Two modern commanders appointed on Donetsk front after dismissal of ‘Soviet-era’ Oleksandr Syrskyi as head of military. What we know on day 1,645
Warren Murray and agencies
27 Aug 2026
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed two of Ukraine’s most prominent commanders to oversee and strengthen defences of the “fortress belt” of industrialised cities in the Donetsk region. Visiting the frontline, Zelenskyy said Third Army Corps leader Andrii Biletskyi and Denys Prokopenko, commander of the First Corps Azov, would head new groupings. Both units are known for embracing Nato-style doctrine and new technology.
- Russian forces are putting pressure on the cities of Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – all critical strongholds for Ukraine. According to open-source mapping group Deep State, Moscow’s troops have been infiltrating deeper into Kostiantynivka, with the Ukrainians weeding them out from houses, basements and ruins. Russia was also stepping up its air and artillery attacks on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk to prepare for a targeted offensive on those cities, Deep State said.
- Ukrainian military analyst Mykola Bielieskov told Reuters the appointments were “the right move” in giving Ukraine’s new commander in chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, greater scope for strategic planning. His predecessor, the “Soviet-era” general Oleksandr Syrskyi, was criticised for micromanagement. Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi, a leader of Kyiv’s mid and long-range strike campaigns, praised the appointments as an important step towards “network-centric warfare … This is exactly what ‘Smart War’ is,” he posted.
- Ukraine hit 16 sites in Russia over the past day including oil facilities and logistics, Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. The targets also included airfields, a missile unit, a military enterprise and infrastructure that Moscow uses to launch attacks against Ukraine. Ukraine’s military general staff said its forces struck a Lukoil refinery overnight in Kstovo, in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, setting it on fire. The refinery can process 125m barrels annually. Long-range Ukrainian drones burned a Wildberries warehouse to the ground in the Tambov region south-east of Moscow, Russian authorities said on Wednesday.
- A Russian guided aerial bomb attack seriously damaged a combined heat and power plant in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, the plant’s owner, Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz, said on Wednesday. The extent of the damage would be assessed as soon as the security situation allowed, Naftogaz said.
- There were explosions in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv early on Thursday, a Reuters witness said. Around the same time, Russia attacked an industrial facility in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih with ballistic missiles, injuring two people, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s defence council. It came after Bloomberg reported that Russia was considering stepping up its ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv, including targets in the city centre, and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal had reached a dead end. While Ukraine has repeatedly offered ceasefires and negotiations, the Kremlin has not altered its demands – chief among which is total control of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy has awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom to Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has provided Starlink satellite internet to Ukraine’s military. Musk has restricted its use over Russian territory – a policy Zelenskyy hopes to change so that Ukrainian weapons can use Starlink to navigate to their targets.
- Ukraine freed 10 Russian prisoners of war, Russia’s human rights commissioner said on Wednesday. On Monday, Russia released 10 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were previously thought to be missing.
- A pro-Russian hacker group on Wednesday claimed responsibility for a cyber-attack on Digdir, the Norwegian government’s digital services agency. The denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks tried to overwhelm the agency’s computers to block services, including one that enables citizens to use one login across multiple public services. A Digdir spokesperson said the agency still managed to keep the services running “practically all the time”. The pro-Russian hacker group Server Killers said it attacked because Norway renewed its security cooperation with Ukraine on 23 August.
Shattering words that could have come from yesterday, are in fact from one year ago today, showing that we in the west have made zero progress :-
“Some of the war crimes that putin/russia has committed in Ukraine are so evil and barbaric, that most people could not stomach hearing them”
Putin may ‘throw the kitchen sink’ at Ukraine soon, says security and defence analyst :
https://news.sky.com/video/putin-may-throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-ukraine-soon-says-military-analyst-13577454
John Foreman, who served as a British military attaché to Moscow between 2019 and 2022, told Radio 4’s PM programme: “The Americans don’t normally send such a high ranking official to Moscow unannounced at short notice unless something is up.” – commenting on Ratcliffe’s visit
Fears Putin will use ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ on Ukraine as peace talks ‘reach a dead end’
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16082617/Fears-Putin-tactical-nuclear-weapons-Ukraine-peace-talks.html
“Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as a national security advisor to three US presidents including Trump in his first term, said: ‘For Putin there is no sign of collective will anywhere to resist him and so many ways in which he can grind people down.”
‘This is why a concerted collective and consistent effort to resist his actions, and to engage in diplomacy, is essential.
‘He has a single-minded focus and we are all over the place.’
Yes we are all over the place. Putler is running rings around Europe and his subordinate in Kremlin West is as hostile as ever to Ukraine.
Markus Gotthard (eMarkus) Dold
Ultimate Partners (Strategic Infrastructure & Energy)
I did not expect to hear these words from a British Prime Minister in Kyiv.
And I suspect President Zelenskyy did not expect them quite this clearly either.
Andy Burnham did not simply promise more weapons or repeat that Britain will stand with Ukraine.
He said something much more consequential:
Ukraine needs support not only to defend against Russian missiles, but to destroy them before they are launched against Ukrainian cities.
That is a very different sentence.
And it comes at exactly the moment Britain has agreed to release classified information on British components of the SCALP/Storm Shadow cruise missile so that production and assembly can increasingly take place in Ukraine.
Moscow noticed.
Russia is now portraying Britain’s actions as a deeper entry into the war and has threatened consequences, including threats against British defence production.
Perhaps that explains why this speech feels different.
For years, Europe has largely discussed how Ukraine can survive Russian attacks.
Burnham spoke about preventing Russia from launching them.
There is an enormous strategic difference between those two ideas.
I have spent many months and enough time since 2022 in Ukraine to know what air-raid alerts mean in reality.
You don’t discuss escalation theory when a missile is flying toward someone’s home.
You ask why it was allowed to leave the launcher in the first place.
Russia still has enormous reserves and further possibilities for escalation. Nobody should underestimate that.
But neither should Moscow assume forever that every escalation can only come from one side.
Maybe this was the real message from Kyiv:
Ukraine is no longer being told only how to defend itself.
It is increasingly being given the technology to remove the threat at its source.
And that may ultimately change far more than another package of weapons ever could.
Watch the speech yourself. I think these words may prove more important than they sound today:
https://lnkd.in/ebJbSJTE
This is also where I put my own capital and time: into Ukrainian defense startups and battery-storage projects in Ukraine and across Europe.
If you are building, financing or looking to scale serious defense or energy-resilience technology, let’s talk.
Marijn Markus :
“Europe is sleepwalking into an extremely dangerous period.
The period between the summer of 2027 and early 2029 will likely be the most dangerous window for Western security in decades, and Europe is currently failing to properly prepare for it.
Europe and Taiwan have less than twelve months to get ready for a massive storm that could erupt by the summer of 2027.
The upcoming French elections represent a massive, overlooked vulnerability for European defense.
Polling trends highlight a strong probability of a far-right victory, which would place Le Pen in the Élysée Palace. She has historically aligned with Moscow, opposing sanctions on Russia and military aid to Ukraine. Such a shift would effectively remove the EU’s only nuclear power from NATO’s collective defense equation (at least when it comes to Russia).
Combined with Trump’s unreliability, Europe could quickly find itself without a nuclear shield or a reliable guarantor of conventional security. The UK can’t do much alone. Russia is aware of this timeline. Moscow’s ongoing mobilization plans aim to generate fresh combat units capable of pressing the offensive in Ukraine while simultaneously threatening NATO’s northeastern flank. However, no decision has been made yet.
If Beijing decides to move on Taiwan during the exact window, the West will be caught in a two-front squeeze it simply cannot supply. European countries and the US lack the production and munition reserves to handle a long war, let alone two simultaneous crises. Trump also can’t be relied on.
To prevent a catastrophe, European leaders must act before the political window closes. The most critical immediate step is seizing Russia’s frozen assets and transferring them directly to Ukraine to ensure Kyiv can sustain its defense (before French elections).
European capitals must also accelerate defense procurement immediately. Waiting another year to take this threat seriously guarantees that we will face it unprepared.”
– Joni Askola
A breakthrough or a false dawn?
Roman Sheremeta :
President Zelenskyy has awarded Elon Musk Ukraine’s Order of Freedom.
According to the presidential decree, Musk was honored “for outstanding personal contributions to protecting human life and freedom, and for developing relations between the peoples of Ukraine and the United States.”
The timing is particularly interesting.
Ukrainian sources report that serious discussions have been taking place between Zelenskyy and Musk in recent days. Among the key topics are additional assistance to Ukraine and efforts to create conditions for ending the war.
Musk and SpaceX have played an important role since the beginning of russia’s full-scale invasion. Starlink became critical infrastructure for Ukraine when conventional communications were destroyed or disrupted.
But there have also been serious disagreements over restrictions on Starlink and its use in Ukrainian military operations.
So this award may be more than symbolic. It could signal that relations between Kyiv and Musk are improving — and perhaps that some of those disagreements are being resolved.
One particularly important question is whether Ukraine could receive greater freedom to use Starlink-enabled systems in operations against russian military targets inside russia, including ballistic-missile launch infrastructure.
If so, this could become a much more consequential development than the medal itself.
Could there have been method in Zel’s madness?