More and more, I find myself thinking that we're asking the wrong question. We ask: Can Russia conquer Ukraine now? Can it seize the country militarily? And we answer with relief - probably not. But that is the wrong question. The right one is different - and more frightening: Can Russia destroy Ukraine's energy system and infrastructure? Here, the answer is yes. Ukraine's defense against ballistic missiles is now approaching zero because of a global shortage of interceptors, in which Ukraine is not a priority. In 2026, deliveries of interceptor missiles have fallen to roughly one-third of their 2025 level. The enemy understands this. In 2026, Russia has significantly intensified its use of ballistic and hypersonic missiles, including Zircon, Iskander-M, and S-400 missiles. In just the last two massive attacks, Russia launched 60 ballistic missiles. Ukraine managed to intercept only two. Contrary to the widespread perception, the Ukrainian energy system is not as large as it seems. Its operation depends on a relatively small number of critical facilities: nuclear power plants, several major power stations, several dozen key substations, and high-voltage transformers. The transformers are the weakest link. They are expensive, almost entirely imported, take months to manufacture, and there are almost no reserves left. During the 2025-2026 heating season alone, the UN Monitoring Mission documented 423 attacks on electricity infrastructure facilities and another 74 strikes on heat supply systems. According to Ukrainian energy analysts, since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has carried out more than 60 major campaigns against Ukraine's energy infrastructure, using around 2,900 missiles and more than 12,700 drones. The situation this winter promises to be significantly harder. Of course, frozen and half-destroyed Ukrainian cities are not necessarily conquered cities. But they are cities becoming unlivable, cities people are forced to leave. And that means weakening the institutional and socioeconomic fabric of the state - and weakening support for the front. At current rates of Russian ballistic missile production and Ukraine's lack of air defense, Russia sees an opportunity to destroy Ukraine's energy and logistics infrastructure in a single winter. I see no grounds for optimism here, and I will not offer any. If this happens, what comes next? No one can say for certain. But we know exactly what Russia wants: all of Ukraine. And knowing how Russia behaves in occupied territories and areas under its control, we can imagine what it plans to do. Russia does not necessarily have to capture the entire territory of Ukraine with troops. It has experience in establishing puppet regimes and taking control of the key functions of a state. The model is already familiar from the occupied territories: administrations installed and cultivated under the FSB, Russian passports made a prerequisite for access to basic services, and filtration turned into a routine procedure. The population's loyalty is not required. Mariupol, Melitopol, and Kherson region have shown: a non-loyal population is not an obstacle to control, but material to be processed. Those who can be intimidated, bribed, or reprogrammed through school, television, and passports will be. Those who cannot will be filtered, imprisoned, deported, or killed. Children will be taken away and re-educated. That is why assuming that public resistance alone will make occupation impossible is a dangerous illusion. Russia's model of control is designed specifically for a hostile population and treats that population as a resource. The occupied Ukrainian population has already become a resource for the Russian army. In occupied Donbas, Russia has forcibly mobilized, according to various estimates, more than one hundred thousand men since 2022 - and used them as expendable infantry in the first waves. If Russia occupies more Ukrainian territory, it could gain access to hundreds of thousands of potential future soldiers, many of them with experience in modern warfare. If Russia establishes political control over most of Ukraine, a large part of Ukrainians will want to leave. But the number of refugees reaching the EU would be determined not by people’s desire to leave, but by the border regime Moscow chooses to impose. Potentially another 5-10 million could leave the country. But Russia would decide who gets to cross the border. There are three possible border scenarios. The first is closure and filtration, following the model already used in occupied territories. Perhaps 500,000 to 1.5 million people would make it to the EU, while most would be trapped inside. For the Kremlin, this would be the optimal scenario - both for erasing Ukrainian identity and for creating a mobilization base. The second is a controlled wave: selectively opening the border and releasing groups of 1- 3 million people in several stages, with the aim of overwhelming the EU, fueling anti-immigration sentiment, and deepening political divisions across Europe. The third is a collapse of control. If the authorities, the army, and the border system disintegrate faster than Russia can establish its own control, the flow could approach the upper estimate of 5-10 million people, constrained only by the capacity of the borders. If Ukraine falls, Russia will gain more than a new recruitment pool for its military. It will gain the time and space to prepare for its next military campaigns. And the next war will be fought on EU territory. Of course, we can listen to those who insist that Russia would never do such a thing. But it is worth remembering that these pseudo-experts are not risking their own lives. If their predictions prove wrong, they will simply shrug and say, "Who could have known?" That leaves one practical conclusion that I consider honest: we do not have the luxury of wishful thinking. Europe's future depends on whether Ukraine survives this winter. And this is a very practical matter: missile defense, interceptors, reserves of high-voltage transformers, and decentralized power generation. Every month of delay in delivering what Ukraine needs increases the risk that, for the first time, the pace of destruction will exceed the pace of recovery. Resilience is a resource that may run out as early as February.

The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to advance Lindsey Graham's Russia sanctions bill, with 86 senators voting in favor and 12 against. President Zelenskyy was present in the chamber during the vote. The legislation would allow for up to 100% tariffs on major buyers of Russian oil and gas and introduces new restrictions on Russia's shadow fleet.

President Zelenskyy: We had a good meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. We discussed the licenses to produce interceptors for the Patriot systems and several other ideas that might help. We also talked about diplomacy - it is important to reinvigorate the diplomatic process. Our teams will arrange the details of their further communication. I am grateful to the United States for its steadfast support.

President Zelenskyy on upcoming mobilization in Russia: We have solid intelligence reports on Russian plans for the fall. What is not there – in the Russian plans – is peace. Unfortunately. Not yet. Putin is preparing the conditions for expanding mobilization. The figures for his losses speak for themselves. In less than seven months of this year, 221,000 people have joined the ranks of the Russian armed forces. While the losses of the Russians in the same period amounted to almost 225,500, and of them 131,000 killed, almost 93,000 wounded. A significant number of injuries are serious, because the Russians have totally poor front-line medicine. Putin is simply preparing to take new Russians to the war. He masks it with other words, signals, but he is preparing. It is important that we and our partners can put enough pressure on Russia so that thoughts about stopping this aggression begin to dominate – thoughts about peace, not about additional Russian mobilization. Our long-range operations, our mid-range strikes contribute to this. More and more Russians are noticing Putin’s war and losing from it and think that the war should not be dragged out. We see this. We also see Russia’s cooperation with North Korea. Russia wants to receive another 30,000 soldiers from North Korea: since June, preparations have been underway in the Voronezh region to receive them. North Korea is also preparing to transfer new ballistic missile launchers to Russia. This is a threat not only to Ukraine. Russia is helping North Korea learn war, improving their weapons – giving them experience in the real use of weapons. All this is a threat to everyone in Asia who is within the range of North Korean missiles. We will counteract it.

11-year-old Ukrainian ballerina Polina Denys has become the absolute champion of the Dance World Cup 2026. Her emotions are priceless. Ukrainian kids are amazingly talented. Congratulations, Polina! 📹: astiasya/Instagram

Could the fuel crisis in Russia break the back of the Russian war economy? It has already evolved from a problem into a systemic vulnerability. Strikes on oil refineries have put at risk the domestic infrastructure essential to the day-to-day functioning of the Russian state. A symbolic and practical turning point was the strike on the Omsk refinery - Russia's largest refinery and one of its key producers of gasoline and diesel. After the attack, the refinery halted processing. The Moscow refinery in Kapotnya, the largest fuel supplier to the capital region, is unlikely to resume operations before at least the end of the year following strikes in June. Estimates of the scale of the damage vary, but they point to the same trend: Ukraine is no longer merely carrying out isolated strikes on individual targets but is creating a cumulative effect in which Russia's repair capacity is beginning to fall behind the pace of damage. The most vulnerable point in this crisis is the agricultural sector. The harvest has coincided with peak summer fuel demand, making diesel a critical resource. Russia's harvesting campaign in early July was running one to two weeks behind last year's pace, with weather and fuel supply problems cited among the reasons. Crops are being harvested late, grain quality is deteriorating, and logistics costs are rising. As expected, large agricultural holdings - which have stockpiles, long-term contracts, access to the wholesale market, and administrative channels - are faring better. Small and medium-sized farmers, by contrast, are likely to go bankrupt. The Russian authorities continue largely to deny the problem, but in practice they are shifting toward emergency management of the shortage. The first set of measures involves a ban on diesel exports and the start of fuel imports. For a country accustomed to presenting itself as an energy superpower, the very need to import petroleum products is humiliating. The second set of measures is the degradation of standards. The Russian government has allowed the use of Euro-3 gasoline until the end of 2026, and parliament has passed tax changes that permit the use of lower-quality components for blending straight-run gasoline, postpone part of the refinery modernization, and provide for subsidies for fuel imports. The third set of measures is administrative rationing. In June, most Russian regions introduced some form of restriction on gasoline or diesel sales: volume limits, unreliable fuel availability, pumps marked "out of service," lines, and periodic disruptions at gas stations. In the medium term, the worst effects may emerge not only in the 2026 harvest but also in the next agricultural cycle - primarily during the 2027 sowing season. The fuel crisis has only just begun, but the most interesting period still lies ahead: seasonal demand peaks in August and September. The future of Russia's war economy will depend primarily on the balance between the pace of Ukrainian strikes, the effectiveness of Russian air defenses, and the ability of repair crews to restore refinery operations. If that balance continues to shift against Russia, the fuel crisis could create conditions in which the Russian authorities would want to end the war. 📹: Fiery footage of attacks on the Moscow oil refinery and other targets in Russia

You asked me to find some positive news from Ukraine for you. I found some! The bottom of the Kakhovka Reservoir, which was drained after Russians destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam, is now covered with willows that have already grown 7-9 meters tall. Birds and animals are beginning to settle in this new forest. In May, zoologist Oleksii Vasyliuk visited the bottom of the former Kakhovka Reservoir nine times and recorded a huge number of nightingales and warblers. "I have never heard so many nightingales at once anywhere else. This may be the largest nightingale forest in Europe," Oleksii Vasyliuk said.

Putin claims Russia has fully replaced imports in aviation and that its aircraft now outperform Western models. The gap between Putin's "reality" and what's actually happening keeps growing.

❗️First Ukrainian guided aerial bomb is ready for combat use - Defense Minister Fedorov. Its development took 17 months. This bomb has been created for the realities of modern warfare. It's not a copy of Soviet or Western developments, but a unique product by Ukrainian engineers. Ukraine is creating our own high-tech weapons, @FedorovMykhailo noted.