Timofey Milovanov

Sept 1, 2026

Imperfect translation:

Maksym drives along the highway between Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka. A Russian FPV drone catches up with him from behind. It catches on to an anti-drone net and explodes. Maksym doesn’t stop and keeps driving. There are more than 30 burned-out cars along the road.

This is what the road to Druzhkivka looks like today, writes The Times.

People have almost disappeared from the streets. Most are hiding underground. Before the full-scale war, 54,000 people lived here. Now there are about 3,300 left. The city lives without water, electricity and gas. Ambulances, firefighters and police are no longer working.

Evacuation teams can no longer enter some areas because of the Russian drones. Some leave on foot.

On the door of one house, someone wrote: “Help, call an evacuation. Apartment 86. I can’t walk. Please.”

The rubble of buildings lies on the streets. In between, people bury their dead in shallow graves — near high-rise buildings and just on the side of the road. No one knows the exact number of civilian deaths.

Instead of people, robots are increasingly driving around the city. They bring ammunition, water, food, and medicine to the military. FPVs are constantly circling in the sky.

The Russians are launching large “mother drones.” They fly closer to the target and release smaller FPV strikes. Other drones drop mines or hide and are activated by the sound of the car. At night, FPVs with thermal imaging find people and equipment by their heat trace.

As The Times journalists were leaving the city, two Russian FPVs attacked their car in quick succession. One exploded nearby, cutting the side of the car with debris and blowing out the windows.

They managed to leave. But thousands of people in Druzhkivka still live there.

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Warning : horrific content :

Natalia Vlasova was detained by the Russians in Donetsk in 2019. At “Isolation,” they stripped her, tied her with duct tape, doused her with water, and electrocuted her. If she screamed too loudly, they increased the current.

They filled her teeth with a metal filling, twisted her nipples, and tried to insert a bottle into her vagina. The doctor brought her to, and she came to, to regain consciousness with a syringe.

Natalia asked to be shot. They replied that she had to suffer.

After one of the tortures, Natalia was locked in a narrow cell where she could only stand with her hands raised.

Another time, they brought her to the shower and said that 15 soldiers were currently raping her. They noticed that she was menstruating and changed their minds.

The Russians have held her in prisons for over seven years. Now she is in a colony in Siberia. They gave her 18 years.

The New Yorker writes about a Ukrainian woman from a cell in Rostov. Before that, many of them were tortured by the Russians in Donetsk.

The Russian doctor “Idar” Lilia Prutyan was taken prisoner near Petrivskoye. On the same day, one of the Russian soldiers raped her.

Three people approached Lilia. One said, “You must understand. We were in the field for three months.” Lilia cried and asked that this be one of them.

In Donetsk, the cooks of “Azov” were also imprisoned. The Russians tried them as members of a “terrorist organization.”
After the occupation of Mariupol, Marina Tekin came to the Russian filtration center on her own. They promised to let her go home. And then they threatened to cut off her fingers if she didn’t confess that she was a fascist.

After several prisons, Marina was brought to a prison in Donetsk. She and other women from “Azov” were forced to crawl on the concrete floor to the basement. There were already more than ten Ukrainian women there. All of them had six beds and several dirty mattresses.

The guards forced the women to sing the Russian anthem. For a mistake, they hit them with rubber sticks with metal inside.

The guards walked down the corridor every day and randomly beat the prisoners. One morning, Marina heard from the guard: “I, damn it, have had enough of beating them.”

In the neighboring cell, the Russians beat a Ukrainian soldier. He groaned in pain, and the cellmates asked the doctor. “Knock when he dies,” he replied. The next day, they took the body out of the cell.

There was no water or sink in the basement. Instead of a toilet, there was a drain in the floor. The women left a little liquid from the borscht to wash themselves.

The pads were made from their T-shirts. They shared the soap among themselves. They hardly took a shower. After a week, many of their hands and feet rotted.

The cook of “Azov” Irina Mogitich says that they rotted alive. When she asked the doctor, the nurse replied: “Doctors are not provided for in the concentration camp.”

One of the guards strangled the women with a bag on their heads and threatened to shoot them. During interrogations, the guards beat them for any movement on the chair.
26-year-old Irina Navalna was brought into the cell with a bag over her head. Her entire back and buttocks were covered in purple bruises. The Russians accused her of preparing an explosion in Mariupol and recorded her “confession” on video.

Before that, she was beaten and electrocuted, and her mother and grandmother were threatened. Irina’s grandmother sometimes brought her lollipops. The women broke one candy with a pebble and shared it with everyone.

64-year-old English teacher Valentina Zayarna sheltered her husband, whom she knew as Dima. She didn’t know that he was Lieutenant Colonel Denis Storozhuk, who had fled from Azovstal to surrender Ukrainian military.

Valentina went to pick up a package for him in Donetsk. There, she was detained by the FSB. The Russians beat her son and threatened to send him to a psychiatric hospital if she didn’t sign a confession. She agreed, and then swallowed a handful of pills. Valentina survived. She was sentenced to 12 years.

Irina Kulish from Zaporizhzhia region sold vegetables at the market before the occupation. Someone informed the Russians that she was supporting Ukraine. The Russians detained her and accused her of preparing an explosion.

Irina Parkinson. In prison, her hands started shaking so badly that she can’t sleep properly. The Russians transferred her through more than 20 prisons and pre-trial detention centers.

29-year-old Kateryna Korovina from Starobilsk was given 10 years for $12 for Ukrainian needs. Kateryna says she helped civilians. The FSB stated that the money went to the military, and accused her of “financing terrorism”.
After 14 months in the Donetsk basement, some women were transferred to Rostov.

They arrived exhausted and with bruises. The deputy head of the pre-trial detention center came to shout at them. He saw the women with bruises and fell silent. He ordered them to be given a hot shower, normal food, and cigarettes for those who smoked.

In Rostov, there was water and a toilet. The women read, wrote letters, sang, danced, learned English, came up with movie plots, and talked about children and families.

On her birthday, they made a cake out of cookies and condensed milk. In September 2024, several women were taken to a medical center. They were stripped down to their underwear and searched for bruises on their bodies. If they were found, they were forced to sign that they had no claims against the prison.

A few hours later, the guards read out the list for exchange. Women from “Azov” and “Aidar” were taken. Civilians remained.

Natalia Vlasova kept a package of clean clothes in her cell for the exchange. Her name was not mentioned again.

This spring, she was transferred to a colony in Kemerovo, in Siberia. When Natalia was detained, her daughter was four years old. Now she is eleven.

In the photo – Lilia Prutyant.

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Chichvarkin: Putin will not have to announce mobilization if Russia loses one Ozon storage facility and ten more oil refineries before the September elections. Released warehouse workers and drivers will go as volunteers just for the money.

Chichvarkin in an interview with Radio Liberty: According to the internal Ukrainian report, during the most powerful strikes on oil refineries in June, Russia sold more oil to India and received more hard currency, not rubles. Governors allowed gasoline prices to rise from 90 to 300 rubles per liter, and the costs fell on ordinary Russians.

The chain that actually worries Putin is oil extraction, transportation by pipelines and tankers, and terminals where this oil is loaded onto tankers. Strike at Russia’s export ports, Primorsky and Novorossiysk, and you will slow down the money that finances this war.

Russian oil for Hungary flows directly through Ukrainian territory, via the same pipeline that previously led to Odessa. This is the cynicism of this war.

I think that by the end of 2026, and then again by the end of 2027, a corridor of darkness will open for everyone, not a corridor of peace, but a corridor of darkness for all. Cities in smoke and darkness.

People who have been living under attacks for three and a half years every day naturally develop a desire: to send a rocket back ten times larger, so that nothing ever flies from there again, so that a black hole remains there until the very core of the earth. This is normal psychology, not a thirst for blood.
Corruption in Ukraine is larger than in Russia, but softer. Less blood, fewer people are imprisoned for it. Just a different nationality.

A country that has been going its own way for 200 years becomes Switzerland. A country that has been going its own way for 36 years, without relying on anyone, becomes Poland. I think the Ukrainian leadership sees the future of the country somewhere between these two paths.

The British court established that people connected with Russian intelligence were preparing to set fire to businesses in Latvia and my kidnapping. I have had no security since 2008, there were only short periods in Chisinau and South Africa.

Dissident Podrobenik says that relying on Ukraine’s victory as a path to Russia’s freedom is morally questionable, Russians must achieve victory themselves. I don’t have a recipe either. In 1968, against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, only seven people came out on Krasna Ploshcha in the country with a population of 300 million.

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Tymofiy Mylovanov 

KSE President, Associate Professor of the University of Pittsburgh, former minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine 

Biography

Tymofiy Mylovanov is a President of Kyiv School of Economics.

Tymofiy Mylovanov graduated from Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (Management) in 1997 and from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy majoring in Economic Theory in 1999. In 2004 he got his PhD in Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA).

During his professional career, he has been teaching for a long time at the European and American universities, including Rheinische Friedrich–Wilhelms–Universität Bonn, University of Pennsylvania and University of Pittsburgh.

Tymofiy’s research interests cover such areas as theory of games and contracts, institutional design. His articles on these topics have been published in the leading international academic magazines, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies.

During the Revolution of Dignity, jointly with other leading economists of Ukraine and the world, he founded the VoxUkraine platform aimed to increase the level of economic discussion in Ukraine.

Tymofiy Mylovanov has been a member of the Academic Supervisory Board of Kyiv School of Economics for a long time.

On July 7, 2016 the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine elected Tymofiy Mylovanov to the Board of the National Bank of Ukraine, and since October 2016 and until August 2019 he has been holding the position of Deputy Chairman of the Board.

From August 2019 to March 2020, Tymofiy Mylovanov held the post of Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine.

On April 6th, Tymofiy Mylovanov returned to work at the Kyiv School of Economics as President.

In 2014 and 2015 (the rating was not issued anymore) Forbes Ukraine included Tymofiy Mylovanov in the ranking of the best Ukrainian economists.

Thanks to extensive economic knowledge, belonging to the international academic community and familiarity with the situation in Ukraine Tymofiy Mylovanov makes a significant contribution to the development of KSE.

https://kse.ua/people/tymofiy-mylovanov/