document obtained by KibOrg News, a Ukrainian project that documents Russian economic-looting activities in the occupied territories.
Russian authorities say that in the first half of this year they sent 15 ships carrying 81,000 tons of wheat to Turkey from Mariupol, another city conquered during the war. Turkey bans ships from occupied Ukrainian terminals and cooperates with Kyiv to block illicit trade, the country’s foreign-affairs officials said.
Separately, Ukrainian prosecutor Ihor Ponochovniy in June started tracking a Turkish-owned ship, the Usko MFU, which he suspected had carried stolen grain last year from the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
Ukraine’s border force in June told Ponochovniy the Usko MFU had entered Ukrainian waters. The prosecutor, who works closely with the Security Service of Ukraine, issued a search warrant and police boarded it. Onboard they found records showing it had left Sevastopol last November for Turkey carrying 2,100 tons of crushed sunflower seeds and brown wheat potentially worth half a million dollars.
Investigators said they found onboard a message from the ship’s managers to the captain instructing him to conceal the cargo’s Crimean origin. Ukraine’s border force in July seized the Usko MFU.
Ukraine is applying diplomatic pressure on importing countries, with some success. In the past two years, Egypt, Israel and Lebanon either canceled loadings or stopped buying grain cargoes after Ukrainian diplomats told them they had departed from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, according to Ukrainian officials.
Tehran buys barley in Crimea for $140 a ton, a 34% discount from market prices, said Kateryna Yaresko, an analyst at SeaKrime, a nonprofit project in Kyiv that tracks illegal shipments from Crimea and provides information to the Ukrainian authorities.
Traders in Russian-occupied territories are building ties with Tehran’s hard-line circles. Yemen is a new market for Crimean exports.
Coming winter may become breaking point for Ukraine as Russia adapts tactics to strike at its energy system, according to Politico
This coming winter may prove to be a breaking point for Ukraine in the energy war as the Russians are aiming to hit the key substations feeding high voltage electricity to Ukraine’s still functioning nuclear power plants, Jamie Dettmer, opinion editor at Politico Europe said in a piece on Sunday.
The risk of Ukraine losing the war this winter has pushed Washington and London to reconsider how Kyiv uses Western-supplied long-range missiles, but the U.S. remains fearful of escalation, the article reads.
[Ukraine’s energy officials] fear this coming winter may prove to be a breaking point for Ukraine in the energy war. And that’s largely because Russian commanders are adapting their airstrike tactics, having learned from their previous failed bombing campaign to collapse the country’s energy system — and the recent shipments of Iran’s Fath-360 close-range ballistic missiles to Russia will help them do so.Ukrainian officials expect Russia will use these missiles, which have a range limit of 120 kilometers, to complement their glide bombs in targeting logistics and communications hubs and ammunition depots in the rear of Ukraine’s front lines. That, in turn, will free Russia up to concentrate its own longer-range missiles on civilian infrastructure — particularly the energy system in a bid to break it.