This week, battles continued to rage along the front lines. Russia carried out intense drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities and towns deep in the rear. Russia has stepped up its rhetoric of nuclear threats in light of its joint nuclear drills with Belarus that began mid-week.
Ukraine continues a campaign of strikes deep into Russia. It launched a major drone attack on Moscow and the surrounding region overnight on Sunday. Ukraine’s defense forces struck the Lukoil refinery in Kstovo in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region on Monday. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian military struck an oil pumping station in the Yaroslavl region. A Ukrainian drone strike ignited a fire at the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region on Thursday.
Ukraine has created its first glide bomb that was successfully tested and is now ready for combat, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Tuesday. Ukrainian forces continue to recapture territories from Russia. This week, they regained ground in some areas of Stepnohirsk in the Zaporizhzhia direction.
Russia struck the center of Pryluky in Chernihiv region with a ballistic missile on Tuesday morning, killing four people and injuring at least 29 others. The Epicenter construction mall and an industrial site sustained damage as a result of the attack. One person was killed and 11 others wounded in a Russian drone strike on the city of Konotop in Sumy region overnight on Wednesday. Two people were killed and six others wounded in a Russian attack on Dnipro overnight on Wednesday. At least 15,850 civilians, including 791 children have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, a UN official said Tuesday, citing the data by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced the start of three-day joint nuclear drills with Belarus on Tuesday. Ukraine’s Security Service said on Thursday it was implementing enhanced security measures with other branches of the Ukrainian military in the country’s five northern regions that border on Russia and Belarus.
Ukraine regains tactical initiative along the frontline, inflicts increasing casualties on Russia, ISW says.
Ukrainian forces appear to be regaining the tactical initiative in different sectors of the frontline in Ukraine following a series of counterattacks and systematic Ukrainian effort to reduce Russian combat power, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in an update on Wednesday. The paragraphs below are quoted from the report.
Ukrainian forces have conducted a series of counterattacks in different areas across the theater in recent months, having made their most significant gains on the battlefield since Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast in August 2024. Ukrainian counterattacks recaptured much of Kupyansk starting in November 2025, liberated over 400 square kilometers in southern Ukraine in winter and spring 2026, and most recently liberated several settlements in western Zaporizhia Oblast since late April 2026.
Ukrainian counterattacks in southern Ukraine have created cascading operational and strategic effects against Russia’s ongoing Spring-Summer 2026 offensive against the Fortress Belt, which has forced Russia to choose between defending against Ukrainian counterattacks or allocating manpower and resources to priority sectors.
