The Home Fronts

Polling in Russia’s first wartime Duma election opened on September 18 and closes on the 20th, with first partial results due from 1800 GMT. The Central Election Commission put turnout near 30 per cent after day one. In August the Supreme Court took Yabloko — the only registered party that had criticised the war — off the party-list ballot; debates ran in half-empty studios. The ballot runs for the first time in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where the occupying authorities claim more than 3.5 million voters and where voting began in late August. Nine Ukrainian rights groups urged residents to stay away; Donbas SOS says commission members are going house to house escorted by troops and that social payments are being made conditional on taking part. Brussels says it will never recognise the result, and notes no OSCE observers were invited. What follows the vote is the open question. Requests for emigration help are up nearly eightfold since the summer, tens of thousands of mobilisation notices have gone out, and an electronic summons register now triggers an automatic exit ban. Putin calls talk of a call-up ‘utter nonsense’ — the seventeenth such denial since June.

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Today5

NewSep 19, 2026high

Leaving Before the Polls Close

Requests for emergency emigration help from Russia have risen nearly eightfold since the start of summer, according to the anti-war project Ark, whose own tally shows daily requests up from about 70 to about 120 since July. Searches for ‘how to leave’ and ‘mobilisation’ reached their highest level since early 2023 over the summer and the first ten days of September. Tens of thousands have received mobilisation notices, and an electronic summons register now imposes an automatic exit ban the moment a notice is issued. In early September a 24-year-old who finished his service in 2024 was stopped at Krasnodar and served with one — the first such case reported at that crossing. None of this is a mobilisation decision. It is the machinery for one, and the behaviour of people who expect it.

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euronews.comtheguardian.com

NewSep 18, 2026high

Russia Votes for the First Time Since the War Began

Polling in Russia’s first wartime State Duma election opened on September 18 and runs to September 20 across eleven time zones, with 111 million eligible voters. The Central Election Commission put turnout at about 30 per cent, including online voting, by late on the first day; first partial results were expected from 1800 GMT on Sunday. United Russia is expected to extend a hold on parliament it has had for 23 years. In August the Supreme Court removed Yabloko — the only registered party to have criticised the war — from the party-list ballot, leaving it a few dozen candidates in single-seat races. Televised debates ran in half-empty studios.

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apnews.comreuters.comtheguardian.com

NewSep 18, 2026high

The Ballot Reaches the Occupied Regions, Escorted

For the first time the Duma election includes the four Ukrainian regions Russia annexed in 2022 and does not fully control — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — which the occupying authorities say hold more than 3.5 million voters, alongside Crimea. Voting there and in some Russian border districts began around the end of August, with officials citing security. Nine Ukrainian human rights groups urged residents to stay away. Violeta Artemchuk of Donbas SOS said commission members were going house to house escorted by troops, and that pensions and social payments were being made conditional on taking part. The European Commission said the EU will never recognise the vote or its result, and noted that Russia invited no OSCE observers.

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npr.orgapnews.com

Sep 4, 2026high

Ukraine Puts a Number on Next Year's Hole, and Says the Squeeze Has Already Started

Ukraine is drafting its 2027 budget around an uncovered external financing gap of $32.6 billion, finance minister Sergii Marchenko said on September 4, against an annual external need that remains about $50 billion; he said the IMF mission just finished in Kyiv reached broadly the same assessment. That is well above the $19.5 billion the Kyiv School of Economics Institute projected in August, which assumed more incoming support than Kyiv now counts on. Marchenko also pressed a Ukrainian plan to move custody of roughly $300 billion of immobilised Russian assets out of Belgian jurisdiction to the European Union, so legal exposure to Russian claims would fall on all 27 member states rather than on Belgium and Euroclear; a group led by Sweden revived the idea the previous week, ahead of a September meeting of euro-area finance ministers. The EU shelved an earlier version last December, agreeing a €90 billion jointly financed loan instead.

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kmu.gov.uaeuronews.comukrinform.net

Aug 28, 2026high

This Time They Are Leaving Before the Decree

Russians of call-up age have begun leaving the country in advance of any mobilisation announcement — the reverse of 2022, when departures followed the decree. Russia's own Federal Customs Service data, cited by The Moscow Times, show more than 19,000 people a day crossing into Georgia at Verkhny Lars on 15 and 16 August and more than 20,000 on 18 August; Politico put the week's total at about 113,000. The rights group School of the Conscript reports a rise in requests for help, mostly from reservists, and says authorities have been gathering reservists' data through employers and tracing relatives' addresses, with men summoned to enlistment offices and issued orders naming the unit they would report to. Its director Alexey Tabalov describes the groundwork for a call-up that need never be declared: "It's enough to send, say, 10 buses to a particular metallurgical plant and pick up a predetermined number of specific people straight from their workplaces."

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english.nv.ua

Earlier this month15

NewSep 19, 2026

Talk of a new Russian mobilisation is ‘utter nonsense’.^?

— Vladimir Putin

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euronews.comtheguardian.com

Checked

Independent Russian media count 17 official denials of an imminent draft since the summer. Not tagged as a prediction: the phrase names no date and no bounded observable. What will score it is the accumulating record of denials against any eventual call-up, and the election closes on September 20.

Sep 5, 2026

Less Energy Money In, More Fuel Money Out, and the Price Held Until the Vote

Russia's federal oil-and-gas revenue was 424 billion roubles in August on the Finance Ministry's own monthly series — the weakest month of 2026 bar January, about 16 percent below August 2025, with seaborne petroleum-product export earnings down 45 percent from July. The budget is simultaneously paying out more: damper payments, which compensate refiners for the gap between export and domestic prices, rose from 113 billion roubles in July to 197 billion in August, partly because importers of gasoline now qualify, so the state is subsidising fuel bought abroad down to Russian prices. The price itself is held before the September 18-20 vote: deputy prime minister Alexander Novak ordered tighter controls at independent filling stations on August 31, sub-Euro-5 sales were legalised, and retail price data restricted.

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minfin.gov.ruenglish.nv.ua

Sep 4, 2026

We haven't had a situation like this since 2022; we really suffered from the shortage of liquidity. Right now, we are getting far too near to the same scenario we had in 2022.^?

— Sergii Marchenko

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euronews.comkmu.gov.ua

Checked

Unverified — the claim is about a squeeze now beginning. Marchenko said Ukraine already sees liquidity issues and may postpone payments unrelated to the war, naming shelter and infrastructure construction, while external creditors would still be paid. Whether non-military payments are actually deferred this winter is what settles it.

Sep 3, 2026

There is no scenario today that would require mobilization. This is an information attack by the enemy ahead of the State Duma elections in an attempt to influence the result. This is simply a planned information operation.^?

— Vladimir Putin

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interfax.rukyivpost.comthemoscowtimes.commeduza.iotheguardian.com

Checked

Unverified — the test comes after the 18–20 September Duma elections, and no decree has issued. Western officials independently estimate Russia is losing about 6,000 more men a month than it recruits, and Meduza notes near-identical Kremlin denials preceded the September 2022 mobilisation. Hedged to the present, it is not scored as a dated forecast.

Sep 3, 2026

The Machinery for a Call-Up Keeps Being Built; the Recruiters Are Still Making Their Numbers

Two readings of Russia's manpower position now sit side by side. The legal machinery a call-up would run on keeps being built: on July 22 the Duma widened which people with criminal convictions may sign military contracts during mobilisation, martial law or wartime, and on August 20 the government tabled a bill fining companies up to 1 million roubles, or suspending them 90 days, for defying a governor or an operational headquarters on mobilisation matters. Against that, Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, reading regional budget data, counts about 93,000 contracts signed in the second quarter — roughly a thousand a day, stabilising after a decline since late 2024, at an average regional cost up 30 percent in a year to 1.8-1.9 million roubles. He reads that as easing the pressure for a call-up; CEPA, surveying the preparations on September 3, calls his a minority view. Searches for “exemption from mobilisation” on Yandex reached 97,380 in July, the second-highest since September 2022.

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interfax.ruinterfax.rusubstack.comcepa.org

Sep 2, 2026

Russia's Three Ways to Fund the War Are Tightening at Once

KSE Institute's August Russia Chartbook shows the state's main routes for covering its budget gap narrowing together. Oil export earnings fell to $13.8 billion in July from $15.8 billion in June. The January–July deficit reached 6.5 trillion roubles — up about 600 billion in July alone and 34 percent above the finance ministry's revised full-year target. Government bond issuance was the lowest since September 2022, with auctions suspended until at least September. The National Wealth Fund's non-liquid assets fell by around 500 billion roubles in a month as Sberbank shares dropped, and 56 of 89 regions ran deficits in the first half.

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kse.uathemoscowtimes.com

Aug 29, 2026

The Export Ban Gets Another Month, and Refining Hits a Twenty-Year Low

The Russian Cabinet of Ministers extended its export ban on diesel, marine fuel and gas oils for direct producers from 31 August to 30 September; a general fuel export ban already runs to 31 January 2027. EA Analytics puts August refining at an average 3.8 million barrels a day against the 5.3-5.5 million normally needed for summer and harvest demand, the lowest in over two decades. Petrol production and domestic deliveries fell nearly 20 percent year-on-year over the first three weeks of August, diesel by more than 23. Rosneft's Igor Sechin said the same week that the company is meeting domestic demand.

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kyivpost.comunderstandingwar.org

Aug 28, 2026

Fedorov Takes His Corruption Charge Public, Then Leaves to Advise Italy

Mykhailo Fedorov, the drone-modernising defence minister whose July sacking set off weeks of street protests, turned on the government in late August and then stepped outside it. In interviews with the BBC and others he alleged that corruption involving hundreds of officials is holding back Ukraine's war effort, and said a newly announced money-laundering investigation meant Zelenskyy should be asked what he knew — though he had never personally seen the president act corruptly. He renewed his call for wartime elections, rejected across the political spectrum. On 28 August he accepted an unpaid role advising Italy's defence minister, Guido Crosetto; Zelenskyy said he had offered Fedorov four government posts, all refused.

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pravda.com.uathehill.combbc.com

Aug 27, 2026

The Russian General Staff has prepared a scenario for the additional mobilisation of 600,000 people across 2026 and 2027 — 300,000 in each year — chiefly to bring units fighting Ukraine up to strength; Putin will most likely decide after the 18–20 September State Duma elections.^?

— Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine's Ministry of Defence (HUR)

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pravda.com.ua

Checked

A belligerent's intelligence services briefing on the other side's internal planning, recorded as their claim. The supporting figures they gave — 240,000 Russian personnel lost January–July against 232,000 contract recruits, convict-recruitment categories widened, 15–60 days' training — are part of the claim, not corroboration of it.

Aug 26, 2026

Russia Has Already Committed Four-Fifths of Its Year's State Contracts

State contracting, defence orders included, ran about 40 percent above last year in the first seven months, reaching 8.44 trillion roubles — 80 percent of the full-year plan with five months to go. That front-loading widened the January-to-July deficit by a further 724 billion roubles in July, to 6.45 trillion or 2.8 percent of GDP. Oil-and-gas revenue is down 16.8 percent at 4.6 trillion; VAT, raised to 22 percent in January, is up 25 percent at 9.8 trillion. Sberbank now expects 7 trillion for the year — revised down from 7.5, still double the government's plan.

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en.thebell.iominfin.gov.ru

Aug 26, 2026

The Duma Committee That Handles the West May Change Party, Not Line

Kremlin and State Duma sources told Vedomosti that United Russia's deputy speaker Pyotr Tolstoy is the front-runner to take the International Affairs Committee from the LDPR's Leonid Slutsky after September's elections. Neither man's position on the war would change with the chair — both have pushed ultranationalist lines and dismissed negotiations — which is what makes the swap legible: the point is the party, not the policy. ISW reads it alongside Putin's congress speech four days earlier, consolidating the committees the Kremlin uses to amplify its foreign policy. The appointment has not been made.

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understandingwar.org

Aug 26, 2026

The Crowds Stopped Coming After Fedorov Asked for Elections

Ukrainians marched for over a month to get Mykhailo Fedorov reinstated as defence minister. Then, on 18 August, he posted a video calling for wartime elections and alleging corruption around Zelensky — and the protests thinned, with his own supporters calling it a misstep. The ground is unfavourable: a March poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found only 12 percent of Ukrainians want elections before the fighting stops, Zelensky called wartime elections "a tsunami that would split Ukraine apart", and Valery Zaluzhny says the subject is premature while martial law stands. Zelensky says he offered Fedorov four roles after replacing the ministry's leadership and Fedorov refused all of them, wanting only his old job.

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meduza.io

Aug 24, 2026high

Ukraine's Defence Budget Is €23 Billion Short, and Part of the Reason Is Kyiv's Own

Ukraine faces a €23 billion hole in this year's defence budget — the same gap Zelensky put at $27 billion, of which $8–10 billion is needed in advance to cover the start of 2027 and nearly $20 billion for soldiers' pay and payments to the families of the killed. Two causes. The defence ministry decided early in the year to spend funds allocated for the second half during the first, buying fibre-optic and mid-range strike drones and interceptors; and the EU's €90 billion loan was delayed by Hungarian objections. The gap sits on top of the €30 billion Europe has already pledged this year under that loan. The European Commission approved a further €6.1 billion in defence procurement on August 24, for air-defence missiles, ammunition and radars — far short of the requirement.

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politico.euaa.com.tr

Aug 17, 2026high

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

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. Verstka, citing two people familiar with a closed poll commissioned by one of the parliamentary parties, reported that Yabloko's rating had climbed from the level of statistical error to 9.3% in the week before the original ruling; the head of a large NGO that works with the Kremlin told the same outlet the final count would never have come close to that. 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.

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aljazeera.comfrance24.comthemoscowtimes.comverstka.media

Jul 28, 2026high

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

Nothing has become law. The Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on August 7 by 86-11, ten days after voting 86-12 to take it up and weeks after Graham's death; Zelenskyy lobbied senators in person before the first vote. The operative text carries two tariff powers, not one. Section 112 directs duties of up to 500 percent on Russian goods within thirty days of enactment; Section 113 directs duties of up to 100 percent on countries that buy Russian crude or gas or help evade sanctions; Section 115 lets the President waive any of it on certifying a national interest. That authority, not the sanctions, is the fight. Its principal Democratic author Richard Blumenthal says it “authorizes — but does not require” the third-country tariffs; Gregory Meeks, ranking Democrat on House Foreign Affairs, calls it “a massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs.” A bipartisan House companion was introduced on August 10, but leaders left the bill off the September floor schedule, and on September 3 Speaker Mike Johnson said he doubted it could reach a vote before the November 3 midterms, citing the few working days scheduled, opposition from senior Democrats on the Foreign Affairs and Ways and Means committees, and pockets of Republican concern; Foreign Affairs chair Brian Mast said the bill's effect on petrol prices was being weighed. Most major Russian financial and energy entities are already designated, so the bill's material effect would be to write them into statute beyond a future administration's unilateral reach.

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politico.comrferl.orgmccaul.house.govnpr.orgaxios.comatlanticcouncil.orgkyivindependent.comrferl.orgtime.comblumenthal.senate.govsenate.govdemocrats-foreignaffairs.house.govnpr.orgpravda.com.ua

This quarter24

Aug 24, 2026

Putin Takes Power to Seize Infrastructure That Fails to Defend Itself

Presidential Decree No. 604 of 24 August lets the government take a site into temporary management when an owner's protection against drone attack is judged ineffective, or when it fails to repair damage in time. It reaches beyond the sites to an operator's property in Russia, its securities, its corporate stakes and its property rights, and applies to foreign owners as well as Russian. Rosimushchestvo manages by default; costs come from the seized property's income. Fuel and energy including nuclear, industry, communications, transport and utilities are covered. It forces owners to carry air-defence and repair costs the state is not.

Aug 23, 2026

The Kremlin is preparing to mobilise around 300,000 servicemembers after the September 18–20 State Duma elections, in part to reinforce Russian positions in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.^?

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Aug 22, 2026

The Bonuses Stopped Working, and Ukraine Starts Talking About the Draft Age

Financial incentives for signing military contracts have failed to raise recruitment significantly, the secretary of Ukraine's parliamentary defence committee, Roman Kostenko, said on August 22, and changes to the mobilisation system are being prepared — including to the draft age. He would not say whether it would rise or fall, referring details to the Defence Ministry and General Staff. He ruled out an exclusively voluntary system, denied that exemptions for parents of three or more children are under review, and said service for women stays voluntary. Men aged 25 to 60 are currently subject to conscription under martial law.

Aug 22, 2026

Putin Makes United Russia the War Party Three Weeks Before the Vote

At United Russia's 23rd Congress on 22 August, Putin told delegates that “the duty of the party, the duty of United Russia is to do everything for victory,” and pointed to the war veterans on its candidate list: “our heroes honourably fought for Russia and, I am sure, will work honourably in its parliament.” Voting on 18-20 September will run “from the Far East to Novorossiya and Donbass” and among troops at the front, he said, closing with “Victory will be ours!” A ruling party campaigning on the war, in the chamber that votes the budget paying for it.

Aug 21, 2026

Complaining About the Petrol Is Now an Offence

Russian police have begun fining and detaining people who complain publicly about the fuel shortage. In Volgograd five residents were detained and fined after filming a video appeal to the head of the Investigative Committee, asking why local officials held priority fuel cards while public pumps sat dry; the recording was classified as an unauthorised public gathering, and a lawyer, Alexei Sevastyanov, was given five days' detention for allegedly resisting police. In Perm a resident was fined 10,000 roubles for mentioning a planned protest in a Telegram channel with 44 subscribers. Katia Glod of the New Eurasia Strategies Centre says there is "no petrol whatsoever" in 80 regions, with states of emergency in Crimea and parts of the Urals.

Aug 21, 2026

Russia could ask North Korea to provide up to 50,000 additional troops during a potential September meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.^?

— Vadym Skibitskyi

Aug 18, 2026

Ukraine's Ousted Defence Minister Breaks a Wartime Taboo and Demands Elections

In a video address on August 18, Mykhailo Fedorov — the tech-minded defence minister Zelensky dismissed in July after six months — called for wartime presidential elections, the first such demand by a major Ukrainian figure since the 2022 invasion and the biggest internal challenge to the president to date. "Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia," he said, while conceding a "legal, safe and realistic mechanism" would be needed; Ukrainian law bars elections under martial law. His call lands amid a rift with armed-forces chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, street protests, corruption probes and sliding poll numbers. Most experts judge a credible wartime vote near-impossible, and the Kremlin has long used the election ban to argue Zelensky is illegitimate.

Aug 17, 2026

Ukraine Is Overfunded This Year and Twenty Billion Short Next

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.

Aug 17, 2026

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

Russia's Second-Largest Bank Fires Its Chief Economist After He Said the War Can't Be Won

VEB.RF, Russia's state development bank, dismissed chief economist Andrei Klepach — in the post since 2014 — days after Russian media surfaced a May address in which he broke with the official line. Klepach said that in a prolonged war of attrition "we will not win this competition" with Ukraine, that Russia was falling behind China and the United States, and that mounting strain would bring a "social crisis" erupting "when no one particularly expects it". The remarks contradicted Vladimir Putin's insistence the economy is weathering the war, and The Bell reported the firing was ordered from the Kremlin. It landed the same week Rosstat reported second-quarter GDP up 1.3% year on year — a rebound analysts tie to extra working days and higher military spending, not recovery.

Aug 16, 2026

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

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. Levada's companion release from the same July fieldwork records 57% describing the political situation in Russia as tense, up ten points since May 2025, and 13% as critical or explosive, up eight points since September 2025, while the share calling it calm fell fourteen points to 19%; Levada notes that comparable readings were last seen in September 2022, when the first mobilisation was announced. Among those answering negatively, 45% cite the war itself, 21% drone strikes on Russian territory, 9% economic crisis and prices, and 7% the petrol shortage. 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%.

Aug 14, 2026

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

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.

Aug 13, 2026

Ukraine Tightens the Rules That Keep Skilled Workers Out of the Army

From September 1, Ukraine tightens the rules that let critically important enterprises shield employees from mobilisation. Under Cabinet Resolution No. 692, the monthly salary a reserved worker must earn rises from 2.5 to three minimum wages — UAH 25,941 gross — with the lower 2.5-wage threshold kept only for firms operating in combat zones or occupied territory. Workers who already hold a deferment on other grounds, or who work part-time at a second critical enterprise, will now count toward a company's reservation quota at just one employer. The government casts the reform as closing avenues for manipulation and rebalancing the economy's need for workers against the army's need for soldiers.

Aug 12, 2026

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

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.

Aug 11, 2026

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 7, 2026

Ukrainians' Willingness to Keep Fighting Rises to Its Highest of the War

Sixty-one percent of Ukrainians say they will endure the war for as long as necessary, up from 48 percent in April, in a KIIS survey fielded 20 July to 3 August and published on the 7th. In Kyiv, under intensified ballistic strikes, the share rose to 69 percent from 61. Few expect a quick end: 21 percent think the war finishes by December, 45 percent not before the second half of 2027. The survey reached 974 respondents in government-controlled territory only — not the occupied areas, not refugees abroad — with a 4.1 percent margin of error.

Aug 4, 2026

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

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.

Jul 28, 2026

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 24, 2026

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 23, 2026

EU Adopts Its Largest Sanctions Package in Four Years

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.

Jul 22, 2026

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 21, 2026

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

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".

Jul 16, 2026

Zelenskyy Dismisses Defense Minister Fedorov

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov amidst reported friction with the military command, triggering days of mass street protests demanding his reinstatement. By July 20 the crisis had widened: demonstrators and Ukrainian media pointed to the possible removal of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi — a step the armed forces' top leadership and presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn publicly denied — as Zelenskyy held behind-the-scenes talks to defuse the standoff and the European Commission was pressed to respond. The standoff was resolved on July 21 with a top-brass overhaul (see the July 21 entry): Zelenskyy removed Syrskyi and appointed Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi as Commander-in-Chief, named a new defense minister, and offered Fedorov a senior government technology role rather than his old post.

Jul 16, 2026

I'm just showing that if the sides can't resolve an issue, I will have to resolve it.^✓

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy

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