After analyzing satellite images from Oct. 7 and 8, Greenpeace reached the conclusion that:

“If 100,000 metric tons of crude oil had been burning, such a fire would have lasted several days. The first reports that the burning had ended came in roughly 10–12 hours after the fire began. They were confirmed by satellite images taken 16 hours after the start of the fire.”

The experts also noted that the oil being transported by the ship is held in 10–15 isolated compartments. Had the contents of such tanks been burning, the compartments would have caught fire gradually, one after another, and each new ignition would have resembled an explosion from the outside. No such explosions were observed.

Additionally, ignition of the transported oil would have seriously damaged the tanker, yet images suggest that the hull of the Aframax Rio remains intact.

Finally, the oil slick that appeared in the Black Sea after the fire covers an area of about 25 square kilometers. Had the compartments with the transported oil been damaged, the volume of pollution would have been significantly larger.

Greenpeace stresses that there has been no official confirmation that the tanker is carrying oil. However, if it is indeed loaded, then a spill remains possible:

“If there is indeed oil in the tanker, the threat of a major spill remains until the entire contents are pumped out of the tanks. We do not know the condition of the vessel’s hull, so it is impossible to assess the likelihood of a further spill. The images also show that on both Oct. 7 and 8, petroleum products continued to enter the water from the tanker. This may be caused either by incomplete burning of the bunker fuel or by a loss of integrity of the tanks containing oil.”

Greenpeace notes that censorship inside Russia hinders accurate analysis of the scale and gravity of the pollution in the Black Sea:

“The statements by Russian authorities that this incident did not lead to environmental pollution are false. Even if only bunker fuel caught fire, this is a serious incident with a complex environmental impact. The film on the water’s surface destroys plankton — the basis of the marine food chain — and poisons and kills marine animals and birds. Heavy petroleum products sink to the bottom over time, destroy bottom-dwelling organisms, and will contaminate the water with toxic compounds for a long period. Toxic soot formed as a result of the fire will settle on the water’s surface and possibly on land.”

Earlier, The Insider reported that the Aframax Rio sails under the Liberian flag, is owned by the Marshall Islands–registered company RIO ENTERPRISES SA, and has called at Russian Black Sea ports — in particular, it spent three days at Taman in May 2026. The tanker is on Ukraine’s sanctions list and most likely belongs to Russia’s “shadow fleet.”

According to Mudavadi, President William Ruto phoned Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the issue. The Kenyan foreign minister insists these individuals, the youngest of whom is 23, cannot be considered prisoners of war because they were “recruited under false promises of employment.”

Besides Kenya, the authorities of Botswana and Zimbabwe have also reached out to Ukraine to discuss the return of their citizens. All three countries insist that Africans who ended up at the front on the Russian side were promised civilian jobs before being coerced into military service.

According to Bloomberg, Ukraine holds at least 213 foreigners in captivity from countries other than Russia and North Korea — of them, 37 are Africans. The agency stresses, citing Ukrainian statistics, that over the course of the full-scale war Russia has recruited more than 28,000 foreigners from 135 countries to fight; more than 5,000 of them have been killed.

The Kenyan Wall Street reported that the authorities in Nairobi have official records on 354 of their citizens who ended up fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Of them, 84 were killed or went missing, and 62 were brought back. Local human rights activists, however, insist the real number of recruits could be as high as 841 Kenyans who ended up in the combat zone.

News of the detention of Zvinchuk, his wife, and other Rybar staff emerged earlier in the day on Oct. 9. Vijesti identified the other detainees as Sergei Belous, Pavel Lekatorchuk, and Kira Doroshenko. All five individuals have now been ordered to leave Montenegro, with law enforcement authorities saying the decision was made on the basis of national and internal security grounds.

According to Montenegrin police, Zvinchuk, his wife, and Rybar employees entered the country two days earlier. They stayed in the town of Risan on the Bay of Kotor, where they were ultimately detained. Officers seized cameras, a GoPro, a filming drone, and mobile phones from the group.

Bosnian investigative outlet Detektor found that Zvinchuk and his team entered Montenegro from Bosnia and Herzegovina. They arrived in Sarajevo on Oct. 2 on a flight from Germany. While Zvinchuk, his wife, and Rybar employees were in the country, elections were taking place in Bosnia. Bosnia’s Security Ministry has not yet commented on the information.

On Oct. 6, Rybar published a video roundup for the Solovyov Live program that was filmed in Bosnia. The following day, Oct. 7, the Rybar team entered Montenegro by land.

Zvinchuk later boasted that he had entered Montenegro despite the sanctions and travel ban levied against him. In a post on social media, Zvinchuk said Montenegro was the 26th country he had visited and described how he entered the country:

“Remember: even if you are under sanctions, like me, even if you have a travel ban, like me, even if you are traveling to a country that has pledged, out of solidarity, to enforce that travel ban, as in my case ... THERE IS A WAY!”

Zvinchuk added that travelers like him could always run into “an idiot border guard who turns out all your pockets but forgets to check the database.” 

On Oct. 8, prior to his arrest, Zvinchuk again appeared on the Russian propaganda channel Solovyov Live, where he claimed that “Montenegro is in tears because visas are being introduced for Russian tourists.”

Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajić confirmed Zvinchuk’s detention in a post on X earlier today:

“The message following today's successful action in which the head of the information network ‘Rybar’ was apprehended is clear: out institutions are doing their job, Montenegro is protecting its interests, and no one will jeopardize our European future.”

Rybar founder Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former employee of the Russian Defense Ministry’s press service, is under EU and UK sanctions. The EU’s sanctions justification says he is part of a working group created by Vladimir Putin to coordinate Russia’s mobilization efforts in support of the ongoing war against Ukraine. Rybar’s main Telegram channel has more than 1.5 million subscribers.

In 2024, the United States offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about people working on the project, which it said used social media to "sow discord, promote social division, stoke partisan and racial discord, and encourage hate and violence in the United States.” The U.S. State Department also listed Zvinchuk as being involved in attempts to influence the U.S. electoral process.

In February 2026, OpenAI blocked a network of accounts linked to Rybar. The project’s team had used ChatGPT as a content farm to generate social media and blog posts in Russian, English, and Spanish.

In September, Czech police detained and questioned Russian nationals Vitaly Chashchukhin and Igor Dolmatov, whom journalists from local outlet Seznam Zprávy had earlier lured to a meeting in Prague and secretly recorded discussing their work for the Rybar project. After questioning, both were ordered to leave the Czech Republic within three days as undesirable persons.

Chashchukhin and Dolmatov are known to live in Germany, where Chashchukhin performs work for sanctioned Russian media outlets Izvestia, Channel Five, and REN TV. In his reports, he portrays Germany as a country in economic decline, claiming its only hope for prosperity requires a halt to arms supplies for Ukraine and a return to the purchase of cheap energy from Russia. 

Zvinchuk’s detention drew reactions from Russian government officials including Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and also  from media outlets, bloggers, and pro-war channels. Ivan Filippov, a propaganda researcher and author of the Telegram channel “All Quiet on the Zzzzzestern Front,” told the independent outlet Vot Tak that many commentators — regardless of their views — were asking why a sanctioned Russian propagandist who was aware of the risks had traveled to a NATO country that is seeking EU membership:

“Some people are expressing sympathy, but looking at the reactions now, the dominant question is why he went there in the first place. The pro-war “Z”-community is genuinely stunned. [Head of RT] Margarita Simonyan believed he would be extradited to Ukraine,” Filippov said.

Montenegro joined NATO in 2017 and is seeking to join the EU after adopting the euro in 2002 and applying for membership in the bloc in 2008. It imposed sanctions on Russia after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The government recently approved plans to end visa-free travel for Russian citizens starting from Nov. 1, as Montenegro aligns its visa policy with the European Union ahead of a possible accession by 2028. Local media reported this spring that around 14,000 of the 21,000 Russians registered in Montenegro had left after the government announced plans to introduce visa requirements.

“Montenegro’s accession as the 28th member state by 2028 is within reach,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at an EU-Western Balkans summit in June.

“The detention period expired. Since no pretrial restriction was imposed, she was released from the detention facility. She has left Kazakhstan. The Kazakh side acted in accordance with the law,” Pryanishnikov said.

Rozhanska was detained on Oct. 1 at Astana airport after arriving from Istanbul. The Ukrainian woman had traveled there to collect her 8-year-old grandson, who is on Ukraine’s list of children who are being unlawfully held in Russia. The boy, however, was never brought to Kazakhstan. Instead, according to the lawyer Pryanishnikov, a staged video was made by the Russian side in order to create the appearance that the boy was departing from Kaliningrad to Kazakhstan in advance of the arranged meeting. Pryanishnikov believes the episode was an FSB operation.

Rozhanska’s grandson was taken to Russia by his mother in 2021 after she married a Russian citizen. The boy’s Ukrainian father had given his permission for a temporary trip, but the mother never returned to Ukraine. In 2022 both she and the boy received Russian citizenship. The father went to a Ukrainian court, which ruled that the boy should live with him. According to Pryanishnikov, that ruling provides a legal basis for returning the child to Ukraine.

At the same time, a separate case over the father’s contact with the boy was heard in Kaliningrad, where the child lives with his mother. “In the end, a court in Kaliningrad issued a ruling allowing the father, who serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to have in-person contact with his son during the summer holidays on the territory of the Kaliningrad Region,” Pryanishnikov told The Insider on Oct. 2.

The boy had already been promised to be returned to Ukraine in 2023, and two Ukrainian citizens traveled to the Kaliningrad Region to pick him up. 

“But those people were detained and accused of attempting to abduct the child, and then they were hit with espionage charges as well. They were put under heavy pressure there, forced to give up their lawyers and sentenced to 15 and 16 years in prison. At the same time, Rozhanska, who was detained in Kazakhstan, was declared by a Russian court to be the organizer of the ‘abduction’ — although charging a grandmother with trying to abduct her own grandson is very strange,” the lawyer said.

An analysis by The Insider found that the antenna closely resembles a design associated with the Chinese company Harxon and bears factory markings pointing to Alabuga, a special economic zone in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan that has become a major production hub for Geran attack drones.

These specialized antennas are critical to the navigation of Geran and Gerbera drones when an adversary is jamming satellite signals. The more elements an antenna has, the more electronic-warfare systems it can potentially resist (while also making the device larger, more complex, and more expensive to manufacture).

On Sept. 30, Ukrainian electronic-warfare specialist Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov published photos of the new 32-element antenna from a Geran drone, and other Telegram channels later posted additional images and videos of the device. Observers quickly noted that the devices appeared to have been mass-produced specifically for the Alabuga plant, as the “ALB” marking was engraved into the housing rather than printed on a sticker.

After analyzing images of the new 32-element antenna from the Geran-4, The Insider concluded that its external design closely resembles products made to Harxon specifications. One indication is the similar arrangement of the antenna’s output connectors. At the same time, the rough finish on the metal section of the housing and the serial number engraved directly into the casing — a feature also seen on some 16-element antennas — suggest that production may have been localized.

An analysis of other recent images of Geran electronics posted on the Ukrainian military-trophy marketplace reibert.info indicates that components marked “ALB” are undergoing a similar evolution. An increasing number of drone-control components carry Russian-language stickers, which may indicate that they are being assembled in Alabuga (at least at the level of so-called screwdriver assembly) using Chinese-made printed circuit boards.

Based on expert assessments and analysis of images of various components recovered from Russian drones, the development model for Geran and Gerbera systems may work as follows: 

• small trial batches of finished electronics are first purchased through popular online marketplaces
• manufacturers are then selected based on how well their equipment performs under operational conditions, including electronic jamming
• the electronics are subsequently ordered in large quantities directly from the factory
• and finally, the design may be licensed either for assembly in Russia from prefabricated components or for full domestic production.

Last year, The Insider found that the Chinese company Harxon had become the main supplier of multi-element satellite-navigation antennas to Alabuga. This year, The Insider published an invoice sent from Harxon to a volunteer with the Nordsint project who had posed as a procurement officer for Russia’s military-industrial complex. The invoice covered seven-, eight-, and 16-element antennas, and also made it possible to interpret customs records from the previous year more accurately, as official customs data had listed questionable per-unit prices.

The Insider also identified two Harxon employees working with Russian customers — Masha Wu and Anthony Zheng — and in correspondence, they replied that the company was developing a 32-element antenna. After that investigation, antenna manufacturer Harxon was sanctioned, prompting protests from Chinese officials. The company also circulated a notice about the Harxon employee identified in the investigation, saying he had acted “in a private capacity” and did not work for the company; The Insider published data refuting those claims.

According to the organization, at about noon Moscow time on Oct. 7, the vessel was located 13 kilometers from Lazarevskoye — about 50 kilometers northwest of the spot where the fire began. The fire on board had already been extinguished by then, but a trail of petroleum products covering about 8 square kilometers was visible on the sea surface.

A satellite image taken around noon the following day showed the tanker being towed northwest. Greenpeace said the vessel may be heading to the port of Novorossiysk. The oil slick visible in that image was larger, covering about 25 square kilometers.

According to Greenpeace:

“This situation is one of the consequences of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. Russia uses oil to finance the war. Now that oil poses a direct threat to people inside the country and to the environment across the Black Sea region.”

The Insider previously reported that the Aframax Rio sails under the Liberian flag, is owned by Marshall Islands-registered Rio Enterprises SA, and has called at Russian Black Sea ports. In May 2026, it spent three days at the port of Taman. The tanker is under Ukrainian sanctions and is believed to be part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet,” a network of ageing, poorly insured vessels that are used to move Russian oil in circumvention of international sanctions, allowing the Kremlin to continue earning revenue amid its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

AfD and BSW lawmakers submitted the resolution to the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag (state parliament), calling for an end to military deliveries to Ukraine and the lifting of sanctions on Russia. The document states:

“The policy of sanctions against Russia, economic embargoes, and arms deliveries and financial aid to Ukraine has failed. The West’s one-sided partisanship in the war in Ukraine has not helped to end the war; rather, it prolongs the suffering of the population and increases the risk of the war spreading to other countries. The energy and economic war directed against Russia is causing massive damage to industry, commerce, and trade in Germany, as well as to our citizens.”

In the resolution, AfD and BSW call for diplomacy to become the main focus, for sanctions against Russia to be lifted immediately, and for financial and military support for Ukraine to end at once. The authors also call for Ukraine to retain neutral-state status while urging the Saxony-Anhalt government to “use all means at its disposal…to launch a corresponding initiative in the Bundesrat,” the German federal government’s upper legislative chamber.

Local AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund wrote on X:

“Not even 24 hours have passed since the constituting session [the first meeting of the newly elected parliament], and we are already getting to work. We are applying for a peace initiative and a special session of the state parliament. End the war, end the payments to Ukraine!”

German political scientist Alex Yusupov, head of the Russia Program at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), told The Insider that, from a legal standpoint, the resolution introduced by the far right and populist left has no force. He said the fact that AfD and BSW made foreign policy, rather than regional problems, the first initiative of the new state parliament shows that both parties “continue to pursue a public relations strategy rather than practical policymaking.”

“It is simply a resolution, meaning a public statement of the Landtag’s position, nothing more and nothing less. It is a call to action and an appeal,” Yusupov added.

Dimitri Stratievski, director of the Eastern Europe Centre Berlin (Osteuropa-Zentrum Berlin), told The Insider that all the issues raised in the resolution fall exclusively under the authority of Germany’s federal government, meaning AfD and BSW have no ability to carry out what they are demanding. He said:

“This is a populist move. But it is notable that, for their first test initiative, they chose an issue that has nothing to do with state-level politics. I think that was deliberate, because no concrete decisions are expected here and there is no political responsibility attached. Voters cannot hold these two parties accountable for promises they fail to keep. At the same time, AfD and BSW need to send signals to their voters.

As a rule, voters for right-wing and left-wing populists are not especially familiar with how powers are divided among different levels of government. And even if some are, it is not particularly important to them. They want the sense that their representatives in government are dealing with major issues. Ending weapons deliveries to Ukraine is also important to them because they believe it would save federal budget money at a difficult time.

In addition, to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, AfD would have to enter a coalition with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. And they very much do not want to do that. The far right is not enthusiastic about the prospect of partnering with people who spent a long time in the left-wing party and are supposed to be strong opponents of the right. BSW does not look like a reliable coalition partner for AfD. But a joint statement like this on Ukraine — which cannot have concrete political consequences — is a trial balloon and an attempt to demonstrate some common ground and pull the two parties closer together.”

Stratievski noted that Ulrich Siegmund is already presenting himself as the leader of Saxony-Anhalt, framing his statements as though they were being made on behalf of the state even though he has not yet become its premier:

“Siegmund is behaving like a state official without having any authority to do so, but he has repeatedly said that he will become the state premier in December. He is doing this deliberately. On the one hand, he is mobilizing supporters. On the other, he is trying to impose on his political opponents a sense that it is inevitable that he, Ulrich Siegmund, will become the next premier of Saxony-Anhalt. It is a psychological and political tactic designed to convey the idea that ’the matter is settled, and I am already behaving like the acting head of the state.’”

In early September, AfD finished first in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election with nearly 44% of the vote. The far-right party won 39 of the Landtag’s 83 seats. The left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance won five seats and said it was prepared to cooperate with AfD.

On Oct. 6, AfD lawmaker Tobias Rausch, 35, became the first far-right politician in postwar German history to be elected speaker of a state parliament, taking the top post in the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag by a vote of 48-34. AfD and BSW together controlled 44 votes, meaning Rausch received support from at least four lawmakers outside either party. Because the ballot was secret, it is unclear who backed him, though speculation in Germany has focused on members of the CDU, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The other parties in the Landtag had said they would not support Rausch.

Prosecutors said Kamlyova did not transfer the money directly. In December 2024, an acquaintance in Russia linked to the Kaskad military-patriotic special training center asked her to help raise money for the “Kupolny Pokrov REB FPV-4,” an electronic countermeasure system intended to disrupt or jam FPV drones. Due to sanctions, it was not possible to transfer money from a Latvian bank directly to Russia, and so Kamlyova asked an acquaintance in Belarus to make the payment on her behalf without telling him its true purpose. He transferred 157 Belarusian rubles, about 43 euros, from his account to the Russian bank account of Kamlyova’s acquaintance, the Latvian prosecutor’s office said

Kamlyova denied any wrongdoing. In her final statement, published by Baltija.eu, she said she did not know the transfer was intended for military use:

“The prosecution says the messages on my phone concerned a request from the Russian army. But that was not said in the correspondence. I was communicating with a private individual. I did not transfer anything myself; I had no funds. There was no intention to finance the war. There was no intent!”

Kamlyova said the correspondence was found when her phone was checked at the Latvian border after she returned from Russia. She said a State Security Service officer looked through her photographs with her permission but then began reading and photographing her messages on his own phone without her consent. Latvian law enforcement agencies have not officially disclosed how they obtained information about the transfer.

As was reported by the independent exiled publication Mediazona, Kamlyova worked at a garment factory and was a member of the Latvian Russian Union, a political party that appeals to Latvia’s Russian-speaking minority. She ran for a seat on the Rēzekne city council on the party’s ticket in 2017.

“[The European] Parliament notes that during the recent fake ballot, there were no genuine alternative candidates, no free media, no credible observers, and no political freedoms, with critics of the regime having been either imprisoned, murdered, or forced into exile. MEPs also condemn the fact that so-called “elections” were conducted in parts of the Russian-occupied Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, as well as in Moldova’s Transnistrian region and in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali/South Ossetia,” it added.

According to the Parliament’s roll-call voting record, lawmakers who opposed parts of the resolution included German MEP Petr Bystron, who had been suspected of receiving money from an influence network linked to Viktor Medvedchuk; Slovak politician Luboš Blaha, who has met with Russian Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin; and Czech MEP Ondřej Dostál, who traveled to Moscow at the invitation of a Russian foundation linked to the GRU military intelligence agency.

Among those voting against the resolution were 23 members of the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) group, including Alternative for Germany (AfD) lawmakers Petr Bystron and Christine Anderson, Slovak MEPs Luboš Blaha and Milan Mazurek, Czech lawmakers Kateřina Konečná and Ondřej Dostál, and Luxembourg politician Fernand Kartheiser.

Also opposing the measure in the final vote were Polish far-right politician Grzegorz Braun and German MEPs Michael von der Schulenburg and Ruth Firmenich, who were elected on the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) ticket. Braun had previously been stripped of parliamentary immunity in connection with a Polish investigation into his alleged denial of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz (in July 2025, Braun publicly denied the existence of gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp).

The Insider compared the roll-call vote with published information about lawmakers’ contacts with Russian representatives. It found that four of the politicians listed above — Blaha, Dostál, von der Schulenburg, and Firmenich — traveled together to Moscow in May 2025. The trip was timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. While in the Russian capital, the MEPs met with Russian politicians and public figures.

In an official declaration published by the European Parliament, Dostál listed the Russian Peace Foundation as a third party that covered part of the trip’s expenses. Dostál said he paid for his flight, accommodation, and meals himself, while the foundation provided bus transportation from the airport.

The Insider previously reported that the Russian Peace Foundation has links to Russian military intelligence. According to internal GRU correspondence, the organization has been involved in passing information about foreign visitors to the intelligence service for assessment and possible recruitment.

In the same investigation, The Insider reported that Luboš Blaha traveled to Moscow with David Lindtner, an adviser to Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. During that trip, Blaha met with Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). According to statements published by Blaha, they discussed the May 2024 assassination attempt against Fico, along with the activities of political opponents of the Slovak government.

Petr Bystron, another lawmaker on the list, had previously appeared in an investigation into the pro-Kremlin media platform Voice of Europe, which European intelligence services say was financed by a network linked to the aforementioned Medvedchuk. As The Insider previously reported, citing Der Spiegel and Deník N, Bystron and fellow party member Maximilian Krah were suspected of receiving money in exchange for cooperation with the platform. In 2025, the European Parliament lifted Bystron’s immunity in order to allow an investigation in a separate case to proceed.

A Transparency International database also contains records of meetings between some of the lawmakers and Russian representatives. According to the data, in May 2025 von der Schulenburg met in Moscow with Russian diplomats and State Duma representatives, and in July of that year with a representative of Russia’s mission to the European Union in Brussels. Dostál met at least twice with representatives of Russia’s permanent mission to the EU, while Fernand Kartheiser attended a forum in Sochi in November 2025 that included Russian politicians.
 

Yandex said specialists are still assessing the scale of the damage in Kaluga. The attack has caused interruptions across some of the company’s digital services; however, the specific systems that were affected and whether the disabled modules can be restored have not been announced. Preliminary reports do not mention any human casualties.

Construction of the Kaluga data center began in 2022 on the territory of the Grabtsevo industrial park. Yandex’s original project was designed to house more than 3,800 server racks, with a total design capacity of 63 MW — one and a half times that of the company’s most powerful data center at the time of announcement. The site is intended both for Yandex’s own services and for customers of the Yandex Cloud platform.

According to official documents of the Kaluga city administration, the first phase of the facility was commissioned in December 2023. In October 2024, the System Operator of the Unified Energy System reported the connection of Yandex’s largest data center to the power grid with a maximum power consumption of 49 MW, though the company has not disclosed the amount of server equipment at the site at the time of the attack.

The day before, drones knocked out a data center in the Ryazan Region

Overnight into Oct. 8, Ukrainian drones attacked Yandex’s data center in the city of Sasovo in the Ryazan Region, located on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant. The strike caused a fire at the facility, forcing the management to suspend operations. As of the evening of Oct. 8, the company could not confirm whether the damaged equipment could be restored.

The data center in Sasovo opened in 2014 and is designed to house tens of thousands of servers. It is currently home to two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, which the company uses to develop and train artificial intelligence models, including YandexGPT. The extent of damage to these assets remains unknown.

On Oct. 8, large-scale disruptions occurred in the operation of Russian internet services. As The Insider reported, users ran into problems opening the websites of Russian media outlets, Russian Railways, the real estate platform Cian, the classifieds portal Avito, and other platforms. Cian confirmed that the disruptions were linked to an incident at a facility of its infrastructure partner. Problems were also recorded in the operation of Yandex’s own services.

On the Yandex Cloud status page, the company reported that the ru-central1-b zone, associated with the data center in Sasovo, was completely unavailable. Customers were advised to move their workloads to other availability zones. At the same time, the outage imposed restrictions on creating new virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases.

On Oct. 8, the independent outlet Verstka also found that Yandex had concealed satellite images of its four cloud data centers, including the facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga. On Yandex Maps, the sites are blurred, and when searched by address, the service does not indicate that data centers are located there. When and why the company hid the images remains unknown.

Several days before his death, Yakovenko underwent medical examinations and was then returned to the detention center “for palliative care.” Memorial also said Yakovenko had been beaten at the facility before he was sentenced.

On Oct. 3, 2025, the Southern District Military Court sentenced Yakovenko to five years in prison on charges of preparing to take part in the activities of a terrorist organization. Prosecutors alleged that on May 28, 2025, he began corresponding with a person involved in recruiting Russians for the Freedom of Russia Legion, which Russian authorities have designated a terrorist organization. Yakovenko allegedly planned to travel to Ukraine, sending the person a completed application form to join the Legion. FSB officers detained him two days later. Authorities did not disclose how they learned about the correspondence.

Memorial recognized Yakovenko as a political prisoner. The movement’s human rights advocates said they did not have access to the case files and therefore could not determine whether he genuinely intended to join the Legion or if had been the victim of an entrapment scheme. Memorial noted that only two days passed between Yakovenko sending the application and his arrest:

“Such a rapid sequence of events may indicate that from the outset he wrote to one of the Legion’s fake websites and sent his application there as well.”

In addition to Yakovenko, at least eight other political prisoners have died in Russian custody since the start of 2026:

• Roman Sidorkin died on Jan. 9 in the Saratov Region. The former employee of a defense company in the Kursk Region had been convicted of treason after investigators accused him and his former wife of passing technical documentation and samples of military products to Ukrainian intelligence. Sidorkin developed bronchitis-like symptoms in December 2025, and later pneumonia. He was hospitalized only four days before his death.
• Oleg Tyryshkin, a former miner and trade union activist from Kemerovo Region, died on Feb. 4 at age 64. He had been sentenced to two years in a penal colony over a comment posted on the social network VK about the 2004 death of Akhmat Kadyrov, the first president of Chechnya and the father of its current leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Activists who corresponded with prisoners said heart problems were the cause of his death. Tyryshkin had previously complained about his health, including about a brain cyst.
• Alexander Dotsenko died on Feb. 19 after a massive heart attack. The jewelry artist had been sentenced to three years in a penal colony in a case involving anti-war postcards left in a Lenta supermarket in St. Petersburg. His wife, Anastasia Dyudyayeva, received a 3½-year sentence in the same case. After Dotsenko’s heart attack, prison officials failed to inform his relatives and lawyer about his condition for several days.
• Vladimir Osipov died in March at a pretrial detention center in Ukhta, where he had been transferred from the Moscow Region. The 56-year-old had been sentenced to 6½ years in a penal colony over posts made on Odnoklassniki about the Russian military and Vladimir Putin. Ambulances were called for Osipov several times during his trial, and at one hearing the judge refused to postpone his final statement despite complaints of high blood pressure.
• Andrei Akuzin, a 53-year-old artist from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, died by suicide on April 8 at a local pretrial detention center — six days after he was arrested. His friend said the criminal case stemmed from an online comment. Russia’s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring, added Akuzin to its registry of “terrorists and extremists” only after his death.
• Vegan Khristolyub Bozhiy, formerly named Dmitry Kuznetsov, died on April 17 at Penal Colony No. 2 in Voronezh. The 43-year-old preacher and YouTube blogger, whose name can be loosely translated as “Vegan Christ-Lover of God,” had been sentenced to three years in prison over videos criticizing the invasion of Ukraine, the Soviet army, and Islam. It later emerged that he had been found hanged in a punishment cell and that, according to media reports, a negligence case was opened against the prison’s employees. His relatives did not believe the official account of suicide.
• Vladimir Yarotsky was found dead on the morning of May 7 at Penal Colony No. 9 in Khadyzhensk in Russia’s Krasnodar Region. The artist had been sentenced to five and a half years in prison on charges of spreading “false information” about the Russian armed forces and “desecrating symbols of military glory” over posts that included a caricature of Putin featuring a penis and a St. George ribbon. Authorities said Yarotsky died by suicide. Another prisoner said the artist had complained of pressure from the prison administration.
• Ibragim Kudzhanov, a 52-year-old resident of Ukraine’s Luhansk Region, died at Penal Colony No. 8 in the Omsk Region. His death became known in July. Kudzhanov had been sentenced to 5½ years in prison for serving as a driver in Ukraine’s Aidar Battalion in 2018 and 2019. His daughter said he had been tortured with electric shocks after his detention and that he died from a second heart attack accompanied by an aneurysm and kidney failure. His son, Artyom, is also imprisoned in Russia after being sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony on espionage charges in 2025.

Macron’s “toxic masculinity”

One of the main themes promoted by the Matryoshka network was France’s test of a new ballistic missile, which was indeed launched from a nuclear-powered submarine on Oct. 6 with Macron looking on. In a post on X, the French president wrote:

“Very few nations possess such expertise…To be free, one must be feared. And to be feared, one must be powerful.”

In videos circulated by the bot network, Macron is accused of “toxic masculinity.” The claim is falsely attributed to Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), an organization whose brand, logo, and personnel are frequently used by the Matryoshka network to lend credence to its false claims. Kagan is also made to appear to say that such weapons would be incapable of standing up to Russia.

Another video, falsely presented as coming from French broadcaster RFI, says Macron is bluffing and claims France’s military sector is “catastrophically” behind “the rest of the world,” leaving him with nothing to do but “wave around cardboard missiles that cannot even get out of the water.”

Another video, falsely attributed to the media monitoring company NewsGuard, claims the footage of the missile test itself was generated using artificial intelligence.

Some of the posts also link the missile test to protests by high school students that spread across France over the past week. The bot network claims the students are protesting the country’s militarization; however, the demonstrations were actually driven by problems in the education system, including concerns over  teacher shortages, substandard facilities, and the overall quality of instruction. 

The videos also claim that some French politicians fled the country because of the protests, withdrawing from the presidential race. Speaking in the name of a supposed French analyst, Matryoshka claims that the demonstrations “showed the true face of French politicians” and that Macron himself is “a worthless person.”

Merz’s ratings and alleged corruption schemes

Matryoshka also targeted neighboring Germany. According to the bot network’s claims, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is at the center of a corruption scandal. Videos falsely presented as coming from outlets including Bellingcat allege that Merz pockets at least 25% of every aid tranche sent to Ukraine.

Earlier this week, Merz announced a new major aid package for Kyiv worth 1 billion euros. In one Matryoshka video, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is falsely depicted as saying Merz would personally receive at least 250 million euros from the tranche, while Ukrainian officials would allegedly divide most of the remainder among themselves. The fake Bellingcat content claims similar schemes operate in other countries and says Macron’s income has “tripled” thanks to a similar arrangement.

Following the real news about the 1 billion-euro aid package, other Matryoshka fake posts focused on an alleged drop in Merz’s approval rating, claiming it had fallen 23%. The bots also claim that the protests in France will soon spread to Germany, citing the country’s large migrant population as the supposed trigger while predicting an escalation in clashes with police within the next six months.

AntiBot4Navalny said such posts may offer clues about issues currently concerning the Kremlin, as bot networks can serve as an indicator of what topics the Kremlin is interested in amplifying.

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.

Ukrainian monitoring channels were among the first to report the drone attack and its aftermath, while authorities have not yet commented on the incident. A Russian Defense Ministry summary listed attacks on the Ryazan Region, along with strikes in the Moscow, Tambov, Tula, and Oryol regions, but gave no details about damage.

NASA FIRMS fire-monitoring maps showed a blaze at the same location as the Sasta plant and Yandex data center. The fire appeared on maps shortly after 2 a.m.

Yandex itself confirmed that the facility had been hit by drones.

“A fire broke out at the Yandex data center in Sasovo as a result of a drone attack, affecting part of the infrastructure. There were no injuries, and emergency services are working at the site to deal with the aftermath,” Kremlin-aligned outlet RBC quoted the company as saying.

The center’s operations are currently suspended, rendering some services unavailable to users. For example, the social media autoposting service Postmypost experienced temporary disruptions before later returning online.

Downdetector also recorded complaints about Yandex Search, Yandex Disk, and other services.

Notably, Russian news agency Interfax quoted the same company statement almost word for word — but with one exception. The phrase “a fire broke out as a result of a drone attack” was replaced with simply “an incident occurred.” The agency did not specify what kind of incident. State-run RIA Novosti also omitted any mention of a drone attack, describing what happened as a fire.

Yandex said in 2021 that its Sasovo data center housed two of the company’s three supercomputers that were built with Nvidia A100 chips and used to train its YandexGPT large language model. The company declined to say whether the systems were damaged in the attack, according to Reuters.

The Yandex data center in Sasovo opened in 2014. Local authorities had previously described it as a “highly promising high-tech enterprise.”

At 11 a.m. local time, Filashkin published a post that read:

“At least 12 people were killed in the Russian strike on Kramatorsk. Twelve lives that Russia took in an instant. These are not ‘consequences of war’ and not dry statistics. These are people killed by the Russian army.”

He updated the post to include information that as of 14:55 local time, 30 people were killed and 20 were known to have been wounded. Filashkin urged everyone still remaining in the Donetsk Region to evacuate to safer parts of Ukraine.

“The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians. For them, a bus full of passengers is an attractive target because a single strike can kill as many people as possible,” Filashkin said in a second post.

Three more people were killed in shelling in the village of Bilenke, part of the Kramatorsk community, bringing the overall death toll in the area to 33, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.

President Volodymyr Zelensky also provided an update via Telegram, adding that the number of casualties may rise:

“As of now, 30 people are known to have died, and, unfortunately, that number may rise. The Russian bomb struck two minibuses. Some of the victims have not yet been identified due to the severity of their injuries. My condolences go out to all the families and loved ones. In total, 18 more people were injured as a result of this strike.

This attack will not go unanswered. Russia is trying to destroy all life in the Donbas region, and the world must react to this. It must react decisively — in the way that the Russians deserve for all the deaths they have caused. Eternal memory to those who have died.”

A day earlier, on Oct. 7, Russia carried out what was then its deadliest attack on Ukraine in a month. By the morning of Oct. 8, 22 people had been confirmed dead in Pryluky in the Chernihiv Region after a missile struck a five-story apartment building. Five of those killed were children. Another 54 people were injured, including seven children. The search-and-rescue operation ended around noon on Oct. 8, Zelensky said.

According to the North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police Office, K. worked for Qilin primarily as a developer and received a substantial share of the ransom payments it facilitated. The group emerged in 2022 under the name Agenda and rents ransomware attack infrastructure to other criminals in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office considers Qilin a criminal organization.

Investigators identified the Russian suspect after Qilin attacked a logistics company in North Rhine-Westphalia in September 2024 and demanded $165,000 in bitcoin. During a covert investigation, police gained access to the group’s network and K.’s computer, learning among other things that he planned to travel to Japan. German authorities then alerted their Japanese counterparts. Germany and Japan do not have an extradition treaty, but extradition can still take place after judicial review.

In Germany alone, 152 organizations have been targeted by Qilin, with the group demanding more than $70 million in total. About one-tenth of that amount was paid. Over the course of four years, the group sought $2.9 billion in ransom payments worldwide, and victims transferred more than $140 million. North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Reul said:

“This is the biggest blow German investigators have managed to strike in the fight against cybercrime.”

Authorities have identified three other leading Qilin members, but they are believed to be in Russia.

In June, The New York Times reported that an investigation into the hacking of UK automaker Jaguar Land Rover found links between the attack and Russian hackers. The August 2025 cyberattack became the most costly in British history, shutting down the automobile company’s operations for several weeks.

Speaking Oct. 7 at a domestic security conference in Copenhagen, Christensen said:

"What we saw in the spring was a lot of planning, but very little carried out; what we saw in early summer is that they started to carry out a lot more," the official said.

The shift marks a significant escalation in Moscow’s hybrid warfare campaign, Christensen said, explaining that Russian authorities had concluded that their earlier tactic of targeting a broad range of sites “did not have the effect of deterring the Western (military alliance) NATO from supporting Ukraine.” Moscow is now “trying to hit targets that have a direct impact on the front line…that means weapons production,” she said.

According to PET, Russian operatives recruit people through Telegram and social media, first assigning them simple tasks such as gathering information and taking photographs before progressing to involve them in sabotage. The recruits can be random individuals, including homeless people and people with drug addictions.

“It could be anyone just looking for quick money. If the first person isn't successful, they'll throw another ⁠one at the problem until they succeed.”

Politico previously reported that the European Union is discussing possible responses to a hypothetical large-scale hybrid attack by Russia. Those talks intensified after a drone equipped with a detonator was found in early August near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany. Poland has also reported arson attacks and other acts of sabotage that the authorities suspect may be linked to Russia, as has Slovakia.

PET chief Emil Gresholm had previously said that Russian intelligence services were recruiting Danish citizens to carry out acts of sabotage against local defense companies involved in military aid to Ukraine.

Russia’s FSB has the authority to conduct investigations connected to extremism, terrorism, and state security. In the first nine months of 2026, the number of new defendants facing charges of “calls for extremism” rose by 26%, and charges involving calls for activity against state security rose 13%. Meanwhile, cases involving calls for terrorism or its justification fell by 1%. The report’s authors hypothesize that the FSB is becoming more active in politically motivated prosecutions.

Not more cases, but harsher ones

Overall, the scale of politically motivated criminal prosecutions inside Russia has not  changed significantly. Memorial recorded 1,393 new defendants in the first nine months of 2026, compared with 1,339 during the same period last year, an increase of 4%. But the structure of repression is markedly new: the number of people prosecuted under statutes related to freedom of expression fell from 487 to 380, or 22%, while cases that rights advocates classify as restrictions on freedom of association rose from 219 to 328. Meanwhile, a previous rise in treason, terrorism, and sabotage cases effectively leveled off.

Much of the growth in the “freedom of association” category came from separate repression campaigns. Prosecutions against individual supporters of Alexei Navalny rose from 69 to 143 over the year, cases against Jehovah’s Witnesses increased from 45 to 91, and defendants from the so-called “Citizens of the USSR” movement jumped from 13 to 29. Nearly all cases Memorial classifies as prosecutions of Navalny supporters involve allegations of financing extremist activity through donations to his Anti-Corruption Foundation. In every quarter of 2026, at least 40 new such prosecutions became known.

Authorities also continued to prosecute people accused of involvement with Vyacheslav Maltsev’s Artpodgotovka movement. Memorial recorded 44 such cases in the first nine months of 2026, compared with 20 over the same period last year. Human rights advocates say the reasons for the simultaneous intensification of several unrelated campaigns remain unclear: it may reflect a shift in law enforcement attention toward alleged “organized” structures, though the authors do not rule out the possibility that several separate trends simply coincided.

At the same time, political prosecutions are becoming more severe. The share of cases involving at least one charge classified as especially serious rose from 29% in the first nine months of 2025 to 34% in 2026. Although the overall number of speech-related cases declined, their severity increased: the offense of “justifying or promoting terrorism” now accounts for more than 60% of prosecutions in the speech category, and in more than 80% of such cases, defendants are deprived of their liberty.

Russian-occupied territories and prosecutions of Ukrainian service members

In the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, Memorial recorded 307 new politically motivated criminal prosecutions in the first nine months of 2026, compared with 338 over the same period in 2025, a decline of about 10%. Human rights advocates, however, attribute that mainly to the end of a sharp surge in repression that had been seen in the second and third quarters of last year, rather than to a sustained easing of Russian legal pressure. Notably, the intensity of prosecutions in the occupied territories remains far higher than inside Russia itself: in Crimea and Sevastopol, the rate is 4.6 cases per 100,000 residents a year, while in occupied parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, it is 9.1 — compared with 1.2 inside the country’s internationally recognized borders. Unlike other major categories, speech-related prosecutions in occupied territories rose by 17%.

The number of new criminal prosecutions of Ukrainian service members also fell — from 484 in the first nine months of 2025 to 330 in 2026. The main reason was the winding down of a mass campaign against Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel captured during fighting in Russia’s Kursk region, with the number of newly recorded prosecutions in that group falling from 258 to 72. Russia has not engaged in the systematic prosecution of Ukrainian prisoners of war captured elsewhere; however, captives taken during Ukraine’s Kursk operation were widely charged with “terrorism” simply for participating in combat on Russian territory.

Memorial believes the peak of that campaign has passed, as most prisoners whom Russian authorities intended to prosecute have already become defendants in criminal cases. New cases are still being discovered with a delay, however: in the third quarter of 2026, the number of newly recorded prosecutions of Ukrainian troops rose from 101 to 129, while among captives from the Kursk region the figure increased from 17 to 40. Russian authorities have said more than 500 Ukrainian service members were captured there, and Memorial is currently aware of prosecutions against 400 of them.

Prosecutions of Ukrainian service members remain the harshest category of political cases, rights advocates say: in 86% of such cases, the charges include at least one especially serious offense. By comparison, the figure is 59% for civilian defendants in the occupied territories and 34% inside Russia.

The number of people formally recognized as political prisoners by the Memorial project rose from 1,680 to 1,825 in the third quarter. A broader list of people deprived of their liberty in criminal cases where Memorial sees signs of political motivation grew from 5,567 to 5,740. The authors caution that some prosecutions become known only after a delay, meaning figures for individual periods may later be revised.

On October 7, 2023, several thousand Hamas militants broke into Israel from the Gaza Strip. They initially headed for the Be’eri and Nahal Oz kibbutzim along the border with the Strip. For the first seven hours of the attack — before the army arrived — Be’eri was defended by just 26 people. A total of 101 residents, including 10 children aged from several months to 17 years, were killed. Another 32 residents were taken hostage by the terrorists.

Three years after “Black Saturday,” just one burned-out house remains in Kibbutz Be’eri — a reminder of the tragedy. Its roof has collapsed and its walls are riddled with bullet holes. The house stands on an empty lot surrounded by a large metal fence. Just one year ago, there were more destroyed houses here, but they have since been demolished. Local residents are divided over what to do with the last one – preserve it as a memorial to the attack or remove it so that it does not remind their own children of the horror they experienced.

Pyotr Stolba has lived in Be’eri for 34 years. He immigrated to Israel from Moscow in 1996 with his wife and settled in the kibbutz almost immediately:

“There were two families living in this house: the Kipnises and the Alons. The Alon family was later rescued alive by the Israeli army, while the Kipnis couple – husband and wife – were killed by the terrorists inside the house, which they then set on fire.

At 6:30 a.m. on October 7, Qassam rockets began falling here. Of course, we went into the safe room. I was at home with my wife, my older son, my pregnant daughter-in-law, and my 10-month-old grandson.

We were told not to leave the safe rooms because there were terrorists in the kibbutz. We thought there were just a few of them. No one could have imagined that 400 terrorists would enter Be’eri.

They smashed through the glass balcony door. They shot at the glass and it shattered. They opened the door and came inside. The dog met them and started barking, and they immediately shot it.

They tried to break into our safe room, pulling at the door handle. My son and I held the door from inside. They knocked and spoke to us in English: "Come out, we won’t hurt you." But my older son had served in the territories [in the West Bank], in combat units. He said, 'Dad, we don’t talk to Arabs. Stay quiet.'

We stayed there for 19 hours, until the army rescued us.

The electricity went out half an hour after the terrorists stormed into the kibbutz. While our phones still had battery power, everyone was passing along information. The Losev family from Zaporizhzhia lived near that transformer station. They were close friends of ours. Marina was burned alive in the house. She was identified only by her teeth. Igor was found shot dead near the fence.

Marina was burned alive in the house and identified only by her teeth, while Igor was found shot dead near the fence

The terrorists were drinking on my balcony and shooting at the road. They used heavy machine guns to shoot anyone who drove past or tried to escape. They shot at chandeliers and the TV. A tree burning next to the house heated the roof tiles until they glowed and began to fall. My wife said, 'Listen, the house is collapsing!' I said, 'All we can do is pray. There’s nothing else we can do.'

When the army arrived, we went outside – everything around us was burning. Cars and houses were on fire; bodies lay in the street. The dead were everywhere: terrorists, Israelis. Children, women, and men lay on the sidewalks and in the roads.

We were taken from there to a hotel by the Dead Sea. That’s where we learned who had been killed and how. One of my friends said, 'I don’t know where my wife is, where my daughter is.' It turned out they had been killed.

I returned to Be’eri four months after the attack to get the local printing press running again. My wife and I now live in temporary housing and are preparing to move into a new home. A new military base has been built next to us. I think that will give us some protection in case of a sudden attack.

We never doubted that we wanted to return, because this is our home. But some families do not want to come back because of the trauma. Maybe with time it will somehow fade, but it’s impossible to ever completely forget that day."

Former hostage Maksim Kharkin: “They were killing people and smiling”

On October 7, Maksim Kharkin went with friends to the Supernova music festival, which was attacked by Hamas. Maksim was held hostage for two years:

“I had never been to Supernova before. It was a huge, very well-organized event, with all the necessary permits. There was police and internal security. We went there to enjoy ourselves and listen to music.

But at 6:27, a massive rocket attack began. That’s when I realized the war had started. The road was cut off, and the terrorists were already advancing. I ran into a field. At some point, a friend called me: ‘Max, where are you?’ I said I’d managed to get about 100 meters away. He asked, 'Max, come back and help me. I don’t know what to do.'

The shelling could already be heard from all sides. But they weren’t shooting directly at us yet – there had been no direct contact.

I heard my friend’s wife screaming into the phone: 'Max, help me, save me.' So I went back.

We decided to lie down in a ditch. The shelling was coming from all sides – from both sides of the road and from the direction of the party itself. The terrorists were advancing from two sides, calmly spraying everything with gunfire: rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

At some point, they reached us – and that was it. My friend managed to fire a shot. He had his service weapon, and he took one of them down, but he was immediately shot in the back.

They first shot at my head, but the bullet whistled over it. By then, I had basically given up hope.

I saw them killing everyone who was there. They were smiling – killing people and smiling. They let their victims scream out their pain, plead and cry. Then they shot them with a smile.

There was a young guy running around with a camera. I called him the “wedding photographer.” He walked around filming everything, enjoying himself.

You see how many of them there are — thirty here, another hundred there. And they’re in no hurry. Everything is fine, everything is great, it’s a celebration.

They tied my hands, pulled a stocking over my head, and took me to the Gaza Strip with another hostage. Every second could have been my last.

I decided I was already a dead man. They brought me to Gaza with my hands and feet tied and pushed me to the floor. I fell to my knees first, then they shoved me again and I fell face-first onto the floor. When I first fell to my knees, I realized that from that moment on, every second I was alive, every breath I took, was a gift.

“When I first fell to my knees, I realized that from that moment on, every second I was alive, every breath I took, was a gift.”

We were held in ordinary homes in the Gaza Strip. Apart from Hamas fighters, the only people we had contact with were the heads of the households. Their sons, boys around 15 to 17, carried machine guns and could casually transport grenades and ammunition in UNICEF bags.

If one of us did something wrong – for example, if they saw someone talking to another hostage, even whispering or communicating with their fingers – you could get a beating for that.

The house where I was held came under fire, and the upper floor was destroyed. After that, I was moved to an underground tunnel. I spent another year and four months there. Some tunnels are designed for people to live in. They can have tile, floors, and entire rooms — basically apartments. Ours was nothing like that. It was a transport tunnel. There were just concrete beams, about 20 centimeters wide and a little over a meter high. Then came a concrete arch of the same thickness, another beam, and another beam on the floor. That was it. The entire tunnel was built that way.

How did we use the toilet? I dug a hole, and that’s where I went.

At one point, there were six of us. We came down with every illness imaginable, including COVID. We never left the tunnel. Your condition gets to the point where you stand up and immediately start swaying. You can’t walk properly; you’re constantly staggering.

There was no light. The only light was a small LED bulb, if there was one. Sometimes there wasn’t. If they called you from one room to another and you didn’t have a flashlight, it was pitch-black. You couldn’t see anything, absolutely nothing.

We were fed infrequently, and it got worse as time went on. Especially during the last five months, we could easily go 27 to 30 hours without eating. Lunch was a tablespoon of some kind of sauce and half a pita. I weighed just 50 kilograms when I came out. When I entered the tunnel, I weighed 90 kilograms.

Hamas guards had a separate room for themselves in the tunnel. There was a core group that stayed there permanently, while others rotated in and out. They had a room like ours, only larger — with a satellite TV, a kitchen and food.

We’d get the shit beaten out of us, then they’d interrogate us, then we’d get the shit beaten out of us again. 'Who are you? Where are you from? What’s your mother’s name? Your father’s? What did you do in the army? Where did you come from? Why did you come here?' We had to make up some kind of half-true story.

Hamas fighters hardly ever spoke to the hostages. From time to time, they would tell us something demoralizing or offer food or other concessions in exchange for converting to Islam. Eventually, I converted to Islam, which let me wheedle a radio out of them — supposedly to listen to prayers recorded on a memory card. They had deliberately broken off the antenna, but the base was still there, along with a manual tuning dial.

I studied a little physics at the Suvorov military school. I understood that as long as electricity was running through the cables in the tunnel, you couldn’t pick up anything. But when the power was off, a cable could work as an antenna. Everyone told me, 'You’re crazy. What waves? What radio? You’re making this up.' We put it under the cable – and suddenly we had a signal!

There was no electricity in the wires from 5:30 p.m. until 9:30 a.m. That was when we listened to all sorts of things – stations from neighboring countries: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon. We quickly picked up the Israeli military station Galei Tsahal. That’s where we got our news and learned what was really happening.

I think I managed to pick up Vesti Moskvy once, or at least hear Russian being spoken. That was hugely important because I hadn’t spoken Russian with anyone for two years.

At the moment we were released, at 7:30 a.m., they lined us up and said that nothing was over yet. If anything went wrong, they would either kill us on the spot or, at best, send us back into the tunnel. From the start, I told myself I wouldn’t believe we were free until the door of the Red Cross armored Land Cruiser closed behind me.

When it did, I exhaled for the first time. But you’re still there, and they’re still all around you."

Vitaly Cheberdin, Israeli soldier with the 188th Armored Brigade: “The army had never done anything like this in Gaza”

In late October 2023, after three weeks of bombardment, the IDF launched a ground operation in the Gaza Strip. The stated goals of the operation were to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, return the hostages, and prevent further attacks on Israel.

During the operation in Gaza, tens of thousands of people were killed, and around 85% of buildings in the Strip were damaged or destroyed. The figures were cited by Nikolay Mladenov, the UN High Representative for the "Board of Peace," who is respected by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Israeli soldier Vitaly Cheberdin entered Gaza in December 2023 with the 188th Armored Brigade. According to him, the troops had initially been preparing for possible fighting in Lebanon, so the deployment south came as a surprise:

“The army had never done anything like this in Gaza. Before that, they had only entered small areas. It’s densely populated there, which makes fighting, especially with tanks, extremely difficult.

On the first day, we had to advance about 10 kilometers in our tanks and bring in several battalions so the security services could begin operating there. When we entered Gaza, I saw the sky glowing pink from the explosions. Hamas fighters started firing back. Something came flying in our direction.

We just kept moving forward, firing as we went – they shot at us, we shot back. I saw houses, movie theaters, cars, things exploding. It was like something out of a movie.

One of my unit’s main tasks was to search for Hamas weapons depots and tunnels. We mostly went to Hamas fighters’ homes looking for weapons. If we found anything – a weapons cache or other infrastructure – we blew it up on the spot.

There were also addresses where hostages were believed to be held. That was a priority for everyone, but honestly, we didn’t expect to find anyone. Whenever there was a small operation involving hostages, we dropped everything and focused entirely on it.

We didn’t want to kill anyone, but it happened. Once, we started entering a house, reacted to movement, and shot a woman. Everything was filled with smoke; the house was already on fire. There was also a dead girl inside, though it wasn’t clear what had killed her – a tank or infantry fire. Three girls were still alive, around 14 or 15 years old, along with an adult woman and two men. We took them all outside.

We gave the women food right away. The men were initially in their underwear. Obviously, that’s all they could wear when they came out. We then brought them blankets, and after some time handed them all over to the Red Cross. We fed the civilians and shared our food with them.

A man started coming out from somewhere. He was shot in the head. I don’t know by whom. He immediately fell backward, his brains blown out. His family came out behind him; they were spared.

“A man started coming out from somewhere, was shot in the head, and his family came out behind him – they were spared”

Civilians suffered mainly because Hamas put them in harm’s way. Hamas fighters don’t look like they do on TV, either. Most walk around in flip-flops and shorts, carrying a grenade launcher or a Kalashnikov. They often hide among civilians — it's guerrilla warfare.

Once, our unit spent the night in a girls’ school. I went into the teachers’ room and started looking at photographs from school parades – pictures of them supposedly destroying something resembling Israel, trampling on it, pretending to slit its throat. They’re steeped in hatred.

I still have a girl’s album that I took from one of the apartments. She draws beautifully, she has talent, but the pictures — she drew the Islamic Jihad symbol, terrorists, Yasser Arafat.

I’ll never forget this image: you’re standing in a building on high ground, with the whole city spread out below, and it’s burning — burning intensely. And you realize you’re part of all this, that you’re the reason for it.

COVID was going around there for a while. I felt sick, but I got through it relatively easily. My gunner, though, just collapsed. He was in the tank as we were attacking and advancing, lying unconscious in the back with a temperature close to 40°C. He couldn’t take part in anything and just rode along with us. We pressured the officer, and they took him back to Israel that same evening. He ended up in the hospital.

In total, I spent four months in Gaza. The first time, I came out more or less okay. But the second time, I had a completely dead look in my eyes. I didn’t feel like doing anything.

You drive into Israel and there’s so much light. We were like frightened idiots. A friend told me that when he got home, he walked into the room, went up to his mother, and asked, 'Can I turn on the light?'

The first day I got home, I couldn’t sleep because it was so quiet. The birds are singing here, while over there you had mortars pounding."

On the evening of Aug. 4, a drone carrying explosives crashed into the wing of a Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane parked at Leipzig/Halle Airport in the German state of Saxony. The device failed to detonate, and the drone fell to the ground, where it was discovered several hours later by a bus driver. At the time, the aircraft was empty, but shortly before the incident, it had transported ammunition from France via Leipzig. One can only speculate as to the level of destruction that might have resulted had the act of sabotage succeeded in causing the explosion of an aircraft loaded with ammunition.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the police investigation and intelligence data pointed to Russian responsibility for the attempted attack. Media reports, citing sources familiar with the investigation, identified the suspects as Oleg L. and Andrei K. both of whom were said to be linked to the GRU. One of the suspects was reported to hold Latvian citizenship, a detail confirmed by Latvian intelligence authorities, but no further details or supporting evidence were presented at the time.

Now, however, The Insider has managed not only to identify the perpetrators but also to prove the GRU’s involvement in organizing the sabotage operation.

How the GRU organized (and failed) the sabotage operation in Leipzig

On a cold morning in January 2026, GRU Colonel Denis Smolyaninov (on the right in the photo below) was walking through Moscow in interesting company — with knife-throwing coach (who also happens to be a deacon of the Orthodox Church) Vladimir Trofimov (left) and arms dealer Andrei Usachev (center). It is unclear what the group discussed that day, but Usachev appears to have had information to share with military intelligence officer Smolyaninov.

Andrei Usachev, 54, began his military career in Russia’s Airborne Forces. In 2000, he was sentenced to nine years for an armed robbery that took place at a currency exchange office, and after his release, he went into the business of manufacturing and trading weapons. Usachev’s company, “Oruzheynaya Palata,” initially thrived after becoming a supplier to the Russian National Guard. However, in 2023,  reports revealed that their “Vyzhigatel” system turned out to be nothing more than a cheap Chinese drone — the SkyfendHunter SHH100 — which had been imported into Russia illegally. Usachev left the company, but his expertise in military drones was still in high demand — which is why he drew the attention of Russia’s military intelligence agency.

Usachev’s interest in drones was not merely theoretical. His billing records, obtained and reviewed by The Insider, show that on July 13, 2026, Usachev called Oleg Levushkin, an acquaintance from the city of Pskov. In everyday life, Levushkin was known as a biker and a small-time businessman who ran a small company importing tea, coffee, and spices. However, for the GRU, Levushkin had a more important asset: Latvian citizenship, which meant he could freely enter the EU. 

Levushkin did not act alone. His accomplices were the ones who actually carried out the failed sabotage operation — and they turned out to be familiar to The Insider from a separate sabotage operation that took place two years ago.

Belarusian criminals and the arson at Leroy Merlin

According to the investigation, Levushkin’s accomplice was the direct perpetrator of the failed Leipzig sabotage operation: Andrei Karshakov, a citizen of the Republic of Belarus residing in Russia (the same “Andrei K.” whom the investigation referred to publicly). Reporting by German media has indicated that traces of Karshakov’s DNA were found on an antenna that, according to investigators, was used to amplify the drone’s signal while the operator directed it to its target.

This was not Karshakov's first act of sabotage. As it turns out, he had taken part in an arson attack in the Polish city of Łódź two years earlier. On July 25, 2024, a shelf containing plant protection products and insecticides ignited at the Leroy Merlin hypermarket. Firefighters extinguished the blaze within an hour, estimating the damage at 200,000 zlotys (approximately 45,000 euros). The probable cause was cited as a violation of storage regulations. At the time, the Polish media did not pay much attention to the incident.

However, law enforcement took notice of two suspicious individuals who had been in Łódź at the time. The Insider identified them thanks to videos in which they were caught on camera withdrawing money from a local ATM. One of them turned out to be the aforementioned Karshakov, and the other was another Belarusian, Maksim Lapunov (he officially changed his last name but somehow managed to continue using his old passport under the name Maksim Kolosov).

Flight records indicate that Lapunov was involved in the Leipzig sabotage. On July 19, 2026, two weeks before the drone was discovered at the German airport, Lapunov flew from St. Petersburg to Ankara and then to Belgrade, all in the same day. According to sources within the law enforcement agencies of a European country that spoke to The Insider, Lapunov likely made his way from Serbia to Germany. 

It cannot be ruled out that there were other participants in the Leipzig sabotage. Border crossing data indicates that Karshakov often traveled with his accomplices, also Belarusians living in Russia: Vyacheslav Aysin, former police officer Denis Shulgan, and Roman Kovalevsky (who has a rap sheet in Russia that includes theft and robbery). The role of Karshakov’s accomplices in the Leipzig sabotage remains unclear, though it is interesting to note that Aysin regularly visited Germany — including the city of Leipzig.

Criminals in service of the GRU

GRU Colonel Smolyaninov was born in 1976 in Chelyabinsk, where he graduated from the Chelyabinsk Higher Military Aviation School for Navigators. He then served in Smolensk before receiving further training at the GRU Academy on Narodnogo Opolcheniya Street in Moscow. He eventually moved to St. Petersburg, where he began working at the GRU’s 172nd Command and Reconnaissance Center, where his work focused primarily on Ukraine.

Smolyaninov was involved in recruiting criminals to carry out missions abroad. As early as 2023, the independent Russian investigative outlet Dossier Center reported on how he had recruited neo-Nazis previously convicted of murder to work as agents in Ukraine.

Among the criminals recruited by Smolyaninov were some true stars of the Russian underworld. For example, former GRU officer Vladimir Borisov, nicknamed “Praporshchik,” had founded the organized crime group Falcon-95 in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and employed several methods he picked up at the intelligence agency, including advanced wiretapping techniques and professional makeup for hitmen that was prepared by specialists from the Lenfilm film studio. Despite numerous murders, kidnappings, and hostile takeovers of multiple businesses, the gang’s leader managed to avoid serious charges in court, receiving only a suspended sentence.

In 2014, Borisov tried to establish his own private military company (PMC). That effort apparently laid the groundwork for his alliance with Smolyaninov, as the GRU was actively helping create PMCs at the time to provide cover for its operations. However, unlike the late Yevgeny Prigozhin (another St. Petersburg ex-con), Borisov did not achieve much success. In 2017, he even found himself wanted in connection with the hostile takeover of the state-owned Institute of Architectural and Construction Design. He went into hiding in Bulgaria before being extradited to Russia in 2021.

Borisov was believed to be serving a prison sentence in Russia. However,The Insider has confirmed that he was released soon after his initial incarceration and issued a new passport, which he has since used for his extensive travels abroad.

This summer, on the main street in central Moscow, many establishments were unusually empty. The Saperavi café was one-third full, CoffeeMania had few customers, and Chaykhana No. 1 was all but completely devoid of customers. The same was true of Tyrolskie Pirogi, the Kremlin cafeteria, and Art Life. The only places that were consistently full were bars – Harat’s, the Krombacher beer restaurant, and the Czech pub Pilsner, among others.

Alexey (name changed), the owner of several Moscow restaurants and gastro-bars, confirms the downturn: “The past few years can broadly be divided into two stages. After the downturn in 2022, the situation stabilized in 2023 and through the first half of 2025, with even some signs of growth. But starting in the second half of 2025, revenues began to decline, and that trend continues to this day.”

The statistics also confirm the downturn. According to mapping app 2GIS, by spring 2026 the number of restaurants in Russia’s cities (population greater than one million) had fallen by 5%, while the number of smaller cafés had declined by 6%, to 12,500. The drop was partly driven by falling tourist numbers amid increasingly frequent drone attacks. According to the newspaper Kommersant, alcohol sales at restaurants fell by more than 40% on average in the first half of 2026, and wine sales were down by 45%, to 361,000 decaliters.

The number of bars is also declining. As of August, Russia’s million-plus cities had 6% fewer bars, while in Moscow the number was down 14% from August 2025, Vedomosti reports. Russian media conclude that people are trying to save money by cutting back on alcohol. The Insider’s sources confirm the trend: Alexey also reports an average 20% decline in foot traffic and a 20% drop in the average check at his Moscow establishments.

The rising cost of restaurant services, and the resulting increase in the average check, is a trend that began long before the full-scale war. Sergei, a wine restaurateur, says the industry’s problems date back to 2014, when “they seized Crimea and imposed sanctions on themselves.” The problems were less about wine than food. “Our government banned imports of dairy products and all kinds of steaks. What happened? We lost U.S. marbled beef. We had nothing comparable,” Sergei explains.

The industry’s problems date back to 2014, when “they seized Crimea and imposed sanctions on themselves.”

According to him, adaptation has not solved the problem. Although the quality of Miratorg’s Russian beef has improved, it still cannot match the level of Argentine marbled beef. Russian cheeses have also improved considerably, but now they cost as much as European varieties — and sometimes more, even though imports must be routed through Kazakhstan and Belarus, driving up their prices.

“If you want to make good pasta, you need to add Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano, and their prices have soared by 30–40%. On top of that, the dollar has jumped, so the price of the dish in the restaurant has gone up too,” Sergei says.

The Russian government also regularly raises excise duties on alcohol imported from “unfriendly countries.” In 2025, import duties on wine and beer exceeded their cost, as The Insider noted. The proceeds go toward Putin’s “wine Disneyland” and enrich his friends.

Sergei has been working with major wine shops since 2022:

“When I started, a bottle of excellent Trapiche Malbec cost 690 rubles on the store shelf. It was often discounted by 30%, so you could get it for 400 rubles. A glass of the same wine in a restaurant cost about the same. Now the bottle costs 1,490 rubles. The price has more than doubled. Some wines have tripled. Before the war, a bottle of French Petrus cost around 400,000 rubles; now it costs 1.8 million rubles in Russia. And you won’t find it in restaurants anymore. All wine has gone up insanely.”

Excise duties on spirits are rising too. For restaurateurs, Sergei says, that means lower margins. He recalls that before the annexation of Crimea, a bottle of 16-year-old Lagavulin cost 2,600 rubles when purchased for a restaurant, with suppliers bringing it in from Scotland at cost. In stores, a bottle cost 3,000–3,500 rubles, but could be bought for 2,500 rubles on sale.

Now, Sergei says, Scottish whisky enters Russia only through parallel imports. A bottle of Lagavulin costs around 20,000 rubles in stores and about 16,000 wholesale: “In a pub now, 50 grams of whisky costs as much as an entire bottle did 12 years ago.”

Rising prices are already driving away middle-class customers who, Sergei says, come into restaurants and complain: “Your glass used to cost 500 rubles, and now it’s 3,000! How can that be?!” Many simply turn around and leave. To save money, they order food for delivery and buy wine at stores.

To save money, they order food for delivery and buy wine at stores.

Sergei admits that even as a senior manager, he himself goes to restaurants less and less often: “My wife and I used to go out once a week – just to relax, have a meal and drink a glass of wine. Now we hardly do it at all. Maybe once a month, because our incomes have fallen while prices have risen.”

Sommelier Tatyana says consumers have become sharply segmented in recent years: “The first group consists of people who are used to drinking wine of a certain quality. They keep drinking it despite the sanctions, higher transportation costs, duties, excise taxes, and so on. The second group switches to cheaper Russian alternatives.” 

Still, it is not only imported wine that is becoming more expensive – Russian wine is too.

Menu: “It was one thing, and now it’s slightly different”

Despite rising costs, restaurateurs are trying to avoid raising prices or switching to cheaper ingredients. Restaurateur Platon, for example, says the prices of products bought by his restaurants have risen 15–20% over the past year: “We raise menu prices on average once every four to six months, but never by 20%.” He says prices at his establishments change only when the menu is updated, “because we keep food costs at an acceptable level.”

Moscow sommelier Tatyana says the industry is gradually adapting, replacing suppliers and, to some extent, recipes. But the changes to menus are not radical. She calls it an “incomplete replacement” — “it was one thing, and now it’s slightly different.” 

Unlike Sergei, the sommelier believes Russian food products are no worse than Western ones: “Restaurants are working more with farms. Their products are usually high-quality. Many restaurants emphasize this. We don’t import from France or Germany – we have our own! And our cheese is just as good,” she says.

Still, as Tatyana explains, the new circumstances have taken some getting used to: “If you need to bring in food products or wine from France now, it has to go through a third country. It used to be fairly easy to do this through the Baltic states. Now the process is much more complicated. As a result, many establishments have had to rethink their recipes, and wine imports from countries such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Iran, Serbia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan are on the rise."

Even shot bars face similar problems, says Konstantin, a bartender: “For example, Kahlúa, the Mexican coffee liqueur, has tripled in price. At one point, it was a problem because we had to figure out what to use in the hugely popular White Russian cocktail. It’s the same with most Western products – they have gradually been replaced with Russian alternatives. There’s more Russian alcohol now… The bar used to be pretty good, with good whisky, bourbon, liqueurs, absinthe. Now it’s getting worse and worse – we keep hitting new lows in quality.”

Wages: high and off the books

Record-low unemployment has exacerbated Russia’s overall labor shortage, but that is mainly a problem for employers looking for highly skilled workers. Waiting tables is hard work, but generally accessible to anyone. However, the same cannot be said of chefs and cooks. 

There are plenty of restaurant-sector vacancies, says sommelier Tatyana: “every establishment is short-staffed, and they are filling the gaps themselves. The shortages are among cooks, bartenders, baristas, couriers. There has never been a shortage of managers and administrators. Everyone wants to manage,” she says.

In the race to attract workers, employers have been forced to raise wages. To keep this from eating into profits – or adding to losses – they resort to tax-avoidance schemes. Svetlana says many Moscow restaurants do not officially employ their workers, paying them under the table instead.

As part of their efforts to cut costs, many establishments are also eliminating ancillary positions. “There were three people: two cooks and a sous-chef. They fired one cook and divided his duties between the other two. That’s optimization for the employer , because now they don’t have to pay a third person. The two who remain won’t get that third salary added to their own – they’ll just get a little extra, and only if they’re lucky,” Svetlana says, describing her own workplace.

A separate problem, unrelated to either the war or sanctions, is Generation Z workers, says Sergei, the wine restaurateur:

“Gen Z doesn’t want to work – they just make demands. When I was 20 and worked as a bartender, I could do ten shifts in a row, pour beer, chat with customers, have fun, and have a few drinks myself. Now a modern 20-year-old Gen Zer will tell you, ‘Fuck off, I’ll work two on, two off. And I want a 200,000-ruble salary!’ You tell him, ‘Well, sorry, we can only pay you 80,000.’

“People like that usually work for two or three days and then quit, citing exhaustion and burnout. And if they leave on a busy day, the establishment loses money. Say it’s Friday or the Champions League final, and half the Gen Z staff say they’re not coming in – the bartender, waiter, and cook. That’s a problem. Young people see no point in working; they want the end result.”

Konstantin, who works for a chain of Moscow shot bars, is a vivid example of what Sergei describes. “It’s easy to start, easy to quit, hard to work,” the bartender says. Many students take these jobs only for a season. Sometimes one team stays at a particular shot bar for a long time, “and then they all suddenly scatter again – it’s like the skin renews itself.”

Shot bars, an island of stability

The low-price segment has also felt the downturn. Near Moscow's Tverskaya metro station, at two of the Vkusno i Tochka locations that moved into McDonald's vacated premises in 2022, there were few customers at the end of the workday. Even at the site of Russia’s first American fast food restaurant, half the cash registers were closed and many tables were empty. Most customers were 35–50, with hardly any young people in sight. A sign outside read, “We pay more than you think,” promising a monthly salary of 142,000 rubles for full shifts.

There are, however, establishments with a steady stream of customers. Bartender Konstantin is confident that even an economic crisis will not force shot bars to close: “A collapse isn’t even close, because prices are low, the PR is good, they’re highly recognizable, and they’re conveniently located near student hangouts. They’re only expanding.”

Shot bars also had to raise prices after the war began, but they have done so in stages, Konstantin says, adding that the bars have introduced deliberately cheap items, such as lavash chips, to boost margins. The chain is also unaffected by problems with imported products, surviving on cheap vodka, infused spirits, and beer – all made in Russia.

Shot bars survive on cheap vodka, infused spirits, and beer – all made in Russia

Restaurateur Alexey confirms that low-priced establishments are holding up better than the rest: “Overall, I’d say establishments at the low and high ends of the market are doing well, while the mid-range restaurant market is shrinking.”

Sommelier Tatyana says the same: “Top-end establishments are growing, and so are fast food, coffee shops, street food, pan-Asian restaurants, shawarma joints, and cheap eateries.”

Outlook: “a wholesale collapse”

All of The Insider’s sources agree that the market is in poor shape. According to Sergei, many restaurants are closing: “With all these sanctions, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. But this also gives the Russian restaurant industry a bit of a boost, because in a crisis people start improvising – growing their own vegetables. And new chefs emerge. But if you take the average temperature across the food-service industry, there’s a wholesale collapse.”

Alexey is equally pessimistic about the outlook for the restaurant business: “I expect suppliers to keep raising prices and the market to shrink further. And if the promised VAT is finally introduced in December, we’ll consider every option, including closing down.”

Sommelier Tatyana agrees: “I’m very afraid of losing my job because establishments keep opening and closing. It happens constantly. There’s no stability, and the life cycle of individual places is getting shorter. These days, the average restaurant lasts three to five years. Street food, food halls, and food courts will survive, where rents are relatively low and you can at least scrape by.”

The sources also note that Gen Z customers are not exactly the best clientele. According to Tatyana, “they are more selective, drink very little, or don’t drink at all.” At the same time, their numbers are growing, as is their influence on the market.

A news release on the court’s website dated Oct. 1 identifies the defendant only by the first letter of his surname: “O.” The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported that the description could only match the case of pensioner Igor Odintsov, a resident of the town of Neman, located just across the Neman River from Lithuania.

“O.” was sentenced under Part 2 of Article 205.2 of Russia’s Criminal Code, which covers public calls for terrorism. The case reached the military court in September, but proceedings were suspended in the middle of the month after the defendant fled.

On Sept. 18, Lithuania’s border service reported that a “68-year-old Russian citizen” had swam across the river into Lithuania the previous day. Local border guards detained him at about 1:50 p.m., and he asked for political asylum. However, that evening at around 7 p.m., he was returned to Russia through a border checkpoint:

“There was no information indicating that he faced danger, had any special status, or might be admitted to the European Union, and he did not fall into the category of vulnerable persons… A decision was made not to admit him,” Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service said at the time.

Four days later, the court proceedings resumed. On Oct. 1, the man was sentenced. Sigitas Šamborskis, head of the Lithuanian community in Kaliningrad, confirmed to the Lithuanian newspaper Lietuvos Rytas that it was Odintsov who had been convicted earlier in the month:

“This is yet another betrayal. It’s very disgraceful on Lithuania’s part. It’s not just disgraceful, it’s downright criminal,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

On the morning of Oct. 7, police in the Chernihiv Region reported that Russian forces had carried out a missile strike on Pryluky. Local authorities said three sites had been hit: a multistory residential building, a children and youth creativity center, and an unidentified business. Police immediately reported deaths and injuries.

Chernihiv regional governor Vyacheslav Chaus announced:

“A missile strike on Pryluky. One of the hits was directly on a residential apartment building. In the morning, while people were still asleep.”

Chaus later said at least nine people had been killed in Pryluky, including three children. About an hour later, he updated the toll to 13 dead, including four children. Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi said the youngest victim was 8 years old. President Zelensky released the latest updated count, which brought the death toll to 19, in a post on Telegram at 8 p.m. Kyiv time.

Chaus said rescue crews were continuing to clear the rubble of the five-story building, meaning the number of dead and injured could still rise. Over 50 people were known to be wounded, with three of them hospitalized in serious condition.

The strike is already the deadliest Russian attack on Ukraine in a month. The Kyiv Independent previously reported that overnight and morning strikes had killed 15 people nationwide, and after the death toll in Pryluky rose from nine to 19, the updated figure brought the national toll to 25. President Zelensky confirmed the figures:

“The total death toll from this massive strike on Ukraine stands at 25 people. One hundred people were wounded. It was a combined strike involving numerous ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and Shahed drones. This was the ‘gift’ Putin gave himself for his birthday: the murder of children, the murder of people. During the day, there were new strikes with Shahed drones and aerial bombs.”

In a previous post, Zelensky said that three of the children who died in the strike were only one year old:

“Oleksandr, Kyrylo, and Serhiy, who were only one year old, and eight-year-old Maksym. My condolences to all their families and loved ones.”

On Sept. 27, Russian attacks killed 14 people across Ukraine, while strikes on Oct. 6 killed 13. No single location had recorded as many deaths over the past month as Pryluky did on Oct. 7.

The U.S. diplomatic mission issued the warning following reports of the possible death from pneumonic plague of Darya Shipilova, a laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. The embassy said it was “aware of press reports” about quarantine measures and hospital closures in Irkutsk. It also strongly advised Americans not to travel to Russia “due to the risk of wrongful detention and security concerns.”

Trump, responding to reporters’ questions, said he would talk to Putin “very soon” and that they would discuss the suspected plague-related death. Asked whether U.S. intelligence had information about the case, Trump said the United States was engaged in “very deep discussions” on the issue and would “probably” be able to say more soon.

Euronews, citing an unnamed European Commission official, reported that EU countries had scheduled a discussion of the suspected plague outbreak in Russia for Oct. 7. The issue was added to the agenda of a meeting of the Health Security Committee.

After several days of silence, Beijing also responded to reports of plague in Russia.

World Health Organization spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said on Oct. 6 that the WHO was closely monitoring developments in Russia. He said the official cause of death of the anti-plague institute employee had not been confirmed and that investigations into what caused her death were continuing. Lindmeier stated that the WHO, based on the information available, currently “estimates the risk to be moderate to low for Irkutsk, a low risk for the Russian Federation as a whole and very low for the WHO European region.”

Earlier, authorities in three Central Asian countries — Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — announced tighter sanitary controls at their borders because of reports of plague in the Irkutsk Region.

As The Insider previously reported, Russian authorities say the epidemiological situation in the region is “stable” and that the anti-plague institute employee died not from plague, but from “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” At the same time those official statements were being put out, Russian media outlets began removing reports of a suspected plague case in the Irkutsk Region.

The Insider reviewed Ragozin’s recent writing, including an August column in which he argued that, given the “devastating prospect” of another harsh winter, “painful compromises at the negotiation table once again emerge as Ukraine’s only way out of national catastrophe.”

Braže said:

“Taking into account the information received today from the competent authorities, and after discussions with the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior, I have decided to initiate the process of adding another Russian citizen to Latvia's list of personae non gratae.”

Braže did not identify the person in her tweet. Delfi noted, however, that on Sept. 30, Latvian Interior Minister Jānis Dombrava had called on Braže to add Ragozin to the list, saying that for years the journalist had expressed views contrary to Latvia’s interests. Dombrava said Ragozin has blamed the West for Russia’s aggressive actions, criticized sanctions, justified Russian foreign policy, and discredited Ukraine. Delfi reported that, according to its information, Ragozin is the person targeted by the procedure.

Press.lv describes Ragozin as an “independent international affairs journalist” who has lived and worked permanently in Latvia since 2014.

Ragozin has indeed worked with a range of Russian and foreign media outlets. A biography on the BBC Russian Service website says he worked there for eight years before joining Russian Newsweek as a correspondent, later becoming its international editor. From 2015 to 2021, Ragozin published columns in Politico. He also wrote for The Guardian. In one 2014 article, he challenged Vladimir Putin’s claims that regular Russian army units were not present in the Donbas. From 2014 to 2016, he contributed to the Kyiv Post, and in 2019 The Moscow Times published an opinion piece in which he argued that “the Russian president’s ideological flexibility gives him the upper hand in the postmodern world.”

After 2022, the number of outlets Ragozin worked with appears to have narrowed. His columns continued to appear in the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, where he criticized Ukraine’s leadership and its European allies, praised U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to revive negotiations with Moscow, and argued that “the pro-war party simply wants any talks with Russia to be doomed, like they wanted the Istanbul talks to be doomed in the spring of 2022 and Minsk agreements to be ditched before that.” In an August column, Ragozin described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s rhetoric as “defiant” and argued that, in light of the “devastating prospect” of the approaching winter meant that the time had come for Ukraine to negotiate its way out of a “national catastrophe.” 

According to investigators cited by Der Spiegel, the former BND head unlawfully obtained 2,000 classified documents and may have shared them while communicating with a foreign agent, though it remains unknown whether Hanning’s analysis reached the recipient, and German authorities have not officially confirmed that they suspect the former intelligence chief of working for Baku. His connection to Azerbaijan, however, is beyond doubt: he was officially a member of the board of the German-Azerbaijani Forum.

Hanning headed the BND from December 1998 to November 2005. According to prosecutors, in 2010 Hanning made an arrangement with Manfred D. to receive information from the BND in exchange for payment. Hanning intended to use the documents he received in his private consulting business. According to the German outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR, the documents included materials from foreign partner agencies, documents on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents on the Russian military.

In at least one instance, Hanning is known to have prepared a security report for an unnamed foreign intelligence service (not a Russian one, according to media reports). Meanwhile, after leaving the BND, Hanning made at least seven trips to Russia, The Insider found — all of them within the period from 2015 to 2019.

Often, Hanning would fly into Moscow in the evening and fly out the next day. In the summer of 2016 he flew from Munich to Moscow on the evening of July 6 and flew out to Berlin on the afternoon of July 7. A  similar trip between Berlin and Moscow took place in May 2019.

The investigation into Hanning has continued for several months. He came to the attention of law enforcement last year in connection with his possible involvement in the abduction of the children of Hamburg businesswoman Christina Block. As part of that case, Hanning’s home was searched in September 2025; some of the BND documents were found during those searches. 

News of Russia’s intention to resume production of the legendary Soviet An-2 aircraft, better known as the “corn duster” or “Annushka,” was delivered without fanfare in early September at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok.

Yuri Trutnev, Deputy Prime Minister and presidential envoy to the Russian Far East Federal District, called for prioritizing the creation of new aircraft: “I might not call this solution ideal, because it’s a bit of a shame that we flew the An-2 for 60–80 years and are now bravely going back to it.”

With poorly concealed sarcasm, Trutnev added: “If our wonderful aircraft designers can’t offer us anything but the An-2 right now, then let’s keep flying the An-2.”

Citing data from the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Putin’s envoy specified that deliveries of “fully updated An-2s” would begin in 2027, and in 2028 the aircraft would be outfitted with the new domestic VK-800 engine (whose certification is still in the works).

Earlier, the presidential envoy repeatedly demanded that the price of new aircraft be cut significantly, talked about project failures, and criticized manufacturers for missing delivery deadlines. In this context, his new comment might be perceived as yet another round in a years-long dispute.

But the Ministry of Industry and Trade gave a new dimension to his words. Deputy minister Gennady Abramenkov claims that several companies are working in parallel to update the An-2, with Rusaviaprom, the Motor Aircraft Repair Enterprise, and Technoregion all being involved. What’s more, there are plans to use the new VK-1600S engine, which the Ministry of Industry and Trade has commissioned from ODK-Klimov (and which for now exists only as a mockup), with the VK-800 (currently in testing) seen as an additional option.

“We’re creating conditions to offer light aircraft developers and manufacturers the tools they need. In particular, we’re exploring the option of preferential loans through the Industrial Development Fund to help set up aircraft production,” Abramenkov explained, adding that domestically produced engines and avionics are not ready for production. Separately, Abramenkov noted that Russia has around 700 An-2 aircraft currently in storage, and that many of them have used up only a third of their service life.

Russia has around 700 An-2 aircraft currently in storage, and many of them have used up only a third of their service life

Remarkably, the launch of a serious civil aviation project was met with studied indifference from First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, Minister of Industry and Trade Anton Alikhanov, and Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov (who is connected to the project through Rostec affiliate ODK, which is developing a new engine for the An-2). It is quite possible that, without Trutnev, the An-2 would not even have come up at the EEF — and for a good reason.

Interest in the “corn duster” arose some time ago. Russia’s air fleet is aging, and the cost of maintaining the An-2, which is essential for connecting remote regions to the mainland, is rising as repairs are needed more often and as replacement parts become more expensive. The planes do not only operate in the Far East, but serve remote communities and rotational work camps all across the country. The alternative to light transport aircraft is helicopters, but they are far more expensive and their use would thus need to be heavily subsidized.

Notably, the revival of the An-2 has nothing to do with Russia’s military needs, which are much better handled by helicopters. The Ural Civil Aviation Plant (UZGA) had specifically been preparing to localize the four-seat Diamond DA42 for the Defense Ministry, but the project, which relied heavily on imported parts, was quickly scrapped once the full-scale war began.

The pride of Soviet aircraft manufacturing

The light multipurpose transport aircraft An-2 is rightly considered one of the triumphs of Soviet civil aviation — the industry’s equivalent of the AK-47 for gunmakers, or the “bukhanka” all-road vehicle for automakers. The An-2 was produced for more than 60 years straight, a fact that put it into the Guinness Book of World Records (even if it was later surpassed by the American C-130).

The “Annushka” was designed by Oleg Antonov’s team at the Novosibirsk OKB-153 design bureau of the Chkalov Plant. After making its first flight on Aug. 31, 1947, it entered service in 1948 and was put into mass production in 1949 in Kyiv.

The aircraft’s first customer was the USSR Ministry of Geology, but other industries soon discovered it too. Depending on the modification, the aircraft was used for agricultural work, civilian and military transport, paratrooper drops, and as a training plane.

Production in the USSR ended in 1971 (a total of roughly 5,000 aircraft were delivered), but by then foreign plants had also begun manufacturing the model. Between 1960 and 2002, Poland built roughly 12,000 An-2s with various designations, and the aircraft was successfully exported to 26 countries around the world. In addition, just under 1,000 An-2s (Y-5) were produced under license in China under the names Fongshou-2 and Yunshuji-5.

The An-2’s advantages include the ability to take off and land on short, unprepared runways, including agricultural fields and unpaved areas, while the biplane’s low speed is offset by an exceptionally stable design. Together, these qualities made the aircraft versatile and simple to service and operate.

The An-2 biplane’s low speed is offset by its exceptional stability

But even Soviet engineers acknowledged that by the 1980s the design had become outdated — primarily due to very high fuel consumption and by the necessity to carry out overly frequent repairs. There were plans to update the aircraft in the 1980s, but they were thwarted by problems with engine production. After the Soviet Union collapsed, new aircraft were no longer a priority.

Independent Russia eventually resumed the attempts to replace the An-2. In 2010, Novosibirsk-based Chaplygin Siberian Aeronautical Research Institute (SibNIA) proposed an extensive modernization of the An-2 called the TVS-2MS — a model that would be fitted with an American Honeywell TPE-331-12 engine.

As of mid-2025, 28 such aircraft had been produced, but the process is slow due to difficulties with engine supplies via parallel imports, along with a lack of government attention and funding.

Keeping it simple

SibNIA was competing with the Ural Civil Aviation Plant (UZGA) for the right to create a replacement for the “corn duster.”  The institute proposed the TVS-2DTS (LMS-9) model — a far more thorough modernization of the An-2 that is effectively an entirely new aircraft with an American engine, an all-composite carbon-fiber structure, and a brand-new fuselage and cockpit. Aircraft assembly was expected to begin at the Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant in 2021.

However, in 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Trade announced that UZGA had won the competition with its LMS-901 project. The ministry explained the rationale for creating such an aircraft as being to reduce the An-2 fleet and replace the Soviet model with an aircraft built on advanced scientific and technical solutions.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade chose the LMS-901 because many of the technologies its competitor relied on were no longer available domestically (a fact SibNIA openly acknowledged). Originally, it was the TVS-2DTS that was supposed to receive the name Baikal, but when the Ministry of Industry and Trade revised its plans, the name passed on to UZGA’s model instead.

A Baikal prototype for static testing was expected to be built by the end of 2020, and then in December of that year, Putin claimed the aircraft would appear in 2021. A year later, Denis Manturov, who was then Russia’s Minister of Industry and Trade, promised that the Baikal would make its first flight in early 2022.

In June 2022, the government approved the Comprehensive Program for the Development of the Air Transport Industry, which envisioned the production of 14 Baikal aircraft in 2024, with output set to reach 25 aircraft a year starting in 2026. In 2023, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin assured the public that the Baikal would be certified before the start of 2024, and that its trial operation would follow shortly thereafter.

The quiet failures of parallel projects

Although Russian officials presented the Baikal as the An-2’s main successor, this characterization is not entirely accurate: while the Soviet aircraft can carry 12 passengers, the replacement carries only nine.

For routes with heavier passenger traffic, there were plans to produce the L-410, which has a capacity of 15 to 19 passengers. However, the project was abandoned due to the fact that the aircraft was a licensed copy of the Czech L-410 fitted with American engines, and in 2023, operation of this foreign aircraft in Russia began to be halted due to a lack of components. Building such aircraft without deliveries from abroad is impossible.

As a result, this aircraft did not make it into the 2024 edition of the industry development program, replaced instead by the mysterious Russian-Belarusian Osvei project (LMS-192), also with a capacity of 19 seats. The two countries’ governments signed an agreement on its production in April 2024.

Airlines were scheduled to receive the first 20 aircraft in 2027, but in August of 2026, Manturov reported that an Osvei prototype would appear only the following year, and that the certification process would not begin until 2029.

In that same address, Manturov admitted that the aircraft is still at the stage of working design documentation development, meaning its estimated cost remains unclear for now. At a meeting with Russia’s first deputy prime minister, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko publicly pointed to certain “misunderstandings” in the project’s implementation that need to be resolved “so that Osvei actually happens.” He did not specify the nature of the misunderstandings, but the project was fraught with tension right from the start.

Yuri Zakharchenko, executive director of the RKK-Nauka professional association, described Osvei as an aircraft unsuited to Russian conditions. The aircraft’s design includes retractable landing gear not built for soft, low-bearing-capacity ground — which makes it poorly suited for the unpaved runways typical of Russia’s remote airfields.

Osvei’s retractable landing gear is not designed for unpaved runways, making the aircraft unsuited to Russian conditions

If such a landing were attempted, mud would get into its gear wells and freeze, meaning that at some point the landing gear might fail to extend for landing, causing a crash. Under those circumstances, pilots end up flying with the gear down at all times, reducing the aircraft’s efficiency and driving up fuel consumption.

Zakharchenko’s comment was published on the NSN portal, but it survives only in news aggregators. Both the original source and the outlets that reprinted it soon deleted the material without explanation.

Certification sleight of hand

The failure of the “corn duster” replacement project — which had looked like the simplest task facing Russia’s aviation industry — needed to be offset somehow, at least in Putin’s eyes. The only aircraft suited to that role was the Il-114-300, a modernization of a Soviet turboprop designed to carry 68 passengers. On June 5, 2026, the aircraft ceremonially received its Rosaviatsia type certificate at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

“The awarding of type certificates is another step by our country toward technological sovereignty in a complex and strategically important industry — aviation. Another aircraft in the lineup is ready to carry passengers. And another engine is ready to lift modern airliners into the sky,” Sergei Chemezov said at the ceremony.

The event was presented as a breakthrough: Russia’s first new airliner was finally complete. However, in order to create that impression, the manufacturer and the government had needed to resort to a whole array of tricks — after all, the aircraft will not be ready for real-world operation for at least several more years.

The state-controlled outlet Vedomosti found that the certificate issued for the Il-114-300 only permits the aircraft to operate within a very narrow temperature range — from minus 9 to plus 25 degrees Celsius, whereas its predecessor could operate from minus 30 to plus 45. The aircraft is also barred from flying in icing conditions or thunderstorms, and from operating on wet or muddy runways. In other words, the aircraft is not fit for regular flights at all, since in real-world conditions a dry runway can never be guaranteed.

The Il-114-300 is not fit for regular flights, since it can’t take off in icing conditions, thunderstorms, or from wet and dirty runways

Ilyushin managing director Daniil Brenerman announced that test flights are continuing and that the approved operating conditions will soon be expanded. To that end, the Il-114-300 was sent for testing in Uzbekistan and Yakutia. In August, Rostec and the Ministry of Industry and Trade assured the public that the tests had been a success and that the approvals would follow shortly. However, there was no official explanation for the expedited certification in June or the lack of approval to fly in low-temperature conditions after tests in Yakutia in February 2026.

In July, the government allocated 2.6 billion rubles ($30.4 million) to finish work on the first three aircraft. Notably, that same amount had previously been the estimated cost of a single aircraft. In terms of value, that works out to roughly a third of the work still unfinished for each of the three certified airliners.

In July, Anton Alikhanov was still promising that the first aircraft would be delivered to the customer in August, with the remaining two following in October-November. Nevertheless, by September the timeline had already shifted noticeably. The 2nd Arkhangelsk United Air Detachment will now only receive the first aircraft by the end of 2026.

A stillborn project

The 2nd Arkhangelsk United Air Detachment (Arctic Airlines) handles passenger transport in the north of European Russia, flying passengers to remote settlements using An-2 aircraft and Mi-8 helicopters exclusively. In other words, it does not even have routes on its schedule where an aircraft with capacity for up to 68 people could be used.

Meanwhile, according to Brenerman, no Il-114-300 production is planned for next year, and only six aircraft will be built in 2028. Ilyushin plans to eventually reach an output rate of 12 aircraft a year, and only then will the Far Eastern airline Aurora — the main prospective customer operating routes suited to an aircraft with these parameters — finally get the chance to receive them.

Another crucial question regarding the aircraft’s parameters is whether it can take off and land on unpaved surfaces. In September, Alikhanov said the necessary testing had not even begun, and that the plant has produced only a prototype of a shield to protect against loose ground debris. The plan is to obtain approval for operation under such conditions in 2028. However, the professional community has expressed some well-founded concerns about these ambitions.

The Il-114-300 is a low-wing aircraft — meaning its engines hang close to the ground. Officials call it a replacement for the aging Soviet An-24 and An-26 (and its popular foreign counterparts, the French ATR-72 and Canadian Bombardier Dash 8). While all of these aircraft are certified for unpaved runways, all of them are also high-wing, with the engines farther from the ground and better protected from mud and debris.

Among low-wing aircraft, the Il-114-300 is comparable in its parameters to the Swedish Saab 2000, which entered service in 1994 and has a capacity of up to 58 passengers. The aircraft did not gain commercial success, so its production stopped as early as 1999. Incidentally, one of the Swedish model’s shortcomings was its unsuitability for unpaved runways.

The remaining operators of the Saab 2000 explicitly attribute this limitation to its wing design, meaning the Russian manufacturer needs to solve — within a mere two years — a problem that Western market leaders never even set out to fix: how to protect the engines of a low-wing aircraft from damage during takeoff and landing on unpaved runways.

Russian designers must figure out how to protect the engines of a low-wing aircraft from damage on unpaved runways

Nevertheless, Alikhanov says that the Il-114-300 already surpasses all its Western counterparts in terms of flight performance, as Rostec and the Ministry of Industry and Trade are announcing agreements with three Indian companies to supply 105 new aircraft (even if the parties to these memoranda turned out to be highly dubious organizations that do not operate scheduled flights). Moreover, while one of the companies does offer charter flights on light aircraft and helicopters, the other two have not even started flying.

The only official offering a more sober view on Russia’s aviation agenda is Deputy Prime Minister Trutnev, who in early 2026 demanded that the price of the Il-114-300 be lowered. At the Eastern Economic Forum he stated the problem in simple terms: at a price of over a billion rubles ($11.7 million), an aircraft with these technical characteristics is of no use to the Far East because the investment would never pay off. “This is fantasy, this is absolute madness, no economy could withstand this,” Trutnev fumed.

The project was stillborn for other reasons too. Even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia was developing the Il-112V military transport aircraft. Both projects were tied to the same engine — the TV7-117ST-01 by ODK-Klimov. After an Il-112V crashed in August 2021 and the investigation showed the crash had been caused by critical engine problems, work on both aircraft was suspended.

In January 2023, the TV7-117ST-01 engine received its type certificate, but only one of the projects in which it was involved was allowed to continue. Instead of the nearly finished Il-112V — which was only waiting on the engine — the decision was made to create an entirely new aircraft, the Il-212, using PD-8 engines that had originally been intended for the SJ-100. That decision required more time — as well as significant financial expenditure, design changes, and new testing.

The most probable rationale for this choice could be that the TV7-117ST-01 engine was unsuitable for the tasks at hand. In that case, the Il-114-300’s oddly poor performance — noticeably worse than its Soviet predecessor’s — can be explained by a problematic powerplant.

Airliners from generations past

The focus on the Il-114-300 is explained by the fact that the flagship MC-21 and SJ-100 projects are approaching a dead end. Officials have even stopped explaining the delays in their certification. Most recently, they’ve been pushed back to 2027, and it is already clear that these aircraft will be extremely weak competitors commercially — that is, if the projects are ever actually completed.

The official reduction in flight range of the MC-21 from a planned 5,100 kilometers to 3,800 kilometers at the same payload (same number of passengers, same fuel tanks) indicates that fuel consumption turned out to be one and a half times higher than planned. This makes the aircraft uncompetitive on the global market right from the outset. And that’s assuming it even makes it into serial production, which is far from guaranteed.

Similarly, the mass production of the modernized Tu-214 is not coming together as planned either. The Kazan Aviation Plant (KAZ) keeps missing deadlines, producing no more than one aircraft a year despite the benefits of financial infusions and experience. Sources at the plant cite a shortage of qualified engineers and difficulties producing components, as well as the need to retool production capacity.

In the case of the SJ-100, serious problems are evidenced by the suddenly emerging plans to replace the Franco-Russian SaM146 engine with the PD-8 for the SSJ-100 model. In 2022, Manturov explained that putting new Russian engines on old aircraft would be too costly and impractical.

In 2025, Rostec also complained about excessive work costs, and in 2026 it became known that the re-engining would be mass-scale and would cost at least 115 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) — a very conservative estimate, according to industry sources. That works out to 2.3 billion rubles ($27.1 million) each across 50 planes. In effect, they will try to replace the engines on every airframe that still has enough flight life left.

The effort does not suggest building new aircraft simultaneously with re-engining old ones, as there will not be enough PD-8 engines for both. ODK’s capacity is limited to 30 engines a year, and each airframe requires two of them. Therefore, the SSJ-100s will have to be re-engined instead of producing the SJ-100s. This decision can only be justified by serious problems with the import-substituted version.

Still, even the PD-8 engine itself is not without its problems. Although the powerplant received an operating certificate, the Ministry of Industry and Trade struggles to even name the engine’s price, encouraging interested parties to wait for serial production to begin.

This uncertainty suggests a host of unresolved issues. Meanwhile, Aeroflot is admitting in advance that it may not be able to re-engine the SSJ-100 without government subsidies. And if the money does not come, company CEO Sergei Alexandrovsky states, the aircraft will have to be written off.

Crucially, a civil aircraft engine is one of the most complex devices in the world. Neither China nor Japan produces its own engines, even though both countries have spent more than a decade trying to create them. Only Europe, the United States, and Canada possess the necessary technology, and the whole world buys engines from them. Soviet engines were far less efficient (higher fuel consumption, more frequent servicing needed), so they were abandoned across every aircraft class at the first opportunity.

All bluster

Officials traditionally compensate for failure with bombastic statements, and true to form, Vladimir Putin claims that Russian aircraft are on par with the world’s best — or even superior in a number of respects. Manturov, for his part, assures that the Il-114 “turned out, in terms of its characteristics, better than its direct counterpart — the European ATR-72.” SuperJet program director Alexander Dolotovsky goes even further, calling the SJ-100 the best offering in the world in the segment of aircraft carrying up to 100 passengers. United Aircraft Corporation chief Vadim Badekha asserts that Russia is the only country capable of producing civilian aircraft relying solely on its own resources. And Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova went so far as to claim that Russian engineers have supposedly recreated critical technologies and production chains in the aviation industry and are now ready to become suppliers to the whole world.

Maria Zakharova claims that Russian engineers have recreated critical aviation technologies and are now ready to supply them to the whole world

In reality, the Russian government is preparing an update to the comprehensive aviation development program by the end of the year. They intend to cut production plans and stretch out timelines. Meanwhile, Russia’s Transport Ministry is searching the globe for ways to lease aircraft on a “wet” basis — that is, along with a crew. Among other things, Transport Minister Andrei Nikitin confirmed that one such offer has been made to Vietnam. Against this backdrop, Vladimir Putin is showing India not the actual MC-21 aircraft but only a mockup of it at the BRICS summit —  just as was done 14 years ago.

As of the fall of 2026, the entry into service of Russian aircraft at airlines has been pushed back to 2028 — certification, as the Il-114-300 example showed, has become a PR move rather than an actual sign that real completion of work on the aircraft has been achieved. The future of the three projects (Baikal, Ladoga, Osvei) remains murky. The MC-21 and Il-114-300 — based on their announced specifications — will turn out to be commercial failures even if they do make it into production in a few years. And the SJ-100 is already losing to its predecessor before it’s even certified.

Still, as long as Russian airlines manage to keep their fleets running through parallel imports, manufacturers and officials can keep up the illusion of an imminent breakthrough.

Footage of a vessel burning off the coast of Sochi began circulating on social media on the evening of Oct. 6. Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ was one of the first to post photos and video of an oil tanker on fire in the Black Sea. The independent Russian outlet Astra identified the vessel as the Aframax Rio, a large crude oil tanker.

Starboard Maritime Intelligence data reviewed by The Insider shows that the tanker is owned by Rio Enterprises SA, a company registered in the Marshall Islands. The vessel’s location had not appeared on the service since Sept. 20, 2026, and its last recorded position that day was near the Romanian port of Constanța. In 2026, the tanker was most frequently recorded at ports in Turkey and Egypt, with additional calls in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and India. In May, the Aframax Rio spent three days at the Russian port of Taman.

According to the VesselFinder service, the tanker transmitted a signal in the Black Sea near Sirius one day before the fire. Russian authorities have not said whether the tanker was carrying oil, with Sirius administration head Plishkin announcing only that:

“A tanker caught fire in the Black Sea. To ensure public safety, the beaches in Sirius will be temporarily closed. Water and air conditions are being monitored continuously together with Roshydromet. I ask residents and visitors to the federal territory to avoid spending long periods outdoors and, where possible, to keep windows closed.”

The pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Mash reported that the captain had requested evacuation for the vessel’s 23 crew members and that “the tanker was carrying crude oil from Novorossiysk to India and was loaded almost to capacity.” The pro-war Telegram channel Dva Mayora (lit. “Two Majors”) suggested that Ukraine may have been involved in the incident, saying the fire had started “likely not without outside interference.” The channel’s authors added that “a huge column of smoke can be seen from hundreds of kilometers away.”

Criticism of Pete Hegseth had been building for months before some Republicans in Congress finally began challenging the Trump administration’s agenda when it comes to military affairs. Finally, it was Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky who, on Sept. 15, introduced eight articles of impeachment against the defense secretary in the House of Representatives. Three accuse Hegseth of launching the war ing Iran without congressional authorization, while the others concern alleged abuses against civilians, the legality of military operations against drug traffickers and Yemeni Houthis, and the reprisals against Senator Mark Kelly after the Arizona Democrat called on service members to refuse to obey unlawful orders.

Other Republicans, however, secured enough votes to postpone consideration of Massie’s motion until November — after the midterm elections. Congress is likely to take the matter up in the future provided that Democrats gain control of the chamber (as polls currently suggest that they will).

There are ample grounds for criticism of Hegseth. The war launched by the United States and Israel in February was initially intended to swiftly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, resulting in a pro-Western shift. The allies achieved the first objective but not the second: after the old leadership was eliminated, power in Iran consolidated in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has not been afraid to escalate the conflict.

In September, the war shifted toward oil exports and maritime routes, with the U.S. beginning to strike Iranian oil tankers and Tehran responding with attacks on commercial vessels. Iranian missiles also began striking ever closer to American ships, and shortly after Saudi Arabia asked the United States for military assistance, Iranian attacks damaged a critical overland pipeline that had become an alternative to the waterborne route. Iran-backed Houthis also recently seized footholds in another part of the region’s maritime corridor, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

The U.S. administration is now being forced to plan for a long war. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly even warned Trump that Iran could continue resisting until the end of his term — meaning early 2029 — a message that is consistent with what Hegseth is hearing from his own generals. According to the Washington Post, as early as August the military’s top commanders told the Pentagon chief that the war could not continue indefinitely at its current pace given that U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has kept more than 50,000 troops on heightened combat readiness for months.

As early as August, the military’s top commanders told Hegseth that the war in Iran could not continue indefinitely at its current pace

Generals are concerned that the operational tempo is increasing, service members are growing exhausted without relief, and rotations may not come until early 2027 (or even later). Meanwhile, stocks of precision-guided weapons are not being replenished.

When the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln recently pulled into port in Thailand after a 286-day deployment – one of the longest in the U.S. Navy's modern history – sailors complained about poor living conditions, a lack of variety in their food, and their deteriorating psychological state. Trump, however, responded that the carrier had been at sea for “not long enough.”

Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle said outright that the Navy could not sustain the current level of operations against Iran with no end date in sight and sailors already stretched to their limits. Even U.S. convoys helping tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz are now operating on a limited schedule and no longer providing 24-hour air-defense coverage. The United States is, of course, still capable of waging war against Iran, but its problems are mounting — and not only in the Middle East. As forces have been pulled in from other regions, deterrence of other potential U.S. adversaries, above all China and Russia, has weakened, generals warn.

Generals vs. the secretary

The resource shortage is compounded by strained relations between the secretary and the military leadership. For the past year and a half, Hegseth has systematically purged the top brass, removing officers he considers disloyal to his political agenda.

Although the U.S. military is subordinate to civilian political leaders, the armed forces have traditionally enjoyed considerable professional autonomy. The assessments of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have often differed from what politicians wanted to hear, and military leaders themselves handled operational planning and execution, assessed military risks, developed doctrine and standards, and made promotion recommendations.

Trump and Hegseth began “purging” the military leadership almost immediately after the current administration came into office. The president fired Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Brown, while Hegseth ousted then-Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and several other senior commanders — without making any allegations of misconduct against them. Brown later indirectly criticized the administration for politicizing military appointments.

More recently, Hegseth has shifted from firing officers to controlling who gets promoted. He has personally intervened in promotion lists drawn up by the military, removing many officers he considers unacceptable. According to media reports, participation in programs connecting with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was among the reasons some officers fell out of favor. In one instance, Hegseth removed all three women and two African American officers from a list of candidates for rear admiral. During the war with Iran, Hegseth also forced Army Chief of Staff Randy George to retire.

For the officers who remain, this inevitably raises the question of where the line now lies between professional assessments of their service and political loyalty. The upheaval in the Army continued when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll left his post in late August. The civilian head of the Army and one of its leading advocates for accelerated modernization, Driscoll was also Hegseth’s biggest rival for influence — and a potential successor as SecDef.

However, the personnel shakeups have not eliminated professional disagreements within the military leadership. As reported by U.S. media, in August the commanders of European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, and Southern Command, along with the Chief of Naval Operations, formally objected to extending the deployments of some forces stationed in their regions.

This was not a refusal to follow orders — which the generals and admirals were still required to carry them out. However, they still made clear that they considered the decision risky. Hegseth has yet to respond, and the dissenting commanders remain in their posts for now.

Where are the weapons, Hegseth?!

Personnel conflicts are only part of the problem. Even setting aside Hegseth’s relationship with the generals and its impact on military readiness, the armed forces simply lack sufficient ammunition and equipment. The U.S. is burning through its expensive weapons far faster than the American defense industry can replenish them. Meanwhile, cheap Iranian drones are creating a stark cost imbalance between offense and defense: Tehran can force the United States and its allies to spend many times more to intercept a drone than it costs to launch one.

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has already expended 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles used against fortified targets, along with more than 1,000 missiles for Patriot air-defense systems and THAAD interceptors. In addition, CNN has reported that by August the United States had used about half of its prewar stockpile of Patriot missiles and roughly 80% of its THAAD interceptors. The U.S. also lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper heavy drones – about a quarter of its prewar fleet — as the slow, expensive UAVs proved relatively easy targets for Iran and its allies.

The United States has not only reduced its ability to strike, but also left its regional allies without adequate air defenses. They were willing to spend their oil revenues on American systems, but there are no longer enough of the systems to go around. It is hardly surprising that the Gulf monarchies are now turning to Ukraine for technology and expertise in countering cheap drones – the very experience Kyiv has gained through years of war with Russia.

The United States is learning the same lesson. The global drone market was already valued at $20 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed $50 billion by 2034. The U.S. intends to take a leading position, albeit belatedly, with the Pentagon investing about $1 billion in the Drone Dominance initiative to produce up to 200,000 attack drones by 2027. Young people who until recently competed in drone racing are now winning half-billion-dollar Pentagon contracts to produce “killer drones” costing $5,000 apiece, and a whole new crop of companies is vying for billions of dollars being distributed by the Pentagon.

By 2034, the global drone market is expected to exceed $50 billion, and the United States wants to take a leading position

But once again, the key issue is Hegseth's arbitrary personnel shakeups, which could undermine combat readiness. After Randy George was forced out, the Army’s new leadership disbanded a 600-member experimental battalion that had spent nearly a year specializing in drone warfare — in part by absorbing lessons from Ukraine.

The Pentagon says a dedicated unit is no longer necessary and that drone skills should be spread throughout the Army. But lawmakers from both parties are demanding an explanation for why the experiment is being ended now, during a war in which cheap Iranian drones have become one of the main threats to U.S. forces.

Hegseth did not create the shortage, but he did arrive in the Pentagon promising to revive the defense industry, overhaul the procurement system, and speed up the adoption of new technologies. Instead, innovation is moving slowly — with any actual progress occurring almost in spite of a leadership that is disbanding specialized units. The military’s inability to replenish its losses is increasingly becoming a problem for which Hegseth bears primary responsibility.

Preparing for the last war

It is still too early to say that the personnel policies implemented by Hegseth and Trump have significantly weakened the U.S. armed forces. But warning signs are coming from all directions. The missile shortage, slow production, and strain on the Navy did not begin under Hegseth. As the old saying goes, U.S. generals prepared for the last war.

They were unprepared for a war of attrition against a major adversary like Iran. Hegseth, however, came to the Pentagon promising to “restore combat readiness” but is making the situation worse through personnel that appears to prioritize ideology over effectiveness. The U.S. military, for which Trump has requested a staggering $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, is working to address these shortcomings, with the Pentagon drawing up emergency plans to replenish its arsenal. Nevertheless, the political agenda pushed by Hegseth has already cost the military substantial resources and effort, and possibly lives as well.

The Secretary's politics are likely to remain the main obstacle to modernization programs and decisions. In other words, the Pentagon chief himself could become the U.S. military's biggest problem.

“Last Friday, the administration learned about the planned protest. Russian-speaking detainees from different housing units were brought together, and [the] officers openly threatened them: ‘If you’re up to something, don’t do it. You’ll regret it,’ and explicitly hinted at solitary confinement. Yesterday, those threats were carried out: four of the guys were made an example of and locked up in solitary.

Because of the direct pressure from the officers, the detainees decided not to wait until Tuesday morning and started the protest earlier. As my husband told me, the hunger strike in his block officially began with yesterday’s dinner (on the evening of Oct. 5). We’re still trying to determine the exact situation in the other units because coordination between different sections of the facility is difficult.”

Ksenia said she, her husband, and another couple were detained in Florida in February while they were on vacation.

“Border Patrol simply pulled us over on the road. As we later learned in immigration court, the car we had rented through the Turo app, where private owners rent out their vehicles, was somehow listed in some database as being connected to an offender or an undocumented immigrant. The patrol ran the license plate on the highway and immediately intercepted us.

They put us under intense psychological pressure and practically forced us to sign documents agreeing to voluntary deportation, but we flatly refused. They wouldn’t let us call our lawyers and took our phones away. The detention itself was a farce and lawless, and the way they continue to hold people is no different.

Andrei, meanwhile, had committed no offenses. He is a political asylum seeker from Russia who was persecuted there for his opposition views. At the time of his arrest, he had been living legally in the U.S. for about two years, working, paying taxes, and had no criminal record..”

According to Ksenia, Andrei and the other man with them were taken directly to an immigration detention facility after their arrest, while their wives were taken to an office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where officials released them after checking their documents and confirming that the women were in the country legally.

“They told us: we have no idea why you were detained in the first place. We asked: ‘Then maybe you can release our husbands, too?’ They said that once the men had already been taken into detention, there was nothing they could do and we would have to hire lawyers.”

As The Insider previously reported, a group of Russian citizens held at Folkston D. Ray James produced a report describing harsh conditions at the facility, including a lack of clean drinking water and negligent medical care. Several dozen detainees launched a hunger strike in protest.

“According to the investigator, the criminal case has been closed,” Biryukov said, explaining that the case was dropped because investigators found no elements of a crime in Moniava’s actions.

Moniava had been charged under Russia’s wartime censorship law criminalizing the “public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Russian armed forces,” a provision introduced after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and which is widely used against individuals who engage in antiwar speech or who share journalistic reporting that contradicts the Kremlin’s official version of events.

The law has been used to imprison scores of Russians for their antiwar statements, including opposition politician Ilya Yashin, artist Sasha Skochilenko, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and former Moscow municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov. (Yashin, Skochilenko, and Kurmasheva were released as part of a prisoner exchange between Moscow and the West in August 2024, while Gorinov remains in prison.)

Moniava was detained on Sept. 2 after law enforcement officials searched her home. Investigators alleged that she had posted in her public Telegram channel what they described as “knowingly false information” about Russian military actions against Ukrainian civilians. In February, Moniava had already been fined 45,000 rubles ($530) for “discrediting” the Russian military in three Telegram posts.

In 2020, the “Dom s Mayakom” children’s hospice was inspected by the Interior Ministry’s drug control division. The institution was found to have violated rules governing the handling of narcotic drugs under Article 6.16 of Russia’s Administrative Code and was fined 200,000 rubles (around $2,800 at the time). The Moscow City Court later overturned the penalty, ruling that the violation was minor.

Moniava has worked in the nonprofit sector since 2008. She co-founded the “Dom s Mayakom” hospice with prominent Russian palliative care advocate Nyuta Federmesser, becoming head of the foundation in 2018.

Former U.S. Secret Service agent Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos discussed his work on the laptop investigation during a presentation in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2024. RFE/RLobtained video of the event from a former Oxygen Forensics employee.

The Washington Examiner had commissioned Dimitrelos to conduct the analysis and published its findings in May and June 2022. When speaking about that work in 2024, Dimitrelos said:

“Oxygen is my number one tool. It's the only tool that I use. It's the only tool that I teach. I love it.”

Dimitrelos added that he had recovered over 160,000 deleted files, more than any other investigators had found.

Oxygen software has been used by the U.S. Department of Defense, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security, among others. The U.S. Secret Service terminated a five-year contract with the company in February, citing “security risks,” but the State Department nevertheless signed a new contract with Oxygen Forensics in late August.

The same software, sold in Russia under the name “Mobilny Kriminalist,” is supplied to the Federal Security Service (FSB) by Russian company MCO Systems and has been used in politically motivated cases in Russia. On Sept. 23, the U.S. Justice Department charged Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber and Chief Technology Officer Oleg Davydov of concealing that Russian citizens effectively controlled the company through a Cyprus offshore entity. Reiber was released on bail in Idaho, while Davydov is awaiting extradition to the United States after being detained at London’s Heathrow Airport.

According to prosecutors, the company’s shareholders discussed possible cooperation with the Russian state in early 2023, as evidenced by a document titled “General Staff, Citadel.” 

The Insider previously reported that the FSB used “Mobilny Kriminalist” to gain access to the iPhone of RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who in July 2024 was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian armed forces. Kurmasheva was subsequently released alongside former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and multiple others in a 26-person prisoner exchange between Russia and the West on Aug. 1, 2024.

On Oct. 1 of this year, The Telegraph reported that the London Metropolitan police had used Oxygen software at least 40 times over the previous year to access suspects’ phones. Law enforcement agencies in several European countries have stopped using the company’s software after the reports emerged about the company’s secret Russian owners.

The state now separately funds organizations that seek out and recruit people for the war in Ukraine. The Insider examined court records, NGO reports, procurement requests, and internal materials from recruitment agencies, reconstructing the chain through which some of this money flows – from regional budgets to intermediaries and ultimately to the individuals who bring recruits directly to military enlistment offices.

A million rubles per head: the cannon-fodder market

As recently as 2024, Ivanovo’s Center for Creative Solutions was engaged in activities that had little to do with military recruitment. For example, the organization ran a quiz called “Favorite Ivanovo Region” at polling stations during the presidential election, with prizes including tickets to sporting events and a car. Another of its projects, “Urban Treasures: A Family Quest,” received a regional grant of almost 1 million rubles (almost $12,000).

On July 4, 2025, Ivanovo businessman Dmitry Gruzdev took over as head of the organization. That same month, the regional budget allocated funds for an entirely different purpose: “financing costs associated with providing services to attract and select candidates for military service under contract.” The Center for Creative Solutions was among the recipients of this funding.

The Insider found that a November 2025 order by the regional government awarded the center a 260 million ruble ($3.1 million) subsidy specifically for recruiting and selecting prospective contract soldiers. The sums it received were on an entirely different scale from its previous earnings from civilian quizzes.

In 2025, the organization received 1.06 billion rubles ($12.5 million), and a similar amount under the same budget line was awarded by the Moscow Region government to the non-profit Dobryye Dela (Good Deeds), which then passed the money on to its contractor, Russia's Agency for Communication Strategies.

As is often the case, the Center for Creative Solutions and Dobryye Dela appear to be the main distributors of budget funds to a long chain of other organizations. They outsource most of the work to private contractors, who in turn often subcontract it. 

One such subcontractor emerged through an ordinary commercial dispute. In February 2026, Nizhny Novgorod businessman Alexander Kondratyev sued the center in the Nizhny Novgorod Region Arbitration Court, seeking 24.78 million rubles ($297,000) in unpaid debt. Court documents identify the contract as being for the “provision of services to attract and select candidates for military service under contract.” In March, the parties reached a settlement, with the Center for Creative Solutions acknowledging the full amount of the debt.

The court documents make it possible to determine how much the recruiter earned per contract soldier, as the debt was the result of two certificates of completed work. Kondratyev was owed 12.98 million rubles ($153,000) for November and another 11.8 million ($139,000) for the first half of December.

Both sums divide evenly by 590,000 rubles: the first amounts to 22 such payments and the second to 20. In other words, Kondratyev appears to have been paid 590,000 rubles (just under $7,000) for each contract recruit, with the two certificates covering 42 people.

In virtually all similar schemes in different regions examined by The Insider, recruiters are paid only after a candidate signs a contract, and the commission varies considerably. For example, at the previously mentioned Agency for Communication Strategies, one of the largest recruitment organizations, a recruiter gets 1.25 million rubles ($14,700) for a person who signs a contract through Moscow. Through Orenburg, the rate is 850,000 rubles ($10,000) “per head”; through Voronezh, 680,000 ($8,000); and through Balashikha, 530,000 ($6,250). In other areas, the rates ranged from 150,000 to 450,000 rubles ($1,750 to $5,300).

Debtors, addicts, bankrupts: recruiters target the vulnerable

Instructions for recruiters from the Agency for Communication Strategies (ACS) reveal who makes up the main pool of prospective contract soldiers. Its “target audiences” include former prisoners and Wagner PMC members, bankrupts, clients of microfinance organizations, residents of economically depressed regions, 18- and 19-year-olds with limited educational prospects, people with gambling or substance addictions, and “socially vulnerable groups.” They also include people who face legal trouble, particularly if they have not yet been convicted.

ACS advises recruiters to seek potential targets through advertising platforms and by buying ads in social media communities.

A recruit’s suitability directly affects the payment: if a prospective soldier fails a stricter medical examination in one region, he can simply be sent to another. An internal ACS information sheet divides medical commissions into “strict,” “moderate,” “lenient,” and “very lenient.”

Moscow, for example, is listed as having a strict commission. Voronezh, on the other hand, is described as “very lenient,” accepting recruits people with hepatitis A, B, or C, HIV, and “serious medical conditions subject to approval that would disqualify them in other regions.”

“Very lenient” Voronezh accepts people with hepatitis A, B, or C, HIV, and “serious medical conditions subject to approval”

Ufa’s commission is also described as “very lenient”: candidates with hepatitis, psoriasis, HIV, and “serious medical conditions subject to approval” may be accepted there. Orenburg and Cheboksary, meanwhile, are designated as merely “lenient.”

Under certain conditions, candidates with a Group III disability, diabetes, hypertension, missing organs, blindness in one eye, psychiatric or addiction records, signs of self-harm, or a history of tuberculosis may still be eligible to sign a contract.

Bonuses for recruiters

Although organizations like the Center for Creative Solutions and the Agency for Communication Strategies do not recruit soldiers themselves, they do provide smaller private businesses with the infrastructure for recruitment: up to 400,000 rubles ($4,700) per recruit, along with “ready-made creatives,” CRM, scripts, and training for new recruiters. The service works with candidates for contract military service from across Russia and attempts to maximize the number of contracts signed through Moscow, where bonus payments are higher.

For people looking to sign a contract, the organization can select a destination, arrange travel, meet them on arrival, and help with accommodation, food, medical examinations, and paperwork.

The page for prospective recruiters states the job’s purpose plainly: “The partner’s task is to get the candidate to sign a contract.” Payment is tied to that outcome – “for one signed contract.” The site promises that earnings are “unlimited.”

The Contract Call service is run by sole proprietor Fyodor Shchepetov, whose main business is “other personnel recruitment.” Public sources identify Shchepetov as a political consultant, conflict-resolution specialist, and internet technologist. He also serves on the public council of Rosprirodnadzor, Russia’s environmental regulator.

The demand for personnel in military recruitment is clearly substantial. Recent job postings offer “military recruiters” up to 300,000 rubles ($3,550) for each contract recruit they bring in, with no experience required and training provided. The job involves handling incoming inquiries, conducting initial interviews, “working with objections,” and managing candidates in Bitrix24 through to the final result.

“Military recruiters” are offered up to 300,000 rubles per contract recruit, with no experience required

The Agency for Communication Strategies has also launched a referral program called “Bring a Colleague.” Partners are promised an additional 100,000 rubles ($1,200) if a recruiter they refer brings in someone who signs a contract through Moscow, and 50,000 rubles ($600) if the contract is signed through another region.

In short, the agency pays not only for new contract soldiers but also for new recruiters who supply them. According to ACS itself, more than 250 “partners” work with the organization, and it has helped arrange more than 6,000 contracts.

How much does it cost the state to recruit one soldier?

There is no fixed price per recruit in this market, as payments vary widely from region to region. Much also depends on the numerous intermediaries involved. In the schemes examined by The Insider, recruiters who directly bring candidates to the point of signing a contract can receive the ruble equivalent on more than $10,000, but a substantial share of the money is absorbed by the intermediary organizations participating in the process.

Adding only the recruiter’s fee and the contract soldier’s enlistment bonus, the total can be much higher. For example, for a contract signed through St. Petersburg, ACS promises the soldier 4.5 million rubles ($53,000) and the recruiter 150,000 ($1,750). According to Re:Russia’s calculations, by mid-May 2026 the average “effective” bonus in the regions where a large share of contracts are signed had reached about 2.74 million rubles ($32,300).

In some schemes, the two visible payments – to the contract soldier and the recruiter – already total 4.65 million rubles per person

The scale of the spending becomes even more evident when these sums are compared with the rate at which the army is being replenished. CSIS estimates that in 2026 Russia has been recruiting an average of 27,000 new service members a month. Applying Re:Russia’s estimate of an average effective bonus of 2.74 million rubles, one-time payments to new contract soldiers alone would amount to about 74 billion rubles a month ($872.4 million).

As for recruiters, even using 300,000 rubles ($3,550) per contract soldier as a rough benchmark would put direct payments to the middlemen at more than 8 billion rubles ($94.3 million) a month.

After four years of war, Russia has built a system in which the army’s need for manpower has created a rapidly growing market fueled by public money. A region allocates the funds, an intermediary gets the contract, a recruiter searches for “leads,” and a person placed at the disposal of the Russian military machine.

As long as the Russian army continues to suffer losses, this market will persist. The state may even increase its funding, and professional recruitment agencies will devise ever more “creative” approaches to get their share of the outlays.

Hanning headed the BND from December 1998 to November 2005. According to prosecutors, in 2010 Hanning made an arrangement with Manfred D. to receive information from the BND in exchange for payment.

Hanning intended to use the documents he received in his private consulting business. From 2010 to 2022, he obtained approximately 2,000 documents this way, many of them classified.

These materials were intended solely for the BND’s internal use and included, among other things, data from situational briefings. According to information from the German outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR, the documents included materials from foreign partner agencies, documents on Iran’s nuclear program, and documents on the Russian military.

In at least one instance, Hanning is known to have prepared a security report for an unnamed foreign intelligence service (not a Russian one, according to media reports).

Meanwhile, after leaving the BND, Hanning made at least seven trips to Russia, The Insider found — all of them within the period from 2015 to 2019.

Often, Hanning would fly into Moscow in the evening and fly out the next day. In the summer of 2016 he flew from Munich to Moscow on the evening of July 6 and flew out to Berlin on the afternoon of July 7. A  similar trip between Berlin and Moscow took place in May 2019.

The investigation into Hanning has continued for several months. He came to the attention of law enforcement last year in connection with his possible involvement in the abduction of the children of Hamburg businesswoman Christina Block. As part of that case, Hanning’s home was searched in September 2025; some of the BND documents were found during those searches. 

“The purpose of this document is to bring public attention to lawlessness, discrimination, torture and punishment… The purpose of this prison is to deport as many people as possible and create conditions in which it is impossible to defend one’s case in immigration court,” the report’s authors, Aleksei Kovalko and Aleksandr Borovkov, wrote.

The document lists the following violations:

• detainees are locked in cells every day with the doors secured and no way to call for help if needed
• denial of medical care, including dental care, with “people surviving for years on painkillers” 
• poor-quality food that the authors say contributes to health problems, including diabetes and food allergies
• spoiled food and water, with bottled water unavailable to detainees even through the commissary
• denial of outdoor recreation and lack of access to sunlight and fresh air
• difficulty obtaining phone calls and letters frequently failing to arrive
• a ban on using electronic devices has left detainees unable to access documents necessary for immigration court proceedings
• abusive behavior by the facility’s staff, including shouting, threats, and humiliation
• noise and lights at night that prevent detainees from getting normal sleep

The report is dated Sept. 14. A source familiar with the situation told The Insider that on Oct. 6, a group of 50 to 60 detainees (including several who signed the report), planned to go on hunger strike to protest the ongoing violation of their rights.

From Brown-Séquard to Altos Labs

1889. Seventy-two-year-old French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injected himself with an extract from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and said he had experienced a “return of strength and increased capacity for work.” A century later, calculations showed that the dose of testosterone in the extract was roughly four orders of magnitude below what was required, meaning any result was merely a function of the placebo effect.

1903–1907. Russian biologist Ilya Mechnikov founded scientific gerontology and the doctrine of orthobiosis (a complete and happy life cycle ending in a peaceful natural death). In 1904, he delivered a lecture in Paris titled “Old Age,” linking aging to putrefactive bacteria in the large intestine while attributing Bulgarian longevity to the consumption of sour milk.

A year later, Bulgarian microbiologist Stamen Grigorov isolated from Bulgarian yogurt the bacterium that would be named Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Mechnikov embraced the discovery, consumed a pure culture of the bacterium himself for the rest of his life, and set out his sour-milk hypothesis in his 1907 Studies of Optimism. The hypothesis quickly became a commercial proposition as sellers of fermented dairy products promised customers longevity long before there was any evidence to support the claim.

1912–1937. German physiologist Eugen Steinach began performing vasectomies on elderly men, believing the procedure would increase the production of sex hormones. More than a hundred Viennese doctors and professors underwent it. Sigmund Freud opted for the procedure at 67, while William Butler Yeats did so at 69 and claimed to have experienced a “second puberty,” prompting the press to dub him an “old man with glands.” But this, too, proved to be a placebo effect.

1920. French surgeon Serge Voronoff performed the first transplantation of chimpanzee testicular tissue into a human, and by the early 1930s, more than 500 men in France and thousands worldwide had undergone this form of “rejuvenation.” But by 1935 it had become clear that the transplanted tissue was rejected and that the reported improvements were due to autosuggestion.

1926–1928. Russian physician Alexander Bogdanov founded the world’s first blood transfusion institute in Moscow and experimented on himself with blood exchanges involving other people, seeing them as a means of “physiological collectivism.” In 1928, the experiments ended with his death – the result of one of the exchange transfusions.

1930–1946. Ukrainian pathophysiologist Alexander Bogomolets linked longevity to the condition of connective tissue and won government backing to produce antireticular cytotoxic serum (a preparation intended to stimulate wound healing and slow aging). He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941 and the title of Hero of Labor in 1944. In 1946, Bogomolets died at 65, and four years later his doctrine was declared unscientific.

2013–2026. Google founded Calico to study the biology of aging, while Yuri Milner’s Altos Labs raised $3 billion for life-extension research. In the U.S., the PROSPR program support efforts to extend people’s lifespan and healthspan.

A lifelong experiment

In 2020, the WHO counted one billion people over 60 worldwide. By 2030, it projects, that number will reach 1.4 billion, and by 2050, 2.1 billion. Over the same period, the number of people over 80 will triple to 426 million.

Life-extension research, however, still faces several natural obstacles. To prove that a technology has actually added years to someone’s life, it is necessary to wait for those years to pass, meaning trials can take decades, with control groups numbering in the tens of thousands aging alongside the study groups. An experiment capable of demonstrating an effect can outlive both its investor and its principal investigator.

To prove that a technology has actually added years to someone’s life, you have to wait for those years to pass

It is hardly surprising, then, that of the three measures of longevity – how long someone lives, how long they remain in good health, and how much their lab markers change – the market is most interested in the third. This creates demand for markers that change within months and can provide a rough estimate of future effects. 

Along with that demand comes the temptation to pass off a surrogate marker as a real result.

A serious attempt: epigenetic clocks

Researchers are constantly working on surrogate measures that reliably reflect biological aging. So far, the most successful example is the epigenetic clock. The model was trained to estimate a person’s age from chemical markers on their DNA that change predictably over time. 

The first such clocks were published in 2013: a universal clock, developed by U.S. researcher Steve Horvath and designed to work with data from any tissue in the body, and one developed by fellow American Gregory Hannum using data from blood cells. In the second generation, PhenoAge (2018) and GrimAge (2019), the model learned to predict mortality and disease rather than simply chronological age. The third generation, the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock (2022), measures the rate of biological aging: the number of biological years a person ages in a single calendar year.

There are three main criticisms of epigenetic clocks. Early versions showed considerable variability when the same sample was analyzed again: results depended on the reagent batch and the laboratory, so the same test tube could produce age estimates differing by several years. In 2022, the clocks were recalibrated, reducing that variability.

The second criticism is that it is impossible to predict how long any particular person will live. Mortality is higher among people with faster-running clocks than among those with slower ones. But this does not work as a practical prediction for any one person, because lifespan is shaped by genetics, past illnesses, lifestyle, and chance, while the model is trained on an average population pattern.

Lifespan is shaped by genetics, past illnesses, lifestyle and chance, while the model is trained on an average population pattern

The third criticism focuses on the divergence between different clock models. Horvath’s clock may show the same person as younger than their chronological age, while GrimAge may show them as older. Which is closer to the truth, and what accounts for the discrepancy, remain subjects of debate.

All of these are examples of a broader problem that can be illustrated by one story. Patients who have suffered a heart attack often develop irregular heart rhythms – extra beats visible on an ECG. In the 1980s, drugs emerged that eliminated these irregularities, making the ECG look more normal. But when a trial was completed, the drug group turned out to have twice as many deaths as the placebo group.

A measure used in an experiment becomes evidence only after it has been validated against actual outcomes – and epigenetic clocks have yet to reach that point.

Why the U.S. does not approve anti-aging drugs

The U.S. is the world’s largest market in the field of anti-aging biotech. In 2024, it was home to 57% of the world’s longevity companies and accounted for 84% of all venture investment in the sector.

But the U.S. drug-approval system requires a treatment to be indicated for a specific disease on the FDA’s list – diabetes, hypertension, dementia, and so on. Aging is not on the list and is mentioned only as a risk factor for actual illnesses, meaning a company developing a molecule that targets the mechanisms of aging has to choose a disease on the FDA’s list and prove the drug works against it. As a result, the anti-aging industry talks about defeating aging, while the regulatory filings for drugs developed for that purpose list conditions such as “heart failure” or “liver fibrosis.”

To resolve this contradiction, scientists proposed the TAME trial, which the FDA approved 15 years ago. Three thousand people aged 65–79 will be divided into two groups and followed for six years at 14 research centers. One group will take metformin, the other a placebo.

It might seem like a routine study, but instead of measuring a single disease, the researchers propose tracking several outcomes at once: heart attacks and strokes, cancer, dementia, and death. They hope that slowing aging will show up across several diseases at once, and if successful, the study would give regulators a framework for evaluating such drugs. Unfortunately, its launch is still delayed, as the organizers are still raising funds.

Meanwhile, life-extension drugs for dogs are already being approved in the U.S. Loyal is developing LOY-002, a drug for dogs over 10, with its indication stated explicitly: life extension. In February 2025, the FDA’s veterinary division agreed that the data submitted were sufficient to support such a claim, and a second drug targeting the same goal has also received FDA support.

The difference lies in the more flexible requirements: unlike human drugs, veterinary drugs can receive conditional approval while developers continue to collect data. And a dog’s lifespan fits within a timeframe that is foreseeable for both the company and its investors.

Candidate No. 1

The first approved geroprotector for humans may turn out to be a drug already sitting on pharmacy shelves. At a conference on aging in Copenhagen in the summer of 2025, executives from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly suggested an idea later echoed in an editorial in Nature Biotechnology: GLP-1 receptor agonists – semaglutide and related drugs – could well become the first longevity drugs.

In patients with obesity and diabetes, these drugs reduce overall mortality and cardiovascular events, with only about one-third of the cardiovascular benefit being explained by weight loss. The rest is attributed to anti-inflammatory and other mechanisms – effects that act throughout the body.

In a study of 108 participants, semaglutide slowed the rate of aging measured by DunedinPACE by about 9%. The author, however, makes an important qualification: slowing individual biological processes and rejuvenating a person are two entirely different things. “We’re not saying that semaglutide reverses aging or makes people younger. We’re seeing a signal that it may slow some biological processes of aging,” cautions Michael Corley, the study’s lead author.

Things are finally moving

In the spring of 2026, the U.S. agency ARPA-H awarded up to $144 million under its PROSPR program to seven recipients: four university teams and three biotech companies.

The interventions being tested are unremarkable: metformin, rapamycin, semaglutide, and calorie restriction. Nothing exotic – all the drugs have long been approved for other indications, and half are available at regular pharmacies. Yet the agency has agreed to use functional changes as outcomes: how fast a person walks, how they perform on cognitive tests, how well they maintain their independence, and how often they are hospitalized.

One team is developing a composite measure designed to predict mortality, disease onset, and hospitalization over a 20-year horizon, and a Phase 3 trial will test whether three approved drugs slow age-related declines in physical and mental function in healthy people over 60. Biomarkers are also part of the program – including chemical markers on DNA – but their role is secondary; they will be measured against functional outcomes.

PROSPR is built around the goal of evaluating trial results within three years using measurements that can be taken at home with wearable devices. It is a direct attempt to solve the problem at the heart of this story: the endpoint lies decades in the future, while money and human resources are spent for years.

The program’s goal is stated openly: to pave the way for the approval of drugs that target aging itself. In parallel, in 2024 the agency launched the PATH project for the Buck Institute (with a contract worth up to $52 million).

In other words, a precedent has been set. For the first time, the government has funded an effort to answer a question that had been sidestepped for more than a century: can a person at 70 retain the abilities they had at 60? And how can that be measured in a way that regulators will accept?

The bigger the budget, the fewer the promises

Companies investing serious money in the fight against aging tend to be cautious and avoid grand promises. Life Biosciences raised $80 million and took its cellular rejuvenation program into clinical trials for a narrow indication – optic neuropathy, with the effect assessed by an ophthalmologist based on the patient’s vision.

Altos Labs launched in January 2022 with $3 billion from Yuri Milner, Jeff Bezos, and ARCH Venture Partners. Its president, Hans Bishop, made clear at the time that the company was focused on extending healthy life, while extending overall lifespan would be an “incidental consequence.” It was a disarming formulation: a company with a budget the size of a small country’s was distancing itself from the promise of a longer life that anti-aging clinics routinely sell.

Calico, founded by Google in September 2013 to defeat aging, remained silent about its results for 12 years. In November 2025, its partner AbbVie ended the collaboration after investing about $1.75 billion in the research, but its drug, Fosigotifator, failed trials as a treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In other words, the most highly funded anti-aging effort of the decade ended in a very public failure.

Clinics, meanwhile, have no qualms about aggressively marketing rejuvenation services: hormone therapy, cellular treatments, infusions, and biomarker panels. MIT Technology Review describes the market as being built around interventions that lack evidence. The market’s poster boy is billionaire Bryan Johnson, who has turned the daily publication of his own test results into a genre of its own.

The offshore biohacking bonanza

Over the past 12 years, aging research has received funding on a scale that gerontologists of the last century could only have dreamed of, but the money has come from a relatively small circle. Calico was founded with funding from Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Altos Labs received $3 billion from Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences. All these people have one thing in common: they can buy almost anything except extra years of life.

They and their somewhat less wealthy peers are buying anti-aging treatments for themselves. Ambrosia once offered clients plasma from young donors for $8,000 a liter or $12,000 for two liters, but in February 2019 the FDA warned that the procedure had not been tested in clinical trials and that it carried risks of infection, allergic reaction, and adverse cardiovascular effects. The company shut down that same day.

On the Caribbean island of Roatán in Honduras, startup Minicircle offers gene therapy to boost production of the protein follistatin for $25,000 per injection. The treatment has no FDA approval, the company has published very few clinical-trial results, and it chose the site in a special economic zone with looser regulations. Bryan Johnson underwent the therapy himself for free, but neuroscientist Christine Glorioso put her conclusion bluntly in Fortune: interventions like these will sooner or later kill someone through cancer or liver failure.

Fountain Life, a clinic founded by Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins, sells an annual program for $19,500–$21,500 that includes whole-body MRI, a CT scan of the heart’s blood vessels, more than 100 blood markers, genome sequencing, and epigenetic tests. Across the industry, annual costs range from $10,000 to $150,000. Johnson himself spends about $2 million a year on his protocol.

In short, the people whose companies spend years guiding drugs through the approval process and carefully framing their claims about extending life are themselves buying treatments that sidestep that process: transfusions of other people’s plasma, injections on an island governed by looser regulations, and annual memberships built around dozens of tests. Billionaires’ money is funding both halves of the industry at once – genuine science in the laboratory and the sale of hope in the clinic.

Putin’s modest anti-aging program

Russia is trying to address these challenges through the national project “New Technologies for Health Preservation.” It comprises five federal projects: management of medical science, development of drugs and medical devices, biomedical and cognitive technologies, and production of medicines in demand. The fifth, particularly interesting project is titled “Regenerative Biomedicine, Preventive Medicine Technologies Ensuring Active and Healthy Longevity.”

The program was designed by Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute and brother of an oligarch believed to be Vladimir Putin's money manager. The genomics program is overseen by Putin's daughter Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist by training.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the program brings together tissue bioprinting, cryotechnologies, xenotransplantation (using organs grown in mini-pigs), and gene therapy targeting cellular aging. Its stated goal is to save 175,000 lives by the end of the decade.

Estimates of the project’s cost vary widely. The WSJ put the program at $26 billion, though when the national project was launched, industry media reported that a mere 210 billion rubles ($2.5 billion) would be allocated. As elsewhere in the world, the hype is backed by little substance. Only about 1.85 billion rubles ($22 million) is earmarked through 2030 for work directly related to aging and longevity. 

Alexander Ostrovsky, who founded Invitro and 3D Bioprinting Solutions before leaving Russia in 2022, summed it up succinctly: “If there are no publications, there are no real results, and their claims should probably be viewed as aspirations, if not dreams.” 

The identity of the main client, meanwhile, is well known: Putin. After all, he is the one who told Xi Jinping about the possibility of extending human life to 150 years.

130 years later

Ostrovsky’s remark goes to the heart of every life-extension project. Since Brown-Séquard, technologies and budgets have changed dramatically, but the pattern remains the same: promises outpace evidence, and instead of demonstrating longer lives, scientists point to changes in individual parameters that can be measured quickly.

The 72-year-old physiologist’s sense of well-being, the number of patients treated with Bogomolets’ serum, the number of technologies introduced under the national project, the figure on a biohacking clinic report – all are measures of activity, while the real question is how many additional years people actually live. In Russia, where men live about 68 years on average, longevity is a pressing issue. And how success is measured matters: by the number of technologies introduced or by the number of people who reach 70 in good health.

The Russian program lists technologies and funding and expects results by 2030. But there is no sign of publications, controlled trials, or clearly defined endpoints. Nor is it clear what will happen to its funding amid sanctions and the protracted war.

The U.S. PROSPR program differs in one crucial respect: experts agreed in advance on how trial success would be measured and chose criteria that people themselves can assess. Walking speed, memory, independence, and hospitalization rates are measurable outcomes that directly reflect health.

In a few years, we will know whether the program works, and the answer may well be disappointing. Metformin and rapamycin may well prove to have no beneficial effect on healthy people in their 60s, but even such an outcome would still provide the first real answer in 130 years to the question of whether life can be extended – instead of yet another empty promise of immortality.

The criminal case against Melekhin stemmed from a post in the Telegram channel “Bobr. There and back (an immigration diary),” run by fellow Perm activist Leonid Bobrov. The post showed Melekhin shortly after he crossed into the United States alongside an image of a poster depicting a mannequin hanging by a rope and a photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The poster read:

“V.V. Putin is a murderer, fascist and usurper. All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Hang the fascist.”

The post appeared in August 2024, the same month Melekhin tried to enter the United States through the Mexican border in the hopes of receiving political asylum. He was placed in immigration detention before being denied asylum in the summer of 2025 and then arrested after being deported back to Russia.

Melekhin’s trial had been held behind closed doors since early May. Prosecutors later added a second count over an online comment whose contents have not been disclosed. Both episodes were classified as justification of terrorism under Russian law.

Before leaving Russia, Melekhin had repeatedly been detained by police for taking part in protests. The detentions continued through late 2023, prompting him to emigrate.

At a briefing for journalists on Oct. 5, Peskov urged participants “to ignore various rumors and speculation” about plague in the Irkutsk Region and instead rely on official statements from the consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor:

“We have Rospotrebnadzor, where top professionals in this field work — let’s listen to their official statements.”

A few hours earlier, the Russian business outlet Kommersant had cited  Axios, writing that the Trump administration was monitoring reports of a possible plague outbreak in Russia. Twenty-five minutes later, the Telegram post and the news item on the Kommersant website were deleted.

In recent days, the REN TV federal network deleted all five of its posts about plague in the Irkutsk Region, as was noted by the independent outlet Lyudi Baikala. Two of them had already been indexed by the TGStat service.

One of the stories reported that Darya Shipilova, a laboratory technician at the Anti-Plague Institute in Irkutsk, had worked with strains of the plague pathogen and studied the body’s immune response to the infection. Another post, citing a source, reported that a patient suspected of having plague had died at a district hospital in the Irkutsk Region.

Rospotrebnadzor denies there is an outbreak in the region. On Oct. 4, the agency said Shipilova had died of “pneumonia of an undetermined type” and assured the public that “the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk Region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable.”

Public officials, too, have been deleting or editing statements about the plague. In a Telegram post dated Oct. 3, Baikalsk authorities asked residents to temporarily avoid traveling to Shelekhov and nearby towns because of “unofficial information about a confirmed case of plague infection in a person.” The post was available for almost two hours.

In addition, on Oct. 2 Buryatia Governor Alexey Tsydenov stated on the state-backed messenger Max that a woman in the Irkutsk Region “had died of plague.” He later edited the message, adding the word “possibly.” On his Telegram channel, Tsydenov published the already-edited post with the softened wording.

Despite official statements, hospitals in Irkutsk have begun introducing quarantine measures, as The Insider wrote on Oct. 4. On Oct. 5, the spread of quarantine measures continued. Lyudi Baikala reported, citing hospital patients, that restrictions had been introduced at the Irkutsk Regional Psychoneurological Dispensary.

Amid reports of a plague outbreak in the Irkutsk Region, Central Asian countries have begun tightening sanitary controls at their border with Russia, and Uzbekistan has introduced similar measures despite the fact that it does not share a land border with Russia. Enhanced sanitary and quarantine controls were also introduced by Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

This past spring saw reports that Russian authorities had attempted to conceal an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the country. Officials had announced an outbreak of pasteurellosis and rabies among cattle amid quarantine measures and the mass culling of animals. Additionally, authorities had imposed bans on moving livestock and exporting livestock products from several regions. However, many experts and farmers pointed out that pasteurellosis is a relatively straightforward infection that is treated with antibiotics — combating it does not require the mass killing of animals. Moreover, the government applied a five-kilometer radius for the slaughter of all susceptible livestock, as is prescribed in cases of foot-and-mouth disease.

The Insider found that Donald and his business had ties to Russia well before the VexPay episode. In 2020, ImageNPay, a company founded founded by Donald, identified Russia and other former Soviet states as key markets and used Russian programmers while attempting to enter the Russian market via the Skolkovo Innovation Center outside Moscow. 

A man named Dmitry Kuptsov also held a 27.2% stake in the British company ImageNPay. A businessman with the same name, described by Bloomberg as an Irish passport holder born in Russia, appeared in luxury real estate deals in Monaco and was also connected to ImageNPay’s circle through another Monaco company.

A7 is a Russian payment network created by Shor in cooperation with Russian state-owned Promsvyazbank, which serves Russia’s defense sector. The network’s purpose is to process international payments for Russian companies amid sanctions and restricted access to the Western financial system. As the Financial Times previously reported, from late 2024 through August 2025 the network moved more than $6.9 billion through international banks using hundreds of intermediary companies — and, according to the FT, ran an “industrial-scale forgery operation.”

On Oct. 1, the U.S. Treasury Department designated A7 as a “significant transnational criminal organization.” U.S. authorities say the network disguises payments linked to sanctioned entities as ordinary trade transactions and uses companies in third countries to gain access to the global financial system. According to the Treasury Department, A7 intermediaries processed more than $17 billion from January 2025 through June 2026.

Shor named Michael Donald as the head of VexPay – which he denies

The new documents obtained by the FT date from the period March to August 2025. They indicate that A7 representatives took part in developing VexPay in Kyrgyzstan. The project was pitched to local officials as an alternative international payment channel that would allow transactions to be processed outside the conventional SWIFT system.

According to meeting minutes, Shor introduced VexPay’s new management at an Aug. 12 meeting in Moscow and named Michael Donald as one of the platform’s executives. Donald confirmed to the FT that he attended the Moscow meeting but said he was never an employee or director of VexPay and never agreed to take the position. He said he was only advising Kyrgyz state company Processing KG on international payments, card acceptance, Apple Pay, and relations with Visa. Donald also says he has never met or spoken with Shor.

His statements contrast with the meeting minutes described by the FT, in which Shor is said to have introduced Donald to other participants as a VexPay executive. The document’s description alone, however, does not prove that Donald accepted the position or took part in any illegal activity.

Formally, VexPay is linked to Kyrgyz state company Processing KG, not A7, and the Kyrgyz side denies that the company is under outside control. The leaked documents outlined by the FT, however, show that Shor and A7 employees took part in discussions about the project’s structure, accounts, staffing, and technical setup.

The Insider finds Donald’s earlier ties to Russia and Skolkovo

Using open sources, The Insider found that as early as 2020 — five years before the meeting in Moscow, Michael Donald was actively seeking opportunities to expand his payments business in Russia. In June 2020, the official Skolkovo website published an interview with Donald in which he said ImageNPay viewed Russia and the CIS countries as key markets for the coming years and was already using a team of Russian programmers. Donald described Russia as a major fintech market and praised Russian payments developers.

ImageNPay took part in Skolkovo’s Soft-Landing program, a two-week course for foreign companies seeking to enter the Russian market. The next step could have been obtaining Skolkovo resident status, which can provide tax breaks and access to grants. In the interview, Donald called Skolkovo an excellent place for a foreign company seeking to enter the Russian market.

Donald’s ties to Russia went back even further. His public LinkedIn profile lists Moscow among his work locations and Russian among the languages he speaks. One recommendation posted on the social network says he helped arrange business contacts and distribution in Russia, including helping establish relationships with the Ritz-Carlton and Grand Havana Club in Moscow.

ImageNPay’s shareholder was born in Russia and appeared in Monaco luxury real estate deals

The Insider found that ImageNPay’s Russia ties went beyond its attempt to enter the market through Skolkovo. Corporate filings for Britain’s ImageNPay UK Limited from 2020 list Dmitry Kuptsov as a shareholder.

A document filed with Companies House on July 1, 2020, shows that after 250 ordinary shares were transferred from Switzerland’s ImageNPay AG, they were divided among four owners. Michael Donald received 127 shares, Dmitry Kuptsov 68, Mark Schlittler 42 and Xupery Limited 13. Kuptsov controlled 27.2% of ImageNPay UK, making him the second-largest shareholder after Donald, who held 50.8%.

A businessman with the same name previously appeared in a Bloomberg investigation into Monaco’s luxury real estate market. In April 2026, the outlet cited leaked emails and documents from the Mareterra development project while reporting on two little-known aviation executives: Dmitry Kuptsov and Konstantin Krivchenko. Bloomberg said both were born in Russia but hold Irish passports.

According to Bloomberg, in 2017 Kuptsov and Krivchenko planned to buy four villas in the Mareterra luxury development for 100 million euros each. Special-purpose companies were created for the purchases and were approved by Monaco authorities in late 2017. The buyers later missed payments on some of the properties and eventually scaled back their plans to a single villa of about 2,300 square meters — still replete with a hammam, sauna, movie theater, massage rooms, and a wine-tasting room. A representative for the businessmen declined to comment to Bloomberg at the time.

Bloomberg’s investigation focused on the origins of money in Monaco’s ultra-luxury property market. The outlet reviewed documents from the Mareterra project, including correspondence among the developer, notaries, banks, and prospective buyers. Bloomberg separately stressed that publication of the documents did not mean the people named in them had committed any wrongdoing.

Kuptsov’s connection to ImageNPay’s circle can also be traced through another company in Monaco corporate records. In September 2018, Dmitry Kuptsov was appointed manager of Monaco-registered FM-CRAFT, according to the official Journal de Monaco. He replaced Konstantin Krivchenko, the same person who appeared with Kuptsov in Bloomberg’s real estate investigation. The document lists Kuptsov’s Monaco address as 54 Boulevard du Jardin Exotique.

FM-CRAFT was engaged in the design, purchase, sale, import, export, and rental of pleasure yachts and related equipment. Kuptsov stepped down as manager in April 2022 and was replaced by Maria Christova Mundt.

By then, Mundt was already connected to Donald’s business. Companies House records show that she became a director of ImageNPay UK on Sept. 1, 2021, and she remains in the role. The British registry lists her address as 27 Boulevard de Belgique in Monaco, the same address that appears in the official notice of her appointment as FM-CRAFT manager. In August 2024, FM-CRAFT’s owners decided to dissolve the company early and appointed Mundt as liquidator.

Taken together, the documents show several points of overlap: Dmitry Kuptsov owned more than a quarter of Britain’s ImageNPay, a person with the same name managed FM-CRAFT in Monaco, and he was later replaced in that role by current ImageNPay director Maria Kristova Mundt.

The Insider, however, was unable to find a document bearing a unique identifier directly linking ImageNPay shareholder Dmitry Kuptsov to the person of the same name who is associated with FM-CRAFT and the Bloomberg investigation.

Two of the 13 crew members were killed, while 11 were rescued. Three of those rescued were injured.

According to a report by ZIUA de Constanța, the vessel was attacked by a drone while it was approximately 20 nautical miles (roughly 37 kilometers) from shore. The bulk carrier was transporting grain and was bound for the Italian port of Ravenna, where it was due to arrive Oct. 12. Data from the Starboard Maritime Intelligence vessel tracking platform shows that the ship departed in mid-September from the Ukrainian port of Izmail.

The vessel entered the Black Sea during the afternoon of Oct. 3, and the ship-tracking service recorded disruptions in its AIS transmissions at around 9:20 local time on the morning of Oct. 5. The attack likely occurred around then.

Although Romanian media reported that the ship had been struck by a drone, officials have not officially identified the cause of the fire. Reuters reported that Romania’s Naval Authority declined to comment on the incident.

The Royad Mammadov sails under the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis, but Turkish companies are responsible for its commercial and technical operations.

Last week, Russia attacked a Liberian-flagged cargo ship at a port in Ukraine’s Odesa Region, killing one person. The two crew members killed aboard the Royad Mammadov bring the total fatalities from similar strikes to seven over the past month. 

From January through September, tax revenue from oil and gas production totaled 5.47 trillion rubles ($64.43 billion), down from 6.61 trillion rubles in the same period of 2025. The oil and gas sector accounts for about 20% of Russia’s tax revenue, and this year’s budget deficit is expected to reach 3% of gross domestic product — nearly twice the level originally planned.

At the same time, the price of Urals crude had risen above $92 a barrel by the end of September, roughly double its level from before the start of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran on Feb. 28. Prior to the American-Israeli operation, Urals crude loaded at the Baltic port of Primorsk was trading at about $45 a barrel. On April 8, the price reached $113.89, its highest level since 2013. Nevertheless, shipments through the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk are significantly down due to risks following a series of Ukrainian attacks and a shortage of available tankers.

Russia is also cutting production. In September, the government lowered its forecast for oil and gas output in 2026 to their lowest levels in 17 years. According to OPEC data, Russia produced 8.718 million barrels of oil a day in August, 5.6% below January’s level of 9.240 million barrels a day. Reuters attributed part of the decline to repeated Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have forced facilities to reduce production and contributed to fuel shortages in some regions.

A stronger ruble is also putting pressure on budget revenue. From January through August, the Russian currency was on average about 9% stronger against the dollar than it had been during the same period a year earlier. Because Russia collects much of its oil tax revenue in rubles, a stronger national currency reduces the domestic value of dollar-denominated export earnings.

On Oct. 4, the local outlet Port Amur was the first to report that the death toll had risen to eight, adding that nine service members had been on board and that two of the dead had not been found right away. Mikhail Piven, head of the Mazanovsky District in the Amur Region, soon published a photograph featuring portraits of those killed. The Ministry of Defense had initially reported six dead and one hospitalized.

According to the captions under the portraits, the dead include Andrei Lobanov, Vladislav Moskovskikh, Artur Enokyan, Mikhail Kotyshev, Sergei Moisevich, Vladimir Kelip, Fedor Pavlyukov, and Andrei Gerasimov. Piven said local authorities intend to ask the long-range aviation command to put the crew forward for state honors.

Three of the dead appeared in a Ukrainian database

The Insider cross-checked the data on those killed against the Ukrainian database Russian Torturers, a project launched in 2022 on the initiative of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Its creators say the entries are verified by Ukrainian law enforcement or intelligence agencies.

As of November 2025, Major Andrei Lobanov was listed in the database as deputy commander of a Tu-95MS squadron in Russia’s 182nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment, based at Ukrainka airfield. The database claims that he directly commanded the unit and personally took part in combat missions.

Lieutenant Colonel Fedor Pavlyukov is listed as deputy commander for flight training for the same 182nd Regiment. From August 2021 to April 2024, he commanded a Tu-95MS squadron. The database’s creators say Pavlyukov was responsible for preparing flight crews for combat missions and directly commanded the unit. As early as March 2022, Ukrainian intelligence had placed Pavlyukov on a list of Russian long-range aviation pilots suspected of direct participation in the war against Ukraine.

Major Andrei Gerasimov is listed as commander of a Tu-95MS squadron in the 121st Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. The database claims he directly commanded the unit and personally took part in combat missions.

Ukrainian serviceman and blogger Anatoliy Shtefan (“Stirlitz”) also claimed that at least three of those killed were involved in organizing and carrying out missile strikes on Ukraine, though he did not specify which of those killed he had in mind.

The Sept. 29 plane crash

The Tu-95MS crashed on Sept. 29 during a training flight near the village of Krasnoyarovo in the Mazanovsky District. The Ministry of Defense said the plane had been flying without weapons and went down “in an uninhabited area.” The local government in the Amur Region said the crew steered the aircraft away from residential areas in order to avoid causing further casualties, and no one on the ground was hurt. The ministry sent an Aerospace Forces commission to investigate the crash. No publicly confirmed findings have established its cause.

Ukrainka airfield, where the 182nd Regiment is based, has taken on particular importance for Russia’s long-range aviation over the past year. The Insider previously reported that most of Russia’s long-range bombers (that are still able to fly) were redeployed from the western part of the country to the Far East following Ukraine’s behind-the-lines Operation Spiderweb.

As a result, Ukrainka became the main base for operational Tu-95MS aircraft, significantly complicating combat missions. In order to launch missiles at targets in Ukraine, the aircraft must fly upwards of 12,000 kilometers round-trip, refueling at the Engels or Olenya air bases in western Russia. A typical mission thus lasts around 23 hours, putting significant strain on the aging aircraft.

Football Watergate

The 2026 World Cup generated a record $15 billion in revenue for FIFA, making it the most profitable tournament in the sport's history. On July 17, appearing alongside Donald Trump at a Trump Tower event attended by multiple billionaires and football federation officials, FIFA President Gianni Infantino called the tournament “the greatest event in the history of humanity.”

However, less than two weeks after the final whistle, it emerged that Infantino had spent nearly a year negotiating the sale of one-third of the commercial rights to the men’s, women’s, and Club World Cups – behind the backs of the 211 national federations that own those rights.

On July 28, The Times published a shocking report: the FIFA president was planning to spin the World Cups off from FIFA into a new private company, to be known as FIFA Forward Enterprises (FFE). Around one-third of the company would be sold to private investors for $4.2 billion, with the largest shareholder set to be Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital, founded by the younger brother of Trump’s son-in-law.

In effect, Gianni Infantino proposed moving the World Cups out of the sphere of formally nonprofit FIFA in order to make them easier to monetize. Under FIFA’s statutes, the organization is required to use all its revenues to develop football around the world. A commercial “subsidiary,” by contrast, could distribute them as dividends to its owners.

FIFA is required to use all its revenues to develop football around the world. A commercial “subsidiary,” by contrast, could distribute them as dividends to its owners

Each national federation that agreed to back the plan was promised $40 million. At the same time, Infantino not only pressured them to respond within 53 days (by Sept. 19), but also openly blackmailed them: if they refused, he threatened to distribute 75% less money to the countries.

Resetting in Putin’s style

Gianni Infantino saw himself as the future head of the new FFE, which promised not only to increase his salary tenfold (from $3 million to $30 million a year), but also to give him a way to stay in power after a third presidential term. The resourceful Swiss has already reset the clock once. Infantino became FIFA president in 2016 after his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, resigned amid corruption allegations. But FIFA’s Council ruled that those years should not count as a full term, meaning Infantino’s presidency is officially dated from 2019 — even if, by the time of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, he was already firmly in charge of the federation, standing along alongside Vladimir Putin at the medal ceremony in Luzhniki Stadium.

Under FIFA’s statutes, its president can serve a maximum three four-year terms. Infantino is now nearing the end of his second full term, meaning if he wins the elections set to be held in March 2027, he could theoretically remain in office a total of 15 years.

However, by taking the helm of the new company, Infantino would move into a position created specifically for him, with no term limits whatsoever. This would allow him to retain control of the financial flows, since FIFA was expected to keep a controlling stake in FFE along with the majority of its commercial rights.

The world against Infantino

The football world’s reaction to Infantino’s plan was severe. On July 30, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) announced a unanimous boycott of the World Cup – and all FIFA tournaments – by all 55 member associations for as long as the proposal remained on the table.

“The World Cup cannot be treated as an investment product, no part of it should ever be surrendered to private investors. The World Cup is not for sale...

It is both irresponsible and indefensible that a proposal of such significance for football was conceived in secret and brought to the brink of approval without any meaningful consultation with those entrusted with stewarding the game. This is not merely a profound failure of leadership, but an abdication of FIFA’s duty as the custodian of world football...

National associations around the world are now presented with an ultimatum: accept the irreversible capture of football’s greatest competitions or bear the consequences. This is governance by intimidation...

This model has no place in world football. Football’s future cannot be dictated by the expectations of those whose first duty is to maximize financial return. We will never lend this model our legitimacy...

UEFA and its national associations will oppose these plans with absolute determination. Some things are simply too important to sell.”

All 41 CONCACAF member associations (the confederation representing North and Central America and the Caribbean) also rejected the project due to its lack of transparency, the demand for an excessively quick response, and the leadership’s attempt to bypass FIFA’s traditional governance structure. There were public signs of opposition to Infantino as well. For example, a petition launched by the Reboot FIFA project, which was created before the 2026 World Cup, gathered more than 100,000 signatures amid the scandal over the deal. Infantino was quickly forced to back down, confirming that the project existed while beginning to qualify and soften his language.

“FFE is a proposal, an offer. It’s part of a democratic process, a consultation process, and, above all, it is an opportunity, not an obligation – a golden opportunity to turbocharge the development of the game globally,” the FIFA president said. “But again: it is just an offer, not an obligation. It would simply commercialize and organize all FIFA-owned competitions for the benefit of FIFA's 211 member associations.”

On the night of July 31, FIFA responded by announcing that the project would not go ahead. Infantino explained that he had listened carefully to all the views and realized that the idea had created divisions that were no longer in the interest of the project’s original objective. “Our purpose has always been – and will always be – to unite and improve.”

Joshua Kushner summed it all up on August 31: “Had we known what this would devolve into, we would not have gotten involved.”

Countries withdraw their support

As of July 17, two days before the World Cup final, The Guardian reported that more than 200 countries around the world would back Infantino in the FIFA presidential election despite the disgraceful rescinding of a red card shown to Folarin Balogun of the U.S. national team, a reversal that had seen Infantino personally intervened at Donald Trump’s request.

The Balogun affair could have been seen as an isolated episode of influence peddling. However, the proposal to sell a stake in the World Cups fundamentally changed attitudes toward Infantino.

Over the course of a month and a half, around two dozen countries withdrew their support for Infantino’s upcoming reelection. Among the largest and most influential were France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. 

On Aug. 11, Donald Trump came to his friend’s defense. “FIFA would be making a terrible mistake if, for any reason, it even considered removing Gianni Infantino,” he wrote on Truth Social. “He is fantastic, and just presided over the most successful World Cup ever – four times more successful than all previous ones. If he leaves, the tournament will never be as successful or profitable.”

This post likely came in response to a joint statement by UEFA, CONCACAF, and the Asian confederation, which described FIFA’s tactics as intimidation and while identifying a deeper problem:

“FIFA's recent letter to its Vice-Presidents and 211 Member Associations acknowledges that mistakes were made in the process. It treats this as a failure of communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgement. A proposal advanced on a compressed timeline, without meaningful consultation, and pushed towards a deadline before Member Associations could properly review its terms is not the product of an oversight – it is the product of a design intended to limit scrutiny. It did not acknowledge that the proposal itself was inherently wrong. There remains no recognition that attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup was a profound failure of judgement.”

Of course, Trump’s support tends to provoke widespread antipathy, and unsurprisingly, organizations representing 143 national federations demanded that FIFA commission a full report on the affair from an independent investigator. The only major federations to support Infantino publicly were those of Argentina, Mexico, Qatar, Cameroon, Egypt, and Morocco (the latter of which has been linked to a purported quid pro quo: a vote for Infantino in exchange for hosting the 2030 World Cup final in Casablanca, an announcement that FIFA called premature).

A system of indirect bribery

The Telegraph reported on Aug. 1 that UEFA was threatening Infantino with a vote of no confidence and issuing an ultimatum: resign voluntarily or face legal proceedings that could force him out.

The FIFA statutes do not explicitly provide for such a scenario, but UEFA can convene an extraordinary congress and raise a no-confidence motion against Infantino — and it has enough votes to do so. However, the most the congress could do is refer the matter to FIFA’s Ethics Committee. 

But Infantino’s strength lies precisely in his influence over the federation’s internal bodies, including its judicial bodies. The system he has built has been described as a form of patronage –  Infantino’s power rests largely on the votes of small national federations for which outlays from FIFA's record-high revenues represents a significant share of their budgets. In any vote, Haiti, Cape Verde, and Curaçao each have the same weight as France, Spain, or England.

The judicial structure of the Ethics Committee includes representatives from Ghana, American Samoa, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, and Chile, with a chair from Colombia. It is entirely possible that Infantino could find ways to pressure the football authorities in these countries so that their representatives cast their vote in his favor.

That is why the most effective way to remove Infantino as FIFA president is through next spring’s election. The problem, however, is that UEFA and the other forces opposing Infantino still have no alternative candidate. The 2019 and 2023 elections were both uncontested, and no new prominent football politician has emerged the challenge the incumbent.

A friend and favorite of dictators

Infantino’s growing closeness to Morocco fits a broader pattern: the FIFA head seems eager to cultivate friendships with monarchs and heads of state with authoritarian tendencies.

Infantino seems eager to cultivate friendships with monarchs or heads of state with authoritarian tendencies

Infantino grew close to Vladimir Putin during the 2018 World Cup and then organized the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. In recent years, he has also deepened his ties with Donald Trump.

Catering to Trump’s wishes has been part of Infantino’s strategy since the start of the U.S. president’s second term. He not only congratulated Trump on his election victory – something Blatter had also done with heads of state – but also attended his inauguration, something previous FIFA presidents had never done.

Infantino then became a regular visitor to the Oval Office, where he gave Trump a personalized World Cup ball, presented him with a symbolic ticket to a tournament match, and let him touch the World Cup trophy. He even promoted the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize — and when the president failed to win it, Infantino created a FIFA Peace Prize specifically for him (which he presented at the 2026 World Cup draw). Infantino lavished so much praise on the president that he earned the nickname “Syco-fantino."

Of the three hosts of the 2030 World Cup – Spain, Portugal, and Morocco – Infantino has the closest ties with authoritarian Morocco. The 2034 World Cup, meanwhile, will be hosted by authoritarian Saudi Arabia.

There is reason to believe that FIFA moved up the schedule to accommodate the Saudi bid and ruled out other options so that the tournament could be held there before the expiration of Infantino’s third presidential term.

Under the rules, a World Cup cannot be held on continents that hosted either of the previous two tournaments, but FIFA devised a unique formula for 2030. Its three main host countries are located on two continents – Europe and Africa. In addition, matches will be played in South America, in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. This left only Asia and Oceania eligible to host the 2034 World Cup – and Saudi Arabia was the only country from those regions to submit a bid.

Even his deputies are shocked

At the start of the World Cup, The New York Times published a major article under the striking headline “The Man Trumpifying FIFA.” The phrase caught on as a concise description of many of the changes taking place (and this was a month and a half before the controversial proposal to sell a stake in the World Cup became public).

When Infantino took over as president, he was well aware of the red flags. In the second half of 2015, FIFA’s Ethics Committee banned two presidents from football for eight years: Sepp Blatter of FIFA and Michel Platini of UEFA, over Blatter’s transfer of 2 million Swiss francs to Platini’s account in February 2011. The officials were later acquitted, but by then their careers had been ruined.

Infantino had been Platini’s right-hand man before taking over Blatter’s position and choosing a different strategy. He consolidated his power by increasing revenues and building government-relations ties, creating a hierarchy of loyalty within FIFA. But even that record could not overcome his audacious idea to sell a stake in the World Cup.

The loudest reaction came from FIFA Chief Operating Officer Kevin Lamour (effectively the association’s third-highest-ranking official), who had worked alongside Infantino for nearly 20 years. His statement was especially striking. “This is one man’s project,” he said three days after the report of the secret deal with the Trump family broke. “It’s not enough to stop this project – it is time for football’s political leaders to ask themselves the right questions and make the right decisions. If that means I lose my job, so be it. At least tonight I will sleep soundly.”

Three weeks later, Lamour did indeed leave his post, and Infantino’s senior adviser, Carlos Cordeiro, FIFA’s representative on the White House Interagency Task Force for preparations for the 2026 World Cup, also resigned, saying he could not be associated with an organization that was considering such deals. Both statements confirm that Infantino kept the idea secret even from his top executives. According to Lamour, people inside the organization saw this as deception by the president, which undermined one of the pillars on which the FIFA head's power rested.

Infantino kept the idea secret even from his top executives

Infantino is also facing criticism from several figures who remain in senior positions. In mid-September, for example, Football Association chair and FIFA Vice President Debbie Hewitt called on him to publish all documents related to the plan to sell off the World Cup rights.

Total monetization continues

Infantino himself, meanwhile, has switched to a much friendlier tone. On Sept. 21, he sent a letter to all 211 national federations promising to propose an independent assessment of the effectiveness of his management system, gather ideas for improving the development of new projects, and strengthen accountability in the development of major strategic initiatives. In effect, he indirectly acknowledged that he had been wrong at every stage of preparing the World Cup deal.

“Democratic processes, independence, and FIFA’s sporting authority have never been up for negotiation. They are not for sale and never will be,” Infantino now writes with characteristic pathos.

Still, his overall strategy has not changed. On July 28, when presenting his plan to transfer the World Cup rights to FFE, FIFA said that it was “undermonetized compared with other leagues” and that “football is not generating enough money relative to its audience.” Infantino is still pursuing the same policy, seeking to take FIFA’s megalomania to a new level – this time by boosting revenue from a youth tournament.

In December 2025, FIFA announced the first-ever World Cup for players under 15, with no qualifying process – allowing all 211 teams to participate. According to The Athletic, the FIFA president hoped to attract investors separately and, following the model of the U.S. Little League World Series, stage the tournament with Disney’s backing at its sports complex in Orlando.

The tournament will instead take place in Baku from Oct. 24 to 30, 2026, with 191 teams having applied. Russia’s national team will be among them – using its flag and anthem. The Russian Football Union notes separately that this will be the country’s first such tournament since 2022.

Infantino initially envisioned an Israel-Palestine match as the opening game, but the Israelis and Palestinians were ultimately placed in different groups, and the tournament will open with Azerbaijan vs. East Timor. Meanwhile, concerns that commercialization is displacing the substance of big-time sport are growing louder. 

Perhaps the essence of those concerns was best captured by Siddharth Srirama, a sports columnist for Indian channel News18. “For more than a century, football also has survived being weaponized by those in power,” he wrote in July. “Hitler’s Germany used it for propaganda. Military dictatorships wrapped themselves in it. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have spent fortunes using it to reshape global perception through sportswashing. Yet the game always endured because, at its core, it belonged to the fans. Now, though, the game faces perhaps its greatest threat yet — becoming just another investment portfolio for crony capitalism. If Sepp Blatter exposed football’s ugliest face through corruption, Gianni Infantino seems determined to finish the job by turning the sport itself into a financial product.”

Shadowboxing: FIFA and UEFA are remarkably alike

UEFA particularly dislikes FIFA, and Gianni Infantino personally. After all, throughout his 10 years in power, Infantino has sought to reduce European football’s influence on the global game. 

One of Infantino’s first ideas after taking over FIFA was to expand the World Cup from 32 to 48 teams. But the 16 additional places were distributed disproportionately: Europe received only three, while the rest went to less developed – and therefore more grateful and dependent – countries.

From the outset, Infantino pushed to reform the Club World Cup, a low-profile tournament that started in the 2000s. At first the idea was blocked because the schedules of the biggest teams were already overloaded, but by 2025, Infantino had managed to push it through. The Club World Cup was staged in the US.. as a test tournament ahead of the World Cup (replacing the Confederations Cup for national teams).

Thanks to a clever qualification formula, FIFA managed to bring many top teams together for the month-long summer tournament, including Real Madrid, Manchester City, Chelsea, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, and Inter Milan. Thanks to commercial deals, even the winner’s prize money was brought closer to Champions League levels, with Chelsea receiving $125 million. Donald Trump was so reluctant to leave after presenting Chelsea with the trophy that he remained at the center of all the victory photos.

European clubs still received far more money than teams from the other confederations, but in some cases the amount was comparable as a share of their budgets and annual spending. FIFA also managed to include Inter Miami as a host club, meaning Lionel Messi played in the opening match and three more games. In this way, FIFA challenged UEFA’s monopoly over matches featuring Europe’s football elite.

One sign of growing tensions that caught the industry’s attention was that UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin did not attend a single match. He had already spoken out against FIFA and even threatened a boycott long before the idea of selling the World Cup emerged.

In 2021, when Infantino was pushing a plan to hold the World Cup every two years, Čeferin responded: “We can decide not to play in it. As far as I know, the South Americans are on the same page. So good luck with a World Cup like that. To play every summer a one-month tournament, for the players it’s a killer. The value is precisely because it is every four years. I don’t see our federations supporting that.”

But despite the disputes, the methods used by the two main football organizations to increase their revenues are actually quite similar. UEFA has also expanded its flagship national-team tournament, the European Championship (from 16 to 24 teams in 2016), and expanded the Champions League as well (36 teams instead of 32 since 2024).

In search of a new leader

UEFA is still grappling with the fallout from an external crisis: in 2021, 12 top European clubs announced plans to create the Super League, a tournament of their own outside UEFA’s jurisdiction (FIFA was also opposed). The idea was poorly thought out, and under public pressure many of the clubs quickly withdrew. Still, UEFA had to respond by taking steps to increase its revenues. The result was the revamped Champions League format.

European football is now united at the level of the national associations: UEFA kept the pressure and boycott threat alive for more than a month — then, immediately after the Champions League draw, announced that it was temporarily suspending the boycott. In the same statement, Infantino’s idea was described as an abuse of presidential powers, and UEFA called for consideration of financial support for national associations from FIFA’s multibillion-dollar reserves. According to Sky News, European and North American football leaders are insisting that Infantino make a one-off payment of $10 million to each national association for infrastructure development.

Clearly, UEFA is the main force capable of confronting Infantino by backing a candidate for the March FIFA election. The problem is, UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin does not want to pursue a political career and almost certainly will not run. Still, even if he wins the March vote, the result of the FFE fiasco has been the opposite of what Infantino sought. He has gone from being an uncontested candidate for another presidential term to a man who many influential figures in the football world would like to see out of office as soon as possible.

The changes do not apply to schools, which are still required to suspend classes during air raid alerts. Schools without underground classrooms have moved children to online learning. Across Ukraine more broadly, local authorities have been given discretion over how to respond to alerts.

In August and September, central government officials held a series of meetings with businesses. Entrepreneurs were advised to consider setting up air defenses on their own, to cooperate with existing volunteer territorial defense formations (known by the Ukrainian acronym DFTG), and to move warehouses underground.

Russian forces have been striking warehouses belonging to home improvement retailer Epicentr and delivery company Nova Poshta for years, but the logistical networks of supermarket chains recently started coming under systematic attacks for the first time. Strikes on warehouses reduced the range of goods available in stores in August, though the situation had largely stabilized by mid-September.

As fall begins, everyone in Ukraine seems to be asking the same question: how can the country make it through a winter of relentless strikes? It is already clear that the infrastructure responsible for heating and other fundamental civilian services will be among Russia’s targets.

The military shield and the front line

Ukraine needs interceptors to defend against ballistic and cruise missiles. But increasingly frequent attacks by jet-powered drones have created another challenge.

A volunteer (call sign Max) with a Kyiv Region DFTG told The Insider that his unit formed teams of interceptor-drone pilots in preparation for the winter campaign, alongside its regular gun and mobile fire teams. Training began in mid-spring, and by the end of summer, most volunteers had passed examinations and received certificates — along with combat interceptor drones.

But a problem emerged: older interceptor drones work well against conventional Shaheds traveling at speeds of up to 250 kilometers per hour, but new interceptors designed to take out jet-powered Shaheds have only recently completed testing. Russia is expected to use both conventional and jet-powered Shaheds during the fall and winter, meaning crews are expected to use different interceptors depending on the target.

Volunteer formations are part of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) and their supply system tends to lag somewhat behind those of the Unmanned Systems Forces, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the National Guard. Newer technologies only reach the TDF and volunteer groups after they have been tested by regular units.

By Sept. 20, videos had emerged showing jet-powered Shaheds being intercepted by high-speed fixed-wing interceptor drones and Sting S quadcopters.

“We have to remember that there is no such thing as 100% effective air defense. Some missiles and Shaheds will get through any defenses. That is why residents should always follow the recommendations of Ukraine’s Defense Forces. New Ukrainian interceptor drones are more maneuverable and can engage targets at greater distances and altitudes than the usual weapons used by ground-based fire teams. But they cannot offer a complete guarantee either. The same applies to Russia, where they are also technologically behind. So if power stations, thermal power plants, and combined heat-and-power plants burn here this winter, there is an even greater likelihood that they will burn in Russia as well,” Max said.

Ukraine’s new interceptor drones are more maneuverable and can hit targets at greater ranges and altitudes, but they cannot provide a complete guarantee against Moscow’s aerial attacks

A Kyiv volunteer territorial defense formation commander called Asgard said his unit has gun teams equipped with a wide range of weapons “from 5.45 mm up to 23 mm,” along with interceptor-drone crews. “The biggest target was probably a cruise missile we shot down in 2024. Believe it or not, we brought it down with a 7.62 mm Maxim machine gun manufactured in 1942.” Unsurprisingly, Asgard’s unit also engages jet-powered Shaheds.

There has been no particular need for “retraining” this year, the Kyiv DFTG commander said. “Every day we face new challenges and learn. Before, they were ordinary Shaheds. Those are very easy targets for us now. We still have work to do with the jet-powered ones.”

Ukraine’s small mobile air defense units shoot down conventional Shaheds in 95% to 99% of cases, but their success rate against jet-powered versions is no more than 40% to 60%. Volunteer formations hope that rate will increase soon as interceptor-drone teams receive more high-speed drones of their own.

At the front itself, winter could provide Ukraine with some advantages, according to Silver, an FPV drone pilot who flies fiber-optic-controlled drones.

“There will be more work in winter. First, the leaves will fall, which will make things easier. Even now we manage to fly fiber-optic drones through forests, but without the ‘greenery’ [the military term for dense seasonal foliage] we will create far more problems for the Russians. Second, we will rely on skill, quality, and careful planning rather than quantity. We are changing our approach, adapting technically and improving our skills. Everyone is talking about AI-equipped drones now, but artificial intelligence will not replace the person who still decides which target to send it toward. I’ve worked with AI-assisted terminal guidance, and it works!”

Even if Russia carries out another mobilization, conditions will become harder for Russian soldiers in winter, according to a Nemesis bomber-drone pilot who has flown 1,000 combat missions over a year and a half.

“The Russian military is adapting too, changing tactics and infiltrating our lines. Maybe they have something new prepared for us. But overall, we’re ready. We’ll see how their mobilization goes and how many more targets we have along the line of contact,” the pilot said.

Front-line cities

About 127,500 people live in the Ukrainian-controlled portion of the Kherson Region — about a quarter of the prewar population. In the city of Kherson itself, 63,000 out of the prewar population of 283,000 remain — roughly 22%.

The situation there is difficult. Russian forces deliberately target energy and heat-generating facilities in an effort to deprive residents of basic services. Strikes take place around the clock, with explosions heard roughly every two minutes. Since the area was liberated in November of 2022, the regional administration has recorded 400,000 Russian attacks involving more than 900,000 munitions.

Elvina Osmanova, head of the Kherson regional administration’s domestic and information policy department, told The Insider that between three and 10 guided aerial bombs (known by the Russian and Ukrainian abbreviation KAB) are dropped on Kherson each day. “They hit infrastructure sites one after another, including the combined heat-and-power plant, and essentially everything responsible for electricity, heating, gas, and water supplies.”

Alongside guided bombs, Russian forces make extensive use of conventional drones, a particular problem for Kherson, Nikopol, and other cities within a 20-kilometer range of the front line. Osmanova lists off the drone types that most frequently attack the city: “FPV drones, Mavics, cheap Molniya kamikaze drones, and other systems. Most of them use fiber-optic control, which makes them difficult to stop. As many as 5,000 drones can be launched at Kherson in a week.”

Still, food deliveries still make it to central Kherson, Osmanova said:

“The city has a sufficient supply of food. But the Russians deliberately destroy trucks and kill drivers transporting bread and other foodstuffs, so issues with deliveries cannot be ruled out. Due to constant shelling, some parts of Kherson are already effectively dead — riverside areas such as Antonivka, Voyenne, Korabel, and several others near the Dnipro. They haven't had normal municipal services for a long time.

Last winter, there were times when people went 10 days without electricity or water. Right now, one district of the city has been without power for 14 days. In other areas, electricity has been restored through the heroic efforts of utility workers. Many have unfortunately been wounded or killed. Drones deliberately target workers while they repair infrastructure.

We understand that the Russians will only increase their attacks in the fall and winter. The number and severity of enemy attacks are increasing every day. Kherson may end up without electricity and heating not just for hours or days but for prolonged periods, and we're preparing for that. We're adapting our anti-drone system — detection systems, electronic warfare, and mobile fire teams — and increasing physical protection for important facilities.”

Shelters are another major focus. Osmanova said 307 protective structures have been repaired and 439 mobile shelters installed in crowded public areas. Protection for critical infrastructure is also being strengthened through backup power, additional physical defenses, and alternative systems intended to allow facilities to continue operating after Russian attacks.

“The Russians attack any kind of transportation with drones: mopeds, passenger cars, trucks, ambulances, municipal vehicles, and public transit,” Osmanova said. “Last week alone, about 40 vehicles were damaged or destroyed. We are doing everything possible to protect the city’s supply routes, including covering roads and streets with anti-drone nets. About 270 kilometers of roads have already been protected that way.”

Zarina Zabrisky, an American journalist with Byline Times who lives in Kherson, told The Insider that residents are preparing for winter however they can. Residents with standalone, private houses were able to heat their homes with firewood in previous winters and are preparing to do so again — and many of them have generators. Zabrisky’s apartment has access to a supply of natural gas, which she used to heat her home last winter.

At the same time, the local administration is advising residents — particularly older people, those with limited mobility, and families with children — to seriously consider temporarily relocating to safer parts of Ukraine. The authorities say they are prepared to assist at every stage, including organizing evacuation, finding housing, providing humanitarian aid, and offering psychological and legal assistance.

Kyiv

Locals in Kyiv are not counting on an energy ceasefire. Instead, they are preparing for something resembling a repeat of last year. The main difference is that the upcoming winter is expected to be milder, with frequent thaws.

Vyacheslav Hryb, who heads three condominium associations in Kyiv, told The Insider how preparations are going:

“We’re buying additional inverters, checking the generators, and connecting elevators to them. If the power goes out, our calculations show the elevators can operate for five to six hours. Heating should also be fine. We have a large building and a 110-kilowatt generator that powers the cold-water supply, hot-water supply, and heating.

Last year, the unprecedented cold made everything harder, and after the strikes, many buildings had to drain water from their heating pipes. Restarting the heating at minus 22 Celsius [about negative 8 degrees Fahrenheit] was what you might call an advanced-level challenge. The instructions say it’s impossible, but we pulled together and managed to get it running.”

Kyiv’s energy situation is among the most difficult among Ukrainian cities not located near the front. Last winter, residents of several buildings on the eastern bank of the Dnipro went without centralized heating for around a month after heating pipes burst. Electricity schedules were largely maintained, with power generally available for four hours followed by four hours without it.

Kyiv’s energy situation is among the most difficult of Ukraine’s non-frontline cities

Residents are now buying batteries and inverters in order to be more self-sufficient. Buildings with condominium associations are generally better prepared, often with generators or high-capacity battery and inverter systems that can keep heat, water and elevators running during outages. But only about 2,000 of Kyiv’s more than 10,000 residential buildings have these associations.

Other buildings are serviced by municipal housing offices, commonly known by the Soviet-era abbreviation ZhEK. Their residents therefore often have to go to special “Points of Invincibility” set up by city authorities and Ukraine’s State Emergency Service to warm up and charge their devices.

The Zhytomyr phenomenon

The city of Zhytomyr is located less than 100 miles from Kyiv, but last winter it did not even suffer widespread short-term power cuts. Vitaliy, a Zhytomyr resident, told The Insider that while Kyiv spent days at a time without electricity, Zhytomyr experienced only a handful of outages, none lasting more than an hour:

“Specialists had told me before that Zhytomyr had inherited many military factories from the Soviet era. It was also an early adopter of power systems designed for wartime conditions. The city developed a distributed energy system, which is why, despite repeated attacks, we did not face major disruptions or prolonged power outages last winter or the winter before.”

In Ukrainian cities where power distribution has been managed effectively, utility services remain close to prewar levels. Residents of Kyiv — and perhaps soon Moscow and St. Petersburg — can only look with envy at Zhytomyr.

The overall state of Ukraine’s energy system

The risk of new large-scale attacks remains one of the most serious and unpredictable factors facing Ukraine this winter. DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company, is preparing for a range of possible scenarios.

“First and foremost, we are repairing and restoring thermal power plants around the clock after attacks,” the company told The Insider. “There is not a single DTEK generating unit that has not been damaged or destroyed during the years of the full-scale war, and some units have had to be rebuilt several times.”

At the same time, the company is carrying out scheduled equipment repairs in order to improve reliability during the winter. It is also stockpiling fuel and supporting the operation of mines, machine-building facilities, and repair businesses. DTEK spent more than 7.6 billion hryvnias ($170 million) on those efforts in the first half of 2026 alone. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, it has spent more than 51 billion hryvnias ($1.2 billion) restoring thermal generation, supporting its businesses, and preparing for wartime winters.

In the first half of 2026, DTEK invested 3.3 billion hryvnias ($74 million) in repairing and modernizing power grids. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, investment in that area has exceeded 15 billion hryvnias ($335 million). The company says its central goals are to restore as much available capacity as possible, maintain sufficient supplies for emergency repairs, and be prepared to respond as quickly as possible to new attacks.

DTEK is advising Ukrainians to use electricity carefully, particularly during periods of peak demand, and says it will do everything possible to minimize the effects of attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, said the government would prepare the country’s air defense network for the winter.

“This is extremely difficult, but it has to be expanded. Absolutely everyone is working on it: the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and the Foreign Intelligence Service. The obvious challenge, as you know, is missiles for the Patriot system. But we are working on that as well,” Zelensky told reporters Sept. 25. “Separately, we are working on our own anti-ballistic air defense system. That is the FREYJA system. We will work on all of this so there is no collapse.”

Zelensky also said Ukraine would retaliate for attacks on its energy system by striking not only Russian oil refineries — but its energy facilities as well.

Even among queer Arabs born and raised in Israel who are fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, life is still far from secure, and those still living in the Palestinian Authority (or who come to Israel to seek asylum) face an even more uncertain future. According to data from HIAS, a Jewish organization that advocates for refugees, as of July 2026 there were around 300 Palestinian LGBTQ asylum seekers in Israel, and that figure includes only those known to organizations working in the field.

“They hung me up in an abandoned building and started beating me”

In November 2023, 23-year-old Yamen, who is gay, fled to Israel from Nablus, a major Palestinian city in the northern West Bank. He was forced to abandon his studies in physics at a local university, and after arriving in Israel he found a job cleaning offices. Yamen told HIAS representatives that he was learning Hebrew and looking for better work.

When Yamen’s family learned about his sexual orientation, his uncle — an intelligence officer with the Palestinian Authority — threatened to have him jailed. His relatives also accused him of collaborating with Israel, shouted at him, and beat him.

From the time Yamen was a teenager, his family had noticed that he was somewhat more effeminate than other young men, but they never discussed it. According to HIAS representatives, this is a common pattern in Palestinian families. Violence against LGBTQ people by their families begins only after a relative’s sexual orientation or gender identity becomes known to others.

Yamen says that from a young age, people around him treated him aggressively – mocking, harassing, and attacking him. Once, when he was 14, a police officer stopped him and a friend. According to Yamen, the reason was their “refined” appearance. The officer wanted to put them in his patrol car, but after a few phone calls he ultimately let the teenagers go. Yamen concluded that the officer had only wanted to frighten them.

However, an attempt to abduct Yamen succeeded and forced him to flee:

“One day I was just walking down the street. About 20 men suddenly attacked me – they simply forced me into a car and drove me away. They hung me up in some abandoned building and started beating me. They were relatively young. Then others joined them – men around my father’s age. I didn’t understand who they were or what they wanted from me. I had never experienced anything like this and had no idea how to react. It was as if they were saying, ‘We found a guy who looks gay, let’s take him and make fun of him for entertainment.’ I couldn’t believe this was happening to me…

They took everything I had, even my phone. Then things became even more serious when they found out my last name. They said, ‘Now we have a problem, and we don’t know what to do.’ They called my family. When my relatives came to find out what had happened and why I had been attacked like that, they were told, ‘Your son is this and that.’ I wasn’t allowed to explain anything, wasn’t given a chance to say a word. I had been a good child my whole life, and this was the first problem that required my family’s intervention.

But my relatives didn’t take my side. They were angry with me, and I didn’t understand what I had done. Instead of being angry with the people who had abducted their son, they simply abandoned me. It was the worst feeling I had ever experienced in my life…

From that moment on, my family turned my life into hell. The story spread until it reached the police, and an investigation was opened — but it was closed very quickly, because nobody cares about an abducted gay man. No one was prepared to protect me. And then I realized: if I want to stay alive, I have to run away from there.”

“I was afraid to go outside”

Twenty-five-year-old lesbian Manar fled to Israel from a village in the West Bank after her father discovered romantic messages with another woman on her phone.

Manar later told HIAS representatives her story:

“When my father found out that I was attracted to women, he started beating me regularly. Then my family decided to marry me off to some guy. He was a loser, a bad person, and used drugs. They simply put me in his house. There was no real wedding, no ceremony, nothing. I was basically kept there, unable to leave the house. He would constantly put some kind of powder in my water and make me drink it. Then I wouldn’t remember anything and couldn’t resist. One day I finally managed to escape, though I don’t even remember how. But I remember very well how I felt when my family abandoned me.”

Manar made a report to the Palestinian police about her father’s violence. He was initially detained, but once it became clear that the conflict stemmed from his daughter’s sexual orientation, he was released and sent home without further investigation.

When she was 18, Manar fled to another city, but relatives found her and tried to run her down with a car. Passersby rescued her. According to Manar, the police refused to intervene, so she fled to another city.

“One day, on my way home from work, I noticed someone photographing me on the street. I later recognized him as a close friend of my cousin. As it happened, there was a police officer nearby. I approached him and said that the guy over there was photographing me for my cousin, who had threatened to kill me. Now they would know where I was. The police did nothing. They didn’t even bother approaching him to ask why he was photographing me. They said it was none of their business, that it was purely a family matter.

“So I stopped working and stayed home because I was afraid to go outside, to go to work, or to be seen by anyone. I didn’t know what to do with myself or where to go. I became depressed and tried to kill myself... My partner found me and called an ambulance.”

After another attack, Manar decided to flee to Israel.

Relatives tied him to a post for two weeks

Twenty-seven-year-old Amjad, who was living in a third country by the time of his interview, described how his “once-loving” family discovered his correspondence with a man and tied him to a post outside the house for more than two weeks. His relatives threatened him with weapons. Only his sister secretly brought him food.

Another interviewee, 29-year-old Shadi from Jericho (who is also living in a third country), said his father had brutally beaten him and broken sticks over him since childhood because of his unusually high, soft voice. For a time, Shadi was made to take hormonal drugs. After a stranger told his father that Shadi was gay, his father told the family he intended to kill him. Shadi packed his things and fled to Israel.

Twenty-eight-year-old Amir, from a major city in the West Bank, said armed members of the Palestinian security forces attacked the home where he lived with his partner. Amir was detained for several days in connection with a case involving “indecent acts.”

“I was constantly pretending so I could be accepted”

“As a child, I often felt like an outsider. I remember sitting alone at lunch and wondering how people could make friends so easily. Mean Girls helped me,” says 28-year-old K. He dyed his hair platinum blond while keeping his perfectly trimmed beard black.

“That movie taught me to pretend to be someone else so society would accept me. It taught me to project confidence and put on a show for those around me. That’s how I started hanging out with the popular girls. If they were popular, then I was popular too, and straight guys would treat me normally because I was with the coolest girls in school,” K. recalls. “But that performance came at a price: I began to forget who I really was.”

K. grew up in northern Israel, in Nazareth, a city sacred to Christians. His father is an Arab Christian, his mother comes from a secular Lebanese family, and he has Jewish and Muslim relatives. K. says his parents celebrate Christian holidays, while everyone in the family tries to respect one another — they never discuss politics.

From childhood, K. understood that he did not fit any conventional mold, and his attraction to both men and women made things even more complicated. He never came out to his family:

“I used to think identity had to be fixed, that you had to choose one label and stick to it. If I’m gay, for example, then I’m only gay. But as I grew older, I realized I couldn’t fit myself into any one category. Over the years, I discovered new things about my sexuality. More importantly though, I realized I don’t owe anyone a simple definition of who I am. My identity is fluid and multilayered, and I don’t feel the need to explain who I am to anyone."

At the same time, his family was wary of the way he dressed, spoke, and moved. They drew their own conclusions.

“When I was younger, my parents would comment on it. It wasn’t easy for them either, because I had always been the ‘black sheep’ of the family. Whenever someone was getting married, they would think twice about whether to invite me, because they knew I might show up in some huge oversized suit and everyone would say, ‘What the hell are you wearing? That’s your grandfather’s suit!’"

After he earned a bachelor’s degree in fashion design and began working with major brands, K.'s parents realized that their son wasn’t just “playing games.”

“Yes, damn it, I’m Palestinian”

As a child, K. identified as Lebanese, but after struggling to find work following graduation from university — and amid the war that followed the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023 — he came to fully embrace his Palestinian identity:

“While I was studying, I lived in a bubble – peace, love, and all that. But after graduation, I saw my Jewish classmates move up very quickly in the fashion world, while doors were closing for me. I asked myself, ‘Is this really happening because I’m Arab?’

Then I started noticing that there were almost no Arab names at Tel Aviv’s nightclubs and festivals – no DJs, designers, or artists. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just about me. There weren’t enough platforms where Palestinian creatives could be seen and supported.

So I said, ‘Yes, damn it, I’m Palestinian, and I’m going to fight for this community.’ That’s how I created a platform for Palestinian creatives. It’s not just about parties; it’s a space creating opportunities for people who didn’t have them, just as I once didn’t.”

In July 2026, K. moved to Berlin to begin pursuing a master’s degree while continuing to develop his project. When people ask where he is from, he insists on answering “Palestine” — “and my best friend, who is Jewish, says he’s from Israel,” K. adds with a smile. 

The status of Arabs in Israel

The most vulnerable group in the State of Israel

While K. was able to build a life for himself and move to Berlin to study, hundreds of other queer people from Israel’s Arab community face persecution because of their identity.

“This is the most vulnerable group in the State of Israel,” says lawyer Nimrod Gorenstein, chair of The Aguda, Israel’s LGBTQ rights association. “Unfortunately, some are still killed in horrific crimes that never even make the news. Others repeatedly seek shelter and a roof over their heads so they can live in safety and peace and integrate into society.”

Some are still killed in horrific crimes that never even make the news

Although Israel generally grants asylum to queer Palestinians living in the West Bank, this does not always guarantee their safety or protect them from their persecutors. In 2022, for example, 25-year-old gay refugee Ahmad Abu-Maruhi was brutally murdered near Hebron: he was decapitated and his body mutilated. Human rights activists said a video of his murder was sent to other LGBTQ Palestinians to intimidate them.

There is no official law against homosexuality in the Palestinian Authority, explains Hamoudi Omar, the director of Israel's Beit al-Mim nonprofit organization, which helps LGBTQ Arabs in Israel and the West Bank. Nevertheless, religious and social norms make life unbearable for people in the community.

Last year, around 400 people approached Beit al-Mim seeking asylum, and upwards of 600 sought psychological support — up from just 200 two years ago. Omar described one of the most memorable cases the organization has encountered this year: after learning of a young man’s sexual orientation, his father and brother cut off his genitals. The young man sent the organization’s staff photographs, but later stopped responding.

From Berlin, K. notes the even harsher reality faced by LGBTQ people living in the West Bank.

“Their reality is nothing like mine. When we meet and I hear their stories, I realize I wouldn’t have survived in their place. There, you can be killed simply for wearing the wrong thing. But even there, small communities hold secret gatherings where people can dress however they want.”

“Israeli Arabs look down on people from the West Bank”

As a rule, queer people forced to leave the West Bank do not receive official refugee status in Israel. Instead, they are issued temporary residence permits – valid for three, six, or 12 months – which must be renewed. According to Omar, before October 7, around 90% of applicants received permits; in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attacks, however, the figure has fallen to about 5%.

Without official status, queer Palestinians struggle to find permanent housing, to secure work, or to access healthcare. Low levels of education and limited Hebrew skills make integration even harder. Israeli Arabs look down on people from the West Bank, while Jews see them as a security threat, Omar explains.

Israeli Arabs look down on people from the West Bank, while Jews see them as a security threat

Many of the refugees dream of moving to Canada, Switzerland, or Europe, but their limited education and lack of language skills also stand in their way. Beit al-Mim helps them find safe housing in Israel and provides legal and psychological support — sometimes simply making sure they have food to eat.

Omar himself is an openly gay Muslim and an Israeli citizen. When he came out, his religious, hijab-wearing mother told him, “God made you this way. We love you as you are.” But, he says, far from all LGBTQ Arabs in Israel find support from their families. “Many face homophobia and threats at work and in their communities. On top of that, we often experience discrimination because we are Arabs,” he says, recalling an incident in which a gay couple in Budapest asked him whether he was carrying a knife after hearing him speak Arabic.

Triple prejudice

L., an Arab transgender woman, has identified as Israeli since childhood. She became particularly aware of her Israeli identity during the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006. “They attacked all of us. I was born in this Jewish state. This is my home,” she explains.

L.'s mother sought to integrate into Israeli society. Her father, however, insisted on identifying as Palestinian, seeing it as a form of resistance against the “Zionist regime” — “they were constantly arguing over which language should dominate in our home,” L. recalls.

After high school, L. voluntarily enlisted in the Israeli military, where she first began seriously thinking about the Palestinian side of the conflict. “That’s when I began confronting the issue of the occupation and what we as a state do beyond our borders,” she says.

Reflecting on her gender identity, L. says she is tired of living up to other people’s expectations. “Some people hate me because I’m too queer. Others because I’m Israeli. Some don’t like me because I’m Arab. Others because I said something they didn’t like. Well, to hell with it! It’s time to return to being myself,” she concludes.

Pryanishnikov said the case could ultimately see Kazakhstan extradite a Ukrainian citizen to Russia for the first time since the full-scale invasion began. Notably, two other Ukrainians are already serving prison terms in Russia on espionage charges after being lured to the Kaliningrad Region in 2023 to retrieve the same child.

Rozhanska flew from Istanbul to Astana on Oct. 1 and was detained immediately at Russia’s request. She had traveled to Kazakhstan to collect her 8-year-old grandson under an agreement reached in advance with his Russian relatives. Pryanishnikov told The Insider that the boy is included on Ukraine’s lists of children abducted by Russia.

“The father, a member of Ukraine’s armed forces, was allowed to see his son in person during school holidays in the Kaliningrad Region”

The lawyer said the case dates back to 2021 and began as an ordinary family dispute. Ukrainian citizen Alla Andreeva (née Sochnik), was living in Odesa with her child, who was born in 2018 during a previous marriage. In 2020, she married Vitaly Andreev, a Russian sailor whom she met in Odesa. Pryanishnikov said Andreev “put pressure on her and called Ukraine a foreign country,” insisting that she move to Russia. In August 2021, Andreeva traveled with her son and Russian husband to Kaliningrad, ostensibly to visit his parents, but they never returned to Ukraine. As Pryanishnikov explained:

“The father gave permission for the boy to leave temporarily, on the condition that he be returned to Ukraine. As soon as they left, problems began. The return kept being postponed, and then the full-scale invasion began. In March 2022, the child’s mother went to Russia’s Interior Ministry and declared that she no longer wished to hold Ukrainian citizenship. She filed the same declaration on behalf of the child. Both eventually obtained Russian citizenship fairly quickly.

Then legal disputes began in Kaliningrad courts over the father’s contact with the child. The boy’s new Russian family brought in all kinds of specialists, including psychologists, who said in their assessments that the child should not communicate with his father because his father was a Ukrainian citizen. Their position was essentially, ’how can he regularly speak with his father by video call, as we had requested, if a Ukrainian flag might be hanging in the background?’ All of this was accompanied by references to Putin’s decree launching the ‘special military operation,’ statements that the boy was growing up as a Russian patriot, and so on.

Eventually, a Kaliningrad court ruled that the father, a serviceman in Ukraine’s armed forces, could see his son in person during the summer holidays, but only in the Kaliningrad Region.”

“Rozhanska was being lured to Kazakhstan”

Pryanishnikov said negotiations continued with the child’s new Russian relatives:

“In 2023, an agreement was reached to hand the boy over to Ukraine. Under that agreement, two Ukrainian citizens traveled through Lithuania to the Kaliningrad region to collect the child. But they were detained, accused of attempting to abduct the child, and later also charged with espionage [the independent outlet Mediazona briefly reported on the case]. They were put under heavy pressure there, forced to give up their lawyers, and sentenced to 15 and 16 years in prison. Around the same time, a Russian court named Rozhanska, who has now been detained in Kazakhstan, as the organizer of the ‘abduction’ — even though charging a grandmother with trying to abduct her own grandson is highly unusual.”

According to the lawyer, negotiations over returning the child to his father in Ukraine resumed in the summer of 2026. This time, the boy’s Russian family proposed dropping mutual claims and handing the child over to his father as ordered by Ukraine’s Supreme Court in 2025. The exchange was set to take place in Kazakhstan. However, as Pryanishnikov explained:

“The night before the flight [from Kaliningrad] to Astana, the child’s stepfather and stepgrandfather recorded a video from the airport showing how they were supposedly seeing the boy off on a flight to Kazakhstan. He was supposed to travel there with his stepfather. But in the end, the boy did not fly anywhere. I can now see that the negotiations were conducted under FSB control. First, the Russian family insisted specifically on Kazakhstan. Second, they kept postponing the handover. Third, as it turned out, the date of the meeting in Astana was agreed at exactly the time a court in Kaliningrad, at the FSB’s request, ordered Rozhanska’s arrest in absentia.

Everything suggests she was being lured there. The meeting kept being delayed because, for bureaucratic reasons, they had not yet managed to complete everything that was needed in order to impose a preventive measure, to put her on a wanted list, and to send the documents to Kazakhstan through CSTO channels.”

“This would give Russian security agencies engaged in political policing much broader reach”

Pryanishnikov said the case has several political dimensions. First, it involves a child who is included on Ukraine’s list of children unlawfully held in Russia. He continued:

“Throughout the war, there has been the issue of Russia taking Ukrainian children away and erasing their Ukrainian identity. People may imagine that they are being taken away in trucks at gunpoint. But that is not usually how it happens. Most of the cases I encounter, including those raised by the Ukrainian ombudsman’s office, involve families that have broken apart. Roughly speaking, relatives end up on opposite sides. There was one case, for example, in which the father was serving in Ukraine’s armed forces while relatives on the mother’s side took the child to the occupied part of the Donetsk Region.

The most important point is that, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children are being stripped of their identity and citizenship against their will, without even consulting the other parent. In the case of Rozhanskaya’s grandson, for example, the child’s mother told a Kaliningrad court that her son was growing up as a ‘Russian patriot’ and should not be allowed to see his Ukrainian father.”

Second, Rozhanska’s detention could set a dangerous precedent for Ukrainians who live in or travel to CSTO member states, Pryanishnikov said. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kazakhstan has not extradited Ukrainian citizens to Russia at Moscow’s request — the only exception being a man with dual citizenship who was deported to Russia as a Russian passport holder. Pryanishnikov explained:

“After facing many restrictions on its ability to operate through Interpol, Russia has been actively looking for other mechanisms to detain people it is interested in. Now it is trying to test an extradition mechanism through a CSTO request. If this works, it would set a precedent for extraditing a Ukrainian citizen at Russia’s request. That would give Russian security agencies engaged in political policing much broader reach. Ukrainian volunteers or activists helping the armed forces or working on humanitarian issues in former Soviet countries, for example, could fall within their sights. And because of the kinds of organizations they work with, cases can easily be classified under what Russia calls terrorism-related provisions of its criminal code.”

Finally, the lawyer said, the case could be an attempt to establish another channel for replenishing Russia’s “exchange fund” — a term commonly used for civilian prisoners who may later be used in prisoner swaps involving Russian agents and officers captured abroad.

Rozhanska is currently being held in a temporary detention facility in Astana. A court is expected to consider her possible extradition to Russia within the next three days.

The unusual buildup was first flagged by the open source intelligence researcher Russian Forces Spotter.

As of Sept. 30, about 150 vessels were waiting for clearance to enter Russian ports — 65 tankers and 85 cargo ships, according to Russian Forces Spotter. There are now about 200 vessels in the area: 111 tankers and 83 cargo ships. That figure includes both ships waiting to enter port and vessels that have recently departed.

The largest queue, stretching nearly 60 kilometers, has formed around the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. The ships are clustered about 120 kilometers from Ust-Luga, one of Russia’s key oil terminals in the region. Of the 43 vessels currently waiting, at least six are part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” (a term commonly used for ageing, poorly insured vessels involved in transporting oil in ways designed to circumvent international sanctions).

A month ago, the queue was about half as large, with roughly 24 vessels.

The congestion began building in mid-August. Maps from earlier in the summer show no more than 10 vessels in the area, but by September 30 to 40 ships could be seen waiting on most days. 

In mid-August, Reuters reported that Russian authorities had begun implementing a plan to free up export capacity at Baltic ports and had therefore begun routing Kazakh oil through the port of Novorossiysk for export. The move came amid increased shipping risks in the Black Sea, where Russia-linked vessels became regular targets of Ukrainian drone attacks in the second half of the summer.

According to the Telegram channel Dossier Shpiona (lit. “Spy Dossier”) the incident occurred Oct. 1 while Russian forces were repelling a large-scale drone attack. The Su-35 crew mistakenly identified the Mi-8 as an unmanned aerial vehicle and opened fire. The helicopter crashed in the Anninsky District of the Voronezh Region, about 80 kilometers from the city of Voronezh. The pilot, navigator and gunner were killed.

Fighterbomber did not explicitly state the cause of the incident, writing that:

“It’s a classic problem that humanity will likely never overcome, despite AI, robots, neural networks, ‘friend or foe’ systems, and other wonders of science and technology. All of which pale in comparison to His Majesty the f---ing idiot.”

The Telegram channel Oko Hora (lit. “Eye of Horus”) reported that the Mi-8 was on a takeoff pad and began lifting off after a drone alert was declared, after which it came under fire from the Su-35. The channel said the helicopter was mistaken for a drone.

The Ukrainian Telegram channel Ukraine Context reported Russia’s loss of a Mi-8 in the Voronezh Region before the Spy Dossier post was published. The channel later said preliminary data indicated that a Russian Su-35 had shot down the Mi-8 after mistaking it for a drone. The channel In Factum also reported that the crew was killed, while Ukrainian outlet UNIAN said the helicopter was downed by Russian forces.

The Voronezh Region came under a large-scale drone attack on the evening of Oct. 1. Regional governor Alexander Gusev said 62 drones were destroyed over two urban areas and six other districts in the region.

It was not the first reported loss of a Russian Mi-8 during efforts to repel a Ukrainian drone attack. Overnight into March 4, a Russian military helicopter crashed in the settlement of Dudki in the Rostov Region, about 2.5 kilometers from the Millerovo military airfield. According to the independent Russian publication Astra, the Mi-8 was shot down by Russian air defenses and crashed into a local farmer’s barn. All three crew members were killed, and no civilians were injured. Sources in Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry confirmed the circumstances of the crash and the deaths of the crew.

The decision was made at a meeting of the company’s shareholders. Schröder will help oversee the “strategic development” of the company’s business in Russia.

Thomas Bruch, owner of Giperglobus and a shareholder in the Germany-based Globus group, said Schröder was appointed thanks to his many years of experience in Russia’s political and economic life. His perspective would help the company maintain a “dialogue-oriented approach” under current conditions, RBC quoted Bruch as saying.

Globus hypermarkets remain among the relatively few foreign retailers still operating in Russia after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In January 2025, Giperglobus LLC left Germany’s Globus Holding, but the Russian company continues to use the Globus brand and has the same shareholders as the German chain.

Other foreign retailers, including Metro Cash & Carry, Auchan, and Lemana PRO (formerly Leroy Merlin) also continue to operate in Russia — however, their Russian businesses were placed under “temporary management” in September.

Schröder has maintained ties to Russia, including a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. In May, Putin named Schröder as an example of a European figure he would consider to be an acceptable mediator in talks involving Ukraine.

A7 is run by fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, who resides in Russia. The network relies heavily on subagents — companies in third countries that use falsified trade documents to disguise payments involving sanctioned entities as ordinary commercial transactions. A7 itself said that as of January 2026, it was processing more than 2,000 transactions a day worth a combined 7.5 trillion rubles ($89.5 billion) — equivalent to about 13% of Russia’s foreign trade in 2025. More than $17 billion passed through the subagents from January 2025 through June 2026.

The U.S. Treasury said the network was also used by Iran’s central bank, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Tehran-backed groups, including Hamas, as well as by cybercriminals. One subagent worked with participants in Iran’s “shadow fleet,” receiving nearly $140 million. Another transferred about $1.6 million to a company linked to weapons procurement for Iran.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said:

“Today’s action targeting A7 continues Treasury’s unprecedented efforts to isolate Iran and its financial enablers and sends a clear message that if you facilitate illicit finance for America’s adversaries, you will lose access to the U.S. financial system.”

In July, the European Union imposed sanctions on Leonid Shumakov, head of the A7A5 stablecoin, the companies A7 Agent and A71, and Mikhail Dorofeyev, deputy chairman of Promsvyazbank (PSB). The A7 payment network was created in late 2024 by PSB and Shor. In April, The Financial Times reported that the network was building infrastructure in Africa and identified Dorofeyev at the opening of its office in Nigeria.

The vote was undoubtedly a success for Marine Le Pen. Her party and its far-right allies had never before had even a small group in the legislature's upper chamber. Yet Le Pen would be wrong to present Sunday's relative success as the guarantee of a second breakthrough: her victory in the 2027 presidential election.

For one thing, Senate elections in France are not direct. Senators are chosen by an electoral college made up of representatives delegated by municipal councils. As a result, a candidate’s party affiliation matters less than their record and reputation in a particular département.

Second, political debate has historically centered on the National Assembly, while senators tend to be less inclined to make high-profile statements. Only a small number of senators, for example, regularly speak out on foreign policy. Finally, the nature of local representation means that the political makeup of the Senate does not mirror the overall balance of political forces in France. In the previous Senate, for example, the traditional Republican right and the centrist coalition held a solid majority, even though their standing at the national level had long been in decline. That balance will remain largely unchanged in the new Senate.

The Senate’s political makeup does not mirror the overall balance of political forces in France

The reasons for this divergence are clear: politics works to a different rhythm at the local level. Voters may agree with the sharp criticisms of the government and established parties leveled by Le Pen or by her opposite number on the left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but that does not diminish their trust in a good mayor or municipal councilor, even if that person has spent their entire political career in one of those same established parties.

One important conclusion can nevertheless be drawn already. If Marine Le Pen wins the 2027 presidential election, the Senate could become a significant check on her power, particularly when it comes to her plans to amend the Constitution by referendum. The National Rally’s representation in the upper house has grown from negligible to very weak, while the majority remains in the hands of a coalition of moderate conservatives and centrists. The Senate will of course not systematically obstruct a newly elected president (whoever he or she may be), but the populists’ most radical ideas are unlikely to find much support there.

Meanwhile, the presidential campaign is gradually gathering momentum. Even if it has thus far produced no major surprises, there have been some unexpected turns. Few, for example, could have predicted that throughout September all the candidates would be forced to keep discussing gas station prices. Gasoline now costs more than €2 a liter, with diesel even more expensive, at around €2.40. This poses a major and complex problem for the government.

The main issue: the fuel crisis

There are two Frances. One is the France of large- and medium-sized cities, where people can easily get around on foot, by bicycle or tram, and do not rely on cars every day. Given that many drive electric vehicles, it is easy to see why the fuel crisis does not concern them much.

Then there is provincial France, where people commute dozens of kilometers to and from work every day. For them, there is no alternative to the car, and they tend to be people on low or middle incomes who cannot afford anything fancier than an aging diesel Renault.

For them, rising fuel prices have been deeply painful. In September, fishermen were already protesting the fact that every trip to sea had become much more expensive. The anger of provincial France, sudden and fierce, recently found expression in the Yellow Vest movement of 2018-2020 – a nightmare the political establishment does not wish to see repeated.

Taxes account for roughly 56% of the price of fuel. Several of France’s neighbors have temporarily cut fuel taxes, at least in part, making it possible to fill up in Germany or Italy at prices that are lower, even if they are not back to pre-crisis levels. However, with a budget deficit of 5.1% and public debt at 116%, the French government cannot afford to do the same, since any loss of tax revenue would only worsen the situation. Meanwhile, France’s debt-servicing costs are now higher than even Greece’s, which was on the brink of bankruptcy just 15 years ago.

The government is offering targeted assistance to people who have to drive long distances or, like fishermen and farmers, need fuel for their boats and farm machinery. But these are only partial measures, weighed down by inevitable bureaucratic complications. With no end in sight to the crisis around Iran, oil prices appear set to remain high, and if they do, social tensions will only grow.

Taxes account for 56% of the price of fuel in France

The presidential candidates may prefer to talk about something else, but under the circumstances there is no avoiding the question: “What would you do about fuel prices?” Le Pen is promising to unveil a plan in October that would slash government spending so deeply that fuel excise duties could easily be reduced.

The left-wing Mélenchon, meanwhile, wants to freeze prices and while raising taxes on the wealthy and on the profits of large companies. Édouard Philippe and other centrists are more cautious, as some of them were in government until recently and understand the scale of the budget problems. They see both extremes – left and right – as forms of unrealistic populism. In any case, the fuel crisis has become one of the main themes of the presidential campaign and could remain so for a long time afterward, especially if it triggers social unrest.

Leading the polls

The frontrunner for the first round of the presidential election is indeed Le Pen, and she remains firmly at the top of the polls, with support above 30% in a field where no other candidate tops 20%. At the same time, her numbers are slightly below their summer peak of 36%, and some pollsters now put her at 31–33%.

It is worth noting, however, that Le Pen has yet to reveal the details of her economic program, making a substantive assessment of her presidential ambitions impossible.

Le Pen’s support remains above 30%, while none of her rivals has surpassed 20%

What is known for certain? The key slogan of Marine Le Pen’s campaign will be “national priority.” It should not, however, be understood as a translation of Donald Trump’s America First — it is not about settling scores with France’s neighbors or leaving the EU, and is still less about grandiose foreign-policy ambitions.

National priority means tighter immigration rules, withdrawing from international aid programs, and restricting foreigners’ social rights, particularly when it comes to social benefits and housing support. There is nothing surprising about these plans. Marine Le Pen has long advocated lowering the retirement age back to 60 or cutting VAT by saving money on outlays for migrants. She has also promised to sharply reduce aid to Ukraine.

There are two problems with her plans. First, it would be nice to see the figures and scrutinize the calculations of Le Pen’s economic advisers, because there is reason to suspect that the numbers will not add up. France’s huge budget deficit is largely the result of persistent deficits in the pension and social security systems, but instead of reforming them, Le Pen proposes looking for money elsewhere. Some of her ideas may well prove sensible, but the need for fundamental reforms, which she apparently does not intend to pursue, will not disappear.

Second, attempts to put her promised policies into practice could encounter strong institutional resistance. In traditional populist fashion, Le Pen intends to appeal directly to the people by seeking approval in a referendum, including for constitutional amendments. She has little alternative, since it remains unclear whether her party could secure a majority in the National Assembly (to say nothing of the Senate and the Constitutional Council, which would have to approve any referendum) even if she wins the presidential election. 

According to the polls, Le Pen remains comfortably in the lead, but the campaign is still ahead. The various contradictions in her program will not trouble her committed supporters, but they may give pause to those in the protest electorate who have the slightest inclination to look beyond the slogans and examine the details.

The battle for the second round

Le Pen still has no serious rival at the top of the race, as her competitors are vying with one another for the right to face the right-wing populist in the second round. A special place in this competition belongs to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the radical-left party La France Insoumise and a perennial contender in presidential elections, where he has typically won around 20% of the vote. Polls currently put him at 19%, potentially enough to carry him into the second round, where he would face Marine Le Pen an a showdown of polar opposites that could end up tipping to the right.

Mélenchon's unfavorable rating is at almost unprecedented levels: more than 60% of French voters say they would never vote for him. A Trotskyist in his youth, Mélenchon has never concealed his hostility toward capitalism in general and the wealthy in particular. His program essentially calls for taking money from the rich by raising every conceivable tax and redistributing the proceeds to the poor in the name of social justice.

Mélenchon’s prospects of reaching the second round would improve if he could unite the entire left behind him, but the Socialists will hold primaries in October to choose a candidate who will have the backing not only of the party but also of moderate left-wing environmentalist movements and trade unions whose members are tired of Mélenchon’s radicalism. Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament currently appears to be the frontrunner among the Socialist candidates. According to polls, he could win around 12% in the first round of the presidential vote. He rejects any alliance with La France Insoumise and could challenge Mélenchon for the support of left-wing voters in April.

Among the centrist and center-right candidates, former prime minister Édouard Philippe currently has the strongest position. Polls put him at around 19% in the first round, on par with Mélenchon. Unlike the Socialists, the centrist camp has no primary planned, and there is no guarantee it will unite behind a single candidate — but if it does, that choice will most likely be made in early 2027, after the current contenders have had a chance to test their public support. Whether Philippe or a different centrist ultimately makes it to the second round, they would prove to be a much more challenging opponent for Le Pen given their potential to unite the electorate against her — as happened in 2017 and 2022, when Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron by margins of 32% and 17%, respectively. 

So far, then, the Senate elections have brought no definitive clarity to the 2027 presidential race. Marine Le Pen is riding high, but until her opponent in the second round is known, uncertainty will remain. Much will depend on whether she faces a politician who can unite the left and the center, or a polarizing figure like Mélenchon.

Still, one thing is already clear: even if she wins in 2027, Le Pen will not control the institutional checks on presidential power, particularly the Senate. Her promise to hold a referendum to overcome resistance from the political establishment is therefore almost certain to fail, even if she manages to win the presidency.