No official information about the case has been made public. However, The Insider’s source says Olimov may have staged his kidnapping in France as part of an effort to portray his former employer and adversary in a financial dispute, Batyr Rakhimov, as the organizer of the crime.

In November 2025, The Insider and French magazine L’Express identified numerous contradictions in Olimov’s account — troubling signs that the financier’s alleged kidnapping may have been staged. Among other things, after his purported release, Olimov exchanged friendly messages with a man he later described as one of his captors, then warned him about police activity and instructed him on how to avoid arrest.

Olimov now stands accused of falsely accusing Rakhimov of organizing his kidnapping. More than that, however, it is also suspected that Olimov conspired with Uzbek security officials to arrange for Rakhimov’s actual abduction in order to pressure him into dropping financial claims. Rakhimov had previously accused Olimov of taking control of business assets belonging to him and demanded more than $200 million in compensation.

A new power plant and the arrest of Uzbekistan’s energy minister

Attention has also turned to a combined-cycle power plant project in Uzbekistan’s Surkhandarya Region that involves QuWatt B.V., a company linked to Olimov. On July 27, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev criticized the project, saying the site had been poorly chosen and that connecting it to the country’s gas network would cost an additional $300 million. He also said the investor agreement had not been reviewed carefully enough, meaning further unexpected costs were possible.

At the same meeting, Mirziyoyev dismissed Mirzamakhmudov as energy minister, citing “serious shortcomings” in the sector. Two days later, Mirzamakhmudov was detained, and on July 30 a court ordered that he be held in custody. Uzbek media outlet Ozodlik, part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, cited several independent law enforcement sources while  reporting that the former cabinet minister is suspected of the abuse of office and embezzlement.

The project, worth around $1.2 billion, was originally developed through the Netherlands-registered Stone City Energy B.V. From its creation in 2019 until March 2024, Olimov was its sole ultimate beneficial owner. Then, after a restructuring agreement, Olimov still retained an economic interest in the project through QuWatt B.V., which remains fully controlled by him and is among the owners of project company SCE-Quvvat LLC (alongside EDF, Siemens Energy, and Qatar’s Nebras Power).

The staged kidnapping

In the summer of 2025, Olimov claimed that he had been kidnapped in central Paris and taken to an unknown location before being moved to a villa near Nice, where he said he was beaten, tortured, and ordered to pay $10 million. According to Olimov’s account, the kidnappers released him after he agreed to sign an IOU for $5 million and hand over $200,000. After returning to Paris, Olimov went to the police.

However, a joint investigation by The Insider and L’Express found several inconsistencies in Olimov’s account. The villa where he said he was held had been rented through an intermediary using documents belonging to a close associate. After his reported release, a first-class ticket back to Paris was paid for by the driver of a man identified only as M., whom Olimov described as having been directly involved in the kidnapping. Olimov continued exchanging friendly messages with M. even after contacting police; during a lengthy police interview, he discussed the transfer of $200,000 to M.

The correspondence continued afterward. When M. asked Olimov whether the police had realized that the incident had been staged, Olimov did not respond. Several days later, Olimov wrote that there was “no enmity” between them and expressed relief that M. had not been arrested. A medical examination that took place eight days after the alleged torture Olimov said he endured while in captivity documented only minor bruises and abrasions of unknown origin.

Notably, the investigation also established that Olimov had been involved in a yearslong financial dispute with his former employer, Batyr Rakhimov. After Rakhimov left Uzbekistan for Turkey in 2016, a significant portion of his business came under Olimov’s management as part of a deal that Rakhimov later considered to be highly unfavorable.

After returning to Uzbekistan, Rakhimov sought to renegotiate the terms and demanded more than $200 million from Olimov. Olimov’s kidnapping allegations emerged in the summer of 2025 amid that dispute.

Israel's upcoming election will be the first since the series of wars that followed the massacre carried out by the Hamas terrorist group on October 7, 2023. Despite ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon and the end of active hostilities with Iran, the war is not over for Israel. IDF soldiers remain in Gaza and Lebanon, the military remains on heightened alert over Iran, and tensions remain high in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Netanyahu’s promised “total victory” (at least over Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah) has not been achieved, even if both groups have suffered heavy losses.

Against this backdrop, one of the key questions ahead of the election is whether Benjamin Netanyahu can remain in power after the security failure that led to the October 7 tragedy. The campaign has raised questions about the responsibility of the political leadership and security agencies for the Hamas attack, the military’s condition and readiness, the aims and results of the recent wave of wars, and the issue of extending mandatory military service to students at ultra-Orthodox yeshivas.

Netanyahu argues that the army and intelligence chiefs failed to warn him of the impending attack, instead portraying Hamas as a contained force. At the same time, the prime minister says he should be judged by the results of the subsequent wars, which led to the elimination of much of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah, the killing of Iran’s top military commanders, and strikes against Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu's main rivals – Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan – hold the government politically responsible for the catastrophe and are calling for a state commission of inquiry into the events before, during, and after October 7. They also accuse Netanyahu’s government of damaging Israel’s international standing and weakening its support in the West, including in the United States.

Still, the issue of October 7 stands out. Haaretz recently reported that roughly 10 days before the Hamas attacks, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu of a major attack being planned by Yahya Sinwar, who was then leading Hamas in Gaza. According to the newspaper, however, the prime minister did not pass the information on to the heads of the security agencies. Netanyahu’s office called the report “an absolute lie,” saying no such conversation ever took place. Eisenkot, Bennett, Lieberman, and Golan issued a joint statement demanding an immediate and comprehensive investigation and promising to establish a state commission under the next government. Bennett himself said that he knew Netanyahu had received the warning. The following day, the prime minister instructed his lawyers to prepare a lawsuit against the newspaper and the authors of the report.

The events of October 7 feature not only in politicians’ statements but have also shaped electoral lists of major parties, virtually all of which include veterans of the recent wars, relatives of those killed or taken hostage, and activists from organizations that emerged after the Hamas attack. Just hours before registration closed, Netanyahu announced that Talik Gvili, the mother of police officer Ran Gvili — who was killed fighting terrorists on the morning of October 7, and whose body was then taken to Gaza — would join the Likud list, taking ninth place. Reservist Elisha Medan, who lost both legs fighting in the Gaza Strip, took 15th place, while attorney Itzik Buncel, the father of soldier Amit Buncel, who was killed in Gaza in December 2023, took 29th.

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, gave second place on his party's list to Rafi Ben-Shitrit, the former mayor of Beit She’an. His son Elroy was also killed on October 7.

Ben-Shitrit is one of the founders of the October Council, which brings together families of those killed or taken hostage, survivors of the attack, and reservists. The organization is campaigning for a state commission of inquiry into the events of October 7. In August 2026, it published a report on the persistence among the political leadership and security establishment of the belief that Hamas could be contained.

Sharon Sharabi took sixth place on the Yisrael Beiteinu list. His brother Yossi was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and died in captivity, while another brother, Eli, was released after 491 days in Gaza. Sharon Sharabi became one of the most prominent figures in the campaign to free the hostages.

The events of October 7 have also become part of the political biographies of leaders of several parties. On the morning of October 7, Yair Golan, a reserve major general and leader of the left-wing Democrats party, went south on his own initiative, evacuating people from the fighting. Ofer Winter, a reserve brigadier general and leader of the right-wing Amha Israel party, likewise made his own way to the Gaza border, joined soldiers near Kibbutz Be’eri, and took part in the fighting.

The Reservists party, which submitted a joint list with Yaron Zelicha’s Economic Party, is led by reserve Lt. Col. Yoaz Hendel. After the war began, he returned to active duty and fought in the Gaza Strip, later forming and commanding the Be’eri reserve battalion. Reservist Shlomi Demari, who lost his brother on October 7, took seventh place on the joint list.

On the “Together” (Beyahad) joint list of Bennett and Lapid, sixth place went to reserve Major General Noam Tibon, who on the morning of October 7 traveled south from Tel Aviv, helping Nova festival survivors and wounded soldiers along the way. He took part in the fighting before reaching Nahal Oz, where he evacuated his son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters from a besieged home.

Netanyahu’s main rival in the race for prime minister is Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, a reserve lieutenant general and former IDF chief of staff. During the war, he lost his son Gal and nephew Maor Cohen Eisenkot, who were killed in the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu’s main rival is Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot, a reserve lieutenant general and former IDF chief of staff

Even the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which has consistently opposed mandatory military service for yeshiva students, placed reserve officer Dror Amos sixth on its list.

Other major fault lines in the campaign include judicial reform, the future of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria, and the related question of establishing a Palestinian state. Equally contentious is the debate over Israel’s very character: the balance between its Jewish and democratic identities, the relationship between religion and state, and whether the country needs a constitution. These issues divide not only Netanyahu’s supporters and opponents but also the parties within each camp. Reaching compromise will be difficult. First though, the people will have their say.

How Israel’s elections work

The first poll conducted after the party lists closed and published by the Walla news portal on Sept. 9 shows how heavily the outcome depends on parties that are currently hovering around the electoral threshold of 3.5%. According to the poll, Eisenkot’s Yashar would win 25 seats, Likud 21, the joint Bennett-Lapid list 14, and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Golan’s Democrats nine each. Winter’s Amha Israel, with exactly 3.5% of the vote, would clear the threshold and win four seats, while the joint Hendel-Zelicha list, at 2.8%, would fall short. The parties in the current coalition, together with Winter, would have 51 seats, the Zionist opposition parties 57, and the Arab parties 12. Neither camp would have the 61 seats needed for a majority, although the figures could still shift in either direction as the campaign progresses.

Israel is a single nationwide constituency, with all 120 Knesset seats allocated proportionally among party lists according to the number of votes they receive. Votes cast for lists that do not clear 3.5% are not transferred to any other party but are excluded from the calculations. As a result, the share of seats won by parties that clear the threshold increases, meaning the number of small parties falling just short of the threshold can change the balance of power between the camps.

Israeli voters do not vote for a prime minister but for a party list. After the results are announced, the president consults with all factions that have entered the Knesset, each of which says whom it recommends be tasked with forming a government. The president then gives the mandate to the Knesset member whom he or she believes has the best chance of forming a government capable of winning the body's confidence.

The first candidate is given 28 days, after which the president can extend the period by another 14 days. If the attempt fails, the mandate can be given to another member of Knesset. If all the subsequent options provided by law are exhausted, the Knesset is dissolved and new elections are held – as has happened more than once under Netanyahu. To take office, the incoming prime minister must present the cabinet and its main policy priorities to the Knesset and win a vote of confidence.

The leader of the largest party does not automatically become prime minister. After the 2009 election, for example, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima won 28 seats, while Netanyahu’s Likud won 27. However, most right-wing and religious factions backed Netanyahu, and President Shimon Peres asked him to form the government. Netanyahu assembled a coalition, while Livni, who led the largest faction, remained in the opposition.

Another precedent was set in 2021. After Netanyahu failed to form a government, the mandate was given to Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid. Lapid assembled a coalition of eight parties, ranging from the right-wing Yamina to the left-wing Labor and Meretz and even including the Islamist Ra’am, and he agreed with Yamina leader Naftali Bennett on a rotation arrangement. Bennett became prime minister first, even though his party was one of the smallest in the coalition, with just six seats. The new government won the confidence vote 60 to 59, with one abstention.

The law does not require 61 members to vote in favor of a government for it to be approved. It is enough to receive more votes in favor than against. This makes it possible to form a minority government – a cabinet formed by parties with fewer than 61 seats that relies on the support or abstention of other factions during confidence votes.

Under the numbers recorded in the Walla poll, Netanyahu’s Zionist opponents could theoretically try to form a minority government with the external support or neutrality of the Arab parties. But such a scenario would require the agreement not only of the Arab factions but also of potential coalition partners, and some of those parties refuse to rely on Arab votes. Another possible route would be to redraw the boundaries of the current camps and bring in some parties that had belonged to the opposing bloc before the election.

Netanyahu’s opponents could try to form a minority government with the support or neutrality of Arab parties

Failure to reach an agreement could lead to another election. After the April 2019 vote, Netanyahu was five seats short of a coalition majority. Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Lieberman controlled five seats but was unwilling to join a government that planned to concede to the demands of religious parties by amending the law on ultra-Orthodox military service. No compromise was reached, and the Knesset voted to dissolve itself.

After the September 2019 election, neither Netanyahu nor Benny Gantz managed to form a government. A third election was held in March 2020, after which they formed a rotation-based national unity government. It collapsed after the state budget failed to pass, and in March 2021, Israelis went to the polls for a fourth time in less than two years. That cycle ended with the formation of the Bennett-Lapid government.

The threat of another election after the October vote remains, but it is only one possible scenario. The polls are still volatile, and the balance of power could shift in response to both external events and domestic political crises. At the very least, some parties hovering around the electoral threshold may withdraw before election day to prevent votes for their party from being lost to the larger political camp they associate with.

Israel’s political camps

The division of Israeli politics into right and left predates the state itself, emerging within the Yishuv – the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine and its self-governing institutions. On one side was the socialist Labor Zionist movement, which dominated the leadership of the Yishuv and the of Israel for decades.

Its main political heir was the Labor Party, which later merged with Meretz to form today’s Democrats. On the other was Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, which advocated a tougher struggle for a Jewish state and laid claim to the entire historic Land of Israel. It gave rise to Menachem Begin’s Herut party, which became the foundation of Likud, established in 1973.

After the 1967 Six-Day War, one of the central issues in Israeli politics became the future of the territories captured during the fighting – the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights. The UN and most countries consider them occupied territories (Sinai was returned to Egypt under a peace treaty).

Broadly speaking, the right favored maintaining Israeli control over the territories and expanding Jewish settlements, while the left supported territorial compromise in exchange for peace. But the divide was never absolute. It was right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin who agreed to return the entire Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 peace treaty, while Ariel Sharon’s government carried out a unilateral disengagement in 2005, withdrawing Israeli forces and dismantling all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank.

After Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the Palestinian Authority was established and granted limited self-government in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The political divide increasingly focused on whether to establish or prevent a Palestinian state, its possible borders, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of the settlements, and the risks of transferring territory to Palestinian control.

Religion and state became another major political divide. In Israel, “liberal” does not neatly correspond either to the right-left divide over the Palestinian issue or to economic liberalism. The left-wing Democrats, centrist parties, and some secular right-wing politicians describe themselves as liberal, and they are united by support for individual and civil liberties, civil marriage, the operation of public transportation and businesses on Saturdays, and equal obligations to the state. Thus Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, which is right-wing on security and the Palestinian issue, can be closer on religion-state questions to the Democrats and the secular center than to the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties in the right-wing bloc.

Parties that describe themselves as centrist occupy a space between the traditional camps. They generally seek to combine a tough approach to security with a willingness to compromise politically, and a secular, liberal agenda with a rejection of a left-wing identity. But Israel’s center is not a single ideological movement. At different times, the label has been applied to parties with substantially different platforms, often built around a particular leader or a demand to replace the existing political elite.

Since 2019, another divide has become firmly entrenched in Israeli politics – one between Netanyahu’s supporters and the parties seeking to remove him from power. It overlaps with the traditional right-left divide but does not coincide with it: right-wing politicians Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have been among Netanyahu’s opponents, while ultra-Orthodox parties and representatives of the religious Zionist right have remained his staunch allies.

The split emerged alongside Netanyahu’s criminal prosecution. In November 2019, he was indicted on charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. Netanyahu denies the charges and has called the investigations politically motivated.

Israeli law does not require a prime minister to resign automatically after being indicted, and he can remain in office while on trial. By contrast, under Supreme Court rulings, a minister or deputy minister who is not prime minister must step down after being charged with a serious offense. An ordinary Knesset member, however, is likewise not automatically required to give up their seat.

Netanyahu’s opponents have argued that the criminal cases gave him an additional personal incentive to remain prime minister — and to use his power to pursue changes to the judicial and law-enforcement systems. Netanyahu denies this.

His trial began in May 2020. He gave evidence from December 2024 through June 2026. After 98 hearings, his testimony was completed. The defense must now present its other witnesses, after which the sides will move to closing arguments. No verdict has been issued, and Netanyahu retains the presumption of innocence. In June 2026, the judges again recommended that prosecutors drop the bribery charge. The prosecution did not withdraw it, however, and proceedings on the remaining charges continue.

The series of elections from 2019 to 2021 showed that attitudes toward Netanyahu can override the importance of ideological proximity between parties. In 2021, right-wing, centrist, and left-wing parties joined with the Islamist Ra’am to form a coalition whose main common goal was to replace the prime minister.

Attitudes toward Netanyahu can outweigh ideological proximity between parties

Bennett assumed the role first. A former director general of the Yesha Council, he opposed a Palestinian state and supported extending Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied territories. Before the election, he pledged neither to make Yair Lapid prime minister under a rotation deal nor to form a government dependent on Ra’am. But he later broke both promises before subsequently insisting that his views on security and the Palestinian issue had not changed and that his decision was driven by the need to end the political crisis.

The judicial overhaul pursued by Netanyahu’s government since 2023 has deepened the divide. Supporters argued that the changes were needed in order to limit the Supreme Court’s influence over decisions by elected authorities. Opponents saw them as an attempt to weaken independent judicial review and the system of checks and balances. The dispute over Netanyahu and his criminal cases was thus joined by a fundamental disagreement over the powers of the government, the Knesset, and the Supreme Court.

In election polls, parties are generally grouped into the Netanyahu bloc, the Zionist parties seeking to replace the government, and the Arab lists, which are counted separately. These are not unified ideological camps but potential coalition groupings. Within each, disagreements persist over the Palestinian issue, the judiciary, the relationship between religion and state, and obligations of military service.

Polls place Netanyahu’s Likud, the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, Itamar Ben-Gvir's far-right Otzma Yehudit, and the joint Religious Zionism-Zehut list of Bezalel Smotrich and Moshe Feiglin in the Netanyahu bloc. Ofer Winter’s right-wing Amha Israel is also counted as a member, and its leader has said he belongs to the right-wing camp and will recommend only Netanyahu for prime minister. At the same time, Winter has refused to join forces with politicians he holds responsible for the October 7 security failure.

However, this bloc cannot be treated as a ready-made future coalition. The ultra-Orthodox parties have made their participation in government conditional on the passage of a law regulating the status of yeshiva students and allowing many of them to avoid military service. The dispute over the legislation has already triggered a crisis in their relations with Likud. Winter, by contrast, is demanding that before the government is formed a law be passed that, in his words, will “put an end to draft evasion” and require all young Israelis to serve in the military or otherwise contribute to the state. In short, their mutual support for Netanyahu is not enough to resolve the fundamental conflict between the incumbent prime minister's potential post-election coalition partners.

Ahead of the 2022 vote, Netanyahu succeeded in uniting three competing right-wing lists – Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit, and Avi Maoz’s Noam – so they could clear the electoral threshold together. This time, it proved impossible to create a single list of Likud’s potential right-wing partners, although Smotrich did reach an agreement with Feiglin. Depending on the poll, the Smotrich-Feiglin and Winter lists either clear the threshold by a narrow margin or fall just short. Maoz’s separate list fails to clear the threshold and therefore also acts to siphon votes from other right-wing parties.

New alliances are no longer possible now that the lists have closed, but individual parties can still withdraw from the race. Netanyahu is therefore likely to continue pressuring parties and candidates hovering around the threshold.

Polls place Eisenkot’s Yashar, the joint Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid list, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and Yair Golan’s Democrats among the Zionist parties opposed to the current government. Eisenkot refers to these four parties as the “camp of change,” but their commitments vary. Bennett and Lieberman have explicitly said they will not join a Netanyahu government. Golan has consistently called for Netanyahu’s removal. And Eisenkot is demanding a change of government and is himself seeking the prime minister’s post, even if he has not made an equally categorical commitment never to join a coalition with Netanyahu.

There are also significant differences within the camp opposed to Netanyahu. Bennett and Lieberman remain unmistakably right-wing on security and the Palestinian issue, while the Democrats represent the left. Yisrael Beiteinu calls for mandatory military or civilian service for all citizens and rules out a government dependent on ultra-Orthodox or Arab parties. Some center-right politicians are unwilling to work with the Democrats. As a result, there is still no agreement on what kind of government Netanyahu’s opponents should form should they be given the opportunity.

Separate from these four parties is Benny Gantz’s Blue and White. After the 2023 Hamas attack, Gantz’s State Camp bloc reached as many as 35 seats in some polls, putting it in contention to become the country’s largest political force. But Eisenkot and other partners subsequently left the bloc, and what remained of Gantz’s party fell well below the electoral threshold. The “camp of change” is therefore urging Gantz to withdraw, fearing that votes cast for him will be wasted. He has so far said he will continue his campaign.

Pollsters usually count the Arab lists – the Hadash-Ta’al-Balad United List and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am – separately. They could join a coalition, support a government from outside, abstain in the confidence vote, or remain in opposition. Each option depends not only on the Arab parties themselves but also on whether the Zionist factions are willing to accept their support. Ra’am was already part of the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021–22, but since October 7, some right-wing parties have ruled out any government dependent on Arab lawmakers.

Outside the two main camps is the joint Reservists-Economic Party list of Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelicha – provided it clears the electoral threshold. Hendel says he will not give Netanyahu the votes he needs to form a narrow coalition, but at the same time, he is open to joining a broad government with Netanyahu provided that it is backed by 70–80 members of Zionist parties. He also rules out joining a cabinet dependent on Arab or ultra-Orthodox factions.

Both Netanyahu and his opponents are now calling for a “broad Zionist government,” but there is no agreement on what it should look like. Such a coalition would clearly exclude the Arab and ultra-Orthodox parties, but questions remain. Some are open to serving in a government with Netanyahu, while others would work with Likud only after a change of the party's leader. Some would also refuse to sit in the same government with the Democrats, Otzma Yehudit, and Religious Zionism.

The main contenders

Coalition arithmetic does not answer the campaign’s central question: who will head the next government? In one of the latest polls asking voters who is best suited to serve as prime minister (conducted by the Kantar Institute for the public broadcaster Kan and published on September 6), 38% of respondents chose Eisenkot over Netanyahu, while 35% chose the incumbent. When asked to choose between Netanyahu and Bennett, the incumbent led 37% to 32%, while in a head-to-head matchup between Eisenkot and Bennett, the former IDF chief of staff led 36% to 17%. The results vary depending on the pair presented, but at the time of the poll, Eisenkot was the only candidate ahead of Netanyahu in a head-to-head comparison.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Likud’s indispensable leader

Gadi Eisenkot: the general who became Netanyahu’s main challenger

Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: together again

Naftali Bennett is 54. An entrepreneur and former special forces officer, he began his political career in Netanyahu’s circle. He later served as director general of the Yesha Council and led the religious Zionist Jewish Home party. Bennett went on to serve as economy, education, and defense minister before becoming prime minister in 2021 with just six Knesset seats, leading a coalition of right-wing, centrist, and left-wing parties that included Ra’am.

Yair Lapid is 62. A former television host, he founded the centrist Yesh Atid party in 2012 and later served as finance and foreign minister. Under the 2021 coalition agreement, Bennett and Lapid agreed to rotate the premiership: Bennett would serve first, and after the Knesset was dissolved early in summer 2022, Lapid briefly became prime minister.

They are running together in this election on the Beyahad joint list, which Bennett leads. He is also its candidate for prime minister.

Avigdor Lieberman: “Now it’s my turn”

Yair Golan: the general leading the left

Benny Gantz: from frontrunner to fighting for survival

Ofer Winter: a new challenger on the right

Partners with strings attached

Beyond the candidates for prime minister, the makeup of the next government will be determined by the parties controlling the final handful of seats needed to form a majority. The collection of potential kingmakers includes far-right parties, ultra-Orthodox factions, and Arab lists alike.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich: rivals on the far right

Itamar Ben-Gvir is 50. He leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party and has served as national security minister, with authority over the police, since late 2022. Before entering the Knesset, Ben-Gvir was an activist in Kach, a movement banned in Israel, and a lawyer for people accused of nationalist offenses. In 2007, a court convicted him of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. He later sought to distance himself from some of his earlier views but retained a platform calling for the annexation of Judea and Samaria, the expansion of settlements, harsher conditions for Palestinian prisoners, and the widespread arming of civilians.

In the run-up to this election, Ben-Gvir has added another coalition demand, unveiling a seven-year plan for the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza residents and saying that in the next government, Otzma Yehudit will demand the creation of a separate Ministry of Emigration.

On Sept. 9, the party also petitioned the Central Elections Committee to bar Ra’am and its leader, Mansour Abbas, from running, arguing that the party rejects Israel’s character as a Jewish state and supports armed struggle against it. The committee has yet to consider the claims, and its decision can in any case be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Bezalel Smotrich is 46. The leader of Religious Zionism serves as finance minister and also as a minister in the Defense Ministry, where he oversees matters related to the Civil Administration and settlement development in Judea and Samaria. Smotrich opposes a Palestinian state and supports extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. His supporters see settlement expansion as the party’s main promise fulfilled, while opponents accuse him of effectively annexing the territories without a formal government decision.

Smotrich is running jointly with the Zehut party of 64-year-old Moshe Feiglin, who holds second place on the list. Feiglin is a former Likud lawmaker and the founder of a movement opposed to the Oslo Accords. His platform combines territorial annexation and an expanded Jewish presence on the Temple Mount with liberal economic policies, less government regulation, and cannabis legalization.

The ultra-Orthodox: allies who can no longer be taken at their word

Shas is an ultra-Orthodox party whose full name translates as “World Sephardi Union – Guardians of the Torah.” It was established primarily to represent religious Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Aryeh Deri remains Shas’s political leader, but the party makes key decisions after consulting the Council of Torah Sages, a group of the most influential Sephardi rabbis.

United Torah Judaism represents the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community. For the first time since 1992, it is running under that name as an alliance of three, rather than two, formally independent parties: Degel HaTorah (representing the Lithuanian stream), the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael, and the new Homat Torat Yisrael (“Bulwark of Israel’s Torah”). Degel HaTorah’s Yaakov Asher heads the list, and Agudat Yisrael representative Yitzhak Goldknopf is second. Here too, lawmakers answer to rabbinical councils and the leaders of the largest Hasidic communities. 

The emergence of a third party within United Torah Judaism stems from an internal dispute in Agudat Yisrael. Representatives of several Hasidic groups accused the Gur community, the alliance’s largest, of wielding too much influence over the allocation of seats and budgets. The creation of Homat Torat Yisrael gives the dissenters their own party funding and the option of eventually breaking away from the joint list. For now though, they describe the move as technical and remain within United Torah Judaism.

The main grievance Shas and United Torah Judaism share with Netanyahu is that his government has failed to pass the promised law regulating yeshiva students’ exemption from military service. Following a Supreme Court ruling, the state must draft them under the existing law and halt funding to institutions whose students evade the draft. The Haredi parties want to preserve the special status of Torah study and limit penalties against yeshiva students who choose not to serve. 

The decision to join a future coalition will be made not only by Deri, Asher, or Goldknopf, but above all by the parties’ rabbinical leadership. Shas representatives have floated the idea of refusing to join Netanyahu’s next government until an agreed law is passed, but Deri has made no final commitment. United Torah Judaism has put it more bluntly: it will not join a coalition that fails to resolve the status of yeshiva students. Their traditional alliance with Likud therefore does not guarantee unconditional support for Netanyahu after the election.

The traditional Haredi parties also face a new challenger in this election: the Ha-Tzibur Ha-Haredi (“Haredi Public”) list, led by Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Moti Leitner, which is aimed primarily at working Haredim and others who feel unrepresented by Shas and United Torah Judaism. American-born Haredim are seen as a potential source of support, as they are more likely to combine a religious lifestyle with solid jobs and secular education. The party advocates teaching math and English, expanding employment, and drafting those who are not actually engaged in Torah study: “Those who do not study must serve.”

Two women are among the list’s top six candidates. This sharply distinguishes the new party from Shas and United Torah Judaism, which do not include women on their lists. Leitner presents the party as an alternative to the existing Haredi leadership, accusing it of perpetuating poverty, opposing secular education, and protecting draft exemptions even for those who do not study at yeshivas. At the same time, Ha-Tzibur Ha-Haredi retains its ultra-Orthodox identity and says it is committed to protecting the right to full-time Torah study. The party may nevertheless fail to clear the electoral threshold.

Two Arab paths

Two major Arab lists are running in the election. The first is a joint list of three parties – Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad. It is headed by Hadash’s Yousef Jabareen, followed by Ta’al leader Ahmad Tibi in second place and Balad leader Sami Abu Shehadeh in third.

Hadash is an Arab-Jewish left-wing bloc centered on the Communist Party of Israel. Ta’al is a secular Arab party built around Tibi. Balad represents the Palestinian national movement and calls for transforming Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens.” In the 2022 election, Hadash and Ta’al won five seats, while Balad, which ran separately, failed to clear the threshold.

The second list is Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, an Islamist Arab party and the parliamentary arm of the Islamic Movement’s southern branch in Israel. The movement split in 1996 over participation in elections, with the northern branch rejecting Israel’s state institutions (it was banned in 2015) while the southern branch chose parliamentary politics and remained legal. In 2021, Ra’am became the first independent Arab party to join a governing coalition, entering the Bennett-Lapid government. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, focused negotiations on funding for Arab municipalities, fighting crime, improving infrastructure, and gaining recognition for Bedouin villages.

In August 2026, Abbas said that Arab parties had been forced to accept the state’s Jewish character as a reality in order to participate in elections. Avi Maoz, followed by Ben-Gvir, then called for Ra’am to be barred from the vote. Otzma Yehudit also cites alleged ties between the Islamic Movement-affiliated Aid 48 foundation and organizations linked to Hamas, but Ben-Gvir’s main concern is that Ra’am could provide the seats needed to form a governing coalition made up of Netanyahu’s opponents.

A notable feature of the current Ra’am list is the second-place candidacy of former Deputy Minister for Internal Security Yoav Segalovich, a retired police major general and the first Jewish candidate in Ra’am’s history. Under the Bennett-Lapid government, he coordinated the fight against crime in the Arab sector.

Ra’am is seeking to return to pragmatic cooperation with Zionist parties. The United List includes both supporters of backing a government from outside to replace Netanyahu and opponents of any coalition that continues military operations and the occupation of Palestinian territories. That is why pollsters count Arab seats separately: it is impossible to know in advance whether Arab lawmakers will join the government, support it from outside, abstain in the confidence vote, or remain in opposition.

Either way, the sheer diversity of party lists and campaign platforms shows how deeply divided Israeli society has become. Yet whoever wins the election and whatever government emerges, there is little reason to expect the country’s internal crisis to end. According to a study published in June 2026 by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), 55% of Israelis consider internal polarization and divisions the country’s greatest existential threat – more serious than Iran’s nuclear program or the Palestinian conflict. Six in 10 respondents see a real danger of bloodshed and physical violence within Israel, potentially escalating into civil war.

55% of Israelis consider internal polarization and divisions the country’s greatest existential threat

The next government will therefore have to do more than decide how to wage the war and shape the country’s postwar future. It will also have to govern a deeply divided society in which a significant share of citizens no longer see their political opponents as rivals but as a threat to the country’s future.

On Sept. 3, Moscow sent Tokyo a formal note of protest over the deployment, Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced earlier today. The ministry called the deployment of the systems in Japan “unacceptable under any pretext” and demanded their removal from the country regardless of how long they are stationed there or the terms of their deployment.

The Typhon systems have been at the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Kanoya Air Base in Kagoshima Prefecture since June, when the U.S. military deployed them there in advance of the Valiant Shield 2026 exercises which ran from June 22 to July 1. The systems are also being used in the Orient Shield 26 exercises running from Sept. 8 to 24, which involve ground forces from Japan, the United States, and Australia. Japanese military officials have described this year’s Orient Shield as the largest in the exercise’s history.

This is the first time Typhon has been deployed directly at a facility of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. The system was temporarily stationed in Japan in September 2025, but at that time it was deployed at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. This year also marks the first deployment of Typhon to Kyushu.

The ground-based Typhon system can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 multipurpose missiles. Tomahawks have a range of about 1,600 kilometers, which would allow them to strike targets along a large portion of China’s eastern coast if fired from southern Japan. The U.S. and Japanese militaries have not disclosed how many launchers were moved to Kanoya Air Base.

Japan has stressed that the deployment is temporary. The country’s defense minister said in June that after the September exercises wrap up, the launchers are expected to leave Kanoya for storage at a U.S. military facility elsewhere in Japan. He said the United States had assured Tokyo that Typhon was not being permanently deployed in the country.

Moscow had objected to the deployment even before the system arrived. In May, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the presence of Typhon in Japan posed a “direct threat” to Russia’s Far Eastern borders.

In late August, a week before Orient Shield began, Russia’s Foreign Ministry protested the exercises once again. Relations between Moscow and Tokyo deteriorated further in August after Vladimir Putin visited Iturup, one of the disputed southern Kuril Islands.

Japan lodged a protest with Russia, calling the trip to the island “utterly unacceptable.” Tokyo considers the southern Kuril Islands (which it calls the Northern Territories) to be Japanese territory. Russia controls the islands and disputes Japan’s claim to sovereignty.

The Insider previously reported that in August 2025, Russia formally abandoned a voluntary moratorium on the deployment of ground-based intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. Russia’s Foreign Ministry cited the appearance of U.S. Typhon systems in the Asia-Pacific region among the reasons for the decision.

Roldugin, the artistic director of the St. Petersburg House of Music and a longtime friend of Putin, received the award “for major contributions to culture and the arts and many years of fruitful work.” Putin had already awarded him the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 4th Class, in 2021.

The Order of Merit to the Fatherland is one of Russia’s highest state decorations. It has four classes, with 1st Class being the highest.

Roldugin’s name has repeatedly appeared in investigations into the assets of people close to Putin. The 2016 Panama Papers showed that offshore structures linked to the cellist had handled more than $2 billion in transactions.

In 2023, a Zurich court convicted four managers at the Swiss subsidiary of Gazprombank who had helped open accounts for companies linked to Roldugin. The Insider reported at the time that the Swiss prosecutors’ case materials indicated the musician was only the nominal beneficiary of the companies and was acting on behalf of third parties.

In March 2026, Putin transferred shares in the nationalized Muzyka sheet-music publishing house to the Talent and Success Foundation, which Roldugin co-founded and currently chairs. Putin himself heads the foundation’s board of trustees.

A month later, it emerged that the same foundation had received a 4.99% stake in energy company En+ worth about 14 billion rubles ($166.2 million).

The block of 31.9 million shares was transferred to the foundation as a “donation.” Independent outlet Verstka reported that the stake amounted to 5% minus one share — just below the threshold at which a shareholder is required to notify the Russian Central Bank and publicly disclose the holding.

Among the Channel One employees named in the decree, four received the Order of Honor, four received the Order of Friendship, and 19 were awarded the Medal of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 2nd Class.

All were honored “for their contributions to the media and many years of dedicated service.”

Those on the list included television presenters Anton Vernitsky, Vitaly Yeliseyev, and Anatoly Kuzichev, as well as Sergei Titinkov, Channel One’s chief producer for film programming and production.

Before she disappeared, Kuznetsova denied that she had withdrawn her election observers from polling stations and said that a document purporting to show that she had done so was forged. Nevertheless, when the voting began on the morning of Sept. 18, her observers were removed from Moscow precinct election commissions Nos. 1263, 1273, and 514, based on statements allegedly signed by Kuznetsova, the legal aid project Slovo Zashchite (lit. “A Word for the Defense”) reported. Kuznetsova herself still could not be reached.

The Telegram channel of Slovo Zashchite subsequently published a recording of a conversation with Kuznetsova’s mother, who explained that her daughter had called her and said she had run into problems and had to leave urgently for three days without her phone. Kuznetsova did not say where she had gone. Her mother said she was worried.

Later, a source in Kuznetsova’s campaign team told Slovo Zashchite that she was being held at a police station in Moscow’s Central Administrative District. According to the source, Kuznetsova had relayed to relatives that she was safe and had “gone away for three days so as not to frighten the family.” There has been no direct confirmation of that account from Kuznetsova or her husband.

Nikolai Toropov, head of the Moscow branch of Rassvet (lit. “Dawn”), an unregistered anti-war political movement founded by former presidential hopeful Yekaterina Duntsova, had earlier said that Kuznetsova and her husband were safe. He later withdrew that statement. “There is still no concrete information about their whereabouts,” he wrote, adding that he would publish further updates only after receiving confirmation directly from Kuznetsova or her husband.

An initiative group supporting Duntsova reported that it had drafted an appeal to state prosecutors, encouraging its followers to contact the authorities and demand an investigation into Kuznetsova and her husband’s disappearance.

“We prepared a complaint to the prosecutor’s office asking it to investigate the circumstances of Yulia and her husband Vadim’s disappearance, determine their whereabouts and, if they have been detained, verify that their procedural rights are being respected,” the group wrote on Telegram.

On the evening of Sept. 17, Kuznetsova held a meeting focused on internet freedom with voters in Moscow’s Sokolniki District. Afterward, she told her acquaintances that she was taking a taxi home and was about 15 minutes away, according to the independent channel SotaVision. At about 9 p.m., the phones of Kuznetsova and her husband, Vadim, were switched off. Neither was found at home.

Kuznetsova is running for the State Duma from “The Greens” in Moscow’s Babushkinsky single-member district No. 195. She previously worked on campaigns for opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin, who recently left Russia after suspending his bid to run in the elections amid mounting pressure from the authorities. Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and the team of opposition politician Maxim Katz both included her on their lists of recommended candidates for Russian voters to support.

According to Bild, Germany’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office has taken over the investigation into the incident around Wunstorf due to the possible link to the Leipzig incident. On Sept. 1, the German government officially accused Russia of a hybrid attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport. At a press conference, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that, in response to Russia’s actions, Germany is closing the Russian House in Berlin and the Russian Consulate General in Bonn.

Russia, for its part, withdrew its consent for the operation of Germany’s Consulate General in St. Petersburg and demanded that the German Goethe-Institut cultural centers in the country cease operations.

German investigators later identified two suspects in the Leipzig/Halle Airport sabotage: Russian national Oleg L. and Belarusian national Andrei K. According to Welt am Sonntag, Oleg L., who was responsible for planning and logistics, is linked to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).

A day earlier, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asserted that Russia is planning “hybrid” drone and missile strikes on countries that support Ukraine — including NATO member Poland itself. The war, he said, is entering its most critical phase.

In Tyumen, pharmacies were advised to limit bulk sales of zelyonka, iodine, and other colored antiseptics. One pharmacist told local outlet 72.RU that police had asked pharmacies not to sell five or more packages of such products to a single customer. Pharmacy staff said they received no formal ban or written order.

The Insider found similar measures in at least two other regions.

In Surgut, in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the restrictions were written directly into the official election preparation plan, which was obtained by The Insider’s editorial team. It says polling stations should post lists of prohibited items at their entrances, specifically including staining liquids and flammable substances that “may be used as part of a protest action.” Local officials were also instructed to install additional lockers for voters’ belongings.

In the Kostroma Region, police said voters would not be allowed to bring staining or flammable liquids into polling stations. Sharp objects will also be banned, and all 448 polling stations in the region will be equipped with metal detectors. About 700 police officers, more than 100 National Guard personnel, and around 80 private security employees are set to guard them during the vote.

Similar restrictions were introduced in the Chelyabinsk Region, where police warned that weapons, ammunition, and sharp objects would be barred from polling stations. They separately listed staining substances among the prohibited items.

The measures follow a series of incidents during Russia’s 2024 presidential election in which zelyonka, ink, and other liquids were poured into ballot boxes in several regions. Some also lit urns of ballots on fire. The Insider reported at the time that such incidents occurred in Moscow, the Voronezh Region, Rostov-on-Don, and Karachay-Cherkessia, among other regions. Attempts to set fire to or pour liquids into ballot boxes were recorded at 29 polling stations across 20 regions.

Several regions are also offering up prizes to local residents during the election period as an incentive to show up at the polls. Prize campaigns and election-day giveaways have become a recurring feature of Russian elections, with regional authorities using lotteries, quiz competitions, and other incentives to encourage turnout.

In Moscow, the “Million Prizes” program promises those who vote online or use electronic terminals at polling stations at least 1,000 “city points” each, with one point equal to one ruble. Participants will also be entered to win prizes worth 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, and 50,000 points.

In the Krasnoyarsk Region, a local-history quiz titled “Viktorina-2026” will run in parallel to the elections. Among the 369 prizes are three apartments, six cars, 90 smartphones, 90 smart speakers, 90 smartwatches, and 90 pairs of wireless headphones. Quiz forms will be handed out near polling stations, though casting a ballot is not required to qualify for a prize.

Even more prizes are being offered in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug through a quiz called “Yugra — vmeste!” (“Yugra [stands] together!”). Organizers say several thousand prizes will be awarded, including six apartments, three cars, 14 all-terrain vehicles, and an untold number of bicycles, televisions, smartphones, and household appliances. To take part, participants must answer at least three out of five questions correctly.

The debate over a new mobilization comes down to a simple question: does the Russian army actually lack manpower? Different methods of counting produce very different estimates of both the potential number of new soldiers and they extent to which they would actually expand the armed forces rather than simply replacing losses.

According to calculations by IStories based on federal budget expenditures for one-time enlistment bonuses, 71,200 people signed contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry in the first quarter of 2026 and another 60,100 in the second. That puts the six-month total at 131,300 recruits, or an average of about 720 a day. This is almost the same as in the first half of 2025 (127,500), but it is roughly 20% below the 2024 figure. After falling in late 2025 and early 2026, the flow of contract recruits therefore appears to have stabilized.

However, economist Janis Kluge, who tracks regional budget spending, arrived at significantly higher figures: around 79,000 new contract soldiers in the first quarter of 2026 and about 93,000 in the second, or roughly 172,000 over six months — around 1,000 new contract soldiers a day in the second quarter. Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, meanwhile, cited an even higher figure: more than 200,000 contracts in the first half of the year.

The discrepancy between official statements and budget-based estimates has of course been seen before, and it is true that federal data on one-time payments probably do not capture the full scale of recruitment. For the calculations that follow, it therefore makes more sense to use a range rather than a single precise figure: roughly 700–1,000 new contract soldiers a day, or 20,000–30,000 a month.

The current rate of recruitment into the Russian armed forces is between 20,000 and 30,000 people a month

New calculations by Kluge published in September confirm this general estimate. According to regional budget data, approximately 234,000 contracts had been signed by the end of August 2026, compared with 260,000 over the same period in 2025. In August, the recruitment rate remained at around 1,000 people a day — a figure that was about 20% lower than a year earlier, despite higher payments and an increase in coercive recruitment.

Actual recruitment rates are probably still below the target set for regional authorities. As the Financial Times reported, the regions have been tasked with securing 409,000 new contracts by the end of 2026. Meeting that target would require an average of about 34,000 new contract soldiers a month, or 1,120 a day.

By itself, the current pace of recruitment is no longer enough to sustain the growth in the size of the Russian armed forces that was seen during the first years of the full-scale war. As military analysts Michael Kofman and Greg Wehner note, in 2023 the Russian military managed to replace its losses while significantly expanding its force, forming two new combined-arms armies, two motor-rifle divisions, and 27 new brigades and regiments. However, in 2024 the growth slowed, and by 2025 it had virtually stopped.

In September and December 2025, Vladimir Putin gave the same figure for the size of the force in the combat zone – around 700,000 troops. According to Kofman and Wehner, this suggests that the force had barely grown over the roughly 18 months since mid-2024. In June 2026, Putin again put the size of the Joint Grouping of Forces at 700,000.

It is difficult to assess the balance between reinforcements and departures more precisely. While estimates of the number of new contract soldiers differ by tens of thousands, estimates of Russian military casualties vary even more widely.

Using budgetary spending on compensation for the families of fallen soldiers, Kluge estimated Russian battlefield deaths in 2026 at roughly 9,000 a month — when compared with recruitment of 20,000–30,000 people a month, that would suggest no manpower shortfall at all.

However, fatalities account for only part of Russia's irreversible losses. They must be supplemented by severely wounded soldiers, those who are no longer medically fit to return to the front, and troops who are missing, captured, deserting, or otherwise removed from active service. Simply adding the numbers of dead and wounded would also be misleading, since a significant share of wounded soldiers return to duty after treatment.

According to The Guardian the number of Russian killed and wounded reached around 30,000 in April 2026. At a recruitment rate of roughly 1,000 people a day, a substantial share of new recruits would go towards simply maintaining the existing strength of military units. The figures cannot, however, be compared directly without accounting for the proportion of wounded soldiers who return to duty.

The Ukrainian General Staff, for its part, puts the Russian army's personnel losses over the summer at 124,200 — 39,300 in June, 42,900 in July, and 42,000 in August – about 26% more than during the three months of the spring and significantly above the current rate of contract recruitment. However, Ukrainian statistics count all personnel losses, not just irreversible ones, meaning the 124,200 figure cannot be directly compared with the number of new contract soldiers either.

The Financial Times reports that the Russian military command is sending most new contract recruits to existing units rather than using them to build a trained reserve. The current pace of contract recruitment is therefore probably somewhat below the target set for the regions.

There is another constraint that gets lost in the aggregate statistics: 30,000 recruits do not equal 30,000 soldiers with the skills the military needs. This is particularly evident in the Unmanned Systems Forces, established in late 2025. According to IStories, the Defense Ministry planned to recruit around 78,800 people for the new branch by the end of 2026. Most were not expected to come from ordinary contract recruits, with a target of 58,000 to be recruited from among students, graduates of DOSAAFtraining courses, former aviation personnel, and “women” with the necessary training. Another 10,800 were to be conscripts transferred to contract service, while only around 10,000 were to be transferred from other military units.

However, on July 17, 2026, Deputy Defense Minister Alexey Krivoruchko said that just over 8,000 specialists had been trained for the Unmanned Systems Forces in the first half of the year. The Conflict Intelligence Team noted that, if the annual target were being met evenly, the figure should have been roughly four times higher by that point. Analysts attribute part of the shortfall to the failure of the campaign to recruit students despite reports from Novaya Gazeta Europe that at least 47 of Russia’s 50 leading universities had campaigned to persuade students to sign such contracts.

After the mass call-up in the fall of 2022, the Russian authorities effectively built an alternative system of continuous military recruitment. The state tried dozens of methods for recruiting people, from advertising contract service and offering large bonuses to using paid intermediaries, conducting raids, targeting men with debts and financial problems, recruiting foreigners, and pressuring conscripts, prisoners, and defendants to sign up for contract service. This system has so far allowed the Russian military command to avoid a second wave of mass mobilization.

Nevertheless, maintaining the previous flow of recruits has become increasingly expensive. Higher payments can indeed temporarily boost recruitment, and after Tyumen region raised its one-time enlistment bonus to 3 million rubles ($35,600), a local military recruitment official reported that the number of inquiries had doubled. However, the need to keep raising both enlistment bonuses and payments to recruiters suggests that the previous level of financial incentives is no longer sufficient to meet recruitment targets. In Moscow, for example, according to sources cited by IStories and Verstka, the flow of recruits fell by roughly a third in the spring compared with the previous year.

The pool of potential recruits is also expanding. In September 2026, Irkutsk region cut the enlistment bonus for Russian citizens from 2.1 million ($24,850) to 1.8 million rubles ($21,300), while introducing a 900,000-ruble ($10,650) payment for foreign citizens and stateless people.

In August, authorities in Zabaykalsky Krai raised the regional payment for foreign citizens and stateless people from 400,000 rubles to 900,000 rubles ($4,750 to $10,650). However, at the same time, they cut the payment for mobilized soldiers who sign contracts from 2 million rubles to 400,000 rubles ($23,650 to $4,750). The contrast illustrates the logic of the current system: regional authorities have little reason to pay as much for someone already serving in the Russian armed forces as they do to bring in a new recruit.

At the same time, the Russian authorities are removing legal barriers to another source of manpower. In August, Putin signed a law expanding the categories of convicts who can sign contracts with the Defense Ministry during periods of mobilization, martial law, or wartime. During the bill’s consideration, Deputy Defense Minister Viktor Goremykin explicitly linked the change to the need to meet the military’s 2026 recruitment target. Kluge views such measures as an additional way to sustain the current recruitment rate.

Here it is important to distinguish between having enough people to replenish infantry units and having enough young, healthy, and trainable recruits for more specialized roles. According to sources cited by Important Stories and Verstka, the share of older recruits and men with serious health problems is growing.

In spring 2026, a source in one military unit claimed that contract recruits had “literally been scraped out of all the villages around here,” forcing recruiters to look for people in other regions. Such accounts cannot be extrapolated to the Russian army as a whole, but they point to another possible limit of the current model: not a shortage of people in general, but a dwindling pool of suitable recruits.

Russian statistics make it possible to count debtors, unemployed people, and those with criminal records, but they cannot show how many are actually fit for military service. It is therefore impossible to calculate mechanically how many months of war Russia can sustain by recruiting from among the poor and indebted.

The extent to which this pool is being depleted can, however, be assessed indirectly by looking at the cost of each next recruit and the effort required to find him. If maintaining roughly the same recruitment rate requires higher payments, more paid intermediaries, searches outside the region, and lower age and health requirements, that suggests the marginal cost of each additional recruit is rising.

That alone, however, does not prove that potential contract soldiers are running out: bonuses of several million rubles remain an enormous incentive for many Russian families.

Why might Putin need mobilization?

What matters is not so much the number of soldiers as the task the Russian military command expects them to perform. Replacing losses may be enough to sustain the current slow advance, but significantly accelerating the offensive, creating an operational reserve, or forming new force groupings would require a much larger pool of troops.

Over the past two years, the Russian military has adapted its offensive tactics in order to fit its limited capabilities. As early as 2024, Russian forces had already largely abandoned attempts to launch repeated attacks with large mechanized formations, instead shifting to small infantry assaults. In 2025, this tactic evolved further — into what has been described as “infiltration,” allowing Russian forces to maintain continuous pressure along a broad front using extremely slow advances that are difficult to turn into an operational breakthrough.

Kofman and Wehner note a paradox: as the Russian force grew, the size of the force the command could deploy simultaneously in direct attacks actually declined. The reason is the battlefield’s saturation with minefields, artillery, prepared defensive positions, and drones of both the reconnaissance and strike variety,  all of which combine to make large concentrations of troops highly visible and extremely vulnerable.

As a result, brigades numbering several thousand troops can spend months advancing along a single ravine or toward one or two villages, even as very few of them can take part simultaneously in assaults. The Russian command has numerical superiority across the theater but cannot fully translate it into local superiority on the battlefield.

This is particularly important when assessing the prospects of an offensive against the Ukrainian-held cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which form the northern part of a larger fortified belt of cities that also includes Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka. The towns are separated by rivers, high ground, and wooded areas.

As of early September, the nearest Russian positions on the Lyman axis were 7–10 kilometers from Sloviansk — close enough for Russian artillery to shell the city. According to an officer with the 11th Army Corps of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russian command has reinforced the sector with the 123rd Motor Rifle Brigade (which was previously involved in fighting around the Siversk salient), giving it the ability to threaten Ukrainian logistics. The Russian army has therefore moved closer to direct fighting for the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk urban area, while Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, is effectively restructuring the defense command system around the expected battle for the area.

Ukraine’s military command system is being reshaped for the coming battle for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk

If the current model remains in place, the most likely first scenario is a continuation of the slow advance without a new mobilization. The Russian command could continue sending reinforcements directly to active units, replenishing assault infantry and gradually attempting to encircle the urban area from several directions while simultaneously degrading Ukrainian logistics and positions with drones, artillery, and airstrikes.

Kofman, however, described the 2026 campaign as significantly less successful for the Russian military than those of previous years. He stressed that the current rate of advance cannot simply be extrapolated to a date when the entire Donetsk region would be captured, as the outcome depends not only on Russian resources but also on the effectiveness of Ukrainian defenses.

Additional mobilization is not a prerequisite for continuing the offensive. The Russian army has sustained its advance for several years with virtually no operational pauses: newly formed or rebuilt units are generally not held in reserve but sent directly to different sectors of the front. Even Russia’s airborne forces and naval infantry are typically pulled from one sector, rapidly replenished, and redeployed to another rather than being kept as a permanent operational reserve. This system allows the Russian command to maintain pressure, but also makes it difficult to accumulate forces for a separate large-scale operation.

The second scenario is an attempt to sharply accelerate the capture of the remaining part of the Donetsk region by deploying a larger mass of infantry. At first glance, a new mobilization might seem the most obvious solution.

Kofman, however, considers this approach unlikely to be effective. In his assessment, if the Russian command simply adds several regiments or divisions to sectors already crowded with troops and continues to use them in the same way, the result will be higher casualties more than anything else. Even 100,000 additional troops would not automatically translate into 100,000 assault troops who could be deployed simultaneously to capture Sloviansk and Kramatorsk quickly.

A radical acceleration of the offensive would require not just more troops, but the ability to conduct larger, coordinated operations. This means a sufficient numbers of trained junior commanders and specialists, engineering support and logistics, and the ability to concentrate forces without allowing Ukrainian reconnaissance and drones to destroy them before they enter the fight.

Linear growth in troop numbers will not work without changes in tactics and organizational support

The third scenario better explains why the Russian leadership might need mobilization: not to reinforce existing assault units, but to form new ones and thereby change the geography of the war.

Kofman considers the most dangerous option to be the creation of additional regiments and several new corps that could be deployed, for example, in the Kharkiv, Sumy, or Chernihiv directions. Even without an immediate objective of capturing major cities, the emergence of substantial Russian troops there would force the Ukrainian command to keep additional brigades in the north and northeast instead of deploying them in Donbas or Zaporizhzhia. In this scenario, mobilization would not be about sending another 100,000 troops toward Kramatorsk, but about creating a shortage of reserves for the Ukrainian Armed Forces across several fronts at once.

This may be the purpose behind the 300,000–500,000 additional troops discussed, among other places, in an analytical memo published by the Black Mirror hacker group. The memo describes a mobilization on this scale as being potentially part of a much more ambitious scenario aimed at achieving a “decisive military advantage” that would allow Russia to establish control over the entire territory of the four annexed regions and Kharkiv region before forcing the Ukrainian authorities into negotiations. The authors consider 300,000–500,000 mobilized troops insufficient on their own, however, as the Russian military would also need to expand air support, strengthen defenses in the rear, and develop its drone capabilities.

Even if a mobilization decision is made, it will not determine the outcome of the 2026 campaign. Mobilized troops have to be assembled, assigned to units, given at least basic training, provided with commanders and equipment, and deployed to the front. And forming new units takes even longer.

Kofman estimates the minimum cycle for building such forces at roughly three months and notes that, in order to significantly accelerate the offensive in 2026, mobilization would have had to begin around May. An autumn mobilization – if it happens at all – would therefore primarily be a decision focused on influencing the 2027 campaign.

What could Putin achieve by expanding the army in 2027?

There is no definitive answer to where Putin’s war aims end. His territorial demands have shifted with the negotiating context. In summer 2024, Putin demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from the entire territory of the four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — as a condition for a ceasefire (while Russian-annexed Crimea remained non-negotiable).

During U.S.-mediated negotiations in 2025, according to Reuters, he was reportedly prepared to halt fighting along the existing front line in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions but continued to demand the entire Donbas. This did not, however, mean that he had abandoned his claims to the other territories: in late June 2026, Putin again publicly described full control of Donbas, plus Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as the goal of the “special military operation.”

After capturing the remaining part of Donetsk region, the Russian military would therefore face a much more difficult task in the south. To fully occupy Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, Russian forces would have to capture the major city of Zaporizhzhia, cross the Dnipro, and retake Kherson (which Russian troops abandoned in fall 2022). These would be operations on an entirely different scale from the current advance by small assault groups in Donbas.

So far, there are no clear signs that such operations are being prepared. In summer 2026, the pace of the Russian advance remained slow. Russian forces are positioned south of Zaporizhzhia, but Ukrainian defenses have so far prevented them from advancing toward the city. There are even fewer signs of preparations for a major operation across the Dnipro to retake Kherson. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have stepped up strikes on Russian logistics in the south, including on the port of Mariupol and the Chongar Bridge linking the occupied territories with Crimea.

If Putin intends to use military force to gain full control over all the Ukrainian territories he has incorporated into Russia’s constitution, the Russian military would have to continue its offensive in the south while holding a front more than 1,000 kilometers long. This would seem difficult without recruiting hundreds of thousands of additional troops for next year’s campaign.

But the Russian military’s potential objectives do not end with the territories incorporated into the constitution. Putin also seeks to expand a “security zone” along the Russian-Ukrainian border. Initially, Russian authorities linked the creation of such a zone to protecting the Belgorod region, and later, they invoked Ukraine’s 2024-2025 operation in the Kursk region as justification.

In June 2026, Putin stated explicitly that the Russian military’s objective in the Sumy and Vovchansk sectors was to seize Ukrainian territory along the border, presenting the loss of this territory as Ukraine’s price for its incursion into the Kursk region. In July, following an intensification of Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, Putin again said that additional territory beyond Donbas needed to be seized in order to expand Russia's “buffer zone.”

There is no predetermined geographic boundary to such an objective. The greater the range of Ukrainian drones and other strike capabilities, the less realistic it becomes to secure Russia’s border regions simply by pushing the front line farther away. Nevertheless, the concept of a “security zone” provides the Russian authorities with a rationale for military operations in Ukraine's Kharkiv and Sumy regions, which Moscow has not formally declared part of Russia.

Still, this does not mean that Putin has decided to pursue such a widespread campaign. For now, the most concrete near-term territorial objective remains the part of Donetsk region that Russia does not yet control, and the timeline for achieving it remains unclear, even if Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed that the Russian command aims to do so by the end of 2026. In August, Vadym Skibitskyi, deputy head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, said that this deadline was included in the Russian General Staff’s plans, and in late August, Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Pavlo Palisa made a similar claim. However, there is no independent confirmation that such an order exists. 

The Institute for the Study of War contends that the Russian command has repeatedly missed projected deadlines for capturing Donetsk region. The Conflict Intelligence Team, neverthless, argues that reports of yet another deadline allegedly set by Putin for the capture of Donbas should not be taken too seriously. In their analysts’ view, Putin is satisfied with the current pace of fighting, meaning a new mobilization is unlikely to be necessary.

The cost of avoiding mobilization – and the cost of carrying it out

Avoiding mobilization is becoming increasingly expensive for the Russian authorities. In addition to the federal payment of 400,000 rubles ($4,750), new contract recruits receive a regional bonus. According to economist Janis Kluge’s estimate, its average size reached a record 1.65 million rubles ($19,500) by August, up from 1.47 million ($17,400) in March, while the regions’ actual spending on such payments rose by about 30%. Including payments to intermediaries, the regional cost of recruiting a single contract soldier increased from roughly 1.4 million rubles ($16,550) in mid-2025 to 1.8–1.9 million ($21,900) in 2026. Including the federal payment, the state is therefore paying roughly 2.2–2.3 million rubles ($26,600) to recruit each new contract soldier.

At least 11 Russian regions (plus occupied Sevastopol) raised their enlistment bonuses over the summer. In early fall, a number of southern Russian regions followed suit. As Kluge notes, some regions are funding the higher bonuses by cutting other areas of spending, from pay increases for public-sector workers to regional payments to the families of fallen soldiers.

The increase in payments to recruits has been accompanied by an expansion of the recruitment machinery itself. By August 2026, 56 Russian regions were offering rewards for bringing in a new contract soldier, compared with 31 in fall 2025. According to The Moscow Times, at least 38 regions have formally established such payments through regional or municipal regulations. The state has effectively created a market of intermediaries that are paid to find new soldiers.

IStories calculated that in 2026, the regions’ average monthly spending on recruiter bonuses had more than doubled, from 358 million rubles ($4.2 million) to 802 million ($9.5 million). By mid-May, regional authorities had spent at least 7.7 billion rubles ($91.1 million) on such payments. In some regions, recruiters receive 100,000 rubles or more for each contract recruit they bring in.

At current payment levels, recruiting an additional 100,000 people would require roughly 220–230 billion rubles ($2.7 billion) in one-time bonuses; 300,000 would cost 660–690 billion ($8.0 billion), and 500,000 would cost 1.1–1.15 trillion rubles ($13.6 billion). This is a rough estimate: payments vary widely between regions and are frequently changed. But the scale makes the key point clear: building an additional force of 300,000–500,000 contract soldiers would cost around a trillion rubles before the state even begins paying them their regular salaries.

Mobilization saves money specifically on buying people’s consent. The state does not have to offer a conscript several million rubles to sign a contract, and it does not have to pay recruiters to find them. However, that is where the savings end. Mobilized soldiers must be trained, clothed, armed, housed, transported to the front, and then paid and maintained like other service members. Simply paying 300,000 mobilized soldiers the minimum monthly allowance of around 195,000 ($2,300) rubles would cost more than 700 billion rubles ($8.3 billion) a year.

Mobilization saves money on buying people’s consent

Finally, mobilization carries a cost that cannot be captured in any budget line. The first wave turned out to be one of the Russian government’s most unpopular decisions since the start of the war and triggered a mass exodus of men from the country numbering in the hundreds of thousands. A new mobilization would exacerbate labor shortages in two ways: several hundred thousand more men would be taken into the army, while countless others would try to evade the draft.

Additional spending would come at a time when the budget is in significantly worse shape than it was in 2022. Beginning in 2026, the government raised VAT from 20% to 22%, with the Finance Ministry explicitly citing the need to finance defense and security, including military pay and support for soldiers’ families, as a reason for the additional trillion rubles in revenue. In the first eight months of 2026, the federal budget deficit reached 5.8 trillion rubles ($68.6 billion), while the government’s ability to cover it with reserves and cheap borrowing has diminished.

The contract system, by contrast, allows the economic and social cost of drawing people into the military to be spread over time. Instead of drafting several hundred thousand people simultaneously, the state recruits hundreds of volunteers every day, many of them from groups for whom several million rubles is worth more than the income they would otherwise earn.

In other words, contract recruitment does not necessarily remove every new recruit from an already tight labor market. Russian authorities can continue recruiting among homeless people, people with alcohol or drug dependencies, and other socially disadvantaged groups, some of whom have no regular employment. The size of this pool, however, is unknown. The official 2020 census counted only 11,000 homeless people, while experts in 2024 estimated the actual number at around 2 million, including roughly 1.1 million men. In 2024, about 980,000 Russians were registered as having alcohol dependence and 208,000 as having drug dependence. It is not known, however, what proportion of these people are fit for military service, have not already been recruited, and are willing to sign a contract.

Notably, the threat of mobilization itself helps sustain the contract recruitment system. As The Guardian reports, recruiters use it as an argument: it is better to sign a contract now and get paid than risk being drafted into the army later without receiving a bonus. The result is a paradox: fear of a new mobilization helps the Russian authorities recruit more people than they otherwise would have, thereby allowing them to postpone mobilization.

What is known about preparations for mobilization

The Russian authorities are far better prepared technically for a new mobilization than they were in the fall of 2022. The clearest example is the Unified Register of Military Registration, created after the first wave.

As IStories found in a leak of documents from Mikord, one of the companies that developed the system, mobilization was built into it from the outset as a separate scenario. The register allows authorities to identify people liable for military service, send out draft notices (without any limit on their number), track the potential number of mobilized troops, and transmit information for imposing travel bans and other restrictions. The system’s capacity is currently designed to send up to one million draft notices a year.

In summer 2026, more explicit signs of mobilization-readiness testing emerged. In June, officials from the administrations of neighboring regions took part in mass-mobilization exercises in Volzhsky, Volgograd region. They practiced setting up a preliminary assembly point, notifying citizens, receiving military equipment, and operating a mobilization headquarters. In July, according to The Wall Street Journal (citing Western intelligence agencies), the military conducted a similar exercise in Kaliningrad region, practicing the accommodation, feeding, and arming of mobilized troops. The newspaper’s sources claim that similar exercises are being held in other regions. 

The organizers of the Volzhsky exercises, however, offered a more prosaic explanation: mobilization preparedness is a “peacetime process,” and such drills are held every year.

At the same time, mobilization has become more prominent in the government’s dealings with employers. In July, three professional publications for accountants, HR specialists, and business executives published or updated guidelines on what employers should do in the event of mobilization. According to a source at the Alabuga industrial complex, the management there also received mobilization instructions in August. There were reports that major companies were compiling lists of employees exempt from mobilization, as well as an alleged order for a mobilization drill at a Gazprom facility. The Alabuga account and the authenticity of the document attributed to Gazprom could not be independently verified. 

At the same time, the surge in guidance for employers does not in itself prove that a new mobilization is being prepared. Since 2022, requirements for military registration and the liability of organizations have been steadily tightened.

On September 4, Sberbank held an internal meeting on reserving employees against mobilization, according to sources at the state-owned bank cited by Mozhem Obyasnit. According to the sources, beginning September 10, Sberbank would begin cross-checking the military-registration records of all its employees. Notably, this was the first time the bank had held such a meeting.

The Russian authorities are also continuing to build out the administrative infrastructure that could be used in a mobilization. In August, the government introduced Bill No. 1322096-8, which would establish administrative penalties for failing to comply with decisions by regional governors and operational headquarters. The bill’s explanatory note explicitly lists mobilization measures and meeting the needs of the armed forces among the tasks of these bodies.

Earlier, the Prosecutor General’s Office updated its procedures for overseeing military registration, including the transfer of information on people liable for military service, employee exemptions, and deferments. None of these measures necessarily points to preparations for a new wave of mobilization on its own. Taken together, however, they show that the state continues to keep the mobilization machinery operational.

Russia is steadily strengthening its administrative infrastructure for mobilization

This is the main difference from September 2022. Back then, the authorities first announced the call-up of 300,000 people, but many of the mechanisms for registration, notification, and oversight had to be created or reworked after mobilization had already begun. Military recruitment office databases were incomplete, businesses and regional authorities often had to work out the rules as the campaign unfolded, and there was no electronic draft-notice register. Now, by contrast, much of this infrastructure exists on a permanent basis.

Still, this does not mean that a decision on a new mobilization has already been made, and as The Wall Street Journal's intelligence sources say, no such decision has yet been made. The Guardian reached the same conclusion: in mid-August, two people familiar with discussions in Moscow, plus a Western official, saw no sign that Putin had decided to launch a new mass call-up. For now, the Russian authorities’ actions can be interpreted equally plausibly as preparations for creating the option of future mobilization, or as an effort to put everything in place in order to avoid actually having to mobilize.

In recent months, Russian officials have conspicuously denied that a new call-up is being considered. In July, Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called reports of mobilization a “lying provocation.” On Aug. 20, Russia’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said that it was “neither planned nor expected.” On August 25, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the reports as “information hoaxes,” while three days later Medvedev again said that mobilization was unnecessary because there were enough contract soldiers. Then, on Sept. 1 and 3, Putin joined them, calling the mobilization rumors (1, 2) “complete crap” and an “information attack.” For now, however, these repeated denials are the strongest public indication that the authorities are concerned enough about the mobilization issue to address it repeatedly.

In any case, the state is maintaining and refining the infrastructure needed to carry out a mass call-up quickly while simultaneously spending ever more money and resources to replenishing the army without one.

So, are the Russian authorities preparing for a new mobilization? The answer is: they are preparing for the possibility. The electronic register, system of restrictions, mobilization exercises, work with employers, and legal framework make a repeat of the organizational chaos of September 2022 less likely. The decision will depend primarily on whether Putin wants to expand military operations in 2027 or if he limit his aims to eventually capturing Donbas. In other words, it will depend on whether he has a military objective important enough to justify the political and economic cost of forcibly recruiting several hundred thousand more Russians quickly.

In February 2025, Kronshtadt issued a tender for the production and delivery of components. Items in the procurement documents carried the designation S8000, the same index used by HUR for the Banderol missile.

The tender listed inertial navigation modules, onboard computers, power units, pressure sensors, cables, and other parts. Ukraine later found the same components in wreckage from Banderol missiles, including the Kometa-M8 anti-jamming antenna and the RFD900x telemetry module.

Nordsint focused its analysis on components that are required at a rate of one unit per missile, such as cable assemblies for the Kometa-M8, the missile’s radio modem, and the mechanism used to deploy the missile’s folding wings. For April 2025, Kronshtadt ordered 200 sets of each of those components. The procurement volume then rose to 250 sets a month and remained at that level through the end of October.

Nordsint said the figures point to an initial production plan of about 250 Banderol missiles a month. If the company had actually reached that rate and maintained it after October 2025, Russia could have produced about 4,450 missiles by the end of September 2026, the analysts estimated.

Available estimates of actual production are significantly lower. In August, HUR reported that Russian manufacturers were only capable of producing up to 80 Banderol missiles a month, even with production running around the clock. HUR also estimated that Russia’s production plan for 2026 totaled close to 1,000 of these missiles.

Moscow began using the Banderol — whose name translates to “parcel” in Russian — against Ukraine in spring 2025. HUR released details of the missile’s design in May of that year.

The S8000 is produced by Kronshtadt, which is also known for manufacturing Orion drones. The missile has a range of about 500 kilometers and a maximum speed of 620 to 650 kilometers per hour. It carries a 114.3-kilogram high-explosive fragmentation warhead.

The Banderol makes extensive use of foreign components. HUR identified a Chinese Swiwin turbojet engine, Japanese Murata batteries, South Korean Dynamixel servos, an Australian RF Design radio modem, and microchips made in the United States, China, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea.

Another Kronshtadt tender, this one published in January 2025, called for the development of equipment to test Chinese SWIWIN SW400Pro and SW800Pro jet engines, as well as the TJ-800A2 engine made by Xi’an Sky Phantom Power Technology. (The SW800Pro is the engine used in the Banderol.)

Russian forces have used Banderol missiles much more frequently in recent months. The Insider reported that two Banderol missiles struck the center of the town of Pechenihy in Ukraine’s Kharkiv Region on the morning of Aug. 18, killing 10 people and wounding 17. In September, the S8000 appeared almost daily in Ukrainian Air Force reports on Russian aerial attacks.

In early September, Ukraine’s defense technology cluster Brave1 said Ukrainian developers had created a lower-cost system to intercept Banderol missiles and that it was already in use.

The report was published shortly after the official launch of the first stage of Vostok Oil. On Sept. 5, Putin marked the project’s first oil shipment, calling it “a landmark event for the Arctic region and for all of Russia.” Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin has claimed that all equipment used at Vostok Oil is manufactured in Russia. According to the company, total investment in the project has reached 4 trillion rubles ($47.3 billion).

However, Arctida and Sistema have found that after foreign oilfield service companies withdrew from Russia, their former subsidiaries and related entities in the country continued receiving money from the project — for example, the Russian business of U.S.-based Baker Hughes now operates as OFS Technologies («Технологии ОФС») after being sold to local management. From 2023 through mid-2026, the company received more than 13.6 billion rubles ($161 million) through projects with Rosneft, including some payments under contracts Baker Hughes had signed before leaving Russia.

Baker Hughes said it does not control OFS Technologies, does not receive any economic benefit from its contracts with Rosneft or Vostok Oil, and does not provide equipment, technology, or services to those companies in cases when doing so would constitute a violation of sanctions or export-control rules. OFS Technologies did not respond to requests for comment.

Halliburton exited Russia in a similar way, transferring its business to local management. Its former Russian subsidiary, Burservice LLC (ООО «Бурсервис»), received more than 8 billion rubles ($94.7 million) in contracts from Vostok Oil between late 2023 and spring 2026, according to the investigation.

Additionally, Weatherford and Schlumberger (now known as SLB) announced after the start of the war that they were suspending new investments and deliveries to Russia; however, entities related to both oilfield service companies continued operating in the country. Weatherford’s Russian subsidiary received three payments totaling 58 million rubles ($686,000) from Vostok Oil between May 2022 and February 2023 for work on one well. In 2026, it also transferred an 8 million ruble ($94,700) advance payment to Vostok Oil under a new contract. The investigators were unable to determine what that contract covered. Entities linked to SLB imported more than 5.7 billion rubles ($67.5 million) worth of high-tech equipment into Russia between January 2024 and the end of 2025, mainly from China and India. 

The journalists noted that SLB brand names have largely disappeared from customs declarations of goods entering Russia. For example, shipments of specialized chemicals from India stopped identifying the M-I SWACO brand, which belongs to Schlumberger, even though the product specifications of imported goods remain nearly identical to the originals.

In October 2023, Vostok Oil also signed a direct contract with the Moscow branch of Panama-registered Schlumberger Logelco for technical support in directional drilling. Financial documents reviewed by the investigators show that work and payments under the contract continued through 2026.

More than 20% of Bashneftegeofizika, a company carrying out exploration work at Vostok Oil sites, is owned by Netherlands-based Schlumberger Investment Services B.V. Between 2021 and 2025, Bashneftegeofizika received nearly 13 billion rubles ($153.9 million) from Vostok Oil’s projects. Neither SLB nor the company responded to Arctida and Sistema’s questions.

Another major contractor is Taimyr Invest LLC (ООО «Таймыр Инвест»). In early 2026, Marat Kabaev, the father of Putin’s partner Alina Kabaeva, acquired a 25% stake in the company. After the deal, Kabaev said in an interview that he had decided to invest after a conversation with Nikolai Patrushev, an aide to the Russian president and the former secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

Taimyr Invest handles logistics and cargo deliveries for Vostok Oil. According to financial documents reviewed as part of the investigation, it received just shy of 200 million rubles directly from Vostok Oil between 2024 and 2026 ($2.4 million). However, its main source of revenue was Sinarastroikomplekt, the largest private contractor on the megaproject and a company linked to billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky.

According to the investigation, Sinarastroikomplekt received nearly 900 billion rubles ($10.6 billion) from Vostok Oil between June 2021 and April 2026. The company supplies metal products to the project, including pipes. Vostok Oil and Sinarastroikomplekt publicly announced an agreement on supplies of metallurgical products for the project in 2021.

The investigators also examined Taimyr Invest’s tax disputes. Following audits for 2023 and 2024, Russia’s tax service assessed more than 3 billion rubles ($35.5 million) in additional taxes against the company, along with around 800 million rubles ($9.5 million) in penalties. Court documents show that the company reduced its taxable profits in part through transactions with organizations that showed characteristics of shell companies, Russia’s Federal Tax Service concluded.

In June 2026, a court upheld an additional 1.5 billion rubles ($17.8 million) in profit tax from one audit while canceling a 154 million ruble ($1.8 million) penalty. In a separate case, the court fully sided with the tax authorities, leaving in place claims for 1.6 billion rubles ($18.9 million) in taxes and 646 million rubles ($7.6 million) in penalties. Taimyr Invest appealed both rulings.

Vostok Oil has been under U.S. sanctions since January 2025, when Washington also imposed restrictions on project operator RN-Vankor and Vostok Oil director Vladimir Chernov. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the project has faced the loss of Western financing and reduced access to imported technologies ranging from drilling equipment and software to ice-class tankers.

At the project’s launch, Putin specifically said Vostok Oil was being developed “with due regard for modern environmental standards and requirements for preserving the unique nature of the Arctic.” However, in a July analysis, Arctida noted that a significant part of the project’s infrastructure is being built in highly sensitive tundra areas and on permafrost whose stability is being reduced by climate change.

According to estimates cited by Arctida, about 45% of hydrocarbon fields in the Russian Arctic are located in areas where thawing permafrost could seriously damage infrastructure. Experts associated with the project also warn that oil pollution in the Arctic has especially severe consequences due to low temperatures, the remoteness of the region, and the long recovery time of its ecosystems.

Davankov himself wrote in August 2025 that Kovalev had been his adviser for “more than a year,” describing him as a supporter of New People, an entrepreneur, and a med tech investor. Together they visited the longevity laboratory at Volgograd State Medical University (VolgSMU), and Kovalev, according to Davankov, was tasked with promoting the university’s products in the region. Davankov’s post was also shared by VolgSMU’s official channel.

Kovalev was nominated to run for the State Duma with New People. However, when the party’s federal list was certified on July 10, the state-controlled Vedomosti newspaper reported that Kovalev had been removed from regional group No. 18, which included Kalmykia and the Astrakhan and Volgograd regions. Kovalev’s is no longer among the 298 names on the list that was ultimately registered by the Central Election Commission.

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is seeking Vitaly Nikolayevich Kovalev, born June 23, 1988. German investigators believe that under the aliases Stern and Ben, he founded and led the Trickbot hacker group. His wanted notice also lists other aliases: Grave, Vincent, Bentley, Bergen, and Alex Konor. The BKA believes Kovalev is in Russia.

According to the BKA, Trickbot had been operating since at least 2016 and, at various points, boasted more than 100 members, who used its infrastructure for spreading malware of the same name, as well as the Bazarloader, SystemBC, IcedID, Ryuk, Conti, and Diavol tools. The group has infected hundreds of thousands of computer systems worldwide, earning hundreds of millions of euros from its criminal activity. Its victims have included hospitals, government agencies, companies, and private individuals.

In May 2025, German authorities obtained international arrest warrants for members of various cybercriminal groups as part of Operation Endgame. The BKA stated that international warrants had been issued for 20 suspects and that an Interpol Red Notice was also issued for Kovalev, obligating law enforcement agencies in other countries to locate him and, if possible, provisionally detain him pending an extradition decision.

In July 2026, the Council of the EU added Kovalev to its sanctions list over his involvement in cyberattacks. The document lists Kovalev’s full name, date of birth, and the aliases Bentley, Bergen, Alex Konor, Benny, Ben, and Stern. The EU describes Kovalev as a senior figure linked to the Trickbot group and Conti malware and holds him responsible for cyberattacks that caused significant economic damage.

Trickbot was used for initial access into computer systems, theft of banking and personal data, and the subsequent deployment of ransomware. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that Trickbot had infected millions of computers, including at hospitals, schools, and companies, and that its infrastructure was used to spread Conti.

Conti became one of the largest ransomware operations in history. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, it was used in more than a thousand attacks worldwide, and ransoms paid by victims exceeded $150 million. The FBI recorded at least 16 Conti attacks on U.S. medical and emergency networks, including ambulance services, police, and 911 dispatch centers. Worldwide, more than 400 organizations were affected.

Ransomware linked to Trickbot’s infrastructure caused especially severe damage to healthcare systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Materials from a U.S. Senate hearing state that more than 200 attacks using Ryuk, which is closely tied to the Trickbot and Conti ecosystem, resulted in nearly $100 million in lost revenue for medical organizations and roughly $500 million in system recovery costs.

A federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, handed down the sentence after finding Sharifullah guilty of participating for nearly a decade in a conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. According to prosecutors, he was part of the ISIS-K structure from 2016 until his capture in 2025 and was involved in more than a dozen attacks — conducting surveillance, relaying messages between militants, transporting suicide bombers and weapons, and filming videos of the bombings for the group’s propaganda apparatus.

The central episode in the case was the bombing at Kabul’s airport on Aug. 26, 2021, during the evacuation of American military personnel and civilians. According to court records, the ISIS-K leadership tasked Sharifullah with checking that the road to the airport was clear of Taliban checkpoints. After confirming the route was indeed clear, he reported the information to his handlers. Several hours later, at 5:36 p.m., ISIS-K operative Abdul Rahman al-Logari, whom Sharifullah knew from their time together in an Afghan prison, detonated a body-worn bomb. Thirteen U.S. service members and approximately 160 civilians were killed.

In addition to Kabul and Crocus City Hall, investigators established that Sharifullah was involved in the attack on Nepali guards at the Canadian embassy in Kabul on June 20, 2016 — he prepared the suicide bomber and transported him to the attack site. Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said Sharifullah “spent nearly a decade at the heart of a horrific campaign of terror” and contributed to the deaths of dozens of people.

The case was investigated by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, with the prosecution handled by attorneys from the Eastern District of Virginia and the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The report estimates that as many as 25,000 North Koreans are employed in Russia’s drone industry, including at facilities in the Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, where Geran-type attack drones, modeled on Iran’s Shahed series, are assembled. Russia gains a new pool of workers for industries supporting its war against Ukraine while further eroding a sanctions regime against Pyongyang that Moscow itself once helped enforce.

According to the MSMT, North Korean workers in Russia are often categorized as students under a special visa arrangement that allows sanctions to be circumvented without the need for a formal breach. One “student” worker earns an average of about $7,500 a year, the report said, with most of that money confiscated by the North Korean government.

Monthly pay in Russia can be up to five times higher than in China, making Russia an increasingly attractive destination for Pyongyang to send such laborers. Still, as of the end of 2025, between 20,000 and 70,000 North Koreans were working in China, compared with 15,000 to 30,000 in Russia.

“DPRKauthorities also exercise extreme control over labourers’ movement and interactions with outsiders in order to prevent defections, while labourers who do defect risk reprisals against family members remaining in North Korea,” the report said.

It was previously reported that North Korean workers at construction sites in three Russian cities were working up to 16 hours a day with virtually no days off and receiving no more than $10 a month after deductions. Their passports were confiscated by representatives of North Korean security services, and the workers often did not know who their actual employer was because Russian companies hired them in violation of UN sanctions.

The MSMT, which includes the United States, South Korea, Japan and eight other countries, was established in 2024 after Russia blocked the renewal of the mandate for a UN panel that had monitored compliance with sanctions against Pyongyang for 15 years.

According to the Russian ministry, the incident occurred at 2:22 p.m. on Sept. 14 while the Baltic Fleet corvette was in international waters in the southwestern portion of the Baltic Sea. The ministry said a Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter was approaching the ship and allegedly failed to respond to calls on an international communications channel. The ship’s commander then ordered the launch of two red signal flares, after which, according to the Russian account, the helicopter left the area.

The Danish military said the helicopter was carrying out routine photography of the Russian ship in international waters near the town of Gedser in southern Denmark. According to Denmark’s Armed Forces, the Russian vessel fired two flares toward the helicopter, with one passing at close range. The Danish military said the flares were pyrotechnic devices normally used for signaling at sea.

Following the incident, Russian Ambassador Vladimir Barbin was summoned to Denmark’s Foreign Ministry, where Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the incident “unacceptable.” 

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen linked the Russian ship’s actions to what she described as an intensifying hybrid campaign against Europe, saying Moscow was testing NATO while trying to intimidate Europeans and sow division.

Russian pilots were also decorated after 2023 incident with U.S. drone

The Insider found that in March 2023, Russia’s then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu similarly awarded Orders of Courage to Su-27 pilots following an incident involving aircraft from a NATO country — a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea. According to U.S. European Command, one of the Russian fighters struck and damaged the drone’s propeller during the encounter, forcing the U.S. military to bring the aircraft down in international waters.

Russia’s Defense Ministry denied that a collision had occurred and said the drone crashed as a result of its own sharp maneuvering. The ministry said the pilots were decorated for preventing a violation of the boundaries of an area where Russia had imposed temporary restrictions on airspace use after the start of the full-scale war.

John Kirby, then a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, mocked the Russian ministry’s decision at the time:

“I don’t know of another military in the world, another Air Force in the world, that would award a pilot for smashing into a drone. If that’s bravery, then I guess they’ve got a different definition of it. It's ludicrous, it's insulting.”

At the same time, the Natural Resources Ministry insists that 20–30 bear attacks a year is normal and that in recent years, only 2014 — when 166 cases were recorded — has been anomalous. But the current wave is nevertheless unusual in both intensity and geography: bears have been reported near populated areas in 41 regions, including places where they had not been seen for years. In late August, for example, a bear attacked a woman near Novosibirsk – a rare occurrence for the region.

The issue received widespread attention after a bear burst into a tent at the Istok tourist camp near the village of Artybash in Altai on the night of August 19 and, in full view of her fiancé, dragged 29-year-old Snezhanа Koroleva, an Emergency Situations Ministry employee from Novosibirsk, into the forest. She had accepted her boyfriend’s marriage proposal the day before. The woman was killed.

Chronicle of incidents

Russian media subsequently began reporting extensively on bear attacks:

• August 26, Novosibirsk Region. A bear mauled a cow and then charged at a woman who had gone to check on the herd near the village of Malchikha in Kolyvan District. She survived.
• August 30, Novgorod Region. A female bear attacked a hunter who had fired in her direction. The man survived with injuries to his head, arms, and legs.
• August 30, Kemerovo Region. A bear attacked a 68-year-old woman in Novokuznetsk. A police officer who arrived at the scene shot the bear.
• August 31–September 2, Krasnoyarsk Krai. Two women, aged 67 and 73, went missing in the forest near the settlement of Podtyosovo while picking mushrooms. They were later found dead, and investigators documented signs of a bear attack.
• September 6, Krasnoyarsk Krai. A bear mauled a 40-year-old shift worker in a forest near the settlement of Yuzhno-Yeniseysky. He died at the scene.
• September 7, Buryatia. A bear attacked a man who was accompanying his wife to the bus and stopped to check on livestock in the forest near Khurtaga. Despite surgeons’ efforts, he died in the hospital.
• September 16, Krasnoyarsk Krai. A bear attacked a 66-year-old woman outside her home in the village of Verkhny Kebezh. The bear fled, and the woman died at the scene.

By mid-September, journalists had counted at least 12 people killed in bear attacks since the beginning of the year, along with more than 530 bears shot across the country after being deemed dangerous by authorities and hunters.

Measures introduced by the regions

Authorities largely see mass culling as the main solution to the problem. By mid-September, more than 530 bears deemed dangerous had been killed across the country. In Krasnoyarsk Krai, which has recorded the most incidents, regional authorities introduced a 36,500-ruble reward ($430) for every bear killed in hunting grounds, while shooting bears within populated areas remains the exclusive authority of the police. In Irkutsk Region, authorities formed 81 task forces comprising 209 specialists and hunters, with 142 vehicles, and approved measures to regulate the population of 250 bears. In Buryatia, 149 bears have been shot this season. Local agencies, however, avoid words such as “shot” or “killed” in their reports, instead using the euphemism “regulated.”

At the same time, regions are restricting access to forests and public spaces. In Altai’s Turochaksky District, authorities imposed a curfew from 8 p.m. to 10 a.m. following the death of a tourist. The Krasnoyarsk Pillars national park and some trails in the Ergaki nature reserve have been closed to visitors, while in Irkutsk Region’s Slyudyansky District authorities postponed school ceremonies on Sept. 1 and tightened security measures at educational institutions. In Buryatia, where the republican environmental watchdog receives as many as 32 reports of bears entering populated areas on some days, two schools and a technical college in Zakamensk, as well as schools in the Barguzinsky and Khorinsky districts, have been switched to remote learning.

At the federal level, the Natural Resources Ministry is collecting proposals from the regions on amendments to legislation governing the bear population. Under current rules, regions may reduce the population by no more than 30% a year. Magadan Region Governor Sergei Nosov has already proposed his own approach: establishing sanitary buffer zones around populated areas that bears would be prohibited from entering, with any predators crossing the boundary to be shot without additional approvals.

Why is this happening?

Biologists and wildlife experts attribute the increase in bears venturing into populated areas to a combination of factors: a growing population (according to the Natural Resources Ministry, it has more than doubled since 1990, reaching 307,900 bears), poor harvests of pine nuts and berries, wildfires in Siberia, and bears becoming accustomed to dumps and tourist camps.

In a comment to The Insider, an expert with the Environmental Communications Agency (KEA) who asked to remain anonymous identified two broad groups of causes:

“The increase in bear attacks on people needs to be divided into two types: attacks in and around populated areas, and attacks in remote wilderness areas.

Geography also matters: the causes can vary significantly from one region to another. But generally speaking, in the first case, predators venturing into populated areas – not only bears, but also tigers in the Far East – are linked to a whole range of problems.

Climate change, logging – both legal and illegal – partly uncontrolled hunting, poaching of fish, and what is effectively industrial-scale harvesting of everything in the forest that serves as food for bears – berries, nuts, mushrooms and so on – are all destroying their food supply. As a result, bears start looking for food near populated areas.

The second group of causes is the lack of outreach to local residents and funding for it, the absence of a system for processing food waste, pets kept on chains, and livestock left unprotected from predators. As a result, people have neither the information nor the resources to reduce the number of conflicts.

The second type involves conflicts with bears in the wild. Tourism is growing, while tourists themselves are becoming less prepared; at the same time, conservation programs are being scaled back, pressure on environmentalists is increasing, and funding is directed almost exclusively toward developing tourism in natural areas.

A systematic effort is needed to accurately assess what is happening, but that is currently impossible. Based on my personal experience and analysis of the situation, I believe the number of attacks will increase, and the predators will end up being blamed for it – animals that the state knows how to deal with only by shooting them.”

The Japanese experience

Japan has been experiencing a similar situation for several years. The number of victims there reached a record in 2025: bears killed 13 people and injured more than 100, with 235 attacks recorded and more than 20,000 bear sightings. Predators entered supermarkets and residential neighborhoods and carried out unprovoked attacks.

Experts cite the same causes as their Russian counterparts: poor acorn and beech-nut harvests forced bears to expand their search for food, compounded by a long-term population increase – from 15,000 animals in 2012 to around 54,000 in 2025 – the decline of rural areas, which has left abandoned orchards for bears to forage in, and a shortage of hunters, whose numbers are falling year by year.

To address the problem, Japanese authorities have taken measures that Russia is not yet discussing even as a last resort: in autumn 2025, the army was deployed to Akita Prefecture to assist hunters, police were authorized to use firearms within populated areas, and a record 13,499 bears were shot or captured over the year.

In March 2026, the government approved a roadmap for dealing with the predators through 2030, including regional culling targets. In April, it officially changed its policy toward bears, shifting from treating them as a “protected species” to “actively regulating” their numbers, and allowing bears to be killed in residential and agricultural areas as a standard measure.

The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against five individuals whom investigators believe worked for Russian intelligence. They are Yuri Khrameev, 63, a former colonel in the Russian intelligence services; his son Kirill Khrameev, 27, an FSB officer; Cuban national Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, 35; Cuban Yaidel Delgado Suarez, 35, known as Viking; and Venezuelan national Angel Eduardo Castro, 22. Commenting on the case, Attorney General Todd Blanche said:

“It is our job to stop America’s adversaries from unleashing violence and terror on American soil.”

According to Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg, the perpetrators attempted to “recruit U.S. citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin.” Over the summer, the network recruited a U.S. resident to surveil a well-known Russian dissident, identified in the published documents as “Victim-1.” Suarez promised the recruit between $1,000 and $1,500 to take photographs and video of locations associated with the potential victim. After the assignment was completed, the recruit was offered $40,000 to kill the dissident. When the U.S. resident declined to carry out the killing himself, he was asked to recommend “someone [who] can do the work.”

As The Insider found, Russian intelligence deliberately used Cubans and Venezuelans living in Russia to recruit a Venezuelan living in the United States. Angel Eduardo Castro, who had previously played baseball in Venezuela, served as the go-between.

In late July, Castro contacted a fellow countryman living in the U.S. and instructed him to surveil a Russian dissident in Washington. They communicated in code: the surveillance assignment referred to the need to “measure the plot of land and provide the measurements,” while the killing itself was called “construction.”

The same network, the U.S. Department of Justice notes, recruited a U.S. citizen in 2025 to surveil another Russian dissident — “Victim-2,” who lived in Lithuania. In that episode, the father and son Khrameev played the leading role. The younger Khrameev asked the recruit to take photographs at the potential victim’s address, and the elder Khrameev offered him $25,000 to carry out the murder. The Justice Department’s statement describes:

“Yuri Khrameev further told U.S. Citizen-1 that they wanted Victim-2 dead because he was ‘spreading dirt about my country’ and ‘distorting history.’ Yuri Khrameev then sent U.S. Citizen-1 a photograph of Victim-2 and described that he could be murdered by ‘throwing a bottle of gasoline’ or ‘sticking a knife’ in him. After U.S. Citizen-1 declined to carry out the murder, Yuri Khrameev offered to give him a ‘simpler job’ which could include ‘set[ting] fire to a warehouse of property or food’ or ‘throw[ing] a bottle of gasoline at an electrical substation.’ Yuri Khrameev made clear to U.S. Citizen-1 that the purpose was to target ‘all the countries that are helping Ukraine’ and that he was offering ‘serious money for serious work.’ Finally, Yuri Khrameev confirmed that he was a ‘colonel of Russian intelligence agencies.’”

The Justice Department notes that the network likely recruited other individuals to carry out acts of sabotage in Europe. According to the department, Cuban national Durruthy coordinated an attack in Czechia in June 2024 and another in Lithuania in September 2024.

All five individuals have been charged with participating in a conspiracy to finance terrorism. Yuri Khrameev, Suarez, and Castro are also charged with conspiracy to commit murder for hire. The first charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, the second up to 10 years. All of them remain at large.

One of the sharpest cuts happened in Mordovia. On Aug. 18, the republic’s authorities set the lump-sum payment for new contract soldiers at 3 million rubles, but by Sept. 15 they had already cut it back down to 800,000 rubles. In other words, the increased payment lasted less than a month.

Mordovia has had trouble financing these payments. In June, when head of the republic Artem Zdunov publicly looked into reasons why payments to some service members had been suspended since the start of the year, the regional finance ministry explained its position by citing “limited budget resources.” Zdunov nevertheless demanded the payments be resumed.

In September, the Irkutsk Region cut its signing bonus from 2.1 million to 1.8 million rubles, with governor Igor Kobzev pointing to the need to meet military recruitment targets despite “the challenging task of executing the region’s 2026 budget.” Notably, the region decided to spend more money directly on recruitment, raising the fee for a middleman who brings in a foreign national to 1.5 million rubles, and 800,000 for a Russian from another region.

The Irkutsk Region had also cut payments in early 2026: contract soldiers who signed up in January were entitled to 1.4 million rubles in additional payments, while those who enlisted in February and March got 1 million. A similar situation occurred in Kuzbass, where payments were lowered amid a regional budget deficit. However, in March, The Insider counted at least ten other regions that kept raising their payments.

This past May, the Sverdlovsk Region reduced its regional payment from 2.7 million to 2.5 million rubles. Regional authorities did not give a specific reason, saying only that the decision had been based on “a combination of factors.”

The mass reduction of bonuses was first observed back in the fall of 2025, when at least nine regions cut payments in October alone, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe’s estimates. In Tatarstan, the regional bonus fell from 2.7 million to 400,000 rubles; in Mari El, from 2.6 million to 400,000; in Chuvashia, from 2.1 million to 400,000. Cuts also occurred in the Nizhny Novgorod, Ulyanovsk, and Orenburg regions, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and Bashkortostan. In the Samara Region, bonus payments had reached 3.6 million rubles in early 2025, but before October it had already dropped to 400,000.

Today, the situation with contract military service is markedly different from 2024 and the first half of 2025, when regions competed for recruits by steadily raising enlistment bonuses. Now some regions are lowering them to initial levels, despite persistent personnel shortages at the front.

According to an estimate by economist Janis Kluge, cited by the Conflict Intelligence Team, some 234,000 people signed Defense Ministry contracts between January and August 2026, compared with 260,000 in the same period of 2025 — roughly 10% fewer. This estimate is based on budget data, not official Defense Ministry statistics.

Previous investigations found that more than 10 million bullets made in NATO countries were imported into Russia between March 2022 and February 2024. A significant share were high-precision bullets in .338 Lapua Magnum and .375 CheyTac calibers, which are designed for long-range shooting. Those quantities are small compared with the overall scale of the war, but the imported bullets are nonetheless important for Russian snipers.

Promtekhnologiya was founded by Russian oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev, who built the weapons company with the backing of two key officials: Dmitry Rogozin, then the Kremlin’s key figure overseeing the defense industry, and FSB General Sergei Beseda.

Nikolaev’s businesses produce weapons in Russia and import ammunition from the European Union and United States through sanctions-evasion channels. And yet, he has continued to develop business interests in Italy, where his Tuscan winery has not been seized and even continued receiving subsidies from the European Union during the full-scale war.

Finnish Lapua and American Hornady bullets for Russian snipers

On April 6, 2026, the pro-war Telegram channel Bolshoy Panda (lit. “Big Panda”) reported that Russian snipers had begun receiving ammunition for ORSIS rifles from the Russian Defense Ministry that had been made with American Peterson cartridge cases and American Hornady bullets.

“The cartridges are formally considered hunting ammunition because they do not have a GRAU index, but these are the rounds supplied with the ORSIS 5000 rifles as standard ammunition for our guys. The bullet is a 178-grain Hornady OTM weighing 11.53 grams, the case is Peterson, I don’t know whose powder it is, and the manufacturer is Promtekhnologiya LLC.”

After testing the rounds at a firing range, the channel’s author praised their accuracy and consistency:

“At 300 meters from my Volkodav, 10 bullets went into the head-sized gong like kids going to school, practically one on top of another. Consistency is at a high level, with minimal variation in velocity. ... In principle, these are among the few more or less factory-made cartridges that honestly deliver 0.5 MOA from my Volkodav.”

A grouping of 0.5 MOA, or half a minute of angle, means that at 300 meters the shots in a carefully aimed series landed within a circle about 4.5 centimeters, or 1.8 inches, across.

Three days later, the channel published a clarification:

“There are currently extremely few cartridges in the configuration described above. At the moment, 6V12 sniper rifles are supplied with ammunition using Scenar bullets” — made by Finnish company Lapua — “weighing 11.53 grams, Irbis 570 powder and cases marked ORSIS.”

The post indicates that because there were not enough American bullets to supply the Russian military, Promtekhnologiya turned to Finnish components to continue producing sniper ammunition.

From Austrian Glocks to Finnish bullets

The first official evidence that Promtekhnologiya was using Finnish bullets and cartridge cases dates to December 2019 — five years after the European arms embargo on Russia was imposed. At the time, journalists from Kalashnikov magazine tested a new ORSIS .308 Winchester cartridge at a shooting range. The ammunition used 12-gram Lapua Scenar HPBT precision bullets and Lapua cartridge cases, both made by the Finnish manufacturer.

The journalists noted that assembling the ammunition in Russia from foreign-made components reduced the cost:

“The ORSIS cartridge, assembled entirely from high-quality foreign components, costs an impressive 400 rubles at the Bars store in St. Petersburg — more than the vast majority of its competitors on the shelf, but less than Norma or RWS cartridges, some versions of which cost more than 500 rubles.”

Unofficial reports of Russian precision ammunition go back to 2014, when firearms forums began advertising ORSIS cartridges made with Finnish Lapua cases, Lapua Scenar bullets, and Finnish VihtaVuori powder.

Promtekhnologiya, founded in 2009, was built with extensive European and American expertise. Between 2012 and 2015, the company pursued three projects aimed at localizing foreign weapons production in Russia.

In July 2012, it signed an agreement with Austria’s Glock GmbH to assemble fourth-generation Glock 17, 34, and 35 pistols from Austrian components. The first trial batch assembled in Russia totaled more than 2,000 pistols. Although the localization project was officially terminated after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Podolsk plant continued receiving products from its former Austrian partner for years afterwards. The latest known shipment came in November 2023, when Promtekhnologiya imported 100 Glock 43 pistols and 100 Glock 19 Gen5 pistols.

In 2013, Promtekhnologiya announced cooperation with the American company ArmaLite. The plan was to assemble semiautomatic AR-10 and M-15 rifles in .223 and .308 calibers using American components and Russian-made barrels. Although the agreement with the U.S. company was terminated, several years later the Moscow Region plant said it had fully localized production of its own AR-10 version.

After the 2014 arms embargo on Russia was announced, the factory also began assembling Marocchi Si 12 inertia-operated shotguns in Podolsk made with components supplied from Italy. The Italian manufacturer’s loose sanctions compliance may have been influenced by the fact that one of its vice presidents was a Russian citizen, Oleg Benedichuk.

Who brings American and Finnish bullets into Russia

The Soviet defense industry, and later Russia’s, focused on mass-produced weapons and did not manufacture high-precision bullets, which are made to tighter tolerances for weight, shape, and balance than bullets made for assault rifles and machine guns. As a result, sniper bullets show less variation in trajectory from shot to shot.

They also typically have more advanced aerodynamics, including a higher ballistic coefficient, and higher-quality jackets, allowing them to retain velocity at longer ranges and reducing the effects of wind. As a result, they produce tighter shot groups and more predictable ballistics than standard military bullets, which are optimized primarily for reliability and cost rather than maximum accuracy.

The Insider has found evidence of American and Finnish bullets being used in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine by both Wagner mercenaries and regular Russian military units.

In Russia, precision rifle bullets in .308 Winchester and .338 Lapua Magnum are produced by the Barnaul Cartridge Plant, the Novosibirsk Cartridge Plant, and Tekhkrim, among others. But both sniper-rifle manufacturers and shooters themselves say American and Finnish bullets provide better accuracy than those made in Russia.

Previous investigations by The Insider found that more than 10 million bullets made in NATO countries entered Russia between March 2022 and February 2024. A significant number were precision long-range bullets in .338 Lapua Magnum and .375 CheyTac calibers. The bullets are critically important for Russian snipers.

There are indirect signs that some shipments of American bullets reached Russia through the European Union.

For example, on June 8, 2022, the Russian company LLC IF Tetis (ООО «ИФ „Тетис“») received a Russian declaration of conformity covering a shipment of American Hornady bullets. The declaration stated that testing documents for the bullets had been issued on April 28, 2022, by Finland’s Lapua Test Shooting Lab under protocol No. 393/16.

After a series of reports by The Insider revealed the large-scale smuggling of European weapons, Russia’s Federal Accreditation Service stopped publishing declarations for a number of customs codes, making it more difficult to calculate precisely how many weapons and rounds of ammunition are imported into Russia. Numerous social media and specialized forum posts, however, indicate that new shipments are continuing.

On Jan. 28, 2026, the Orel weapons retailer announced a new shipment of Hornady ammunition on Telegram. The store is part of a group of companies controlled by arms businessman Mikhail Khubutia, a partner of Italy’s Beretta Holding.

In the Milya group for ammunition sales, seven advertisements from five users offering Hornady bullets were posted between Aug. 31 and Sept. 4 alone.

EU subsidies for an FSB-linked businessman

The technology and equipment for the weapons plant in Podolsk came from Europe despite the company receiving political backing at the highest levels of the Russian state. Until 2012, Promtekhnologiya’s deputy chief executive was Alexei Rogozin, the son of Dmitry Rogozin, who was then the deputy prime minister responsible for Russia’s defense industry and state arms procurement. (After public accusations of a conflict of interest, Alexei Rogozin left the company. He was later replaced by the deputy prime minister’s nephew, Roman Rogozin.)

A 2018 investigation by the independent outlet Novaya Gazeta linked Promtekhnologiya owner Konstantin Nikolaev to the family of FSB General Sergei Beseda. A Panama-based company linked to the general’s son, Alexei Beseda, received 187 million rubles from Nikolaev-controlled entities and a 25% stake in a joint venture producing thermal-imaging sensor arrays.

In 2013, the same year Nikolaev’s Cyprus offshore company paid more than $5 million to the son of the FSB general and Promtekhnologiya signed its rifle-assembly agreement with ArmaLite, Nikolaev bought the La Madonnina winery in Tuscany’s Bolgheri wine region.

The winery is located near the renowned Italian estates Sassicaia and Ornellaia, whose standing in the wine world can be compared with Ferrari and Lamborghini in the automotive industry. Nikolaev invested about €40 million in La Madonnina.

The winery is owned by the Cyprus company Cetrezza Trading, which until recently belonged to British Virgin Islands-based Cedar Circle Holding Limited, whose beneficial owner was Nikolaev himself.

Ownership of Cetrezza has since passed to the Magic Forest Trust, whose owners are not publicly disclosed. The Cyprus company nevertheless retained links to the oligarch even after the formal sale. Cetrezza owned an 85% stake in the Enoteca Tognoni wine boutique in Livorno, while Nikolaev himself held 5% of the company’s share capital until 2024.

While Nikolaev-linked companies manufacture weapons in Russia and bring ammunition into the country from the United States and European Union, his Tuscan winery has not only avoided seizure but continued receiving EU subsidies.

Over the past 10 years, La Madonnina received €135,600 in subsidies from European Union agricultural funds, including €107,800 paid after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In theory, EU rules require member states to identify the ultimate beneficiaries of public funding. In practice, however, inquiries to Italy’s Financial Intelligence Unit and to the National Anti-Corruption Authority found that the databases used by regulators do not contain information on the ultimate owners even of some Italian companies, let alone foreign entities.

As a result, Italian oversight agencies are effectively unable to establish the connection between the Tuscan winery and a man who has publicly described himself as its owner in multiple interviews.

At the Sept. 16 hearing, the judges rejected a request from the Investigative Committee to extend the drivers’ detention until Oct. 12. The investigators alleged that the truckers transported explosives as part of an organized group and that they had effectively “committed a terrorist attack.” They were charged under provisions covering illegal trafficking of explosives by an organized group and terrorism resulting in major damage.

The Investigative Committee alleged that the men were part of a group including Ukrainian-born Artyom and Ekaterina Timofeyev and a wanted man identified as “Borisovsky,” who investigators say were recruited by the SBU. Some of the drivers were formally employed by a sole proprietorship registered to Timofeyev, while others dealt with him simply as a customer who ordered routine freight transport.

The case materials indicate that the defendants left Chelyabinsk driving trailers trucks carrying prefabricated frame houses. However, unbeknownst to the drivers, Ukrainian drones that had been concealed in the roof of each structure.

On June 1, 2025, when the trucks were positioned near military airfields in the Ivanovo, Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ryazan and Amur regions — where drivers had been instructed to make their deliveries — SBU personnel remotely activated the drones, which then attacked the Russian military facilities. The investigation estimated the damage to Russia’s Defense Ministry at 2 billion rubles ($23.7 million). The investigation lasted more than a year and ultimately filled more than 90 volumes before being sent to the Prosecutor General’s Office. The Insider previously reported on the claimed damage.

Kommersant reported that last week First Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin refused to approve the indictment, saying that investigators had failed to find direct evidence of the drivers’ guilt and that the circumstantial evidence was not enough to send the case to trial. He returned the case to the Investigative Committee for further investigation. The Investigative Committee disagreed and appealed Razinkin’s decision to Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan.

While the dispute between the agencies remains unresolved, the Moscow City Court ruled that there were no longer any legal grounds to keep the defendants in pretrial detention, and the four drivers were released Sept. 16. The men deny any wrongdoing and describe themselves as “Russian patriots,” adding that after the drones emerged from their trucks, they themselves called the police, tried to shoot down the drones, and attempted to minimize the damage caused to the airfields.

The circumstances of Grunis’ death currently remain unclear. Important Stories noted that leaked records appeared to place him in Alchevsk, in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Luhansk Region. On Sept. 13, a few days before the reports began appearing, Ukrainian forces struck multiple locations across the city. Ukraine said the strikes destroyed a supply depot and a location where Russian forces stored weapons and military equipment.

Around the same time, according to the Exilenova+ monitoring channel, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) attacked military equipment in the settlement of Karpaty near Alchevsk. It is not known whether Grunis’ death was connected to those strikes.

Before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Grunis took part in Russian military campaigns in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria. He also participated in the annexation of Crimea.

More recently, Grunis commanded a brigade advancing toward Kostyantynivka in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region. In July, the Major General reported to Vladimir Putin that the city had been captured, and a month later he was awarded the title Hero of Russia, the country’s highest honorary distinction.

Kostyantynivka, however, has still not come fully under Russian control. The open-source intelligence project Black Bird Group and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) continue to report fighting inside the city.

The pro-war Russian Telegram channel Rybar also indicates that Ukrainian positions in the area remain, marking the territory as a contested “gray zone” that is not firmly controlled by either side.

The Russia-installed government of Sevastopol adopted a resolution on Sept. 15 transferring such property to the city treasury. The list includes six companies and five individuals whose assets were taken. Russia-appointed governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said the cases were reviewed by a working group of the local Anti-Terrorism Commission together with Russia’s financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring, the FSB, and other government bodies.

The authorities claim that everyone on the list either helped Ukraine’s armed forces or acted “to the detriment of Russia’s security.”

However, Razvozhayev’s own explanations justifying the confiscations show that the grounds vary widely, from alleged transfers of information about Russian military personnel to simply having relatives in Ukraine.

The most striking case involves 56-year-old Olena Vasylenko. Razvozhayev said she is the wife of a judge on the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal in Kyiv and that apartments in one of Sevastopol’s apartment buildings are registered in her name. The official did not state any other accusations against Vasylenko and did not allege that she had transferred money to Ukraine’s armed forces, nor that she cooperated with Ukrainian intelligence services or passed any information to Ukraine. There have been no reports of a criminal case against her.

Nevertheless, Vasylenko’s real estate was transferred to the city treasury alongside the property of people whom the Russian security services accuse of treason.

A relative serving in Ukraine’s armed forces was also cited to justify the seizure of property belonging to Rifer LLC. Since 2015, the company has been headed by a man identified as A.B. Authorities said he holds an “anti-Russian position” but did not explain what that meant.

They did, however, specifically note that Gerashchenko’s son serves in Ukraine’s armed forces. Razvozhayev did not say that Gerashchenko himself or his company had transferred money to the Ukrainian military or provided it with other assistance.

A local businessman with a father in Kyiv

The Russian authorities linked three other companies — KETZ Saturn, Atlantis-LTD, and Rosttrade — to Sevastopol businessman Viktor Rozhmanov. Officials also made accusations against Rozhmanov personally, with the Russian Anti-Terrorism Commission saying he belongs to “pro-Ukrainian groups,” spreads information supporting Ukraine’s armed forces, and posts content that Russian authorities consider to be “discrediting” to the Russian military. The authorities did not cite any specific posts.

Another allegation concerned Rozhmanov’s relationship with his father. Russia-appointed  Sevastopol governor Razvozhayev said the businessman’s father is a former member of Ukraine’s armed forces who lives in Kyiv. Through him, Rozhmanov allegedly “maintains contacts with representatives of the Ukrainian regime.”

The Insider found no previous reports accusing Rozhmanov of supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine or of having ties to Ukrainian authorities. Those purported connections became public only when the decision to seize his assets was announced.

The Rozhmanov family’s connection to Kyiv, however, can be traced through older Russian court records. Arbitration cases involving Saturn and Atlantis mention the businessman’s father, Vitaly Gennadievich Rozhmanov. One document says that a 2018 power of attorney listed his registered residence as Kyiv.

Still, The Insider found no open-source confirmation that the elder Rozhmanov served in Ukraine’s armed forces nor that his son communicated with Ukrainian authorities through him.

Viktor Rozhmanov himself had long been part of Sevastopol’s Russian business establishment. The website of the Sevastopol Entrepreneurs Council lists him as a board member and director of Atlantis-LTD. He also heads the council’s committee on small and medium-sized business and the development of youth entrepreneurship.

Authorities also cited a family connection to a Ukrainian intelligence officer in the case of 72-year-old Viktor Piskunov. Russian officials say his son-in-law works for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR.In this case, however, the accusations go beyond the family relationship. Authorities allege that Piskunov regularly sent his son-in-law money earned from renting out an apartment, and a criminal case has been opened against him under a statute on the illegal trafficking of explosives. Governor Razvozhayev did not explain why the alleged money transfers to a relative were connected to that charge.

Authorities disclosed even less about Andrei Krivobokov, born in 1972. In his general description, Razvozhayev included Krivobokov among those who allegedly helped Ukrainian armed formations or acted “to the detriment of Russia’s security.” However, when discussing Krivobokov specifically, the governor said only that he is a Ukrainian citizen. Authorities did not publicly say what actions led to the confiscation of his property, and there was no mention of a criminal case against him.

Not everyone on the latest list had property seized because of relatives or formal connections to Ukraine. The same resolution includes the names of Yevhen and Svitlana Kharchenko, a married couple facing much more serious accusations from the Russian security services. According to the FSB, the couple began cooperating with Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) in February 2024 and passed it information about the locations of Black Sea Fleet ships, as well as routes used by Russian troops and military equipment. The Russian authorities say the information could have been used to prepare missile strikes and acts of sabotage.

The Kharchenkos face a criminal case on treason charges, meaning the property of people accused of directly working for Ukrainian intelligence was placed on the same list as apartments belonging to a woman whose husband is a judge in Kyiv.

Among the companies whose property was seized Sept. 15 was the Sevastopol instrument-making plant Parus. The Russia-installed officials claim the company is controlled by people in Cyprus, France, and Luxembourg, and that its main beneficiary is a man identified as A.A. Dreyev. The Anti-Terrorism Commission alleges that the plant is linked to Ukrainian foundations that finance the country’s military. Authorities did not name the foundations or provide details of any money transfers.

Another company, TBI LLC, is effectively owned by Ukrainian citizen G.K. Lutsai, founder of Kyiv-based Interrybflot, according to the commission. Authorities say Lutsai publicly stated that “Interrybflot helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Property seized without a court conviction

Confiscations of this kind do not require Russian authorities to obtain a criminal conviction against the property owner. Instead, they use a special mechanism introduced after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

The framework is based on Sevastopol government Resolution No. 123-PP, adopted Feb. 28, 2015. The document was originally titled “On Certain Issues of Property Nationalization.” In 2024, it was renamed “On Issues of Managing the Property of the City of Sevastopol” and amended to include provisions on “terrorism prevention.”

The process works as follows: security agencies and other government bodies collect information, the Anti-Terrorism Commission reviews it, and the Sevastopol government then issues a resolution placing the property into the city treasury. There is no requirement to wait for a court to find the owner guilty of a crime.

In the current list, criminal cases are mentioned only for some of those affected. Razvozhayev did not report the existence of such cases against Vasilenko, Krivobokov, Rozhmanov, or Gerashchenko.

Earlier seizures focused mainly on financing Ukraine

Sevastopol has used the mechanism for several years, but authorities previously justified the largest confiscations primarily by alleging financial support for Ukraine or direct ties between owners and Ukrainian institutions.

For example, in October 2024, the city seized Sevastopolgaz PJSC. Razvozhayev said at the time that the company’s profits had been routed through a chain of front people to Ukrainian businessmen who financed Ukraine’s armed forces.

In March 2025, authorities seized seven businesses and property belonging to 13 people connected to the Kozlovsky-Miroshnikov family. The assets included the Mayak marine lighting plant and the companies Plosk, Tinos, Tekhnotron, and Technical Operations Center No. 1. Authorities said the owners were connected to a Polish foundation and had transferred large sums to support Ukraine’s armed forces. Some of those companies had previously benefited from tax and other incentives under Russia’s Sevastopol free economic zone before they were nationalized.

The city also took control of glamping sites at Fiolent that had previously received a construction grant. After the seizure, they were transferred to the state-owned company Sevastopol Boarding Houses.

In December 2025, authorities seized Sevastopol’s largest local internet provider, Sevstar, along with affiliated companies Lancom, Sevtelecomservice, Freenet Crimea, Digital Innovations, and Spetstekhservice. The city also took ownership of the Glechik restaurant and property belonging to people connected to those companies. In those instances, Razvozhayev again cited alleged financing of Ukraine and links to Ukrainian intelligence services.

On the afternoon of Sept. 15, the Ukrainian offensive in this sector was publicly confirmed for the first time. In a video address posted to Telegram, Andriy Biletsky, the commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, announced that operation was codenamed Vivaldi, adding that while it was operating under conditions of information silence, the corps’ units eliminated pockets of Russian infiltration across 75 square kilometers and deoccupied a further 10 square kilometers in the areas of Novoselivka, Oleksandrivka, Yarova, and Korovii Yar. In addition to clearing the territory, Biletsky noted that Ukrainian drone units had also cut the enemy’s logistics, forcing Russian troops to relocate their fuel and lubricant depots and dismantle a pipeline, shifting their supply lines into Russia’s Voronezh Region. Biletsky estimated the personnel losses of Russia’s 20th and 25th armies at roughly 1,500 soldiers, while equipment losses totaled more than 12,000 drones and hundreds of armored vehicles, along with artillery pieces and other vehicles.

At the same time, Biletsky cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the operation’s ultimate goal, saying rumors about Ukrainian troops aiming to reach the Chornyi Zherebets River were premature. “Our operation is called ‘Vivaldi.’ And Vivaldi, as everyone knows, has four seasons. This is only the first of them,” Biletsky said, promising further official updates on the corps’ progress.

The scale of the operation had previously been reported by independent OSINT analysts who had been following the situation near Lyman for several months. In particular, French analyst Clément Molin noted that Ukrainian units had launched a counteroffensive north of the city back in late May, but information about it was deliberately withheld until now. By Molin’s estimate, Ukrainian forces used that time to cut off the Russian salient north of Lyman and liberate more than 200 square kilometers of land, pushing the enemy back across the Zherebets River.

Molin called the operation one of Ukraine’s most significant victories of 2026, noting that its success could complicate further Russian advances on Lyman, Izium, and Sloviansk, thereby delaying the occupying forces’ progress in northern Donbas. Similar assessments came from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). As its experts wrote, Russian military bloggers are already acknowledging Ukrainian counterattacks in the Lyman sector and are increasingly criticizing the Russian command for masking territorial losses with fabricated reports of success.

Movlaev left a suicide note asking that help be given to Russian activist Yulia Yemelyanova, who is also being held in pretrial detention in Kazakhstan and faces possible extradition:

“I ask forgiveness from all my friends, relatives, lawyers, the embassies of the European Union, the Netherlands and France, and the UN Committee, who tried to save my life. Forgive me, I am tired of injustice! Neither the court nor the prosecutor’s office hears us!

They will torment me, torture me and kill me, and then they will say I did it myself... I will not let them torture me again! For 16 months I lived with the fear of being extradited and with hope... Now there is only fear!

I ask Kazakhstan for only one thing: bury me here, in Kazakhstan. So that they do not even get my body!

Please at least save Yulia!”

Kuchusheva confirmed to The Insider that Movlaev had attempted suicide. She said doctors stitched up his wounds and saved his life.

“Mansur is alive. But his blood is on the hands of the Kazakh authorities. I cannot even imagine how much pain and fear they — both Mansur and Yulia — are living through there. We will keep fighting for them. An appeal has now been filed with Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court.”

Despite the Supreme Court appeal, following the cassation ruling there is currently no legal barrier preventing Kazakhstan from extraditing Movlaev to Russia. Kuchusheva previously said he could be extradited “as soon as they agree with the Russian side on the crossing point where he will be handed over.”

Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office approved Movlaev’s extradition in early 2026.

As The Insider reported in July, Russian activists Yulia Yemelyanova and Mansur Movlaev, both detained by Kazakh authorities, appealed to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev directly asking him to stop their extradition to Russia. The Consuls of the Antiwar Committee, the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR/IGFM), and the Kovcheg (“Ark”) project also called on Tokayev to halt both extraditions, to release the activists, and to allow them to travel safely to third countries.

This past spring, The Insider published a detailed report on the worsening situation facing anti-war Russians seeking asylum or refuge in Western countries and in former Soviet states close to Russia. Human rights advocates interviewed for the report said Kazakhstan had become one of the countries that stood out most negatively, and advised Russians at risk of political persecution not to travel there even in transit.

Movlaev faces criminal charges in Russia involving accusations of extortion and extremism. Yemelyanova, a former volunteer at the late Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, is wanted on a theft charge.

The Danish Armed Forces said the Russian vessel fired two flares toward one of its helicopters, which was carrying out a routine photographic survey of the frigate in international waters off Gedser.

“One of the flares fired passed within a short distance of the helicopter,” read the statemenent, which was followed by an explanatory note saying “Flares are pyrotechnic devices. They are normally used as a warning signal at sea.”

Frederiksen said the Russian ship’s actions “is part of the pattern we are seeing across Europe.”

“Russia is behaving increasingly aggressively and assertively and has intensified its hybrid war against Europe,” she said. “Russia is testing NATO and challenging it. Russia wants to intimidate us and sow division. Our response is to stand even more closely together and strengthen the defense of Denmark and Europe.”

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called the incident “unacceptable” and said Russian Ambassador Vladimir Barbin had been summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen.

Reporting on the incident, German newspaper Die Zeit placed the Danish helicopter incident in the context of a failed attack that took place on Aug. 5 at Leipzig/Halle airport, where a drone with a detonator was found near a Ukrainian transport plane.

The German government has formally accused Russia of carrying out a hybrid attack following the incident in Leipzig, with Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul announcing at a recent news conference that Germany would respond by closing the Russian House in Berlin and Russia’s consulate general in Bonn. Russia, in turn, withdrew its consent for the German consulate general in St. Petersburg to continue operating and shut down Germany’s Goethe Institut cultural centers nationwide.

According to German investigators, one of the people involved in the failed Leipzig airport sabotage was a Russian citizen identified as Oleg L., who allegedly worked for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

An unlikely recovery

North Korea’s recovery began, in part, by simply reopening the country. Trade with China had collapsed from nearly $2.8 billion in 2019 to $539 million in 2020—  and it was just $318 million in 2021 after Pyongyang responded to COVID-19 by virtually sealing its borders. However, freight traffic gradually resumed in 2022, and by 2023 bilateral trade had recovered to around $2.3 billion. That reopening restored supplies of fuel, fertilizer, machinery, and consumer goods while allowing North Korean exports back onto the Chinese market. At the same time, the state poured resources into construction and industry, and improvements in agricultural production also helped pull the economy out of its pandemic slump. Russia would soon add an entirely new source of demand and foreign revenue, but North Korea’s recovery was already far from dependent on the wartime relationship with Moscow alone.

The domestic component of North Korea’s sudden relative prosperity has been remarkably visible. Since 2021, Kim Jong Un has made construction and regional development a central priority for the government, combining a five-year program to build 50,000 new apartments in Pyongyang with an extensive rural housing drive. With even grander ambition, in 2024 the DPRK’s Supreme Leader launched the “Regional Development 20x10 Policy,” calling for the modernization of factories in 20 cities and counties every year for a decade, with an emphasis on food processing, clothing, and everyday consumer goods. This represents a notable turn away from the focus on heavy industry traditionally favored by the state. Even more worrying for its neighbor to the south (and for the power of UNSC sanctions more broadly), however, is the fact that these programs are difficult to dismiss as propaganda. Satellite imagery has shown construction beginning within weeks of its announcement, and factories were installed in all 20 communities targeted during its first year. Building on its initial success, in 2025 the 20x10 program expanded into hospitals, leisure facilities, farming infrastructure, and other local projects, again opening all of its intended projects before the end of the year.

This headline policy represents a significant shift for a nation that has historically experienced extremely uneven economic development, with the capital, Pyongyang, and strategic heavy industries absorbing a disproportionate share of state investment while much of the country’s provincial economy remained dependent on Cold War-era factories or the nation’s growing informal economy. The 20x10 program, by contrast, is an explicit attempt to narrow that divide and invest in creating local provincial centers capable of processing regional materials into basic consumer products. It also seeks improvements in food production, agricultural mechanization, and housing. Whether these new industries can survive the country’s harsh shortages of electricity, machinery, and several raw inputs remains to be seen, but its focus on provincial economies and light industry is a significant departure from traditional party doctrine and seems to have borne early fruit.

That shift in emphasis, however, has not come at Pyongyang’s expense. At the same time the government has redirected investment toward provincial cities, it has continued an enormous reconstruction of the capital. In February, the government announced the completion of the aforementioned program to construct 50,000 new housing units, much of it concentrated in the brand new Hwasong district, where the program transformed former agricultural land into dense high-rise neighborhoods. The more striking changes, however, are taking place at the street level rather than on Pyongyang’s prominent skyline (which itself has long been a Kim family prestige project). Foreign visitors returning after the pandemic described the city as shockingly different from its pre-COVID self, with app-based taxis, QR-code payments, food and medicine delivery services, new storefronts and restaurants, and a far more visible smartphone economy. For the first time, the city’s wide streets and parking lots have been tested to capacity as the country experiences an influx of largely Chinese vehicles, imported despite UN sanctions. The most important new source of resources behind this expansion, however, came from outside the country.

Beginning in the summer of 2023, Pyongyang became a major supplier of artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles to Russia, eventually providing more than 15 million artillery rounds, according to South Korean intelligence estimates.

The resources for North Korea’s economic upturn largely came from military cooperation with Moscow

The Institute for National Security Strategy (INSS), a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s intelligence service, estimates that weapons exports alone earned North Korea more than $10 billion between mid-2023 and the end of 2025 — an extraordinary sum for a country whose entire annual GDP is estimated at only around $27 billion. The subsequent deployment of roughly 15,000 North Korean soldiers to Russia added hundreds of millions more, even if INSS says only a fraction of the proceeds has been confirmed as payment in kind, while much of the remainder may consist of sensitive military technology, components or materials, or may still be owed.

More consequential than the scale of the payments themselves, however, is the extent to which the relationship has begun to dismantle the economic constraints imposed on North Korea over the previous decade. The sanctions adopted after 2016 derived much of their force from the unusual willingness of both Russia and China to participate in isolating Pyongyang — restricting its access to fuel, machinery, foreign currency, overseas labor, and many of the export markets on which it had previously depended. Russia has now reversed that situation by becoming a major customer for the same military-industrial complex that the sanctions were intended to constrain while simultaneously supplying North Korea with many of the resources those measures sought to keep out. In short, the DPRK’s recent recovery is not simply a rebound from the extraordinary deprivation of the pandemic years, but the result of a much larger change in the country’s international position.

Pyongyang’s place in the new world

North Korea’s problem was never a lack of powerful backers. When it was nearly destroyed by the U.S.-led coalition during the Korean War, Communist China intervened in large part out of fear of having an American-aligned state and military presence on its border, and to this day the DPRK-PRC alliance remains China’s only mutual-defense commitment. What it couldn’t secure were powerful friends that truly needed anything it could provide. For most of the post-Cold War era, Pyongyang had little to offer in exchange for its dependence on Chinese and Russian trade and diplomatic protection — a meagre workforce, a domestic market too poor to absorb high-end imports, and an endless stream of diplomatic liabilities generated by its nuclear program and recurring foreign provocations. However, the war in Ukraine has begun to reverse that imbalance, turning qualities that had made North Korea a diplomatic liability into assets that its allies increasingly covet.

The shift is clearest in relations with Moscow. In 2017, Putin insisted that Russia “unequivocally condemned” North Korea’s nuclear tests and pledged “fully complied with the UN Security Council resolutions” imposed on the DPRK. And yet, by 2024 he was in Pyongyang signing a mutual-defense treaty as Russia purchased billions of dollars’ worth of North Korean munitions. The change soon reverberated to international institutions that had been designed to constrain the DPRK. In March of that year, Russia vetoed the renewal of the UN Panel of Experts responsible for monitoring sanctions on North Korea, dismantling one of the central mechanisms through which the Security Council could apply pressure on the country.  

In March 2024, Russia vetoed one of the central mechanisms through which the UN Security Council could apply pressure on the DPRK

Of course, for Pyongyang the benefits go far beyond munitions export revenue and diplomatic protection. North Korea also receives access to fuel, materials, and advanced military equipment. According to some South Korean and Western assessments, the partnership also includes transfers of military technology in areas ranging from air defense to missile and satellite development. For the Korean People’s Army (KPA), which is still overwhelmingly reliant on Cold War-era Soviet designs and indigenous attempts at their modernization, such cooperation offers one of the few plausible routes toward modernizing the capabilities that North Korea cannot readily develop on its own.

The benefits of friendship with Russia also affect North Korea’s other international relationships.  If anything, Pyongyang’s growing independence from Beijing appears to have made China more attentive when it comes to preserving its own influence. After starting to cool off during the pandemic, relations with Beijing grew dramatically closer starting in late 2025. As a result, in June 2026, Xi Jinping made his first visit to Pyongyang in seven years, pledging that China would not waver in its support for North Korea and agreeing to deepen cooperation in various fields. Rather than displacing Beijing, Russia’s entry has made North Korea more valuable to China by giving Pyongyang a realistic alternative source of support. Kim is now in a position to draw economic backing from Beijing and military and diplomatic benefits from Moscow while reducing the degree to which either power can take its influence over the DPRK for granted.

By the time Trump returned to office, he found the conditions that had enabled his famous first negotiations with North Korea largely absent. Back then, the DPRK was largely isolated from the rest of the world, and Western offers of sanctions relief and moves toward normalization were actually enticing. Now, Pyongyang has retained its nuclear arsenal, expanded its missile program, rebuilt much of its foreign trade, and secured relationships with Moscow and Beijing that are far more economically valuable than the recognition America once promised. While none of this removes negotiations or even potential steps to rapprochement from the table, it has shifted the starting point decisively in Kim’s favor. Trump’s America is still interested in talking to North Korea, but Kim’s North Korea has less of an incentive to reciprocate.

Trump’s gambit

Trump’s most consequential move toward Pyongyang so far took place on August 16. Only hours before the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises were scheduled to begin, the president ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” America’s participation, arguing that the drills were costly and that they sent a “totally inappropriate and hostile” signal to North Korea, a country he described as having been “unthreatening and respectful” during his first term. The eleven-day exercise was subsequently cut to five days and its field component reduced; Washington later cancelled a separate upcoming joint Marine Corps exercise. For Pyongyang, which has spent decades portraying the exercises as rehearsals for an invasion and demanding their termination — along with the end of America’s presence in South Korea — Trump demonstrated immense goodwill without even requiring Kim to meet him.

Trump has shown readiness to engage with Pyongyang since returning to the White House

While it’s unclear how much Trump’s apparent frustration with South Korea’s lack of backing for American action in Iran contributed to the cancellation, the move itself isn’t entirely unprecedented. Days after his first summit with Kim in Singapore in 2018, Trump announced the suspension of Ulchi Freedom Guardian and several smaller exercises, similarly adopting Pyongyang’s description of the drills as “provocative” while arguing that their cancellation would save the U.S. money. However, the circumstances surrounding the two decisions could hardly be more different. In 2018, Trump’s suspension came amid perhaps the most dramatic thaw in inter-Korean relations since the division of the peninsula, with Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un having already met at Panmunjom, where they declared that “there will be no more war” between the two Koreas and that reconciliation, economic cooperation, and even the eventual reunification of the peninsula were desirable. 

Today, nearly every condition that made such a gesture logical in 2018 has disappeared. The inter-Korean rapprochement surrounding Singapore has given way to Pyongyang’s formal abandonment of reunification, its designation of the ROK as a hostile state, and even the destruction of sections of the road and railway links that Moon and Kim had once promised to reconnect. At the same time, North Korea would enter any renewed negotiations with a growing nuclear arsenal, a mutual-defense treaty with Russia, and considerably less dependence on the sanctions relief that once formed Washington’s principal bargaining chip.

Despite offering little in return, Pyongyang does not appear to have ruled out renewed talks. Following Trump’s move, South Korean intelligence assessed that another Trump-Kim summit could be arranged “at any time.” However, unlike in 2018, North Korea now treats its nuclear arsenal as a permanent component of the state and the ultimate guarantor of its sovereignty. Analysts argue that, from Pyongyang’s perspective, America’s war against Iran vindicated a lesson already drawn from Libya and earlier attacks on Tehran: a credible nuclear deterrent is a necessary guarantee against potential American attack. This leaves any renewed summit with a much narrower window for discussion, particularly given Washington’s enduring policy calling for the complete denuclearization of North Korea (which is mirrored by South Korea).

Regardless of whether Trump’s gambit produces another summit, the larger reversal has already taken place. Less than a decade ago, North Korea faced a sanctions regime endorsed by Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, and the country depended almost entirely on China for its economic survival while remaining a liability even to the powers most interested in keeping it alive. Today, Pyongyang has already hosted two of the three most powerful leaders on Earth and is within reach of another meeting with the third. For the beleaguered hermit kingdom, it is a break in the storm clouds perhaps unmatched at any point this millennium.

A shrinking peninsula

For all of North Korea’s vast newfound advantages, the peninsula clearly leans in South Korea’s favor. For the DPRK, the enormous Korean People’s Army  KPA remains central to the state, but the South Korean armed forces are still judged to hold the conventional advantage, as they are built around cutting-edge technology as opposed to the North’s heavily aged stockpiles. The economic imbalance is even more lopsided, with South Korea’s nominal GNI coming in at 56 times that of the North’s in 2025. Seoul’s annual defense budget alone now exceeds the estimated value of North Korea’s entire economy, giving the South a capacity to modernize, replace losses, and sustain high-end weapons systems on a scale Pyongyang cannot realistically match.

The one area where this overwhelming disparity is beginning to matter less, however, is manpower. South Korea’s fertility rate stood at just 0.80 children per woman in 2025, and the demographic collapse which for decades loomed as a distant economic problem has now reached the pool from which the ROK draws its soldiers. Between 2019 and 2025, the number of 20-year-old men fell by roughly 30%, while the active-duty military shrank by a fifth (to around 450,000 personnel), leaving a manpower shortfall estimated at roughly 50,000 troops. Seoul has been able to soften the consequences through force restructuring, expanded recruitment of women and career personnel, and a growing reliance on technology, but none of these measures change the arithmetic behind a conscription system which is drawing each successive intake from a substantially smaller generation than the last.

From 2019 to 2025, the number of young men in South Korea fell by 30%, and the size of the active-duty military by 20%

North Korea has also struggled demographically, though not as severely as its neighbor. The UN estimates its fertility rate at 1.8 children per woman in 2025, far above the South’s but still below replacement level. As the much smaller generation born during and after the famine of the 1990s reached enlistment age, the government reportedly loosened physical requirements for military service and also drew increasingly heavily on women. The country’s working-age population is estimated to have begun shrinking by almost 1% annually after 2020, and similar shortages have appeared outside the military, leading the state to increasingly direct young people toward mines and farms and mobilizing married women into factories and other production sites where the supply of workers has begun to thin.

The demographic balance between the Koreas is consequently moving in two directions at once. In the near term, South Korea is losing military-age manpower far faster, allowing Pyongyang to preserve one of the few quantitative advantages which Seoul’s economic ascent never completely eliminated. Over a longer horizon, however, the North is facing the same problem, only with much less room to absorb it. A smaller South Korean generation still enters an economy capable of sustaining increasingly capital-intensive production and defense, whereas a smaller North Korean generation has to be divided between an oversized military and a civilian economy in which agriculture, mining, construction, and large parts of manufacturing remain unusually dependent on labor. What currently looks like a durable Northern advantage is therefore better understood as a delayed disadvantage, albeit one which may matter considerably for the military balance during the decades before the DPRK’s own demographic contraction fully catches up with it.

Over a longer horizon, however, the North is also facing a demographic decline, only with much less room to absorb it

That reversal extends far beyond the demographic balance. North Korea’s reinvigorated economic growth, wartime partnership with Russia, renewed importance to China, and reduced dependence on what Washington can offer have together placed Pyongyang in perhaps its strongest international position since before the end of the Cold War. The country remains vastly poorer and conventionally weaker than the South, and its own demographic decline may ultimately prove more difficult to absorb, but it no longer approaches the outside world from the position of near-total dependence which shaped Trump’s first negotiations with Kim. If the two return to the negotiating table, Trump will therefore confront not the isolated North Korea he encountered in Singapore, but a state which has found in the unraveling of the post-Cold War order considerably more room to survive on its own terms.

According to a 74-page indictment outlined by Der Spiegel, German prosecutors have accused Ilona W. of acting on behalf of a Russian intelligence service. The charges were filed nearly eight months after her arrest.

Investigators say that in November 2023 the businesswoman began passing information to a contact at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. German counterintelligence identified that contact as GRU officer Andrei Mayorov, who worked under diplomatic cover as a deputy military attaché. Mayorov was expelled from Germany earlier this year.

Der Spiegel reported that Ilona W. deliberately gathered information about participants in political events, including a “NATO Talk” held at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon in November 2023 and the German-Ukrainian Business Forum in Berlin in December 2025. At the latter, Wiener sat a few meters from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Prosecutors also allege that in February 2024, Ilona W. used a false name to bring her suspected handler, Mayorov, into a meeting of Bundeswehr reservists. Der Spiegel characterized her as a prominent figure “considered extremely active” in Berlin who headed an association dedicated to “promoting international understanding” and regularly attended receptions and events with ambassadors, senior diplomats, and well-known politicians. The advisory board of her organization included prominent businesspeople and former lawmakers from Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

In the spring, Wiener’s defense challenged her detention and criticized prosecutors for what they called a “broad interpretation” of the criminal provision covering intelligence activity on behalf of a foreign state.

News of Wiener’s arrest first emerged in January.

Kremlev’s team helped organize the event, while the payments were made through IB Challenger, a Dubai-based company linked to the IBA. The boxing association, which Kremlev leads, was previously financed by Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom.

Among the roughly 50 wedding guests were Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, his brother Eric Trump, and Kremlev himself, along with a group of Russian-speaking guests whose presence “puzzled other attendees,” according to ProPublica. Two people who spoke to the outlet said the group largely kept to itself and spoke Russian. The Russian guests are barely visible in photos and videos published after the wedding.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not deny that Kremlev had paid for wedding expenses, describing him as a “personal friend of Don.” The spokesperson said the two “met through a mutual friend in the hunting world” and “bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.”

Kremlev’s press office also confirmed that the two men had a “friendly relationship” and said the businessman had “never discussed political matters” with his American acquaintances.

Former FBI officials interviewed by ProPublica called the situation concerning. “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story,” retired career FBI officer Frank Montoya Jr. told the publication.

Kremlev is known to have close ties to Vladimir Putin. In April, Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, a Russian state honor, and in the days before the wedding Kremlev accompanied Putin on a trip to China.

Ukraine has imposed personal sanctions on Kremlev, citing his ties to Putin and to Russian security agencies.

On Sept. 6, a religious procession held in Moscow drew upwards of 100,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry. The procession, which travelled from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior to the Novodevichy Convent, was led by Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyaev). Notable attendees also included federal officials and far-right activists from several organizations.

Public preparations for the procession began a month before the event. An official Telegram channel was launched in late July, with its first posts appearing on Aug. 3. These stressed that the procession had Kirill’s blessing and the approval of Moscow authorities. Organizers also set up a dedicated website and a free mobile app while promising to provide transportation from some churches.

Far-right and nationalist organizations joined the campaign around the same time. The Malofeev-linked Two-Headed Eagle reposted the announcement on Aug. 3, while the far-right nationalist Russian Community published its own announcement the following day. By the end of the month, the Russian Community was urging supporters not only to attend but to bring friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors, as well as to distribute promotional posters in group chats, coordinate with parish priests, and organize separate groups.

The procession was promoted particularly heavily by Tsargrad, Malofeev's Orthodox nationalist television channel, which devoted a separate page on its website to the event. In the two days before the procession, the outlet repeatedly described it as a “Russian March.” One post called it “the real nationwide Russian March,” while in another, blogger Petya Pervy described it as “a genuine peaceful Russian march, with no political slogans or divisions.” On the eve of the event, Tsargrad again wrote that Moscow would see “not just a religious procession, but a real Russian March” — one featuring prayers for Russian soldiers and Russian “Victory.” Actress Yana Poplavskaya used the same formulation in a Tsargrad video.

During the procession, Patriarch Kirill directly linked the event to support for the authorities and of the Russian military. In two official speeches, he said that people should pray “for our Orthodox president and for our armed forces,” describing Russia as a country once again becoming “invincible.” The procession was accompanied by the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God and an ark containing a fragment of the relics of 14th century prince Dmitry Donskoy.

We must work for the good of our Fatherland, for the good of our Church, and not slacken in our prayers for our President, for the authorities, for our armed forces and for our people.

The procession also drew sitting government officials and politicians. The Moscow Diocese listed Industry and Trade Minister Anton Alikhanov, State Duma Deputy Speaker Anna Kuznetsova, LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky, Moscow Department of National Policy head Vitaly Suchkov, and Accounts Chamber auditor Irina Kagramanyan as being among the participants. Representatives of the World Russian People’s Council, various Cossack organizations, and public groups affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church also took part.

Far-right and nationalist elements were also visibly represented, although the Sova Center estimated their combined presence at only around 2,000 people, or 2% of the total attendance estimated by the Interior Ministry. The Russian Community claimed it had formed “the largest and most striking” column and helped “maintain order,” though these claims could not be independently verified. The group nevertheless made its presence conspicuous, marching behind banners dedicated to Alexander Nevsky.

The procession was also attended by the Two-Headed Eagle and the far-right student group Brotherhood of Academicians — as well as by Konstantin Malofeev himself, under whose auspices both organizations were created. He attended with his wife, Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over allegations of abducting Ukrainian children.

Malofeev is a billionaire who has repeatedly been accused of corporate raiding and fraud. In 2014, The Insider established his role in financing the armed seizure of parts of the Donbas. Igor Girkin, a separatist commander who had previously headed the security department at a Malofeev-owned company, reported directly to Malofeev after his fighters' capture of Sloviansk. In 2025, Malofeev’s name also surfaced in connection with the disappearance of around $450 million from the WEX cryptocurrency exchange. Its former technical director, Alexey Bilyuchenko, claimed that at Malofeev’s request he handed FSB representatives the keys to the exchange’s cryptocurrency wallets. Malofeev has denied any involvement with the missing funds.

After the Sept. 6 march in Moscow, the Brotherhood of Academicians wrote that participants were united by “one idea, one faith, one identity” — wording reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s slogan “One people, one Reich, one leader” (“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”). The group also described the slogan “We are Russian — God is with us” as part of a “new reality”:

“If anyone has questions about this phrase, they will have to accept this mainstream, this new reality, in which Russians are strong and united in their faith.”

Other nationalist movements also organized their own groups and columns. The Northern Man reported that its Moscow and Moscow Region branches had marched "in a single formation" as “one powerful column.” The nationalist movement "Society. Future," founded by Roman Yuneman, also participated, and prominent nationalist writer and commentator Yegor Kholmogorov was among those in attendance.

After the procession, Malofeev wrote that Moscow had shown a “living Russia, walking shoulder to shoulder” — one that, “despite the fifth year of the war,” remained united. He described the procession as a prayer “for our soldiers” and “for a Russian Victory.” The Russian Community likewise ended its report by declaring that “Holy Rus is alive and being reborn” and that “Victory will be ours.”

Irkutsk: Less pro-war rhetoric and fewer far-right groups

Also on Sept. 6, a religious procession going under the name “The Radiance of Russia” was held in Irkutsk to open the nationwide Days of Russian Spirituality and Culture. According to the Irkutsk regional government and the Russian Orthodox Church, more than 15,000 people took part in the procession, which carried the relics of Saints Spyridon of Trimythous and Innocent of Irkutsk. The relics were brought to the city by the Irkutsk Diocese, while the festival itself was organized jointly with the regional authorities.

The procession was attended by Irkutsk Region Governor Igor Kobzev and regional Legislative Assembly Chairman Alexander Vedernikov, as well as representatives of the Cossacks, security agencies, and military educational institutions. OMON riot police inspected the venues in advance, while access controls were introduced on the day of the procession. The Interior Ministry and the National Guard provided security, while traffic was restricted in central Irkutsk and public transport routes were altered.

The festival also received organizational support from the state: a procurement worth 552,500 rubles ($6,530) was announced to provide technical equipment for one of the “Radiance of Russia” events. Unlike the Moscow procession, however, official statements by Irkutsk authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church did not feature rhetoric about supporting the war or praying for the president and the military. Governor Kobzev focused instead on Orthodoxy, Russian culture, “traditional Russian values,” and spiritual unity.

The Irkutsk branch of the Russian Community also invited its supporters to join the procession. Afterward, it reported that its “squad” had helped “maintain public order.” The group did not disclose the size of its contingent, and a video published by the far-right organization shows only a handful of Russian Community flags.

Elista: With Malofeev “in the name of victory”

On Sept. 10, a religious procession was held in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, as part of celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the Appearance of Christ the Savior, a purported 1946 miracle in which Christ himself is said to have visited the city. According to the official anniversary website, more than 2,000 people took part in the procession from the Kazan Cathedral to the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross. 

The anniversary was organized by the Kalmyk authorities in cooperation with the Elista Diocese. The organizing committee was headed by Kalmykia head Batu Khasikov, who joined the procession alongside Astrakhan Region Governor Igor Babushkin, Metropolitan Matthew of Pskov and Porkhov, and other government and church officials. Khasikov also reported that Construction Minister Irek Fayzullin and Ataman Sergei Bodryakov of the Great Don Cossack Host took part.

Military and state-patriotic rhetoric featured in the anniversary program even before the procession. On Sept. 9, Elista hosted events organized by the Kalmyk Cossack District of the Great Don Cossack Host, which were attended by government officials, Cossacks, and members of the security forces. Archbishop Justinian held a prayer service “for the defenders and builders of the Fatherland,” including servicemen “fulfilling their duty” and Cossacks “guarding the borders.” The Kalmyk Cossack District was then presented with a consecrated military banner.

The 80th anniversary of the “Appearance of Christ the Savior in Elista” was promoted particularly heavily by  Malofeev’s Tsargrad. Beginning Sept. 7, the outlet put out a series of reports on the “Elista miracle,” portraying Russia as an “Empire” that is “invincible” — a “Katechon holding the world back from evil.” The reports were accompanied by AI-generated images. One illustration depicts Soviet soldiers and modern Russian servicemen bearing Russian symbols before an image of Christ.

Malofeev himself arrived in Kalmykia the day before the procession and appeared alongside Khasikov at the launch of the regional “2050 Club.” The two also jointly presented “Tsargrad Crosses” to participants in the war in Ukraine. Malofeev called Kalmykia a “southern outpost of the Russian World,” adding that its residents were “bravely fighting the enemy in the special military operation zone.” He ended his post: “For four centuries, Kalmyks have been victorious alongside Russians and dozens of other peoples. They will be victorious this time, too.”

The following day, Malofeev directly linked the procession to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, writing that “in the fifth year of the war,” the relics of Dmitry Donskoy had “appeared” in Russia, while even in Buddhist Kalmykia, regional governor Khasikov carried an Orthodox relic through Elista.

During the celebrations, Khasikov described Russia as a “sacred power” whose destiny was to “protect the world from evil.” In a speech following the procession, he directly linked the anniversary to “Victory”:

“Our country is a sacred power, and Russia’s destiny is to protect the world from evil... The time has come to say this. To say it with love, in the name of good, in the name of Victory.”

St. Petersburg: Nationalists in their most organized form

On Sept. 12, St. Petersburg held its annual Alexander Nevsky religious procession from Kazan Cathedral to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. According to the Interior Ministry, more than 90,000 people took part. The procession moved along Nevsky Prospect with the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God and an ark containing a fragment of the relics of Dmitry Donskoy, which were brought from Moscow. At the same time, a smaller procession carrying the relics of Alexander Nevsky set out from the lavra, while a separate water procession took place on the Neva.

The event was held with the blessing of Metropolitan Barsanuphius of St. Petersburg and Ladoga — and with the direct involvement of the city authorities. A preparatory press conference was attended by Fyodor Boltin, head of the city’s culture committee, along with a representative of the Committee on Law, officials from the transport and media committees, and representatives of the St. Petersburg Diocese. For the procession, the authorities closed a large section of Nevsky Prospect and adjacent streets to traffic.

The celebrations were financed using the St. Petersburg city budget. On June 29, the city’s culture committee announced a tender for an event marking the Feast of the Translation of the Relics of Alexander Nevsky and the Treaty of Nystad, with an initial budget of 14.4 million rubles ($170,000). The amount covered the entire program of festivities, not the procession alone.

Nationalist groups had a particularly prominent presence in the procession. The Russian Community marched in a separate column under its own flags, while some participants carried the imperial black-yellow-white flag. Russian Community activists chanted “We are Russian — God is with us,” among other slogans. The organization described its participation as a being part of a “celebration of unity.” Its St. Petersburg spiritual adviser, Priest Alexander Bashkin, said afterward that “when we are united, we are invincible” and that “no enemy can overcome our unifying Russian strength.”

Malofeev’s organizations were even more organized. The Two-Headed Eagle claimed that its column had teamed up with the Brotherhood of Academicians and “led the public organizations.” According to the group, around 300 young people marched under a banner reading “The Russian Land has stood and will stand on this,” and the slogan “We are Russian! God is with us!” The Academicians described their contingent as the “Orthodox vanguard” and called the procession a “march of youth” allowing them to “openly proclaim our ideas.”

During the procession, the Two-Headed Eagle recorded a separate address to the Serbian far-right groups Srpska Akcija (“Serbian Action”) and Narodna Patrola (“People’s Patrol”), whose participants carried a Serbian flag. The group expressed support for Serbian nationalists who had recently attended the funeral of Ratko Mladić, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska. Srpska Akcija responded by calling the Two-Headed Eagle activists its “Russian friends” and publishing the slogan “Russians and Serbs — brothers forever.”

Tsargrad also extensively covered the St. Petersburg procession, contrasting it with an LGBT pride march held in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv the same day, writing that Russia was “carrying the banner of Orthodoxy,” which contained “the seed of inevitable victory.” The post also expressed hope that a similar procession would be held in Kharkiv after its “liberation.”

Alexander Belsky, speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, said after the procession: “We showed the whole world what Rus is, what a Russian person is.” That same day, Governor Alexander Beglov linked the celebrations to the current war, saying that Russian servicemen were “continuing the feat of their ancestors” by defending “the lands and the Orthodox faith.”

The participation of Malofeev-linked organizations in the St. Petersburg processions is nothing new. On Sept. 12, 2025, activists from Tsargrad, the Two-Headed Eagle, and the Brotherhood of Academicians took part, alongside representatives of at least two foreign far-right groups — Hungary’s Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement and Belgium’s Nation. That same day, Malofeev organized an international gathering of far-right and neo-Nazi groups at the Mariinsky Palace, which resulted in the creation of the “Paladins” International League of Anti-Globalists. Representatives of the Sixty-Four Counties later said that the Two-Headed Eagle and the Academicians were among the gathering’s organizers. Both groups are part of the Tsargrad network.

In his video message, Kravchenko addressed the NABU/SAPO investigation that led to the searches at his office, alleging that its real aim was to seize evidence that the prosecutor general had gathered against the country’s anti-corruption bodies:

“Its real goal was to gain access to the materials of criminal proceedings against the leadership and staff of NABU and SAPO. And after that — to remove the prosecutor general and halt procedural decisions in these cases.

Right now, the Prosecutor General’s Office is providing procedural oversight in dozens of criminal proceedings investigating grave and especially grave crimes committed by NABU and SAPO staff. Based on the evidence gathered, I signed a notice of suspicion for NABU Director Semen Kryvonos.”

The prosecutor general claims Kryvonos is guilty of “forging official documents to obtain an especially large unlawful benefit” and of a “sham adoption of a child intended to create grounds for evading liability in court.” Kravchenko said NABU and SAPO had gained access to legally protected case materials and had copied and stolen some of the documents.

NABU and SAPO noted that no one had officially served the suspicion notice against Kryvonos and called Kravchenko’s statements “a continuation of the systemic attack on independent anti-corruption bodies.”

In his address, Kravchenko also said that Zelensky had “politically held him back” from making a decision on Kryvonos, and that NABU representatives had offered him a deal: drop the charges against the bureau’s director in exchange for guarantees of immunity.

Zelensky responded to these remarks on his Telegram channel:

“This prosecutor general has only one way out: dismissal from office. That’s exactly what I told him. Ukraine has seen all the reasons. If he considers this political pressure, let him call it that. I ask members of parliament to support this dismissal without delay.”

On Sept. 4, Ukrainska Pravda reported on the searches by NABU and SAPO at the Prosecutor General’s Office, as well as at the offices of his deputy Mariia Vdovychenko and of Oleh Kiper, head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration. The next day, NABU and SAPO confirmed the searches. The anti-corruption authorities detained Serhiy Kropyva, deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office’s International Legal Cooperation Department, announcing the exposure of a criminal organization headed by a high-profile Prosecutor General’s Office representative. Amid the scandal, Kravchenko filed a letter of resignation on Sept. 7.

Ukrainska Pravda established that overnight into Sept. 14, Kravchenko left Ukraine in an official car. He later confirmed his departure, insisting that he was on a “foreign business trip,” during which he intended to “inform international partners about the real state of affairs in the anti-corruption system, signs that it is concentrating uncontrolled influence, and the risks that such practices pose to state sovereignty, the rule of law, and Ukraine’s democratic institutions.”

David Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People parliamentary faction, announced that the Rada will vote on the Prosecutor General’s dismissal on Sept. 15.

Drozdenko said he “understands the general concern” and complained that his younger daughter could not visit him on Sunday because she “didn’t get gas,” while his older daughter “stood in line for more than two hours.”

In his address, Drozdenko explained:

“We all understand that this is a consequence of the enemy’s recent drone attacks on major oil refineries, including Kirishinefteorgsintez, and, as a result, of reduced production of 92 and 95 octane gasoline. Diesel is available.

We are now restructuring fuel supply chains through other refineries, together with major companies, but that takes time.

I want to say that there is light at the end of the tunnel. We expect that by early October new supplies will reach the region, new logistics chains will be built, and, of course, the refineries will resume operating after repairs.

Together we are working through options to reduce peak demand, and we’re considering introducing fill-ups for vehicles with odd and even plate numbers on alternating days. For now, our goal is still to meet gasoline needs within a limit of 20 to 30 liters a day.”

As The Insider reported on Sept. 12, lines at gas stations in St. Petersburg have forced customers to wait for up to five hours to fill up. Economist Janis Kluge, analyzing GdeBenz data, noted in a post on X that AI-92 and AI-95 gasoline were available at fewer than 20% of gas stations in St. Petersburg, and more than 60% of the city’s gas stations were not operating at all.

By the morning of Sept. 14, the situation had improved only marginally, judging by messages in the GdeBenz service chat. Car owners noted that huge lines immediately formed outside the few gas stations that had begun to sell gasoline. User Maria N. wrote at around 10 a.m. that the Lukoil station on Marshala Zhukova Avenue had AI-92 and AI-95 available. Car owner Denis Z. confirmed this information but immediately noted: “The line’s already nuclear.”

A young woman named Ulya complained that she had spent the whole night at the gas station because the station’s administrators had promised gas by morning – but she still could not fill up: “Well, they did get gas by 5 a.m., but it was the hundred [octane] — I can’t put it into a Lada.”

Vyacheslav I., for his part, wondered whether he might be able to find gas at 4 or 5 a.m. in the Primorsky district. Dmitry N. admitted he had the same plan: “since this brilliant idea occurred to two of us here, I’m afraid we’ll run into another hundred at the gas station.”

Early on Monday morning, many chat users across the region reported that gasoline had indeed appeared, albeit accompanied by long lines. However, by around 11:00 a.m. reports of empty gas stations became more frequent, along with questions such as: “Is there gas anywhere?”

Since the start of summer, Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries have resulted in a persistent fuel crisis inside Russia. As The Insider reported, Ukrainian UAVs target the hardest-to-replace components, putting refineries out of commission for the longest time possible. Repair speed is lagging behind the pace of new strikes as sanctions make it increasingly difficult for Russian refineries to obtain the necessary parts and equipment. As a result, oil refining in Russia had fallen to its lowest level in 20 years.

In late August, the Russian government adopted a resolution allowing gas stations to sell gasoline and diesel fuel of lower environmental classes — Euro-2, Euro-3, and Euro-4. The Energy Ministry called the decision a temporary measure to stabilize the domestic market; it will remain in effect until June 30, 2027.

The suspected base was first identified by the Ukrainian open-source intelligence (OSINT) project CyberBoroshno, and naval researcher H. I. Sutton later analyzed satellite imagery of the site. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s project Krym.Realii highlighted their findings in a report on Sept. 4.

CyberBoroshno first reported the existence of the structures near Novoozerne on Sept. 1. The project’s analysts said the hangars were likely intended to store unmanned surface vessels (USVs) — remotely operated or autonomous boats.

The analysts said Russian forces have not yet been seen using these drones extensively in combat, but the construction of specialized infrastructure may indicate preparations for their future deployment. Using CyberBoroshno’s findings, H. I. Sutton examined satellite imagery of Donuzlav and counted at least 21 shelters at two sites along the lake’s southern shore.

According to his analysis, construction of the first eight shelters began in February 2026, while another eight appeared soon afterward. The second site was later expanded to 13 shelters. Roads are seen leading up to the shelters, allowing boats and equipment to be transported to the water. The shelters could be used to store, prepare, and launch the drones.

On Sept. 2, one day after CyberBoroshno published its findings, the Ukrainian Navy reported that it had destroyed a Russian Kama unmanned surface vessel near Snake Island. It is not currently known where the craft was launched from.

Russia officially unveiled the Kama for the first time in June 2026. According to its stated specifications, the vessel can operate up to 700 kilometers from its base and carry a payload of up to 600 kilograms.

Russia has already used naval drones in its war against Ukraine, but so far only in limited numbers, according to a source interviewed by Krym.Realii who previously served in Ukrainian military intelligence. The source said most of the military unmanned boats Russia has publicly displayed remain at the testing or prototype stage, with no evidence that they are being produced at scale.

In July, Russian Navy commander-in-chief Alexander Moiseyev announced the country was building its first 500-metric-ton unmanned vessel for hunting submarines and other underwater targets. The announcement drew criticism from several pro-war Russian Telegram channels and commentators, who argued that the Russian Navy should first establish mass production of small, inexpensive attack drones of the kind Ukraine has used extensively against Russian ships and infrastructure.

Researchers with the Antibot4Navalny project, which tracks pro-Russian bot activity on social media, provided The Insider with information about 16 videos that have recently been posted on social media. In the clips, various “celebrities” appear in videos bearing the CNN logo — calling Democrats “pedophiles” and “criminals” and urging viewers not to vote for the party’s candidates in House and Senate elections on Nov. 3.

On Sept. 11 and 12, at least eight posts appeared on X, each containing two videos featuring well-known Americans who supposedly “explain” why users should not vote for the Democratic Party. The videos use footage of celebrities including Alyson Hannigan, Eric Roberts, Jeri Ryan, Ed Begley Jr., Sarah Jessica Parker, Lea Thompson, Melora Hardin, Christopher Lloyd, Julia Roberts, and multiple others. All of the videos display the logo of CNN, and the clips also carry the hashtags #midterms2026 and #AllDemocratsAreCriminals.

In the videos, the celebrities are shown accusing members of the Democratic Party of using children “for their own purposes,” supporting “the Zelensky regime,” popularizing the “rejection of family and faith,” promoting hormone therapy, and engaging in corruption.

Some clips also attack individual Democratic candidates. Roy Cooper, for example, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, is accused of “calling for letting another 12 to 15 million immigrants into the U.S. if Americans want to have cheap groceries in stores.”

Most of the videos follow the same formula: celebrities purportedly claim to have “learned something” about the Democrats that is so disturbing they can no longer bring themselves to vote for the party. Every video ends with a call to share the clip and not support Democratic candidates in the upcoming elections.

The Insider has obtained links to the original posts from AntiBot4Navalny confirming that the accounts that shared them belong to the Matryoshka network. The newsroom is not publishing direct links to the posts to avoid helping spread the disinformation.

Current polling suggests Democrats have a strong chance of winning control of the House, while races for Senate seats are more competitive. Amid declining support for the Republican Party, Donald Trump even promised to pay every adult American $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate.

What is Matryoshka?

Antibot4Navalny’s researchers coined the name Matryoshka to describe a Russian operation that produces and spreads fake stories through a coordinated infrastructure of bots, trolls, and anonymous platforms. Its aim is to create artificial information “noise” and manipulate perceptions of events both inside Russia and abroad. The Antibot4Navalny project named the operation after the eponymous Russian nesting doll — the bots hide behind one another, and disinformation is spread in layers across different platforms, making the source harder to identify.

The mechanism works in two ways. First, it creates large numbers of fake profiles posing as ordinary people, independent media outlets, or think tanks. These accounts generate dozens of posts a day, imitating local styles of speech. Second, identical content is launched simultaneously across multiple social media platforms at the same time. In order to appear convincing, the bots use the logos of well-known Western media outlets and human rights groups.

German law enforcement officials investigating the attempted attack traced the operation to Russia’s GRU, with Welt am Sonntag citing investigative files obtained by the newspaper. Those materials indicate that Oleg L. appears to have overseen preparations and logistics for the operation. German security agencies believe he is a GRU officer.

The newspaper said Oleg L. entered Germany from Turkey through Berlin Brandenburg Airport. He later left the country from the same airport, flying to Serbia. Investigators believe he is now in Russia.

Welt am Sonntag also reported that German security agencies already knew of Oleg L.’s possible ties to Russian military intelligence when he entered the country, but did not place him under surveillance.

The suspected perpetrators planned to use three drones in the Leipzig airport sabotage operation. Two were destroyed during takeoff, while the third reached the Ukrainian aircraft. Investigators believe an explosion was avoided only because the detonator failed to function.

The second suspect is Belarusian national Andrei K. His DNA was found on an antenna that was used to control the drones. The DNA matched records in Finnish and Lithuanian police databases.

In Finland, he had been suspected of theft. He is also suspected of setting fire to a hardware store in the Polish city of Łódź in 2024.

The German publication Bild previously reported that a DNA trace found during the investigation of the Leipzig airport attack case matched DNA evidence from a 2024 arson attack on a DHL logistics center in Leipzig. The newspaper did not say whose DNA was found.

On Sept. 1, the German government formally accused Russia of carrying out a hybrid attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, where a drone with a detonator had been found near a Ukrainian transport plane on Aug. 5. At a news conference, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Germany would respond by closing the Russian House cultural center in Berlin and Russia’s consulate general in Bonn. 

Russia, in turn, withdrew its consent for Germany’s consulate general in St. Petersburg to operate and shut down the country’s Goethe-Institut cultural centers nationwide.

Russian law does not classify forced labor as imprisonment, but a person sentenced to forced labor is nevertheless obligated to live in a closed FSIN facility. They must work wherever the administration sends them and cannot freely leave the correctional center.

“You can sit there and not go anywhere for a year,” Olga [name changed], a former convict who spent time in correctional centers from Perm to Volgograd, told The Insider. After a penal colony, Olga said, a correctional center can genuinely feel “almost like home.” People there can wear their own clothes, use a phone, read the news online, and communicate with relatives every day through messaging apps. But the relative improvement in quality of life that Olga experienced only applies to those who have previously spent time in a penal colony, where prisoners must wear standardized uniforms, communication with relatives usually happens by letter, and phones are banned.

For someone sent to a correctional center directly from life outside prison, the experience looks different: living by a schedule set by the FSIN, leaving the center only with permission, working forced overtime, and being subject to the administration’s will.

“People who were sent to a correctional center straight from home were somewhat shocked,” Olga recalled.

“A model correctional center with a sports ground and park”

According to Olga, life becomes especially hard when a correctional center is set up directly at a production site — with a dormitory next to the workshop and the employer working together with the administration to reduce inmates’ lives to moving between bed and the workplace. That is exactly the model FSIN now wants to replicate: fast-deployable correctional centers that can be built next to enterprises.

“At the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, FSIN presented a model correctional center with a sports ground and a park. The project was sent to the regions as a recommendation,” TASS wrote in late June. In FSIN photographs, the model does not look like a prison but like a tidy workers’ dormitory: a long two-story modular building, lawns, bushes, streetlights, a separate sports ground, and a walking area with benches.

The TASS report also listed other elements of the project: a parking lot, a diesel power station, a transformer substation, and a separate yard where those who have violated prison rules can still get a chance to walk. But the presentation itself showed that the most attractive parts of the image — the park and sports ground — aren’t mandatory. A FSIN representative clarified that they are only “optional facilities.”

In other words, what was sent to the regions was not a plan for a center with a park but an easily replicable solution for quickly housing people sentenced to forced labor. The FSIN website describes it even more directly: the facilities can be built quickly “at any enterprise,” and the project can be used by representatives of large and medium-sized businesses interested in creating dormitories for convicts at their facilities.

That detail is crucial, Olga explained. She served her sentence both in a correctional center where she had to walk down the street to get to work and in a center where the dormitory was effectively on the production site.

“If it’s a closed-system correctional center, then the employer works in very close coordination with FSIN. No one’s getting away from them. FSIN plays the way the employer needs it to,” Olga said.

Employers work in very close coordination with FSIN in closed-system correctional centers

In that model, a person does not simply live near work — work becomes an extension of the prison regime.

“The conditions were always more lenient where the employer wasn’t in the same building as the dormitory. But where you live right in the workshop, right at the production site, that was where things were the hardest,” Olga recalled.

At one correctional center in the Moscow region, Olga said, the living quarters resembled a hangar or garage, with a workshop on the floor below. The facility had poor ventilation and was plagued by dirt, rats and cockroaches.

“It's legalized slavery,” she said. “They force people to work and use every tool of pressure and punishment available to make sure they keep working and don’t complain.”

30,000 workers with no rights

Forced labor as a new type of criminal punishment began to be used on Jan. 1, 2017, when FSIN opened its first four correctional centers and seven sections attached to its penal colonies, with a total capacity of fewer than 900 people. The first convicts arrived in March of that year. Now, a small network of facilities that was previously being tested as an alternative to colonies has turned into a separate and growing branch of the penal system.

By the end of 2025, according to FSIN Director Arkady Gostev, Russia had created 400 correctional centers and sections operating as correctional centers, with capacity for 50,000 people — and more than 30,000 convicts were actually being held there.

Given the overall decline in Russia’s prison population, those figures are especially notable. In May 2026, Gostev said that since the end of 2021 the number of people in places of detention had fallen from 465,000 to 282,000. About 85,000 of them were held in pretrial detention centers (SIZO) and PFRSI, a Russian abbreviation for facilities operating as pretrial detention centers, leaving about 197,000 in penal colonies and prisons.

The rise of correctional centers, whose inhabitants are not counted among the country’s prison statistics, do not explain that decline. Instead, the main reason for the drop in the population of penal colonies was the recruitment of prisoners for the war in Ukraine — first by the Wagner private military company, then by the Defense Ministry. In May, FSIN itself acknowledged for the first time that “efforts to recruit contract soldiers” for the armed forces was affecting the number of prisoners.

But at the same time, the agency is expanding the part of the system that is formally not considered imprisonment — exploiting the labor of convicts rather than simply isolating them away from society. The more than 30,000 people actually held in correctional centers already amount to about 15% of the current number of people under FSIN’s jurisdiction. The centers’ total capacity — 50,000 places — is comparable to about a quarter of that population.

The agency is expanding the part of the system focused not on isolation, but on exploiting convicts’ labor

At the same time, legal changes are making it easier to fill correctional centers. Since 2026, forced labor can be imposed as a standalone punishment, without a prior sentence involving imprisonment. The penalties under dozens of articles of the Criminal Code have also been expanded to include forced labor.

A “dormitory” behind a fence: What life is like in a correctional center

Russia’s Penal Enforcement Code describes correctional centers as special institutions for people sentenced to forced labor. They can exist separately, as sections attached to penal colonies, or directly at enterprises that use convict labor. Inside such centers, internal rules apply, and convicts are kept under supervision.

In correctional centers, people are allowed to have money, wear ordinary clothes, use a phone, access the internet, and keep personal belongings. At the same time, a convict must remain on the correctional center’s grounds, they may not leave without permission from the administration, they must carry an ID card at all times, they must follow internal rules, and they must take part in unpaid maintenance and improvement work for up to two hours a week. The person and the room where they live may be searched, and their belongings may be inspected. In effect, it is the same kind of closed institution as a penal colony, only with a softer internal regime.

The word “dormitory,” which is used to describe the living quarters in correctional centers, says little about the real conditions. Russia’s Penal Enforcement Code uses the same word for the places where convicts live in general-regime, strict-regime, and special-regime colonies. In practice, these are usually not separate rooms for a few people but buildings divided into large sections, each housing several dozen people. Even in the model FSIN showed at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, a large room with rows of beds can be seen inside the modular building. It looks more like a barracks-style sleeping hall than a regular dormitory.

Olga said conditions varied widely by region. In some places, the administration turned a blind eye to the rules, while in others, it used them as a tool of pressure. Still, the routine in forced labor facilities, she said, resembled the “Groundhog Day” rhythm of life in a penal colony:

“Wake-up, breakfast, go to work, a little lunch at work, and then at around 8 or 9 p.m. we come back from work, wash, have a bite to eat, and go to sleep. That’s basically every day.”

In some correctional centers, Olga said, people could go into town for a few hours on weekends. However, on others, people had to go months without leaving the grounds.

“If there are no problems, if the employer does not say they are working badly, then everything goes normally,” she said. “But if someone starts, for example, filing complaints against the employer, then the administration first of all restricts outings.”

Grigory Mumrikov, an artist who served a forced labor sentence in Zelenograd, just outside Moscow, after being convicted of participating in the organization of an anti-war protest, shared similar impressions. Compared with pretrial detention, the correctional center seemed to him like “great happiness,” even if he was still in captivity. From evening to morning, he was in the correctional center, and from morning to evening, he worked as a laborer at Aksakovo, a sanatorium run by FSIN. Mumrikov spent the couple of free hours he had after work walking around a lake.

“I could simply sit on a bench, just to avoid being on that territory,” he said, referring to the correctional center.

That was possible because the convicts worked outside the correctional center and traveled to and from Aksakovo on their own. But by 8 p.m., Mumrikov had to return to the center for the evening roll call.

“Everyone was rounded up and told to work weekends”

Under the law, people sentenced to forced labor must work wherever the correctional center’s administration sends them. Formally, their labor is supposed to be regulated by labor law. But convicts do not have the key right of a free worker: the right to refuse a particular job and leave for another employer.

Convicts do not have the key right of a free worker: the right to refuse a particular job and leave for another employer

In some correctional centers, Olga said, there was still some choice — the administration could offer two or three potential employers, and the person would choose where to work based on their skills and health. But that was not the case everywhere. In the correctional center in Leninsk, in the Volgograd region, where she was held in the winter of 2023-2024, there was only one employer: a canned goods factory.

“You cannot refuse to work, because that is considered a malicious violation,” Olga said.

According to her, people worked 10 to 12 hours a day, and weekends could be turned into workdays. However, if inspections began, the employer would show a normal schedule.

“The employers drew up a good schedule and pretended that no one had been forced to come in on weekends and that the working day was what it should be,” she said. “Accordingly, as soon as the inspectors leave, everything goes back to the way it was: longer working days and mandatory weekend work.”

The order to work on weekends, she said, usually came not directly from FSIN but from the production site. A foreman would gather the convicts, make sure no one had phones to record the conversation, and then announce the new schedule: “We work on weekends. We work until such-and-such time. And whoever complains will make things worse for themselves.”

That is what makes a convict’s position in a correctional center fundamentally different from that of an ordinary worker. In a correctional center, an employer’s demand almost automatically becomes an FSIN demand. The administration begins applying pressure, and complaints or refusal to work can result in disciplinary penalties.

“Inspectors work in coordination with the employer. They are one single system,” Olga said. If a person refuses to work for pennies or complains about conditions, she said, the administration can begin “catching them on small things” to find grounds for punishment. Accumulating such penalties creates the risk of transfer to a penal colony.

“Inspectors work in coordination with the employer. They are one single system”

Similar complaints have emerged in other regions. In Zelenograd, convicts in a correctional center said they worked without a proper schedule, faced overtime, and were threatened with tougher conditions if they reminded officials of their rights.

“We differ from undocumented migrants on a construction site only in that we are Russian,” forced laborers said.

Konstantin, a former prisoner who served his sentence in Kabardino-Balkaria in Russia’s north Caucasus, told the independent outlet Cherta that he was sent to sort household waste — eight hours in the heat at a rural dump that included hides of slaughtered cows and sheep, a terrible smell, large numbers of insects, and no ability to refuse the work.

Another person interviewed by the outlet, from the Voronezh Region in central Russia, worked at an agricultural complex growing mushrooms and said regular hired employees earned significantly more than convicts got from the correctional center.

These examples do not mean that people in every correctional center are forced to work overtime or are sent to the hardest jobs. Former convicts themselves also describe centers with decent working conditions and normal schedules. But all cases have one thing in common: a person cannot resign if they are unhappy with the conditions.

There is pay, but people support themselves

Officially, labor in correctional centers is paid. In any sentence, between 5% and 20% of a convict’s salary is withheld for the state, and the inmate is free to use the rest of the money. But unlike a penal colony, where prisoners have to be fed and issued uniforms, people in correctional centers are almost entirely self-supporting.

Convicts are given a bed and bedding, but they usually buy their food, clothes, shoes, hygiene products, medicine, and other everyday items while also reimbursing the correctional center each month for utilities and household services.

In Leninsk, in the Volgograd Region, Olga said, about 3,000 to 4,000 rubles ($35-$46) were withheld from her wages for utilities, and after all the deductions were made, convicts were typically left with about 9,000 to 10,000 rubles ($104-$116) a month to live on.

“And you have to take into account that this is not a colony: you need to dress yourself and eat something, because not all correctional centers provide food,” she said.

“This is not a colony: you need to dress yourself and eat something, because not all correctional centers have food”

Formally, if a convict has no money, the correctional center has to provide them with food, clothing, and shoes at the state’s expense. But in practice, Olga said, getting that support can be difficult.

“You go to the management and say: I have nothing to eat, you are supposed to provide me with food. And they say: ‘Well, where am I going to get it? You can see there is no kitchen,’” she said, describing life at a correctional center in the Moscow Region.

At the same time, Olga stressed that low pay is not an inevitable feature of correctional centers. In the Perm Region, where she worked at a private garment factory, the business was properly organized, and convicts’ wages could be comparable to ordinary wages outside the prison.

Olga earned about 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($460-$580), while women who sewed well made up to 100,000 ($1,160), even after the deductions. “It was a fairly good place,” she said.

That contrast shows that the problem with correctional centers is not simply that they always pay poorly. With a decent employer, convicts can earn close to what they would outside prison. But if the employer is dishonest, the fact that a person is trapped means they are forced to survive on less than the national subsistence minimum.

What can lead to punishment in a correctional center

Under the Penal Enforcement Code, violations committed by people serving forced labor can lead to them being placed in an internal isolation cell inside the correctional center for up to 15 days. Olga said anyone sent there can only bring a minimum of belongings, and there is a ban on phones. “Not as frightening as in a colony, but the point is the same — to isolate you and show what they can do to you,” she explained.

The law separately defines “malicious violations,” which include refusal to work, disobeying the administration, participating in a strike or collective disobedience, possessing banned items, leaving the center without authorization, or returning more than 24 hours late. If a person is declared a malicious violator — for one “malicious” violation or for three ordinary violations within a year — the head of the correctional center submits a request to a court to transfer the person to a colony.

In practice, Olga said, these rules become a method of control. The administration may ignore minor violations for a long time, then use them against those who complain about an employer or refuse to work in poor conditions.

“They may treat you relatively well for a long time, but once you start demanding your rights, they begin finding fault with everything you do,” she said. 

“Once you start demanding your rights, they begin finding fault with everything you do”

An everyday minor infraction can thus become part of a chain that ends in a person being packed off to a penal colony. “For those who came from a colony, that's the main fear,” Olga said. “They tell you: ‘if you don't want to work, you'll go back.’”

Who benefits from the new system

In public statements, FSIN describes correctional centers as a more humane alternative to colonies: a person is not completely isolated from society, and they can work, earn a salary, use a phone, and gradually return to normal life. In an explanatory note to the law expanding the use of forced labor, its authors wrote that such punishment allows convicts to maintain social ties, restore work skills, and compensate victims.

But this humanization also has an economic aspect. Under the Penal Enforcement Code, sections of correctional centers can be created directly at enterprises that use convict labor. The standard contract between a correctional center and a company describes the arrangement as a ready-made production scheme: the correctional center sends convicts, and the organization agrees to employ them at its site and report violations of labor discipline to the administration.

For businesses, this means access to workers whose minimal privileges depend on their successful fulfillment of assigned tasks. A convict cannot simply quit and leave for another employer, and as a FSIN representative told TASS, commercial entities are interested in creating such sections because people sentenced to forced labor are “fairly disciplined workers.”

“They are interested in doing their work well, because if they violate labor discipline or the procedure and conditions for serving their sentence, there is a risk that the punishment will be replaced with a harsher one — imprisonment,” the representative said.

The state additionally encourages businesses to take part in the scheme. Since 2026, organizations have been exempt from property tax on premises, territories, and other real estate they provide free of charge to house correctional centers.

The model is also convenient for FSIN. The agency does not need to build a traditional penal colony, as businesses provide part of the infrastructure while paying convicts enough that the state is not obliged to provide them with food, clothes, or medicine — 5% to 20% of their wages also go directly to the state.

In the end, businesses get workers whose discipline is backed by FSIN, while the agency gets infrastructure and a “contingent” — the official bureaucratic term used for prisoners and other people under state supervision — whose burden of support can largely be shifted onto the convicts themselves. At the same time, for FSIN and the state as a whole, this is a form of punishment that can be presented as humane resocialization.

A Gulag without isolation

The idea of correction through labor is not a new concept in the Russian penal system. In Soviet times, it was reflected even in the names of institutions, as camps and colonies were called “corrective labor institutions.” Soviet Russia’s Corrective Labor Code explicitly said that punishment should “correct and reeducate” convicts “in the spirit of an honest attitude toward labor.”

Under Stalin, this logic reached its extreme: the Gulag was not only a system of isolation and terror but also a vast economic mechanism. Prisoners built canals, railways, industrial facilities, and urban infrastructure. But direct comparisons between modern correctional centers and the Gulag would be misleading because the scale, conditions and level of violence are vastly different. Today, supervision is as light as possible, as it is the system itself that stimulates the efficiency of the inmates’ labor.

Correctional centers look like an updated version of the Soviet tradition of forced labor — without the barracks of the Gulag, but with the same basic idea that a convict must work for the benefit of the state — and now for Russia’s business sector

The state does not need to fully isolate a person in order to control them. It is enough to link their place of residence, their type of work, their salary, and the threat of transfer to a penal colony into a single system. As a result, correctional centers look like an updated version of the Soviet tradition of forced labor — without the barracks of the Gulag, but with the same basic idea that a convict must work for the benefit of the state — and now, also, for Russia’s business sector.

Not humanization, but a pragmatic move by FSIN

Correctional centers may offer better conditions than penal colonies, but they are still a form of deprivation of liberty, no matter what the paperwork says. In the end, they create even more opportunities to exploit prisoner labor than colonies do, and FSIN directly describes people sentenced to forced labor as a convenient labor resource.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is draining prisoners from Russia’s penal colonies, and dozens of institutions have closed down due to the lack of inmates. That could have led to FSIN losing bureaucratic influence (and with it, staff and funding from the state budget). Instead, the agency’s leadership appears to have found an effective way out: it can now report growth in the number of institutions providing a more humane form of punishment, and it can do so in a way that certainly pleases Russian businesses.

Sources identify 38-year-old Kaliningrad native Vladimir Balobayev as the Russian Presidential Administration's point man on issues involving Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. 

In 2015, Balobayev was general director of the Baltic Information and Analytical Center, which channeled funding to so-called independent journalists in the Baltic states. Among those who received payments from him was Andrei Solopenko, editor of the Baltnews portal, which is now banned in the EU. In 2025, a Riga court sentenced Solopenko to 280 hours of community service for violating anti-Russian sanctions.

In 2016, Balobayev became deputy director of the Center for Eastern European Studies at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, where he published a paper titled “Transformation of Poland’s Political System.” In 2019, Balobayev moved from Kaliningrad to Moscow and joined the Presidential Administration. He soon became head of the Department for Interaction with Civil Society Institutions within the presidential office responsible for cultural ties with former Soviet states. In December 2020, Putin awarded him the rank of Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation, 3rd Class.

At the time, the “cultural” directorate's Baltic desk was headed by Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) colonel Yevgeny Umerenkov. In the 1990s, Umerenkov had used a Komsomolskaya Pravda press pass as cover to spy in the United States and Mexico, and in 2020 he returned to the Kremlin-friendly tabloid after effectively being sent into retirement. The desk was taken over by Umerenkov's aide, Vadim Smirnov, who reported directly to Dmitry Kozak.

In the early 2000s, Smirnov had trained at the Moscow office of the American Council for International Education, which is funded by U.S. taxpayers. He later worked for RIA Novosti, served as press secretary to Kaliningrad Region Governor Vadim Tsukanov, and became a political columnist for Kaliningradskaya Pravda. In 2013, Lithuanian authorities barred “journalist” Smirnov from entering the country due to suspicions that he was involved in espionage activities. In 2024, due to poor performance, Smirnov lost his position as the Presidential Administration's overseer of the Baltic states. Balobayev took his place.

In August 2025, following a series of spy scandals, Putin scrapped the “cultural” approach and created the Directorate for Strategic Partnership and Cooperation (USPS) in its place (as The Insider previously reported). In the new directorate, Balobayev oversees a range of Kremlin-backed organizations: the Foreign Ministry’s Third European Department, Rossotrudnichestvo, the Russian International Affairs Council, the Foundation for Support and Protection of the Rights of Compatriots Living Abroad, the Russkiy Mir Foundation, the Baltnews news portal, and a team of propagandists.

Among Balobayev’s better-known actors promoting narratives about NATO’s “cunning” plans to seize the Baltic Sea while spreading “Russophobia” in the Baltic states are propagandist Andrei Mamykin (who is internationally wanted at Latvia’s request), former Riga City Council member Ruslan Pankratov (who fled to Russia), Belarus-based blogger Roman Samul (formerly active in the “Antifascists of the Baltics” movement), “historian” Alexander Dyukov (who predicts the imminent extinction of the populations of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania), and Konstantin Khudoley (head of the Department of European Studies at St. Petersburg State University’s School of International Relations).

One of Khudoley’s students at St. Petersburg State University, Vyacheslav Morozov, moved to Estonia in 2016 to teach at the University of Tartu, where he gave numerous lectures on Russia’s role in the modern world before being caught spying for the GRU. During the investigation, Morozov admitted to working for Russian military intelligence; he was sentenced to six years and three months in prison.

SVR station chief in Riga Igor Sorokopud

In 2023, in the midst of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Latvia downgraded diplomatic relations with Moscow and cut embassy staff by 60%. The ambassadors were replaced by chargés d’affaires. Today, the Russian embassy’s work in Riga looks more like the activities of a school patriotic club: on commemorative dates, diplomats visit the graves of Soviet soldiers and present certificates to the few surviving World War II veterans who have made it to almost 100.

But that is only the visible side. Closely monitoring the Saeima elections is the SVR station chief in Riga, 43-year-old embassy first secretary Igor Sorokopud.

Born in Moscow, Sorokopud studied Middle Eastern languages at Department No. 38 of the Military University of the Russian Defense Ministry (VUMO), an institution currently headed by Colonel Vladimir Bykovtsev, who spied in Yemen back in Soviet times. After graduating from VUMO, Sorokopud enrolled at the SVR Academy, where he underwent specialized training for work at stations in the Middle East.

In 2018, he was posted to Iran, where he worked under the cover of the embassy’s third secretary. The Insider obtained an invoice from the Peter Justesen store in Tehran — part of the international duty free chain serving diplomats — made out to Sorokopud. According to the invoice, in January 2020 the Russian official spent $2,944.45 at the store (the sale of alcohol is strictly prohibited in Iran, and it appears that Sorokupud resold bottles on the side).

In 2024, Sorokopud was transferred to Latvia, where he took charge of the local SVR station. His main operational interests are Latvia’s cooperation with NATO, Western military aid to Ukraine, and people with access to the country’s leadership, the Defense and Foreign ministries, and other centers of decision-making.

Sorokopud’s operational focus: Latvia’s cooperation with NATO, military aid to Ukraine, and people in positions of power

The SVR’s agent network in Latvia is made up primarily of former Soviet military personnel and Russian-speaking residents who are susceptible to pro-Kremlin propaganda due to dissatisfaction with their personal economic circumstances.

In Latvia, Sorokopud lives with his wife, Yekaterina Vostrikova, a St. Petersburg native who previously worked as a financial analyst at Aton, a Russian company that manages the assets of private investors. Until 2024, Vostrikova went by the name "Gretchen" and the surname of her then-husband, American Chad Anthony.After divorcing him, Yekaterina reverted to her maiden name, Vostrikova, and joined Sorokopud in Iran. The Insider has found that Vostrikova herself has access to classified information, suggesting that she may be more than simply a spy’s wife.

The SVR is actively engaged in disinformation operations in Latvia. In May, for example, the agency claimed —falsely, by all available indications — that Ukraine had reached a deal with Latvia to launch strikes on Russia from Latvian territory: “Despite concerns on the Latvian side that it could become the target of a retaliatory Russian strike, the authorities in Kyiv persuaded Riga to approve the operation. The Ukrainians emphasized that it would be impossible to determine the exact launch site of the drones.” 

However, Sorokopud does not appear to be responsible for producing that particular disinformation narrative. Instead, the false claim in question was apparently orchestrated by SVR press bureau chief Sergei Guskov, whom The Insider previously reported on.

The “Russian world” in Latvia

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, support for the “Russian world” in Latvia has declined noticeably. Moscow, however, still appears to be betting on the Russian Union of Latvia (RSL), despite the high-profile espionage scandal involving former Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka, who, as The Insider revealed, worked for the Russian intelligence services for several years. (Notably, the RSL’s governing board also includes the aforementioned Baltnews “journalist” Andrei Solopenko.)  

In Strasbourg, Ždanoka served as leader of the RSL, promoted claims that Russian-speaking residents of the Baltic states were being persecuted, and voted against resolutions condemning Russia over the annexation of Crimea, its war in Syria, and its aggression against Ukraine. Leaked correspondence indicates that since at least 2005, Ždanoka had been in operational contact with the FSB, received money from Moscow, and sent reports to her Russian handlers. She also advised Russian intelligence on how to intervene more effectively in the internal affairs of EU countries.

MEP Zdanoka advised Russian intelligence on how to interfere more effectively in the internal affairs of EU countries

In 2024, amid the espionage scandal, Ždanoka stepped down from the RSL leadership. The party was then taken over by co-leaders Andrei Pagor and Yevgeny Osipov. Pagor, a former police officer, was forced to resign after suspecion arose that he had been soliciting bribes from drug dealers. He is currently running for the Saeima on the Sovereign Power–Young Latvians ticket.

The other co-leader, Osipov, was responsible for founding the Latvian branch of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity (RNE) organization back in the 1990s. Osipov says that he went underground at the age of 16 and spent his nights putting up RNE leaflets. In 2000, fellow members accused him of disloyalty to RNE leader Alexander Barkashov and expelled him from the organization, after which Osipov joined the Latvian National Democratic Party (LNDP). In 2013, he was sentenced to community service for desecrating the Latvian flag.

Elena Osipova, Osipov’s wife, is also on the RSL’s governing board and heads the Russian Community in Liepaja. In 2023, she ran for the European Parliament alongside Ždanoka but failed to win a seat. She is now a regular participant in RSL protests and has had repeated run-ins with police. In 2024, Elena challenged the results of the Liepaja municipal elections, demanding a recount; the court rejected her request.

“Not so fast!”

Another former Ždanoka aide, Anna Bondere, is running for the Saeima on the Sovereign Power–Young Latvians ticket — alongside former police officer Pagor. She presents herself as a defender of the Russian language and a fighter against neo-Nazism. Bondere regularly attends RSL rallies and is frequently quoted by the propaganda website of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, established by Putin’s decree.

“Do you think the Russian Union of Latvia has ceased to exist? No! Not so fast!” she wrote in a Facebook post.

Bondere graduated from Moscow State Industrial University in 2003. After returning to Riga, she worked in education before joining the RSL. Russian border-crossing data show that Bondere travels to Russia almost every year and has visited the country particularly frequently since the start of the so-called “special military operation.” While in Russia, she stayed at expensive hotels, citing “business” as the purpose of her trips and using a Sberbank card to pay for her expenses.

The Insider sent Bondere questions via social media, but she did not respond.

Among the other pro-Putin candidates running for the Saeima is Aleksejs Rosļikovs, founder of the Stability! party. However, Latvian authorities have opened a criminal case against Rosļikovs for inciting ethnic hatred, prompting him to flee to Belarus.

Rosļikovs was previously involved in business, and local journalists have reported that he evaded taxes and repeatedly set up new companies. Whenever one of his companies accumulated debts, he would promptly change its founders. Rosļikovs has served as a member of both the Saeima and Riga City Council, but in 2026 he lost his mandate for repeatedly failing to attend meetings.

While lying low in Belarus, Rosļikovs has been waging an anti-Latvian propaganda campaign, portraying Russian-speaking people as victims of discrimination in the Baltic states. In his statements, the fugitive candidate says that if elected to the Saeima, “Ukraine will not receive another cent.” In April, Rosļikovs also spread a false claim that Latvian schools had purportedly banned students from speaking Russian even during recess.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Foreign Ministry has joined the disinformation campaign. Grigory Lukyantsev, director of the ministry’s Department for Multilateral Cooperation in Human Rights, claimed that authorities in the Baltic states were preparing mass deportations of Russian-speaking residents. The “sensation” was picked up by all major pro-government Russian media outlets. Unsurprisingly, the news turned out to be fake.

According to the company, the developers used Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool, to write and test software, saving the results directly into files for a project they called “DronDoc” or “Serafim.”

Apart from Claude, the developers used a software simulation stack and a rented server equipped with graphics processing units to train models. With the help of AI, the group developed:

• shared swarm memory and fault-tolerant coordination logic (FTCL)
• an onboard small language model to govern attack, observe, and return-to-base behaviors
• a terminal guidance software system to steer drones to their target (using the onboard camera) and issue the call to detonate
• a control-link geolocation module to find opposing drone operators
• a passive acoustic detection layer
• and low-level logic for the drones’ programmable chips

The platform was designed for autonomous lethal use. Anthropic said the onboard model could independently select targets — including a “person” target class — and issue a command to detonate without human involvement.

Using captured battlefield footage from Ukraine, the developers trained a computer-vision classifier that divided targets into “friendly” and “enemy” categories, placing Russian systems on the friendly list.

They repeatedly used the same coordinates in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region as a demonstration strike point, while the mission area itself covered a wider range of front-line cities and logistics corridors inside Ukraine.

Accounts linked to the operation were created between late 2025 and early 2026, and the activity itself began in mid-May of this year. The developers used commercial virtual private servers, or VPS services, to circumvent geographic restrictions on access.

Anthropic concluded that the people behind the project were a small, specialized freelance group handling both civilian and military contracts, rather than an organization directly tied to the Russian government.

Of nine accounts linked to the group, eight were used only for ordinary freelance work unrelated to weapons.

According to Anthropic, members of the operation appeared to have ties to a regional university and a federal research center affiliated with the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The developers themselves claimed they were receiving funding from Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, a state defense research body sometimes compared to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well as the National Technology Initiative and the Russian Defense Ministry. Anthropic said it could not independently verify those claims.

The company blocked accounts associated with the group and incorporated findings from the investigation into its safeguards in an effort to prevent similar abuses in the future.

In November 2025, Anthropic reported that Claude had been used to almost completely automate a major cyberespionage campaign, with 80% to 90% of the activity carried out without human involvement. Analysts attributed that operation to GTG-1002, a group linked to the Chinese government. It targeted around 30 organizations worldwide, including technology companies and government agencies.

The investigation analyzed ads on 1,145 pages across 131 websites in Eastern Europe, including Romania’s RTV, Realitatea TV, and dozens of others. AdNow’s ads were embedded through the company’s own infrastructure rather than Google Ads and included pitches promising miracle cures for illnesses and offering various get-rich-quick schemes. After users clicked on the ads, the network collected data about their psychological profiles, political views, and interest in conspiracy theories.

The journalists found that data was transmitted even when users explicitly refused consent in a notification. During two checks of the RTV website in February and May, information was still sent to 10 and 17 companies, respectively.

The investigators estimated that AdNow racks up 500 million ad impressions a month. From August 2022 through December 2025, Romanian companies billed AdNow 1,913,334 lei, or about $420,000.

AdNow founder Yulia Serebryanskaya previously worked in the public relations department of Russia’s ruling United Russia party and took part in the presidential campaigns of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. In 2024, journalists found that AdNow’s IT infrastructure had been used in the election campaign of Kaliningrad Region governor Alexei Besprozvannykh, who is under international sanctions. AdNow formally operates through the Bulgarian company Renodo Media Ltd., which has been linked to Georgian-born Giorgi Abuladze. However, Snoop reported that employees of the advertising network had been overseen by people in Russia for years.

A company affiliated with AdNow, RocketProfit (which holds an FSB license to process personal data) was found to have used fraudulent advertising practices. One example involved an AI-generated video falsely showing doctor Irinel Popescu endorsing a medical product. The ad was viewed 445,836 times, and a total of 1,856 people clicked through to sales pages; 843 of them handed over their names, phone numbers, addresses, and a total of around $30,000 to the scammers.

After Snoop published an investigation in 2025, Romanian regulator ANCOM blocked access to RocketProfit.

At the end of May, IAB Europe revoked AdNow’s right to place advertising through its centralized real-time bidding system. AdNow ads have continued to circulate, however, through undeclared servers.

Snoop had previously reported that money generated by similar Russian advertising operations went to websites promoting far-right presidential candidate Călin Georgescu and the AUR party.

In December 2024, Romania’s Supreme Council of National Defense accused Russia of interfering in the country’s presidential election by aiding Georgescu through cyberattacks and the manipulation of social media algorithms.

The company said its identification of the group is consistent with public reporting on Midnight Blizzard, a hacking operation that the U.S. and the UK have linked to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). According to Anthropic, the group targeted more than 20 organizations, including government ministries, intelligence and defense agencies, embassies, think tanks, and defense industry companies. Most of the targets were in Ukraine and Europe.

The hackers automated a significant share of their operations using AI agents built on Claude. The agents were used for reconnaissance, phishing, gaining access to systems, and stealing data. The hackers also scanned email services and remote access systems used by more than two dozen Ukrainian government organizations.

One of their main targets was Ukraine’s drone industry. The hackers extracted the contents of email accounts belonging to at least two manufacturers of drone components, attacked a military drone producer, and stole a software development kit (SDK) for a drone computer-vision system.

They then spent several days studying the system, reconstructing the product’s architecture, identifying its components and supplier dependencies, and obtaining information about a product that had not yet been publicly unveiled. Anthropic said the hackers showed particular interest in firmware related to military drone control and machine vision — technology that allows drones to interpret visual information from cameras and other sensors.

AI agents were used at nearly every stage of the attacks. They gathered information on potential targets, helped build and maintain phishing infrastructure, executed commands inside victims’ systems, stole credentials, and processed hundreds of gigabytes of stolen data.

Some tasks were performed autonomously. For example, the agents monitored whether security tools were detecting the group’s malware. If the software began to be recognized, the agents modified and rebuilt it on their own, repeating the cycle after new detections.

Anthropic said one of the group’s operators speaks Russian and uses the handle JackPoterz. The company said the operator’s methods and choice of targets were characteristic of Russian state-backed cyberespionage campaigns.

The hackers also breached at least three providers of hotel Wi-Fi networks. After obtaining administrative access, they redirected hotel guests’ internet traffic through servers under their control and attempted to infect Windows, Android, and iOS devices. They were particularly interested in people connected to Ukraine, including government officials and employees of drone manufacturers.

Anthropic noted that Microsoft described the same technique in July under the name CaptiveCrunch. According to an August report by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, hackers linked to Midnight Blizzard intercepted hotel Wi-Fi traffic around the world and installed malware on victims’ devices by disguising it as browser or operating system updates. Microsoft said at the time that artificial intelligence had helped conduct a significant portion of the group’s operations.

Anthropic’s new report provides additional details about the operation — for example, the fact that the hackers hijacked WhatsApp accounts and covertly extracted Russian- and Ukrainian-language conversations, targeting at least two former senior Ukrainian officials using that method. The group also identified vulnerabilities in video surveillance services that allowed it to access live camera feeds.

Another target was a government technology organization in a North African country. Anthropic said the hackers gained control of its central account server and stole a database containing more than 300,000 national identity records, as well as registry data on more than 500,000 companies.

Anthropic said it blocked accounts linked to the group and shared information about the operation with state authorities and industry partners.

Although individuals and entities tied to the Russian military-industrial complex dominate the proposed list, The Insider found that around 10 people and more than 15 organizations could be included over their role in the unlawful transfer of Ukrainian children. Several EU member states have proposed sanctioning Minnikhanov on these grounds based on the operations of Miras children’s camp in Tatarstan’s Zelenodolsk District, which EU officials say forms part of Russia’s broader strategy of removing Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territories.

Among the other individuals falling in this category are Russian-appointed officials in occupied Ukrainian territories, including school directors, local education ministers, and heads of regional branches of Dvizhenie Pervykh (lit. “Movement of the First”), a Kremlin-backed youth organization.

More than 15 organizations could also face sanctions, mainly children’s camps and educational and sports centers.

The Insider has learned that the EU is also discussing sanctions against the Moscow City Tourism Committee (Mosturizm). EU officials believe the agency contributes to the forced assimilation and indoctrination of Ukrainian minors.

Canada previously imposed personal sanctions on eight Russian officials over their involvement in the deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children. Those sanctioned include Russian Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs (Rosmolodezh) Grigory Gurov, and Movement of the First board chairman Artur Orlov.

On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights. They were accused of the war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring children from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.

With reporting by Morgane Fert Malka.

According to data provided by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, by April 2026 Ukraine had identified at least 28,391 foreigners from 136 countries who had taken part in combat as part of the Russian army (not counting those from regular North Korean units). Amnesty International itself notes that it could not independently verify these figures.

While conducting the study, human rights researchers made six visits to two prisoner-of-war camps in western Ukraine, where they spoke with citizens of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Somalia, and South Africa. Amnesty International also collected testimony from foreigners still serving in the Russian army, as well as from their relatives and lawyers.

According to Amnesty International, foreign citizens were lured to Russia with promises of high pay and expedited citizenship in connection with jobs in security, logistics, construction, IT, and other fields. However, upon their arrival in the country, some were made to sign documents in Russian, a language they did not speak. Among those documents was a contract with the Russian army.

Nalin, a Sri Lankan national (name changed by Amnesty International), says a middleman promised him work as a security guard. He came to Moscow with 58 other Sri Lankans. The group was met at the airport and taken to an office, where they were told to quickly sign documents in Russian without translation. According to Nalin, he did not understand what was happening. Among the papers he signed was a military contract. After a brief training, he was sent to the front. Nalin’s account matches the testimonies of two other Sri Lankans interviewed by Amnesty International, who added they never even received the promised pay.

In late 2025, a South African national referred to in the study as Joseph responded to an online job posting for a driver in Poland. An intermediary explained that he first had to fly to Moscow, pick up a truck there, and drive it to Poland. After Joseph departed, the agent stopped responding. According to Joseph’s wife, upon his arrival in Moscow he had “everything taken away.” He was told he would not be going to Poland and that he “was a soldier now.” The family says Joseph was never paid for his service either.

Another interviewee, Brazilian IT specialist Pedro, was offered a well-paid job in his field in Russia. Instead, he ended up at the Avangard training center. According to Pedro, his captors confiscated his phone, laptop, and passport. He could not leave the center on his own. When he asked the commander to let him go, the commander reportedly replied: “If you try to run, you’ll either go to prison, or we’ll kill you ourselves.” Pedro spent 11 months in the Russian army before being captured by Ukrainian forces. He, too, says he never received the payments he was promised.

Colombian national Jorge told a similar story. He saw a job posting for civilian work in Russia and flew to Ufa via Istanbul in November 2025. There he was given documents to sign in Russian, with people repeatedly saying “quickly, quickly” and “later.” He was then driven by bus for three days to an unknown location, given a rifle and a uniform (despite his protests that he was a civilian), and ultimately delivered to a trench on the front line.

Another Colombian told Amnesty International that his passport was taken from him at the airport in Ufa. He also spent several days on a bus — along with seven other Colombians and 35 Africans — eventually arriving at a military training ground. According to him, rumors circulated among the recruits that people who refused to go to the front were “disappeared.” When his group was sent forward, he saw that everyone from the previous group had been killed; his group was ordered to keep moving.

The study also describes a different scheme, using Peru as an example. According to a group of Peruvian lawyers, since 2025 intermediaries have been receiving about $2,000 for each recruit they deliver for Russian military service. After arriving in Russia, people were made to sign not only military contracts but also powers of attorney valid for up to 15 years (and sometimes indefinitely). Amnesty International notes that such documents could give third parties access to recruits’ money. Such schemes also operated through agencies in Colombia, and The Insider previously reported on a similar scheme involving stolen payments to Brazilians.

The same Peruvian lawyers told the human rights group that they are assisting 200 families whose relatives went to Russia after being promised civilian jobs. They know of at least 300 more such cases and say that the Peruvian embassy in Moscow has returned at least ten former recruits home. In one instance, a father who had already been caught up in a scheme warned his son to contact the embassy before he, too, was shipped to the front. Recruiters failed to find the younger man, and he ultimately managed to escape Russia.

Yet another scheme involves foreigners already living in Russia. According to Amnesty International, migrants with expired visas or other legal difficulties were offered a contract with the army as a way to avoid detention or deportation — and even to obtain a residence permit or citizenship. Foreign prisoners were also offered the opportunity to join the army instead of serving time. Two Egyptians detained on drug charges said they were threatened with lengthy imprisonment and offered military service as an alternative. A Cuban national sentenced to six years agreed to a contract because he faced deportation after his release from prison.

A refugee from a Central African country told Amnesty International that his temporary protection renewal was denied after he refused to sign a contract with the Russian army. After losing his appeal, he was placed in detention, where representatives of the army approached him and other detainees with new contract offers. A lawyer interviewed by Amnesty International confirmed that Russian immigration offices offer foreigners the chance to legalize their status and obtain Russian citizenship through military service. Human rights defenders argue that when the practical alternative is detention or deportation, this cannot be described as fully voluntary consent.

All of the foreigners interviewed by Amnesty International reported severe restrictions on freedom of movement after signing a military contract — regardless of whether they had joined up voluntarily. People had their passports, phones, and other devices confiscated and were barred from leaving their housing. Some said they were woken up at night, put on buses, and driven for several days to an unknown destination without being told where they were going.

Training before deployment to the front usually took about two weeks. Interviewees complained of equipment shortages and a language barrier that often prevented them from communicating properly with their commanders. Amnesty International believes this practice is part of a Russian effort to increase the number of troops at the front by any means possible.

“The level of exploitation and coercion involved led us to conclude that in many cases this amounts to human trafficking, as defined under the UN’s Palermo Protocol,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said.

In its conclusions, Amnesty International notes that the migration units of Russia’s Interior Ministry and the Russian Ministry of Defense may be directly implicated in these practices. The organization could not establish the exact structure of ties between all of the foreign intermediaries and Russian state bodies involved in the coerced recruitment efforts, but as the report makes clear, the recurrence of identical schemes across different countries points to possible coordination or cooperation between recruiters and the Russian state agencies that send foreigners to the front. Amnesty International stresses that Russian authorities have, at the very least, created favorable conditions for these schemes to flourish and that the Russian military benefits from their existence as a means of replenishing its manpower.

In late August, four EU countries sent a letter to the European Commission urging it to return to the task of developing options for using Russian assets to benefit Ukraine. Politico reported that Germany is now leading the group of countries pushing for a solution to the question of the Russian funds.

The Financial Times said the renewed debate over frozen Russian assets has been driven by Ukraine’s rising defense costs and discussions over the shape of the EU’s next long-term budget for 2028 to 2034.

European officials say the main challenge is to develop a proposal acceptable to Belgium, which has previously blocked initiatives of this kind. Belgian authorities are concerned that if the assets are used to support Ukraine, Russia could sue, leaving Brussels exposed to the legal consequences.

According to the Financial Times, Belgian officials insist that “any proposal involving the immobilized Russian assets must provide a complete and legally watertight solution covering both the assets and the liabilities of Euroclear and of the Belgian State.”

One option under discussion is a joint proposal put forward by former German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Nathalie Loiseau, a French member of the European Parliament from President Emmanuel Macron’s political camp. They suggest creating a separate EU structure that could take custody of the Russian funds currently held at Euroclear. Some European officials believe such an approach could provide Belgium with the necessary guarantees against legal risks.

Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and Poland had earlier called on the European Commission to resume work on finding ways to use Russian central bank assets for Ukraine’s benefit. In a letter to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, they wrote:

“Ukraine needs more financial support in both the short and long term…By using the immobilised assets, the EU can ensure that Russia pays for the destruction it has caused in Ukraine without delay, while at the same time reducing the burden on our own taxpayers.”

Politico reported that Germany is now leading the group of countries pushing for a rapid solution.

Among the proposals under discussion is a new loan for Ukraine backed by the frozen Russian assets. 

Those sanctioned include Russian Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Kurenkov, head of the Federal Agency for Youth Affairs Grigory Gurov, and Dvizhenie Pervykh (lit. "Movement of the First") youth organization head Artur Orlov. 

The Movement of the First is a Kremlin-backed youth organization created after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is modeled in part on Soviet-era mass youth movements, running patriotic and educational programs for children and teenagers.

Also added to the sanctions list were Denis Chernobai, chairman of a regional branch council of Movement of the First; Vladimir Khromov, an adviser in the office of Russia’s children’s rights commissioner; and Elena Milskaya, chairperson of the board of trustees of the National Center for Assistance to Missing and Affected Children. Alexandra Kulgina and Vitaly Suk were also included.

The Canadian government said the eight were involved in the abduction of Ukrainian children, the unlawful transfer of those children to Russia, and the indoctrination and militarization of the abducted children.

On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights. They were accused of the war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring children from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.

Ukrainian authorities have previously stated that over 20,000 Ukrainian children have been unlawfully taken to Russia since the start of the full-scale war. The Insider has also reported numerous cases of abuse involving Ukrainian children who were illegally transferred to Russia.

In the fall of 2022, Sweden underwent an electoral shift that ended the era of Social Democratic rule traditional for Nordic countries. The right-wing coalition led by Ulf Kristersson came to power on the wave of a security crisis. In 2022, voters were driven less by ideological preference than by a sense of losing control over the familiar course of life.

The catalyst for disillusionment with the center-left was an alarming surge in street violence that turned once-quiet Swedish towns into arenas of criminal warfare, waged by gangs of teens recruited by criminal bosses from disadvantaged neighborhoods — minors who can escape criminal prosecution because of their age.

Years of neglecting the problems tied to the rise of isolated suburban ghettos and criminal gangs, combined with an outdated and ineffective anti-drug policy, led to a sharp rise in the number of deadly shootouts between rival gangs. For years, the Social Democrats tried to treat this social wound with soft measures and integration programs. The right, by contrast, offered voters a clear and tough answer: they promised to restore law and order through expanded police powers, mass searches, and an increase in the prison population.

In the mind of the average citizen, crime was inseparable from failures in the country’s migration policy. Society expects newcomers to assimilate, but instead Sweden has experienced cultural segregation and a significant strain on social funds due to high unemployment among migrants.

In this context, the right-wing parties made a historic compromise, lifting the decades-long “cordon sanitaire” — the unspoken ban on forming a coalition with the far-right nationalists of the Sweden Democrats (SD). The united right-wing bloc stated bluntly that the humanitarian superpower could no longer fulfill its mission. The bloc promised to close the borders and restrict immigrants’ rights.

The right-wing parties made a historic compromise, lifting the unspoken ban on forming a coalition with far-right nationalists

The straw that tipped the balance in favor of the right-wing coalition was an economic shock in which an energy crisis spurred runaway inflation. Gas and electricity prices soared to historic highs, hitting the middle class hard.

The right skillfully exploited the moment, blaming the left-wing government for making a strategic mistake by shutting down Swedish nuclear plants in order to fast-track the green transition. The right’s promises to immediately cut fuel taxes and revive the nuclear program became the decisive argument for a nation tired of austerity.

In the end, voters backed the new leadership not out of hatred for socialism but out of a desire to restore stability. People placed their trust in those who promised to use a firm hand to restore order in a state that seemed to be falling apart.

What the right failed to deliver

The cabinet that came to power in Sweden under Ulf Kristersson, backed by the far-right nationalists of the Sweden Democrats, launched reforms touching the very foundations of the famous “welfare state.” What had been considered the gold standard of Nordic socialism for decades has, in recent years, become a testing ground for right-wing experiments. This policy brought about a social crisis that made Swedes doubt once again the permanence of their familiar way of life.

The right-wing government’s main thrust was to overhaul the philosophy of distributing public benefits. The cabinet attempted to abandon one of the core principles of the Swedish social system — universal, equal access to social guarantees based simply on residency in the country. Instead, they adopted the concept of tying benefit payments to employment and citizenship. The government introduced a so-called benefits cap, significantly cutting subsidies for the unemployed and large families. Authorities also launched a sweeping reform of the criteria that determine eligibility for benefits.

Particular controversy was sparked by a bill introducing a residency requirement for access to basic social protections, including housing subsidies and child and parental benefits. The new rules require migrants to have lived legally in Sweden for at least five years before they can claim full state assistance.

Experts from Stockholm University are convinced that such measures undermine the foundation of equality and fuel social tension. Alongside these restrictions, the government eliminated educational grants for vulnerable groups, justifying the move as necessary to push people into work. In practice, however, this marginalized the country’s poorest neighborhoods.

These reforms coincided with a crisis in healthcare and education — areas that are traditionally a strength for Sweden. In seeking to cut government spending while also lowering taxes for businesses and the wealthy, the government shifted the financial burden onto municipalities. As a result, Swedish healthcare faced chronic underfunding, staff shortages, and record growth in wait times for elective surgeries.

Schooling became one of the most painful issues in society. The education system was largely outsourced to private schools, which nevertheless continued to profit from budget subsidies. In the chase for state funding, private schools began artificially inflating grades for students, causing actual knowledge levels to plummet, while national exam results stopped reflecting reality. The situation is compounded by across-the-board cuts to qualified teachers and infrastructure. Coupled with growing segregation, the trend is rapidly dismantling what was once a model education system.

Police and migration services gained unprecedented powers under the right-wing government, and deportation now looms not only for those found guilty of criminal offenses but also for migrants who commit administrative violations, run up debts, or engage in an “improper lifestyle.”

Deportation now looms for administrative violations, debt, or an “improper lifestyle”

The crisis of the Swedish model was the logical result of the right’s attempt to cross market fundamentalism with anti-migrant populism. The nation, accustomed to social security and predictability, got record unemployment, a withering healthcare system, and rising poverty. Amid this dismantling effort, Swedes are increasingly leaning toward the center-left, hoping to save what remains of what was once a model welfare state.

The nation’s reaction to the right’s reforms

The right’s efforts to address three major challenges — rampant crime, a migration dead end, and an economic crisis — produced ambiguous results. On the one hand, the government demonstrated a genuine willingness to break old taboos. On the other, the side effects of this shock therapy created new sources of tension that have split society ahead of the upcoming parliamentary vote.

On the issue of combating street crime — the main trigger for the change of power  — the right can credit itself with figures that speak for themselves. Official Swedish police data record a sharp drop in violence, with the number of shooting incidents in the country less than half of what it was at its catastrophic peak in 2022. This was achieved through an unprecedented expansion of law enforcement powers, the introduction of blanket electronic surveillance without a court warrant, and the creation of so-called security zones, where police gained the right to conduct preventative searches.

Nevertheless, as noted in an official report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), despite the overall decline in criminal incidents, the number of firearm deaths is falling extremely slowly.

In 2025, 42 people were killed by gunfire, compared with 45 the year before. On top of that, instead of shootings, gangs are increasingly turning to bombings. Although the total number of such attacks does not look particularly large by global standards, Sweden is not most countries, and every such incident becomes a major scandal. At the same time, gangs have moved teen recruitment online in order to continue their brutal turf wars, often killing or injuring innocent bystanders.

A similarly harsh approach was applied to migration policy, as the government needed to meet the key demands of its far-right coalition partners. For the first time in half a century, Sweden recorded negative net migration. Refugees are now issued only temporary residence permits, with no guaranteed path to permanent residency. These measures have also affected refugees from Ukraine, who now struggle to obtain even a work permit despite the Sweden Democrats’ nominal support for Kyiv’s fight against Russian aggression.

Parliament keeps churning out one harsh law after another, including stripping migrants’ residency status over vague “improper conduct” allegations and the controversial requirement that public employees report undocumented migrants to the police. The changes have come at a high cost to Swedish business and the labor market, which is plagued by an acute talent shortage due to inflated salary thresholds for foreign specialists.

The government’s economic policy yielded the most contentious results. Together with the Riksbank, the cabinet managed to bring down runaway inflation, but doing so required cutting the key interest rate to one of the lowest levels in the EU and introducing a reduced VAT on food. This macroeconomic victory came at the cost of severe stagnation and a sharp rise in unemployment.

The prosperity the right promised in 2022 turned into harsh austerity on social spending, eroding public trust. Swedish voters sobered up once it became clear that fuel tax cuts and police on the streets could not offset the decline of the healthcare system and the drop in their quality of life. The attempt to cure Sweden’s chronic problems with right-wing populism and police batons produced a short-term security effect but stripped people of their confidence in what was once a model welfare state.

The implementation of Sweden’s hardline right-wing course has split society, sparking a prolonged debate over the price of public safety and the limits of humanism. The initial enthusiasm for the authorities’ decisive actions has given way to fatigue, skepticism, and mounting internal protest against methods many consider excessively repressive.

At first, voters shocked by the rampant crime approved of expanded police powers, preventive searches, and tough anti-migration laws. But as theory turned into practice, public sentiment swung the other way.

Recent polls show the opposition, led by the Social Democrats, with a combined rating above 50%, while the ruling coalition teeters on the edge of losing power. Swedes have shown they are willing to back a firm hand only as long as it restores the order that has been violated by gangs — not when it starts rewriting the basic ethical norms of Scandinavian society.

The so-called “snitch bill,” which would require teachers, doctors, and social workers to report undocumented migrants to police, drew particular outrage from the left opposition and professional unions. Public-sector workers launched mass protests against the measure, arguing that turning civil servants into agents of migration control would destroy the foundations of professional ethics and humanism.

Surveys by human rights organizations such as Civil Rights Defenders confirm that Swedish society has developed a deep-seated fear of a two-tier legal system taking shape, in which permanent residents of foreign origin become powerless hostages to bureaucratic arbitrariness. The idea of retroactively revoking previously granted permanent residence permits — a move affecting nearly 200,000 people — has stripped any semblance of fairness from the right’s migration policy.

While in 2022 Swedes were demanding protection from external threats, in 2026 they are increasingly demanding that Sweden itself be protected from the dismantling of its democratic institutions.

The right-wing government’s economic missteps

Left-wing activists and politicians describe Sweden’s economic dead end of recent years as a direct consequence of the rigidity and tactical missteps of Ulf Kristersson’s cabinet. The right-wing government made a classic mistake, trying to address the welfare state’s structural problems via austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, and administrative pressure on the labor market.

The right’s first and most painful mistake was a fanatically monetarist approach to combating inflation, which ended up strangling domestic demand. Determined to curb post-COVID price growth at any cost, the government fully backed the Riksbank’s aggressive interest rate hikes and abandoned targeted support for households.

Riksbank’s previous policy had involved decades of artificially inflating a debt bubble, and as a result, almost every citizen had taken out at least one loan. But the reversal of this ultra-loose monetary policy brought about an economic catastrophe. Years of near-zero and even negative rates accustomed the population to cheap money, driving Swedish household debt to above 150% of gross income, making the country one of the most indebted in Europe. 

Household debt has exceeded 150% of gross income, making Sweden one of the most indebted countries in Europe

With the vast majority of citizens burdened by punishing floating-rate mortgages, a sharp rise in the Riksbank’s base rate — aimed at fighting inflation — instantly bled family budgets dry. Swedes were forced to hand over the lion’s share of their income in order to service loans that had suddenly become far more expensive.

Instead of temporarily cushioning the shock for consumers, the cabinet took a wait-and-see approach. As a result, Swedish consumer spending collapsed, the property market entered a prolonged slump, and the construction sector — once a growth engine — effectively ground to a halt, triggering a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs.

The second strategic misstep lay at the intersection of fiscal policy and ideological commitments to far-right allies. Amid an evident liquidity shortfall, the Kristersson government pushed through ill-timed and unjust cuts to taxes on capital, high incomes, and property. The idea that these measures would spur business activity failed: large businesses chose to hold back funds amid the uncertainty, and the budget lost out on colossal sums.

To make ends meet, the government cut subsidies to regions and municipalities. Since local government in Sweden is responsible for social infrastructure, the move paralyzed municipal budgets, forcing hospitals and schools to cut staff and skimp on basic services, delivering the final blow to public confidence in right-wing governance.

The third devastating factor was an artificial barrier erected in Sweden’s labor market to appease the coalition’s anti-immigrant elements. A sharp rise in the minimum salary threshold for skilled foreign specialists blocked the inflow of talent into key technology and innovation sectors, and Swedish startups and industrial giants suddenly found they could no longer hire engineers, programmers, and researchers from abroad. 

Swedish startups and industrial giants suddenly found they could no longer hire engineers, programmers, and researchers from abroad

At the same time, a harsh crackdown on low-skilled labor dealt a heavy blow to the services and municipal sectors, deepening the staffing crisis in the social sphere. The right’s attempt to prove that Swedes themselves would fill these jobs collided with reality: unemployment rose among vulnerable groups, while the systemic labor shortage slowed any recovery in GDP. As a result, Sweden emerged from the crisis more slowly than its European peers.

The parliamentary coalition’s troubles

The current government’s tenure has caused Swedish voters to increasingly see the country’s top legislative body not as a forum for building national consensus but as a generator of chaos.

The entire machinery of state governance has been hijacked by the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), whose votes are mandatory for every initiative of Ulf Kristersson’s minority government from budget parameters to education reform. The public is becoming increasingly irritated as parliament openly disregards its long-standing unwritten rules of conduct, turning sessions into ideological battles. Instead of a functioning cabinet, citizens see a conglomerate of political appointees whose sole purpose is to hold on to their ministerial seats at any cost.

How to handle the right-wing legacy

Ahead of the parliamentary campaign, the center-left coalition led by the Social Democrats has rolled out a sweeping program of counter-reforms as part of its effort to dismantle the right’s legacy and return the country to the classic principles of the Nordic model. The centerpiece of its economic program will involve launching large-scale state investment in infrastructure, green energy, and industrial revival.

The left plans to restore the financial stability of the regions by channeling targeted, multi-billion injections into municipal budgets to halt cuts in hospitals and schools. At the same time, it proposes introducing a progressive tax on excess income and large capital, as well as legally banning commercial companies from profiting off budget subsidies in education and healthcare, bringing these sectors back under strict state control.

On the issue of fighting street crime, the center-left is seizing the initiative from the right, proposing to tackle the root causes rather than the symptoms of the crime crisis. While acknowledging the need to maintain a strong police presence and effective prosecution of gang leaders, the left is shifting the focus toward prevention and social outreach.

Their strategy rests on large-scale funding for low-income suburbs, job creation for young people, and restoring state control over schooling in at-risk areas in order to cut off gangs’ channels for recruiting teenagers. The opposition promises to scrap the right’s most notorious innovations, such as warrantless preventive searches in designated security zones, which have arguably only embittered the population, undermining trust in the police. These will be replaced with targeted operational work and an expanded corps of municipal inspectors.

The migration issue in the left coalition’s platform has undergone a significant evolution: while there will be no return to the unrestricted refugee intake of 2015, the approach will be purged of the right’s xenophobic populism. The left promises to maintain reasonable border controls while completely scrapping the shameful “snitch laws” and vague “improper conduct” deportation criteria in order to bring Sweden’s migration policy back within the framework of international humanitarian law.

The main emphasis will be on genuine, rather than coerced, integration through the labor market. The center-left intends to lower the salary thresholds for foreign specialists that the right had artificially inflated, thereby easing the staffing crunch in IT and healthcare. At the same time, subsidized training and language-learning programs will be launched for permanent residents, transforming migrants from objects of police control into a full-fledged economic resource for the country.

The parliamentary arithmetic of coalitions

Public opinion polls in August showed a steady lead for the center-left opposition bloc, led by former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson. A Verian survey, commissioned by state broadcaster SVT, put support for the opposition bloc at 53.9% (which would guarantee the center-left 196 seats in the country’s 349-seat parliament), while the right-wing governing coalition polled at just 43.9%, projecting 153 seats. However, a Demoskop poll putting the balance of forces at 50.6% to 46.9% in the opposition’s favor may herald a more tight-run result.

The main mathematical problem for sitting Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and his coalition is the collapse of the Liberal Party. To enter the Riksdag, a party must clear a strict 4% electoral threshold. But the Liberals, led by Simona Mohamsson, have consistently teetered on the brink of political oblivion, polling between a paltry 1.9% and 2.4% in recent surveys. If the Liberals fail to clear the necessary mark, it will be mathematically impossible for the right to retain a parliamentary majority.

The Liberals’ decline accelerated after March 13, when Mohamsson signed the so-called “Swedish Promise” (Sverigelöftet) — an agreement with Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats. The move crossed the Liberals’ historic red line: Mohamsson publicly shook hands with the right-wing populist leader and agreed to bring his party into a future government as full-fledged cabinet ministers. 

The decision triggered an intra-party revolt, high-profile resignations of key figures, and a mass exodus of voters. Attempts to resuscitate the party by bringing back former leader Lars Leijonborg and through Mohamsson’s bold gestures at the debates on Aug. 17 failed to win over moderate voters. Public rejection of the Sweden Democrats remains consistently high: 56% of Swedish voters categorically oppose the right-wing populist party’s presence in the cabinet.

While the right-wing forces try to normalize the far right in order to hold on to power, Swedish women are clearly demonstrating their objections to this alliance: support for Åkesson’s party among women stands at just 12%, compared with 24.7% among men.

The Social Democrats, holding the lead with roughly 30% of the vote, depend in large part on the support of three forces: the socialists of the Left Party, the Greens, and the liberal Centre Party. But Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar categorically rejects the role of an obedient junior partner to the center-left and is demanding full ministerial portfolios for her party in exchange for votes. Despite resistance from the moderate wing at the party congress in Örebro in April 2026, Dadgostar firmly held her ground on the demand.

Meanwhile, another potential partner — the Centre Party, led by Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist — says it will never allow the Left Party into government. Thand Ringqvist, whose roots lie in small business, champions a platform of entrepreneurship and tax cuts, which directly contradicts the socialists’ plans to raise the tax burden on business. The Centre Party itself is teetering at around 5% in the polls, and Thand Ringqvist’s personal approval rating stands at a critically low 6%.

The pre-election dynamics are so complex that young political scientists from Rotterdam University have compiled an entire electoral map of Swedes’ group preferences. It shows who could have the greatest impact on the outcome of the vote. 

The study suggests that the voters who will decide the outcome of Sweden’s upcoming election may yet switch their preferences at the last minute.

NATO, Russia, and foreign policy

On foreign policy, Sweden is showing a rare national consensus. Questions of NATO membership, support for Ukraine, and countering Russian hybrid threats have been effectively removed from the arena of interparty struggle.

Swedish society’s attitude toward the war in Ukraine and the threats from the Kremlin remains uncompromising. Opinion polls in recent years have recorded a consistently high level of Swedish anxiety over Russian aggression in the Baltic, as well as concerns about espionage and cyberattacks.

Against this backdrop, Swedes see military aid to Kyiv not as charity but as a direct investment in their own security. Voters harshly punish any flirtation with pacifist or isolationist rhetoric. As a result, even traditionally skeptical left-wing parties have had to adjust their platforms so as not to lose voters.

The idea of military aid to Kyiv is seen by citizens not as charity but as a direct investment in security

Ulf Kristersson’s ruling right-wing coalition is trying to claim full NATO integration as one of its primary achievements, reminding voters of its resolve at a moment of crisis. But the center-left opposition, led by the Social Democrats, stresses that it was their government that filed the alliance application in 2022, and that the course toward Euro-Atlantic integration is a cross-party achievement belonging to the whole nation — not a success the right can claim as its own.

The only remaining source of electoral tension in this area is the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD). Although the party’s leadership has officially adopted a pro-Ukraine and pro-NATO stance, the left-wing coalition has skillfully used the party’s history against it in the campaign. The Social Democrats regularly remind voters of certain SD functionaries’ past sympathies for the Kremlin’s style of governance and their ties to Moscow-sympathizing European right-wing populists. Given Swedish voters’ extreme sensitivity to any sign of hybrid influence, such reminders inflict serious damage on the right-wing bloc’s reputation and make citizens doubt the reliability of Kristersson’s far-right allies.

Whoever wins the upcoming vote — the center-left or the sitting cabinet — Stockholm’s course will remain unchanged, much to the relief of voters weary of domestic reform battles. No matter who wins, Sweden will continue to build up its defense budget, strengthen NATO’s presence in Northern Europe, and provide comprehensive military support to Ukraine. Everything else, however, will come down to the vote on Sunday.

Investigators later found a notebook in a camper van used by the suspect containing handwritten notes on more than 160 targets — some already attacked and others that may have been intended for future sabotage operations.

Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and a member of the Christian Democratic Union, told the state parliament’s interior committee about the discovery. 

“We not only detained the suspected perpetrator of the attacks, but may also have prevented further attacks,” he said.

The suspect also told investigators about seven additional locations he had used as hideouts and storage sites. Police have already found evidence at three of them, while the others are still being searched.

The manhunt lasted several days and covered energy facilities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Brandenburg and Saxony. Up to 1,700 police officers took part in the operation.

Frank Wiesbaum, who led the search, said investigators were confronted with an unusual pattern: the attack sites were more than 700 kilometers (435 miles) apart, while the suspect had sent letters claiming responsibility to media outlets and signed them with his real name — a rare step that suggested he wanted to be identified.

Police were investigating possible ties between the suspect and environmental activists linked to the Hambach Forest, a long-standing hub of protests against coal mining in western Germany. His camper van was found there, but a search of the forest failed to locate him.

It was previously reported that 12 improvised explosive devices were found near two electrical substations in the eastern German state of Saxony. Those incidents were part of the same series of sabotage attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure.

Kazakhstan’s Prosecutor General’s Office approved Movlaev’s extradition in early 2026, and the country’s Cassation Court for Administrative Cases confirmed the rulings of lower courts that had already denied him asylum. Kuchusheva, a human rights advocate working on Movlaev’s case, told The Insider that in practice the ruling means the Chechen activist could now be extradited at any time:

“Mansur can be extradited as soon as they agree with the Russian side on the crossing point where he will be handed over. Even if an appeal is filed with the Supreme Court, the extradition is not suspended. Moreover, there is no guarantee the Supreme Court will even agree to hear the case. From this moment — from the cassation ruling — extradition can happen at any time.

It is not very clear how Kazakhstan will treat the UN emergency measures, which effectively require the local authorities to halt the extradition. Will they fulfill their international obligations? That is far from certain. If they do not, we will work to formally document that, because this would amount to a very serious violation. We will help Mansur in every way possible.”

Kuchusheva said that if Astana sends Movlaev to Russia, rights advocates intend to push for sanctions against Kazakhstan in every jurisdiction available to them, including personal sanctions against judges and prosecutors.

“You cannot, on the one hand, participate in PACE and the OSCE and, on the other, extradite political activists to Russia — and in Mansur’s case, to Chechnya and certain death. That is unacceptable, and Kazakhstan should face public consequences for it.”

As The Insider reported in July, Russian activists Yulia Yemelyanova and Mansur Movlaev, both detained by Kazakh authorities, appealed to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev directly asking him to stop their extradition to Russia. The Consuls of the Anti-War Committee, the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR/IGFM), and the Kovcheg (“Ark”) project also called on Tokayev to halt both extraditions, to release the activists, and to allow them to travel safely to third countries.

Earlier this year, The Insider also published a detailed report on the worsening situation for anti-war Russians seeking asylum or refuge both in Western countries and in former Soviet states. Human rights advocates interviewed for the report said Kazakhstan stood out as one of the most concerning countries and advised Russians at risk of political persecution not to travel there even in transit.

Movlaev faces criminal charges in Russia involving accusations of extortion and extremism. Yemelyanova, a former volunteer at the late Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, is wanted on a theft charge.

Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, announced earlier today that the coordinated strike on the naval base in Novorossiysk had caused it to “lose a number of military vessels, including missile carriers.”

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) said the Admiral Essen was hit in its superstructure, causing a fire aboard the ship. The Ukrainian Navy also said a Neptune cruise missile was used in the attack.

The Admiral Essen is a Project 11356 frigate of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and can carry Kalibr cruise missiles, which Russian forces have repeatedly used in strikes on Ukraine.

It was not the first time Admiral Essen had been targeted. In August, Ukraine’s General Staff reported strikes on the Admiral Essen, Admiral Makarov and the patrol ship Vasily Bykov.

Satellite images published after the latest attack appear to point to at least two other possible strikes. One target was a Project 21631 Buyan-M small missile ship. Images appear to show a direct hit on the vessel. Ukrainian sources said it lost combat capability after the strike.

Buyan-M ships are a class of small Russian missile vessels armed with the Kalibr-NK missile system. Despite their relatively small size, they can launch long-range cruise missiles at ground targets and have repeatedly been used by Russia to carry out strikes on Ukraine.

The Ukrainian side said the vessel hit in Novorossiysk had taken part in an attack on Kyiv shortly before it was struck.

Another likely target was the frigate Admiral Makarov, which is also capable of launching Kalibr missiles. Ukrainian sources published images that they said show damage to the ship’s port side.

Footage of a possible attack on the Project 11711 large landing ship Pyotr Morgunov was also analyzed. In that case, however, Ukrainian monitoring resources preliminarily assessed that the munition failed to reach its target.

The Novorossiysk strike was carried out overnight into Sept. 9 and involved several types of weapons. Ukraine said it targeted the port and military infrastructure in the city.

Fires in the area were also visible on satellite data from NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which detects thermal anomalies. According to the FIRMS map, heat signatures were recorded in the port area from 2:05 a.m. to 3:45 a.m. Moscow time on Sept. 9, with the strongest readings at 3:45 a.m.

After repeated Ukrainian attacks on Sevastopol, Russia relocated a significant part of its Black Sea Fleet to Novorossiysk. In recent years, however, Ukraine has also begun systematically attacking that base with maritime drones, aerial drones, and missiles.

The attack was first reported by the public association Support for Azerbaijani Sailors, which said drones had attacked TEDY in the Black Sea near Odesa on the morning of Sept. 9. After the first strike, the damaged vessel headed toward the Romanian port of Constanța, but it came under attack twice more during the night.

There were 10 people aboard: four Azerbaijani citizens, three Turkish citizens, two Germans, and one Ukrainian. Azerbaijani sailors Aslan Aliyev and Asim Gasimov were killed. Two other Azerbaijani citizens, Imran Novruzov and Rauf Aliyev, suffered burns and were taken to a hospital in Chornomorsk.

Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry later confirmed the deaths and injuries. The ministry said it was in contact with Ukrainian authorities and diplomatic missions to assist the injured and arrange for the return of the bodies of those killed. It also advised Azerbaijani citizens to avoid working aboard vessels whose routes pass through areas of active fighting.

On the evening of Sept. 9, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Russian forces had carried out coordinated strikes on Ukrainian seaports and vessels. Among the targets, it listed a tug that had been escorting dry cargo ships into the port of Odesa. The Russian military did not name the vessel or report any crew deaths. There is no direct confirmation so far that the ministry’s statement referred to TEDY.

TEDY (IMO 9059200) is a roughly 30-meter tug and supply vessel built in 1995 and registered under the Somali flag. The Insider reviewed data provided by the vessel tracking platform Starboard Maritime Intelligence. On Sept. 7 at 12:58 p.m. UTC, TEDY departed the Romanian port of Midia and headed northeast toward Odesa at a speed of 14 to 15 kilometers per hour. At 4:41 p.m., the ship stopped transmitting its tracking signal for nearly a day.

Then, on Sept. 8 at 4:03 p.m., it reappeared in the tracking system about 40 kilometers southwest of Snake Island (Zmiinyi Island) and had effectively stopped. TEDY transmitted its last signal from that location at 4:24 p.m. 

The group Support for Azerbaijani Sailors identified the Turkish company Mert Marine Corporation as TEDY’s owner. Data reviewed by The Insider supports that claim. TEDY’s vessel record lists Mert Marine as both the owner and operator of the tug. The same information appears in all available Automatic Identification System (AIS) records from June through September 2026.

Ships with foreign crews operating in the Black and Azov seas have repeatedly been targeted by Russian and Ukrainian drones in recent months. In June, drones attacked the vessels Natra and Circon in Taganrog Bay. According to updated figures from Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry, four Azerbaijani sailors were killed and four others were injured. One Azerbaijani citizen initially listed among the dead was later identified as a Russian national. Ukraine’s military effectively confirmed the strikes, saying the vessels had been used to transport stolen grain, military cargo, and fuel. An analysis of their routes by The Insider found that both ships had sailed between the Russian ports of Kavkaz and Rostov-on-Don.

On July 14, Russian drones attacked two merchant ships near Odesa. On the dry cargo vessel Atlas Bey, which was sailing from Chornomorsk to Turkey with a cargo of meal, the captain, an Azerbaijani citizen, and another crew member were killed. Three people were injured.

Several more foreign vessels were hit between July 17 and 19. One sailor was killed and three were injured in an attack on the Antigua and Barbuda-flagged dry cargo ship Venturo. A strike on the Guinea-Bissau-flagged dry cargo ship Golden Leo, which was carrying corn, killed 10 people — nine crew members and a Ukrainian pilot. The vessel later sank. Four Indian citizens were among those killed, prompting New Delhi to summon Russia’s chargé d’affaires.

Ukraine has also attacked vessels linked to Russian ports. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said that as of Aug. 8, a total of 218 vessels had been struck in an operation launched in July. That figure has not been independently verified. The Insider found that not all of the vessels attacked were under Ukrainian sanctions, and one was sailing under the Turkish flag.

After attacks on the Yasar and Nadezhda, which had departed Novorossiysk, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry warned that strikes on commercial shipping risked triggering uncontrolled escalation in the Black Sea.

As The Insider calculated, United Russia’s share of this airtime nearly doubled in a week — from roughly 39% to 70%. From Aug. 24–30, the channels also allocated a total of 89 minutes to political parties, but United Russia received just under 35 minutes. In other words, the overall volume of campaign coverage did not grow, but a significantly larger share of it was redistributed in favor of the ruling party.

Notably, 89% of segments about United Russia in the last week of monitoring had a positive tone. For the New People party, by contrast, this figure was 71%, and for the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), only around a third of the coverage was positive. The average length of United Russia-related segments came in at 2.7 minutes, while the majority of material about its rivals lasted under a minute.

United Russia’s main news hook involved Vladimir Putin’s meeting with the top five candidates on its federal list: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, “war correspondent” Yevgeny Poddubny, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, and head of the pro-Kremlin Yunarmiya youth movement Vladislav Golovin. Five of the six television channels examined in the study devoted coverage to the meeting, with Channel One running its segment three times. Putin himself is not on the federal candidate list.

United Russia has used Putin’s persona as a promotional tool in its television campaign more than once. On Aug. 22, the president came to the party’s pre-election congress and, even before the vote, called United Russia the “leading political force” in the country. Putin also spoke at the party’s congress in June, where, for the first time since 2007, the event’s decor used imagery directly linking him to United Russia — including a poster with the president’s portrait and the captions “Being for Putin is the bare minimum” and “United Russia is the president’s party.”

The State Duma election — Russia’s first parliamentary election since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — is scheduled for Sept. 20. The only registered party with an antiwar platform, Yabloko, was removed from the federal-list ballot by the Supreme Court on Aug. 10. After Yabloko disappeared from TV airtime, the Election Atlas project noted a sizable increase in the percentage of overall coverage using a positive tone. 

According to the news agency, the operation was carried out by the Russian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research, known by its Russian acronym GUGI. The highly secretive military unit operates specialized ships and deep-diving vessels and is associated with work on undersea infrastructure.

Russian deep-sea vessels simulated the use of technology that could be employed during a conflict to damage critical underwater infrastructure in a way that would make it difficult to determine who was responsible, Reuters reported.

The Russian ships were tracked by British, Norwegian and U.S. forces, and a confrontation at sea prevented the Russian side from completing the exercise. No cables were actually damaged. The UK and Norway said in April that they had detected covert GUGI activity in Arctic waters, but the alleged test of new technology, the operation’s location near Svalbard, and the fact of U.S. involvement had not previously been reported.

Reuters’ sources said British and Norwegian officials also informed Moscow that they were aware of the new technology. The aim of the Western countries was to demonstrate that such operations could be detected and to deter Russia from using it.

“We sent a clear message to Russia that they cannot operate covertly,” commented Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik. Moscow was told that attempts to attack critical infrastructure “will be detected and met with consequences,” he added.

Russia’s Defense Ministry did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied carrying out sabotage operations in NATO countries or preparing for a conflict with the alliance.

Why the cables are strategically important

Two separate fiber-optic cables, each about 1,400 kilometers long, connect the Svalbard archipelago with mainland Norway. They lie at depths of up to 2,700 meters and make up the Svalbard Undersea Cable System, effectively the archipelago’s digital backbone.

Among other things, the cables carry large volumes of satellite data from SvalSat, the world’s largest commercial ground station for polar-orbiting satellites and part of NASA’s Near Space Network. The cable system is owned by state-controlled Space Norway and has operated since January 2004.

The two cables run along parallel routes to provide redundancy — if one is damaged, traffic can be rerouted through the other.

According to Space Norway, each steel-reinforced cable is only 2 to 3 centimeters thick, housing eight pairs of optical fibers under a protective sheath.

Along the most vulnerable stretches, where fishing trawlers or ship anchors pose a threat, the cables are buried around 2 meters beneath the seabed. West of Svalbard, the sea is about 1,670 meters deep. Elsewhere, the route descends as far as 2,700 meters.

The cables were originally constructed primarily to serve SvalSat. Svalbard is exceptionally well positioned for communicating with satellites in polar orbits, and the station receives enormous volumes of satellite data that must be transmitted quickly to the mainland.

Today, the cables carry much more than satellite data. Ordinary telephone and internet services for Svalbard residents depend on the connection, and government agencies, health services, research institutions, and aviation use them for communication. Norway’s airport operator Avinor, for example, uses the system for air traffic control at Svalbard Airport.

Norway officially classifies the system as critical infrastructure.

Because SvalSat is also part of NASA’s Near Space Network, an attack on the cables could do more than simply leave Longyearbyen without internet access. It could also disrupt the transmission of satellite data.

One of the cables has already been damaged

At 4:10 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2022, one of the two cable links stopped functioning properly. Svalbard did not lose connectivity because the second cable took over the traffic, but the system lost its redundancy.

The technical cause was a loss of power to repeaters after the cable was damaged. Eleven days later, Space Norway was able to temporarily restore redundancy by supplying power through an alternative route.

The circumstances appeared suspicious at the time. The Russian trawler Melkart 5 crossed the area above the cable more than 30 times in the two days before the failure, and Norwegian police questioned the captain. Investigators, however, were not able to link the trawler’s movements to the cable damage; they found no evidence of a crime and closed the case.

The damaged cable was not fully repaired until June 2023. Space Norway says the system’s security was significantly strengthened afterward, reinforcing broader upgrades that were carried out between 2018 and 2024.

The cables are aging, however, and the current system’s projected technical service life ends in late 2028. It could continue operating beyond that date, but Space Norway says there is no guarantee it will.

Why Moscow might prepare new sabotage operations

Reuters said the incident comes amid growing concern among Western intelligence agencies over possible Russian sabotage operations in Europe.

According to three U.S. officials cited by Reuters, some American intelligence analysts are concerned that Moscow could try to test the dependability of NATO’s Article 5, which holds that an armed attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all. As the officials told Reuters, damage to undersea cables could form one element of such a Russian operation.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow in August for talks with representatives of Russia’s intelligence agencies. Reuters reported that one purpose of the trip was to warn Moscow against further escalation of alleged sabotage operations in Europe, though it was not clear whether GUGI’s activities were specifically discussed during the visit.

NATO stepped up surveillance of undersea infrastructure after the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022, which German prosecutors have linked to a Ukrainian citizen who was serving in the country’s special forces at the time of the incident. Kyiv denies involvement in the pipeline blasts.

According to maritime analytics company Windward, at least 11 undersea cables were damaged or severed in the Baltic Sea alone between October 2023 and the end of 2025.

“His plane was nearly hit by a drone as it was about to take off from Moldova. That’s the reality he’s facing,” Stoere said.

On Sept. 8, Zelensky flew to Oslo for King Harald V’s funeral and met with Stoere that same evening. The Norwegian government’s official statement on the talks does not mention the drone incident.

Around the same time, a drone flew over Moldova and Romania; Moldovan authorities initially identified the object as a Shahed of the sort commonly used by Russian forces. According to Moldova’s Defense Ministry, the aircraft entered the country’s airspace from Ukraine at 4:20 p.m., headed through the Chisinau area toward Romania, and left Moldovan territory 17 minutes later.

Romania’s Ministry of Defense said that at 4:33 p.m. its radars detected an aerial target west of Chisinau, and at 4:37 p.m. it entered Romanian airspace roughly 30 kilometers southeast of Iasi. Two Spanish F-18s were scrambled to track the drone, which advanced further into Romania, reaching the vicinity of Roman before turning back. It was detected again over Moldova at 5:08 p.m. The aircraft eventually crashed near the village of Mihaileni Vechi, roughly 25 kilometers from the Romanian border.

On Sept. 9, Moldovan police said that the debris found at the site featured a turbojet engine and other elements characteristic of UAVs commonly used by Russia. The impact caused an explosion that left a large crater; at the scene, investigators found shrapnel in the form of metal balls. Experts are still determining the drone’s exact type and the size of its warhead. No casualties were reported.

The OSINT project Oko Hora (Eye of Horus) ✙ News and Analysis claims that the UAV was a jet-powered Geran-4 that had flown about 500 kilometers over Moldova and Romania at an altitude of 7,000-8,000 meters before it ran out of fuel and crashed.

Violations of Romanian airspace by Russian drones have happened before. Since the start of the full-scale war, the country’s Ministry of Defense has recorded 45 unauthorized drone incursions — 26 of them in 2026. In July, Romanian troops destroyed three drones over the course of three days, and in late May a Russian Geran-2 crashed into a residential building in Galati, injuring two people.