Shaheds have been one of Ukraine's main problems from the moment of their emergence on the battlefield in the fall of 2022. Together with the lighter Gerbera drones, which often act as decoys or scouts, they have become the primary means of Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, especially the country’s power grid. From February through April 2026, Russia was launching more than 200 Shahed-type drones into Ukrainian territory each day. For a long time, the Defense Forces of Ukraine (DFU) struggled to find countermeasures until cost-efficient interceptor drones came along.

The use of anti-aircraft drones has been a known practice since mid-2024, when the DFU began using modified FPV drones to intercept Russian reconnaissance UAVs, such as the Orlan-10, Zala, and Supercam. Over time, the DFU acquired special-purpose models, such as Sting, Bagnet, and later STRILA, designed first and foremost to counter Shaheds.

Today, Ukrainian interceptor drones can hit Russian UAVs at ranges of up to 30 km beyond the line of contact, comparable to the range of a short-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) system.

Air defense based on anti-aircraft drones has proved to be cheaper and more mobile than the conventional kind. Intercepting a single Shahed requires up to two interceptor drones that cost around $3000 each. Meanwhile, the cheapest single shot from a SAM system (such as the Vampire) costs approximately $30,000.

Interception with air defense drones follows a simple pattern. A signals-intelligence post detects an enemy UAV heading toward the position. Compact radars then determine its range, altitude, and speed in order to give the operator of an air defense FPV a rough understanding of where the target is. Then, as soon as the enemy drone appears in the FPV-goggles or on the screen, the operator locks it in his sights and brings his own drone into close range. Several hundred meters from the target, an aim-hold system may engage automatically, but at the final stage, the operator remains free to choose between a direct ramming, a net drop, or an airburst of the charge.

The new technology has been a game-changer at the front, notes aviation expert Valeriy Romanenko. In March 2025, Ukrainian air defense drones (mostly based on primitive quadcopters) shot down a mere 2,518 Russian reconnaissance UAVs, including one Shahed. However, after a year of tactical development, in March 2026 Ukrainian air defense drones destroyed more than 33,000 Russian UAVs of various types, doubling the February figures.

In March 2026 Ukrainian air defense drones destroyed more than 33,000 Russian UAVs

The Russian side has begun to make more active use of jet Shaheds (Geran-3), whose serial production began in 2025. Still, despite their ability to reach speeds of 400 km/h, these soon proved vulnerable to Ukrainian interceptor drones as well. Footage of the interception of Geran-3s by air defense drones in tail-chase pursuit shows that the interceptors can outfly even a jet drone.

In April 2026 Russian Telegram channels showed the use of a jet “drone-missile,” the Geran-5, against oil and gas infrastructure in Sumy Oblast. Ukrainian UAVs cannot yet catch this drone, which can reach speeds of up to 600 km/h. The shape of the new Geran resembles a small cruise missile rather than a drone, and it is fitted with a more powerful jet engine than other types. Russian sources also demonstrated the use of the Geran-4, also jet-powered, against the energy infrastructure of Chernihiv Oblast. On May 3, however, an example of this modification being intercepted was recorded.

As Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov stressed, “jet Shaheds” have become “a key challenge,” and Ukraine is developing new technological solutions to counter them. In particular, the minister promised support for the development of high-speed interceptors capable of reaching at least 450 km/h.

Russian interceptor drones

Interception assets in the FPV segment fall into two broad types: rotor-wing and fixed-wing. Each type is suited to a specific task. With a short range of up to 20–30 kilometers, copters are used mainly against slow-moving drones.

The air defense drones Boomerang-8 and Boomerang-10 are highly maneuverable, AI-enhanced suicide drones with automatic target hold capabilities and a speed of up to 170 km/h. They are used for both interception and reconnaissance. Among the advantages of the air defense variant of the Boomerang FPV drone, Russian pro-war authors note a wide range of frequency combinations, a convenient and clear software platform, easy setup, and adequate technical support. Drawbacks include weak batteries and a stand that is not fully adapted to the tasks of air defense crews. The Boomerangs are used to intercept relatively low-speed reconnaissance drones and fixed-wing suicide drones, such as the Darts, and Baba-Yaga hexacopters.

Fixed-wing drones are used to intercept larger and faster UAVs such as the FP-1, the FP-2, or the Liutyi. As the author of the Russian Telegram channel ARKHANGEL SPETSNAZA writes, this category is largely represented in the Russian Armed Forces by the interceptor drones Sokol, Molniya-PVO, and, more recently, Lis.

The Sokol-1 and Sokol-2 interceptors possess high-quality digital video links, an airburst capability, high speed, and good maneuverability — but the use of standard control frequencies negates all these advantages.

The Molniya-PVO, a modification of the Russian FPV suicide drone of the fixed-wing Molniya family, is designed to intercept and destroy heavy drones like the Baba-Yaga. The drone can be launched by hand, reach speeds of up to 220 km/h, and is equipped with both a digital video system and an analog video link featuring conventional and thermal-imaging cameras. Notably, the digital system is usable only in daylight and at short range. The drone has a proximity sensor, which detonates the warhead when a target appears at a set distance from the bow camera. Among the Molniya-PVO's drawbacks are a weak battery and the lack of a thermal-imaging digital version for nighttime work or a standard ground control station. Users have also complained of poor technical support along with the manufacturer’s reluctance to respond to feedback.

Interceptor drones Lis and Lis-2, from the makers of the Boomerang, exist in daytime and thermal-imaging versions. Both feature the target-lock function, which noticeably eases the operator's work. However, their time in the air is limited due to a weak battery, meaning their key user scenario involves high-speed interception rather than long patrols.

The Yolka (“Fir Tree”) drone combines the characteristics of fixed-wing drones and quadcopters. It can hit a wide range of targets, from small FPV-drones and reconnaissance craft to heavy UAVs. The compact drone features a target lock-on and has an engagement range of up to 3 km while flying at speeds of up to 200 km/h. Notably, this model has no warhead and engages the target kinetically, which reduces its effectiveness while increasing its popularity in the Russian Armed Forces: after all, Russian personnel are banned from using improvised explosive devices.

Last May, it was stated that the Yolka possesses an AI-enhanced target-lock and tracking system (in effect, an electro-optical homing head). At the same time, analysts noted a significant drawback (1, 2): the target auto-lock fails in low-light conditions. These interceptors have been on the battlefield since September 2024 and are being actively used (1, 2) by mobile firing groups, air observation posts, and frontline units. In February 2026, reports emerged of mass deliveries of Yolka drones to Russian Armed Forces units.

Ukrainian interceptor drones

The Defense Forces of Ukraine have several types of interceptor drones in their arsenal. The best known is the P1-SUN, made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall. This UAV, unveiled in the fall of 2025, can accelerate to 300 km/h and climb to altitudes of up to 5 kilometers. The airframe is made using 3D-printing, which keeps its cost in the vicinity of $1,000. The warhead contains up to 800 grams of explosives — enough to shoot down a Shahed. P1-SUN destroys the target by ramming it or by detonating next to it. According to information from Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Anna Hvozdyar, as of late April P1-Sun drones had intercepted more than 3,000 Russian Shaheds.

The Ukrainian Sting interceptor drone, serially produced by the Wild Hornets non-profit, was designed to intercept Shaheds and has since been enhanced to counter nighttime attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure objects. It has also been spotted intercepting a jet-powered Shahed while fitted with an R-60 air-to-air missile. The Sting can reach speeds of more than 340 km/h and operates at altitudes of up to 3 kilometers.

The Osminog (“Octopus”) air defense drone is a joint Ukrainian-British development created to counter Shahed-type UAVs. The drone can reach speeds in excess of 300 km/h. It is equipped with an AI-based control system for automatic terminal guidance to the target, can operate around the clock, is resistant to EW systems, and performs well at low altitudes. More than 29 private Ukrainian companies have received licenses for its serial production, and assembly in the United Kingdom is also planned. Four Ukrainian manufacturers have signed contracts to deliver 8,000 drones to the DFU, the Defense Ministry reported on April 30.

The Merops system, developed by the American defense company Perennial Autonomy, was supplied to Ukraine in 2024 and has shown high effectiveness, according to U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll. The Merops consists of a ground control station, which detects the target, launchers, and Surveyor reusable interceptor drones with a compact warhead. The interceptors are fitted with wings, typical of fixed-wing UAVs, and X-tail stabilizers. The exact technical specifications of the system are not disclosed, but the Surveyor is known to reach speeds exceeding 280 km/h. A distinctive feature of the system is its ability to work both autonomously and under an operator's remote control. Merops can function in EW conditions and uses AI for autonomous navigation when GPS and comms are jammed. The cost of a single Merops system is $14,000–15,000, but the unit price can drop significantly for large orders. It is currently known to be in use in the Middle East.

The Bagnet air defense drone, made by the Ukrainian defense company Tenebris, is 85% composed of domestically produced components. It is designed for the detection, interception, and destruction of loitering munitions at altitudes of up to 5 kilometers. Bagnet reaches speeds of up to 250 km/h and is fitted with a warhead of up to 1 kilogram. It uses an explosively-formed penetrator to destroy targets in the air and reduce the risk of falling debris. Its built-in guidance system, developed by the French startup Alta Ares, can detect the target and steer the drone toward it in the final stage of the flight. Another important feature is automatic takeoff and return in the event no target is detected.

German TYTAN Technologies interceptor drones emerged at the end of 2024 and were immediately put to the test in real combat conditions in Ukraine. These autonomous air defense drones detect, track, and destroy Shaheds and reconnaissance UAVs by direct hit — all with minimal operator involvement. This past April, TYTAN Technologies announced a special shipment of more than 1,000 METIS interceptor drones for Ukraine's National Guard. The new AI-enhanced version has a range of more than 45 kilometers, reaches speeds of up to 400 km/h, and is capable of effectively engaging targets at altitudes of up to 6 kilometers while carrying a warhead of up to 1 kilogram.

STRILA is a Ukrainian air defense missile-type UAV produced by WIY Drones. It is designed to intercept high-speed and maneuvering airborne targets. STRILA uses original WIY software and target-designation sources that allow the operator to receive data on the target's direction, altitude, and speed. The drone has an operating radius of up to 14 kilometers and a range of 28 kilometers. It operates at altitudes of up to 5 km, carries a warhead of up to 800 grams, and reaches speeds of up to 350 km/h.

This past March it was announced that Ukraine’s WIY Drones and Germany’s Quantum Systems had released the STRILA-2 modification featuring a solid-fuel rocket booster that allows the UAV to take off almost vertically and gain altitude in a matter of seconds before switching to energy-efficient flight using four electric motors. As a result, the STRILA-2 can attack targets from above, while built-in AI-driven software helps it autonomously recognize and lock onto the target even when comms are jammed by EW tools. The German government has financed an order to produce 15,000 STRILA interceptors for Ukraine's National Guard. The cooperation envisions not only procurement but also the expansion of production to Ukraine itself.

In short, air defense is undergoing substantial changes due to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. Given the shortage of SAMs in the world and the growing prevalence of cheap one-way attack systems, the emphasis is shifting toward creating affordable air defense alternatives such as interceptor drones.

The more Russia launches, the more Ukraine shoots down

In February 2026, Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov named the protection of the country’s civilian population and critical infrastructure as his ministry’s top priorities, setting the goal of detecting 100% of airborne threats in real time and intercepting at least 95% of missiles and drones. To that end, the minister ordered the creation of a multi-layered air defense system and a ramp-up in interceptor production. As early as April 1, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry stated that in March, Ukraine’s air defense systems had destroyed or suppressed 89.9% of Russian airborne targets, compared with 85.6% in February and 80.2% in December.

The growing effectiveness of countering Shahed-type strike UAVs and their decoys has been driven at least in part by the DFU’s increased use of air defense drones, which shoot down about 45% of targets. As Fedorov reported April 28, over the first four months of 2026 the DFU had received twice as many interceptor drones as it did in all of 2025.

Interception effectiveness is growing in step with a rising number of Russian launches. In effect, the two sides are now locked in an unmanned technology race: Ukraine’s main objective is to increase kill effectiveness while producing large numbers of interceptors at low cost, while Russia is focused on producing more strike drones and adapting them to Ukraine’s new countermeasures. To accomplish this task, Ukraine must stay at least ten steps ahead of the enemy in every technological cycle and keep its lead in the war of innovation, Fedorov believes.

Both sides are now locked in an unmanned technology race

This past April, the defense minister said that Ukraine has developed interceptor drones that can be controlled remotely to engage targets hundreds — or even thousands — of kilometers away. Coupled with the Sting drone, the HORNET VISION Ctrl system forms a new air defense architecture in which mobile interceptors can effectively repel large-scale attacks of suicide drones while they are still over enemy territory. On April 4, Roman ‘Hulk’ of the BULAVA unit reportedly destroyed two Shaheds from a distance of 500 kilometers using this technology. According to Fedorov, more than a dozen manufacturers have already integrated this innovation into their systems.

In addition, the Defense Forces of Ukraine have begun using air defense drones deployed on the Magura V5 sea drone. As The Economist reported in early March, this technology was developed in response to the Russian tactic of launching drones over the sea in order to make them harder for Ukrainian EW to detect.

The first Ukrainian tests took place in the Black Sea near Odesa. According to the description of the technology, the Ukrainian unmanned vessels operate in groups, forming a common radar field. When a target is detected, an interceptor drone is launched from a special hatch on the deck of the boat and is then remotely controlled via Starlink. In mid-April, the surface unmanned systems division of the 412th Nemesis Brigade of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces reported the first successful destruction of a Shahed using an interceptor drone launched from an unmanned surface vehicle.

Another unconventional solution has involved launching interceptors from an aircraft. Ukrainian aviator Tymur Fatkullin posted a video on April 23 showing launches of P1-SUN air defense drones suspended under the wings of a PZL M28 Skytruck light transport aircraft (the Polish modification of the An-28). 

Originally, in order to intercept Shaheds the aircraft was fitted with an M134D machine gun by Dillon Aero. To hit the target, it has to fly in close, and as a result, on one of the sorties debris from a downed Shahed damaged the wing of the An-28. After this incident, the method of launching P1-SUN interceptor drones from the aircraft was tested. As a result, the aircraft acts as a delivery platform for drones — a setup that significantly expands the interceptors' range.

Ukraine’s air defense landscape notably features a number of private actors. As Mykhailo Fedorov reported on March 30, one such group created by a company in Kharkiv Region has already shot down several Shaheds and Zalas. On April 17, Fedorov noted that the same air defense group had destroyed a jet-powered Shahed flying at a speed of more than 400 km/h.

As of April 30, the private air defense project has been joined by 24 entities from all across Ukraine. The experimental framework that allows private enterprises to set up their own air defense units was approved by Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers in November 2025, and at the beginning of March 2026 the government permitted critical-infrastructure enterprises to receive additional weaponry to strengthen their air defense capabilities. The arsenal of such groups includes air defense drones and remotely operated machine guns.

Private air defense systems ensure coverage for vulnerable areas, protecting commercial and infrastructure facilities. Ukraine is effectively becoming the first country to consistently integrate private companies into its air defense network.

Prospects for the development of air defense drones

Former Ukrainian prime minister and current chair of the expert council of the Nemesis brigade Oleksiy Honcharuk has observed the exponential growth in his country’s drone capabilities. “Every year, a drone either halves in size or price, or doubles its range,” he says.

Still, Russia continues to make modifications of its own. Shaheds may soon become not weapons but delivery vehicles carrying smaller drones. The Russian Armed Forces already use Shaheds to launch FPV-drones near the front line, and this practice will likely ultimately require Ukraine to devise a new means of defense: walls of interceptor drones, automatically launched on detection, without operator involvement. “It may sound like science fiction, but we are already preparing for it,” Honcharuk insisted.

In April 2026, former CIA director General David Petraeus returned from a trip to Ukraine, where he had spent time in a specialized drone unit in Zaporizhzhia. Petraeus sees promise in the emergence of drone swarms — truly autonomous formations that do not require operators for remote control and are virtually impossible to intercept or suppress due to their huge numbers. He believes that in response to this threat, breakthrough technologies will appear, possibly including powerful microwave systems.

Petraeus sees promise in the emergence of drone swarms, which do not require operators and will be virtually impossible to intercept using current defenses

Several companies are already working on a project to deploy interceptor swarms within the Brave1 cluster. The developers aim to get the drones working as a single system controlled by one operator in real time.

In the near future, AI capabilities will likely enable air defense drones to change course on their own in order to dodge obstacles, respond to changing conditions, and safely and effectively carry out missions. In particular, the Hornet interceptor drones by Destinus have received a combat AI system from the U.S.-based defense technology company Shield AI. During trials in Spain in early 2026, the Hornet drones with Shield AI’s Hivemind system independently corrected their flight trajectory in real time, adapting to changing conditions and tasks. Both Destinus and Shield AI are already working with Ukraine.

Ukrainian air defense drones and the Middle East conflict

After President Zelensky’s March 2026 visit to the Persian Gulf, which resulted in the signing of defense agreements with a number of countries in the region, Ukrainian UAV manufacturers have entered the spotlight as potential leaders of arms exports to the Middle East, writes The Times. However, in practice, they have run into difficulties with export licensing and have been drawn into a debate over the utility of selling interception systems abroad at a time when Ukraine itself has to repel regular attacks.

Even among drone manufacturers, there is no consensus. “If your house is on fire, you don't sell water to a neighbor,” a senior Wild Hornets representative said in a comment to The Times, and Kyrylo Budanov joined the debate by taking the position that the free sale of weapons during an active phase of war is unacceptable. Still, others believe that UAV exports will stimulate growth in domestic production by allowing companies to raise capital via sales to the Persian Gulf.

The situation is further complicated by the military dimension: Russian cruise and ballistic missiles remain out of reach for Ukrainian air defense drones, and although Moscow’s missiles are vulnerable to Western-made PAC-3 SAMs, these are in short supply in Ukraine. At a March 30 press conference, Zelensky cited a global shortage of anti-ballistic missiles, noting that only about 60 PAC-3 interceptor missiles for the Patriot SAM system are produced per month — and that most of the production output is currently being sent to the Middle East.

In January 2026, Zelensky spoke of a critical shortage of SAMs: the shipment of PAC-3 was around a month late and arrived only a day after a large-scale Russian strike caused a near-total blackout in the country. According to Zelensky, the Ukrainian side had known in advance about the launch of ballistic missiles against power infrastructure and had deployed Patriot and NASAMS systems, but Kyiv’s forces could not use them due to the lack of ammunition. For this reason, Kyiv is considering an informal arrangement with the Persian Gulf states: trading Ukrainian technology in the field of unmanned systems in exchange for interceptor missiles.

On April 28, Zelensky announced several decisions aimed at simplifying the transfer of Ukrainian weapons and expertise abroad under existing partnerships. The very next day, TAF Industries, a private Ukrainian FPV drone manufacturer, reportedly received its first request for military consulting: to send specialists with anti-drone systems to protect a vessel in the Strait of Hormuz.

A CIT expert who chose to remain anonymous explained to The Insider that Ukrainian air defense experience and technology are applicable to the Gulf states’ predicament only in part. Simply scaling up the use of Ukrainian solutions is unlikely to produce a comparable result in the Middle East due to the fundamental differences in geography and the structure of threats. Ukraine is a large country, which gives its air defense network ample time to detect threats against regions that do not border Russia. However, in areas where the time of flight is minimal, interception has remained a serious problem even after the introduction of air defense drones. 

Ukrainian air defense experience and technology apply to the Gulf states only in part

In the Gulf states, the situation is fundamentally different. Except for Saudi Arabia, most countries of the region are relatively small in size, and key infrastructure is concentrated along the coast. Therefore, their air defense systems essentially have no time buffer, as targets can reach their objectives in a matter of minutes. Accordingly, interception must take place either instantly over land, or — more logically — over the waters of the Gulf.

This is where a whole set of new questions arises. Ukrainian air defense relies on a network of acoustic sensors for threat detection and interceptor drones. But how does one deploy such infrastructure over water? To date, there is no practical solution to this problem, and the role of air defense drones in the maritime zone remains uncertain. For now, the leading role in intercepting targets over the Gulf belongs to conventional tools: aviation, including helicopters and aircraft that use inexpensive engagement munitions such as guided rockets of the APKWS class.

Military expert Kirill Mikhailov, however, draws attention to the fact that Iranian Shaheds that were fired at the Gulf states appear to have barely evolved since 2022, making them simpler targets than the Russian Gerans, which have acquired serious EW countermeasures and remote-control systems over the course of the war. In Mikhailov’s estimation, this means that the application of current Ukrainian technology and know-how could make a serious difference in the Middle East, at least until Iran improves its attack munitions. 

In turn, the CIT expert notes that Ukraine leads the world in the development of air defense drones, primarily thanks to the scale of investment and their constant combat use, which provides continuous feedback. In the Ukrainian case, shortcomings are quickly identified and fixed, and solutions are rapidly refined. At the same time, the technologies themselves are not unique and their underlying principles are well explored, meaning other countries can close the gap fairly quickly if they make it a priority to do so. The main advantage in the area of drone warfare is not secret developments, but the accumulated experience necessary to constantly improve existing systems faster than the enemy can. 

The published video appears to show at least two hits. The Russian pro-war Telegram channel Rybar wrote that the Boikiy was undergoing scheduled repairs in a dry dock at the Kronstadt Marine Plant.

“Why the corvette was in such a position without protection is a question with an asterisk,” Rybar wrote, using a Russian expression indicating that an issue is difficult or uncomfortable. “The fleet is extremely vulnerable to Ukrainian raids… As for communications, a Starlink satellite terminal was most likely used. The scheme is already well established: one of the relay drones travels through the Baltic states into international waters in the Gulf of Finland and transmits the signal to strike drones,” the channel wrote.

According to The Insider’s calculations, this is the third Baltic Fleet ship damaged during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. In April 2024, the missile ship Serpukhov, Project 21631 Buyan-M, caught fire after being hit in a sabotage attack at the Kaliningrad Region’s Baltiysk base. Another ship of the same type, the Grad, was hit in October 2025 in Karelia.

In June 2025, a Russian Navy ship was reported to be escorting “shadow fleet” tankers through the English Channel for the first time. The Boikiy took part in that operation and later escorted the tanker General Skobelev and cargo ship Sparta from the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean via the English Channel. The vessels are believed to have helped remove military equipment from Russia’s base in Tartus, Syria.

The Insider previously reported that the Boikiy spoofed its signal by using a shared Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI), making it appear in tracking systems as different maritime objects.

On June 3, the opening day of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), the city came under a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack. The locations hit included the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, the city’s Kirovsky and Krasnoselsky districts, and infrastructure facilities in Kronstadt.

Moscow and the Moscow Region

On the morning of June 3, gas stations operated by the Odintsovo Regional Fuel Company (ORTK) reported limits on gasoline sales. Local outlet MSK1.RU reported that one station in Troitsk, a district within Moscow, posted a notice saying no more than 60 liters of gasoline and 100 liters of diesel fuel would be sold per customer.

ORTK said the restrictions had been introduced on May 30 and would remain in place until the situation “settles down.”

Most gas station chains did not report restrictions. However, a Gazprom station employee told the outlet that limits were nevertheless in effect in Moscow and the surrounding region for diesel and gasoline, capped at 100 to 150 liters.

St. Petersburg

According to the St. Petersburg outlet Fontanka, local residents began reporting fuel sale limits late last week. Kirishiavtoservis, a chain of gas stations operated by the Kinef oil refinery in the Leningrad Region, limited sales to 50 liters per receipt.

AI-95 gasoline appears to be in the shortest supply, Fontanka reported. A source in the oil refining market told the outlet that production of that grade had been hit hardest, but said the problem in St. Petersburg was “not exactly widespread or global” and that smaller, less popular gas stations were more likely to face a noticeable fuel shortage than larger chains.

The issue was caused less by reduced production volumes than by logistics issues, the source explained: 

“Whereas we used to bring it in from Kirishi, which was quick, now we have to bring it in, roughly speaking, from Perm. The logistics have become more complicated. In other words, the volume of shipments has remained the same, but delivery times have gotten longer. As a result, we’ve become slower at responding to requests from every gas station in the most remote corners of the country.”

The border regions of Kursk and Belgorod

On June 2, residents of the Kursk and Belgorod regions reported restrictions on gasoline sales, with gas stations run by state-owned energy giant Rosneft halting sales of AI-92 gasoline in canisters. That grade is often used to power electric generators and similar equipment. Limits were also introduced on AI-95 gasoline, including a cap of no more than 20 liters per customer in the Kursk Region.

Regional authorities confirmed the restrictions. Maxim Gusev, the Kursk Region’s Minister of Economic Development, said the limits were linked to “ensuring safety during fuel sales.”

The occupied Luhansk Region

Sales of AI-95 and AI-92 gasoline were restricted in the occupied Luhansk Region of Ukraine. The Russian-installed occupation government of the “Luhansk People’s Republic” announced the measure the previous evening. Diesel fuel sales were also capped at 20 liters per person, including for customers filling canisters.

Authorities attributed the restrictions to the risk of a shortage.

“Given the reserves that exist today in the Luhansk People’s Republic, and taking into account increased demand from the population over the past few days, there is a risk of a shortage,” said Konstantin Rogovenko, the Russian-installed energy minister of the occupied Luhansk Region.

Occupied Crimea

The Russia-installed authorities in Crimea were among the first to introduce such restrictions. Starting from May 30, sales of AI-95 gasoline across the illegally annexed peninsula were limited to no more than 20 liters per customer per day.

As The Insider reported, a “shadow” fuel market began expanding rapidly in Crimea and Sevastopol as a result. Resellers are offering AI-92 and AI-95 gasoline for up to 250 rubles per liter — more than three times the recent retail price of 75 to 82 rubles.

On the evening of June 2, Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhaev wrote that overnight from June 2 to June 3, fuel of all grades would be sold “only to emergency services ensuring the functioning of the city.”

He promised that general sales would resume after 2 p.m. on June 3. In the end, authorities announced their return even earlier, reopening gas stations to all customers by 11 a.m. However, “general sales” again meant restricted sales, with no more than 20 liters per customer.

Governor Alexander Beglov said infrastructure sites in nearby Kronstadt and in the city’s Kirovsky and Krasnoselsky districts were targeted in overnight strikes. He reported several injuries but did not specify what damage had been done.

Telegram channels published videos of a fire at the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, which is located in the city’s Kirovsky District. The terminal is used for storing and processing oil and is one of the largest oil transshipment complexes in northwestern Russia.

The terminal is located less than 20 kilometers from the Expoforum Convention and Exhibition Center, where the economic forum is being held.

Mobile internet outages were reported in the city overnight, according to data from the Detector404 monitoring service. Local residents noted that some text message alerts about the drone attack arrived late. St. Petersburg publication Bumaga later reported that mobile service had resumed after flight restrictions were lifted at Pulkovo Airport.

Available data cited by The Moscow Times shows the Taliban still has dozens of T-55 and T-62 tanks, BMP-1 and BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles, Mi-17 and Mi-24 helicopters, several Soviet-made transport aircraft, as well as various artillery systems and small arms. The equipment is a legacy of the Soviet Union’s presence in Afghanistan before its withdrawal in 1989.

Details of the May agreement have not been disclosed. Kabulov described it as a framework document that allows for separate contracts to supply various systems.

The Taliban is still designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. In Russia, however, its status has changed. In December 2024 Vladimir Putin signed a law opening the way for the movement to be removed from Russia’s terrorist list, and in April 2025, Russia’s Supreme Court suspended the ban on Taliban activities in the country.

Ruslan Suleymanov, an expert on the Middle East and Central Asia, told The Insider that Russia may need to maintain good relations with the Taliban due to the fact that Afghanistan still presents a terrorist threat, one that Russian security agencies are “clearly not coping” with.

“There is also the threat from the Central Asian republics, for example Tajikistan,” Suleymanov said. “Recall that those who carried out the terrorist attack at Crocus [City Hall] were from Tajikistan. The Kremlin clearly wants to coordinate the fight against the terrorist threat with the Taliban.”

Suleymanov also said there is an image-building element to Moscow’s ties with the Taliban.

“The Taliban is one of the most vivid modern examples of resistance to the West,” he said. “Russian propaganda likes to hold them up as an example. And for Moscow, which claims the mantle of leader of the so-called Global South, it is important to show that it is patronizing groups such as the Taliban and Palestinian radicals represented by Hamas, who can in their own way be described as anti-Western forces.

Since Russia is unable to conduct active trade the way Iran, Pakistan, and China do, and ranks only 10th, the Kremlin, in its preferred manner, offers symbolic gestures in the form of military cooperation — sending a couple of instructors, repairing equipment, and holding exercises. Moscow is fully capable of that. These are not tens of billions of dollars in investment, as China offers. Moscow is not capable of that.”

The amendments concern Decree No. 95 of March 5, 2022, titled “On the Temporary Procedure for Fulfilling Obligations to Certain Foreign Creditors.” Originally, the decree allowed Russian authorities, companies, and citizens to settle obligations to foreign creditors in rubles through so-called Type C accounts and, in some cases, to freeze payments on loans, borrowings, and other financial instruments.

The mechanism has now been extended to obligations on bank deposits owed to foreigners from countries Russia has designated as “unfriendly.”

The decree entered into force on June 1, 2026, the day it was officially published.

Economist Sergey Aleksashenko told The Insider that access to funds held in Type C accounts is highly restricted and that, for banks, the money effectively becomes a free source of funding:

“Legally, the funds belong to whoever held them in a regular account or deposit, but access to them is extremely limited. For banks, this money becomes a free source of funding. The amount currently held in Type C accounts is secret. There is information that at Citibank, at the time of its sale, the figure was around 1 trillion rubles ($13.5 billion).”

Alexander Kolyandr, a banking analyst and visiting researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told The Insider that the amendments may have been introduced in anticipation of the seizure of frozen assets linked to the Belgian depository Euroclear:

“I also cannot rule out that this was added in anticipation of the seizure of assets frozen in Russia through Euroclear. Because in addition to securities owned by foreigners through Euroclear accounts, there should also be cash deposit accounts where, over five years, various dividends, payments on matured debt securities, and so on have accumulated.”

“I am very glad [these citizens are coming] because, first, our polls show that most of them will vote for us [the ruling Civil Contract party], and second, we need these people, because military training camps are now underway. It will be very good: We will send 30,000 to 40,000 of those 100,000 to training camps, and then they can return to Kaluga [where Strong Armenia party leader Samvel Karapetyan lived for several years]. What’s the problem?”

The pro-government Telegram channel Baghramyan 26, citing its own sources, wrote that starting on June 1 the authorities began checking Armenian citizens arriving from Russia. “This applies to people who are subject to mandatory 25-day training camps. At the moment, a number of people have already received notices requiring them to appear at a military draft office to take part in training camps,” the channel wrote.

Under a plan previously approved by Armenia’s government, reservist training camps are being held seven times this year, including from March 31 through June 19.

On June 1, activist Arshak Makichyan took to Facebook to publish correspondence with Mikael Badalyan, a pro-Russian blogger and head of the Armenian office of the Eurasia Foundation. In the messages, Badalyan promised to organize a trip to Armenia to vote in the June 7 election.

The Telegram channel Ateo Breaking reported that a complaint had been filed with Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Court against Badalyan’s Eurasia Foundation over suspicions that it was involved in voter bribery.

Makichyan told The Insider he decided to write to Badalyan and publish the exchange because he considers diaspora interference in Armenia’s electoral process unacceptable:

“I had written to him once before, last time in May 2024, when they were organizing protests in Armenia. Back then, he replied that there was no money. This time, to my surprise, he asked me to send passport details to buy a ticket. I did this because I am irritated by people who pretend to be activists while in reality promoting Russia’s interests in Armenia, which is obvious to everyone. I also disagree with the current government on many issues and often speak out about it, but I believe that the diaspora, which does not live in Armenia, should not interfere in the country’s domestic and foreign policy. I believe people like him put Armenian democracy at risk, because criticism of the government is ultimately instrumentalized by pro-Kremlin actors. This obstructs discussion of real problems and harms independent candidates who do not have Kremlin support.”

“100,000 voters”

Reuters reported in late May that the Kremlin had allegedly discussed the possibility of bringing tens of thousands of Armenians from Russia to Armenia, whose total population is under 3 million, to take part in the vote. Unnamed Western intelligence officials told the agency that Russian officials estimated that transporting 100,000 people would cost $50 million. Reuters noted, however, that it could not determine whether Russian authorities were trying to carry out the plan.

Under Armenia’s election law, voting for the National Assembly takes place only inside the country. Citizens are included on voter lists according to their place of permanent registration in Armenia.

Article 11 of Armenia’s Electoral Code states: “All citizens with the right to vote who are registered in a given municipality, as well as citizens temporarily or permanently residing there and not registered in that municipality, shall be included in the voter lists if, no later than five days before voting and in the manner established by the Central Electoral Commission, they submit an application to the head of the municipality to include their surname and first name in the voter list.”

Over the first four years of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the Religion on Fire project documented at least 742 cases of religious sites being destroyed or damaged. These included Orthodox churches, Protestant houses of prayer, Catholic churches, synagogues, mosques, and theological schools and seminaries — at least 146 sites in the Donetsk region, at least 83 in the Luhansk region, at least 78 in the Kherson region, and at least 51 in the Zaporizhzhia region.

In Mariupol, which fell under Russian occupation after a months-long siege, buildings belonging to various religious communities were damaged. In May 2022, it became known that Russian troops had completely destroyed the local synagogue and the premises of the Jewish community center.

Valentyn Zahreba, pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, said that both buildings belonging to his congregation in the city had also been completely destroyed. One of them was located on Mykolaivska Street, in the historic building of a former synagogue that had been transferred to the Adventist church. The second, on Shevchenko Boulevard, was also used by other Protestant communities.

In the occupied territories, religious buildings were not only shelled. They were also seized, closed, and handed over to occupation authorities for use as military and administrative facilities.

Religious buildings were not only shelled – they were seized, shut down, and handed over to the occupation authorities

In Melitopol, Russian troops appropriated the Grace Evangelical Christian Church, founded in 1910. During the Soviet era, the congregation endured repression and the confiscation of its buildings, and the premises on the city’s main street were returned to believers only in 1991. Services continued there until September 2022, when armed men in masks stormed the church.

During the takeover, they blocked the exits, led parishioners out in groups, confiscated documents, and carried out a search. Pastor Mykhailo Brytsyn and the church administrator were detained and interrogated, after which they were given an ultimatum: leave the city within 48 hours, or else. The church itself was accused of “extremism.”

According to Brytsyn, the Grace building has now been handed over to the so-called Ministry of Culture of the Zaporizhzhia Region and is now used for concerts and ceremonies honoring pro-war propagandists. The cross was removed from the building’s facade.

Not only buildings came under attack. According to an estimate by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by the spring of 2025 Russian forces had killed at least 67 clergy members from a range of denominations. Some were executed for refusing to cooperate with the occupation administration or for publicly opposing Russian aggression. Others died during the shelling of churches and houses of prayer while remaining in place alongside their congregations.

Some were executed for refusing to cooperate with the occupiers or for publicly opposing the aggression, while others were killed during shelling

In February 2024, in the occupied part of the Kherson region, Russian troops took Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) priest Stepan Podolchak from his home in Kalanchak, where he served. He was led away barefoot with a bag over his head. Two days later, the priest’s body was found bearing signs of torture.

Before the full-scale war, Podolchak conducted services in Ukrainian and continued to do so even after the occupation. He was repeatedly summoned for “conversations” with the FSB and pressured to join the Moscow Patriarchate. He refused.

Some religious figures in the occupied territories were subjected to arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. In Melitopol, Russian troops detained Dmytro Bodyu, pastor of the Protestant Word of Life church, after he took part in public prayer services for Ukraine and helped believers leave the city.

In the Kherson region, Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) priest Ihor Novoselsky spent 262 days in captivity. He was ordered to stop using the Ukrainian language and submit directly to the Russian Orthodox Church, but he refused and was imprisoned.

Maksym Vasin, director for international advocacy and research at the Institute for Religious Freedom, says that Ukrainian priests, pastors, imams, and other religious figures in the occupied territories were often among the first targets of the Russian occupation authorities. Then, as Russia consolidated its hold over the region, the pressure changed, as overt violence was gradually replaced by “legal” forms of repression through the imposition of Russian legislation.

“It is repressive at its core and serves as a smokescreen for the international community. Under the cover of law, the authorities are systematically destroying any form of dissent both in Russia itself and in the territories of Ukraine under its control,” Vasin says.{{ 

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From destruction to control

After the start of the full-scale invasion, most religious communities in the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia ceased to exist. Since 2014, Moscow had been developing its methods of repression in the occupied territories. Once Russian legislation was introduced, persecution could be formalized through administrative and criminal procedures.

Mykhailo Brytsyn, director of the religious freedom department at the international Christian organization Mission Eurasia and an elder at the Grace church, says that this legally formalized model of pressure allows the occupation authorities to portray the persecution of believers as “restoring order” or “combating extremism.” Such a system intimidates communities not only through direct violence, but also through fines, courts, paperwork, and registries. “The violence did not disappear. It was built into a bureaucratic and judicial framework,” Brytsyn says.

One of the main instruments of this pressure is the forced registration of religious communities under Russian law. According to Maksym Vasin, the occupation authorities threaten believers with the confiscation of church buildings and other property, demanding that they re-register under Russian regulations. To do so, the head of a religious community and its founding members are required to obtain Russian citizenship.

“The demand to accept Russian citizenship is part of the strategy of forced Russification and the destruction of the Ukrainian identity of the local population in the occupied territories of Ukraine, including churches and other religious communities,” Vasin says. At the same time, he adds, re-registration itself does not guarantee that property will be preserved. Moreover, the personal data of founders submitted during the registration process can later be used by the FSB for surveillance and raids on “illegal” home gatherings of believers.

In practice, the demand for registration is often presented to church leaders during summonses to military commandants’ offices for so-called preventive conversations, Brytsyn says. There, the clergy are threatened: either register in one form or another, or face bans, repression, and deportation.

Under Russian law, conducting religious activity without registration or without filing a required notice is prohibited. “Clergy are effectively faced with a difficult choice: accept the conditions imposed by the occupation authorities or go underground,” Brytsyn says. Those who continue to hold services without registration face administrative cases, followed by criminal prosecution.

Clergy are threatened: either register in one form or another, or face bans, repression, and deportation

The registration requirement functions not only as a way to legalize a religious community, but also as a mechanism of selection: some are allowed to exist officially, while others are denied that right. In the occupied Luhansk region, all Protestant communities were denied registration. Orthodox churches not affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate were likewise unable to obtain permission to operate. Jehovah’s Witnesses, already banned in Russia, decided not to submit documents at all, fearing further persecution would follow the submission of believers’ personal data.

Refusal to register leaves a community without legal status and therefore without any formal right to use its church building. In practice, this paves the way for the forcible seizure of property: Russian troops and security services occupy church buildings, cut down crosses, and repurpose the premises for the needs of the occupation authorities. According to Brytsyn, by the summer of 2023 at least 15 churches of different denominations had been seized in Melitopol. Police officers now live in one of the buildings, while another houses the occupation “Ministry of Youth.” Several others simply stand empty.

Another instrument of pressure is Russia’s restrictions on “missionary activity.” In the ordinary sense, this means preaching and spreading religious beliefs. However, after the adoption of the “Yarovaya package” in Russia in 2016, the country began to interpret missionary work much more broadly. The amendments were introduced as anti-terrorism measures, but in practice they made it possible to punish almost any expression of religious belief outside officially authorized premises. Prayer meetings, home services, conversations about faith, and the distribution of religious literature could all be treated as violations.

In the occupied territories, this mechanism primarily targets communities that have lost their buildings or are unable to register under Russian rules. If an unregistered community gathers in private homes, the gathering itself can be declared “illegal missionary activity.”

One community subjected to such pressure in the city of Sorokyne was a congregation of Evangelical Christian Baptists (ECB). It is affiliated with the International Union of ECB Churches, which refuses state registration as a matter of principle. As a result, over the past few years Russian security forces have repeatedly carried out searches and raids during its services, while Pastor Vladimir Rytkov and other ministers were fined for “illegal missionary activity.” In March 2026, Rytkov was ordered to leave the occupied part of the Luhansk region within two weeks. The deportation order was issued ten days after yet another protocol was drawn up against him for “holding religious services without authorization.”

Went to a church service and ended up under FSB scrutiny

Even if a religious community in the occupied territories manages to retain legal status, religious services cease to be safe spaces, as Russian security forces can burst in for an inspection at any moment. “During such raids, they try to find signs of disloyalty among parishioners. First of all, they check whether people have Russian passports. Then they search phones for Ukrainian contacts, ties to the military or volunteers, subscriptions to Ukrainian social media, anti-Russian messages, and banned applications,” says Brytsyn.

If the occupation authorities begin to doubt a person’s loyalty, their home may be searched. “And very often it turns out that a Ukrainian almost always has something Ukrainian at home – and therefore something ‘prohibited,’” the pastor says.

The control does not stop at raids. After his release, Protestant pastor Dmytro Bodyu remained in Melitopol for a little while even though he understood that he would not be able to continue his ministry. To stay, he would have had to accept the occupation authorities’ terms — a concession that involved more than formal declarations of loyalty. According to Bodyu, the security forces demanded that he hand over lists of parishioners and their personal data, including places of work and income, and report on their attitudes towards the occupation.

Ukrainian churches do not collect such information, and this, the pastor says, baffled the security services. During interrogation, he was asked who in the SBU supervised him. “I told them: we don’t have anything like that. – What do you mean you don’t? That’s impossible,” Bodyu recalls his conversation with the security officers. According to him, they could not understand how a church could exist without supervision from the security services: “It’s a different way of thinking, a different view of life. For them it’s logical and understandable, but for us it isn’t.”

The Russian security services could not understand how a church could exist without supervision from the intelligence agencies

The pastor refused to cooperate with the occupation authorities and left Melitopol. Another minister remained in the city, and according to Bodyu, he was required to submit his Sunday sermons in advance for review. People who continue attending services now “walk as if through a minefield,” the pastor says. “You have to be extremely careful about expressing your opinions and think about who you are speaking to.”

In such an atmosphere, people begin to fear going to church, praying aloud, speaking Ukrainian, bringing their children to religious activities, or gathering in private homes. According to Brytsyn, there have been cases in which priests were ordered to disclose what they had heard in confession, even though the secrecy of confession forbids such disclosure. “Church life is turning from a space of trust into a space of fear and self-surveillance,” says Brytsyn.

Who is being targeted

According to Maksym Vasin, those most frequently subjected to repression are clergy and communities that the Russian security services regard as openly pro-Ukrainian: the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which is independent from Moscow; the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), which is subordinate to the Vatican; and Protestant denominations, primarily Baptists, Pentecostals, and Adventists. “Evangelical churches are also stereotypically viewed as pro-American structures and ‘dangerous’ sects supposedly leading the Orthodox majority astray,” Vasin adds.

In Crimea, Vasin says, the Russian authorities have effectively destroyed the presence of the OCU and the UGCC by eliminating all of their parishes, while Protestant churches were forced to sever their spiritual and administrative ties with Kyiv.

In the newly occupied territories, the OCU’s presence remains, but in an underground format. According to Metropolitan Epifaniy, the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, OCU priests still remain in the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson regions, but the church does not disclose statistics or details about their activities so as not to place people at additional risk.

In the Zaporizhzhia region, the UGCC was banned by a separate order issued by the occupation administration. The document, dated Dec. 26, 2022, accused the church of operating “in the interests of foreign intelligence services,” participating in anti-Russian rallies, storing weapons and explosive devices, and engaging in the activities of “extremist organizations.” UGCC property and land plots were transferred to the military-civilian administration, lease agreements were terminated, and the registration of UGCC communities was prohibited.

The head of the UGCC, Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych Sviatoslav Shevchuk, reported that not a single Greek Catholic parish remains in the occupied territories of Ukraine. “This means that UGCC parishioners have been left without the sacraments of confession and communion, which can only be administered by an ordained priest. And where can one be found under occupation?” asks Brytsyn.

Before the occupation, Protestant churches in Melitopol were a visible part of city life. Pastor Bodyu says that the city once had an interfaith council, communities held joint events with the local Ukrainian authorities, and clergy could directly approach the mayor, deputies, and officials whenever help was needed.

“Our city is small, and relationships between people matter a great deal. This isn’t about supervision – it’s about living together in one city and working for the good of our community,” he says. During Bodyu’s detention, Russian security officers were surprised to find the phone numbers of the mayor, deputies, the police chief, the prosecutor, and the head of the SBU in the pastor’s phone. As he recalls, “The remarks were along the lines of: we didn’t expect churches in Melitopol to be this influential and this organized.”

Bodyu believes the security forces did not come for him by chance. Instead, they had studied local churches in advance, knew where he lived, and had monitored him for some time.

“The reason for the repression is simple: these religious communities have their own horizontal ties, authority among local people, and often do not fit into the Moscow-controlled religious vertical. They are accustomed to the basic democratic norms by which they lived in Ukraine,” Mykhailo Brytsyn says.

The “correct” religion

In the occupied territories of Ukraine, pressure affects different denominations differently. In the case of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is canonically linked to the Moscow Patriarchate, congregations are often simply forcibly integrated into the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to Maksym Vasin, the Russian authorities demand that UOC bishops and priests abandon the Ukrainian language, sever their ties with Kyiv, and submit directly to the religious authorities in Moscow. “For the Russian authorities, local church communities and religion in general are instruments of propaganda and control over the population of the occupied territories,” he says.

The Russian authorities demand that UOC priests abandon the Ukrainian language, sever ties with Kyiv, and submit directly to the ROC

After the start of the full-scale war, the UOC declared its independence and autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate, but the ROC did not recognize this status. As a result, several UOC dioceses in the occupied territories have already been incorporated into the ROC, while bishops and priests who opposed the move have been pushed out or persecuted.

In the Berdyansk diocese, Metropolitan Yefrem (Yarynko) opposed the transfer, but most priests petitioned Patriarch Kirill to accept their parishes into the Moscow Patriarchate. In May 2023, the diocese was incorporated into the ROC, and another bishop was appointed in place of Yefrem.

One of the priests who refused to sign the appeal to Patriarch Kirill was Kostiantyn Maksymov. Two weeks later, he was detained by the occupation authorities, and in August 2024 a court in occupied Crimea sentenced him to 14 years in a maximum-security penal colony for espionage. According to the investigation, Maksymov collected information about Russian air defense systems and passed it to an SBU officer.

At the same time, the ROC was not only integrating occupied dioceses into its hierarchy, but also giving religious meaning to Russian aggression, describing the war as “sacred.” OCU priest Andriy Dudchenko, who lived through the occupation in the Kyiv region, recounted how an ROC chaplain had convinced Russian soldiers of the morality and necessity of the war against Ukraine.

Patriarch Kirill and other representatives of the Russian clergy continue to justify the war despite the deaths of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including of Orthodox churches. “The leadership of the ROC and other religious structures loyal to Russia legitimize the regime’s hatred and xenophobia through religious terminology: ‘spiritual struggle,’ ‘spiritual bonds,’ ‘traditional values,’ and the ‘Russian world,’” says Mykhailo Brytsyn.

Religious genocide

Brytsyn describes the Russian authorities’ repression of religious communities in the occupied territories as religious genocide. In his view, this is not a series of isolated episodes, but a systematic policy aimed at destroying the religious identity and everyday life of these communities.

“In essence, the very core of religious freedom is being destroyed — the ability to live according to one’s faith and convictions. The Kremlin regime, having merged with the Russian Orthodox Church and adopted the ideology of the ‘Russian world,’ has carried out a total purge of the religious sphere. Everyone who refuses to openly support this system is subjected to pressure and driven out,” Brytsyn says.

The very essence of religious freedom is being destroyed — the ability to live according to one’s faith and convictions

Ukrainian believers are forced to choose “between bad and even worse.” Those who have left search for new communities in other cities and countries, while those who remain must engage in only extremely cautious forms of ministry. “Communities fragment, lose their public presence, but do not always disappear. They continue to exist in small groups through dispersed support networks and personal ties,” Brytsyn explains.

Pastor Bodyu says that, in Melitopol, little remains of the local religious communities’ former public life after church buildings were seized. Elderly parishioners, who find it easier to adapt to the new conditions, now make up most of those attending services. “The church is now in survival mode. Believers need to gather, communicate, and pray so as not to completely lose heart,” Bodyu says.

Mykhailo Brytsyn reflects on what is happening — not only as a researcher, but also as a pastor. For him, the survival of communities is not dependent on the ability to hold public services in an established building. “The true Church of God knows how to survive under any conditions. Neither comfort and prosperity nor repression and killings can destroy it,” he affirms.

My name is Nadezhda Zavyalova, I am 37 years old. I worked at LLC IFK Silver Pharm from 2012 to 2014 as a junior research associate. When I joined the organization, I was told they were developing antidotes to poisoning in the event of chemical attacks.

I ended up there by chance. I’m a veterinarian by training and had previously worked as an assistant in veterinary clinics, but I quit because of the low pay. I spent some time at home, and then my husband found a listing on Avito saying the organization was looking for a secretary. When they learned about my veterinary background, they offered me a position as a junior research associate instead.

I was invited for an interview — not at the office where the secretaries worked, but at 4 Lesoparkovaya Street. I arrived after hours and was met by Mikhail Yudin. As I understood it, he was not part of Silver Pharm itself, but of the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy, and he supervised other military researchers.

After the introductions, Yudin gave me a brief tour of the second floor — to show me around the lab rooms and explain where the lab equipment was located, where the chromatographs were kept, and where drugs were administered. He briefly glanced at my diplomas, but he showed little interest in them. From the way he described the duties of a junior research associate, I understood I could handle them. Essentially, I was expected to work with animals, prepare drug dilutions, and perform injections. As a veterinarian, I already knew how to do all of that. The interview ended there, and he told me they were expecting me on my first day of work.

The following Monday, on my first day, I was assigned to assist Svetlana Subbotina, a senior research associate. I worked with her for some time, but senior researchers mainly focused on writing papers, so I often had nothing to do. Later on, I started working more with junior research associates who conducted experiments on animals. At first, I only assisted them by holding the animals. With time, they taught me how to prepare and dilute pharmaceutical compounds.

My direct supervisor was Alexander Nikiforov. Technically, I did not answer to anyone else, but in practice all the men on the team acted as superiors to us, the junior research associates. If one of them asked for help, we could not say no.

In addition to Alexander Nikiforov and Mikhail Yudin, several more military officers from the academy worked at the company in a separate office: Nikolai Vengerovich, Igor Ivanov, Mikhail Tyunin, and Ivan Fateev. They also wrote papers and occasionally conducted experiments, but never requested assistance.

Sometimes people who were not employees of Silver Pharm also came to the laboratory. One of those I remember seeing on multiple occasions was Vladimir Bykov. Later he married Anna Kurpyakova, a senior research associate. She appeared in subsequent publications under her married name as Anna Bykova.

As far as I knew, Bykov held a senior position at the Kirov Military Medical Academy. He mainly communicated with Alexander Nikiforov. Occasionally, other elderly men would also come in. They never introduced themselves, and no one explained who they were. They would simply walk down the corridor into Nikiforov’s office and then leave. Judging by photographs from investigations by The Insider, one of them must have been Sergei Chepur — one of the visitors looked very much like him. Being relatively young, he stood out from other visitors.

Despite its status as a pharmaceutical company, Silver Pharm did not manufacture any medications. I once saw a colleague from another team mixing substances. I asked what he was doing, and he replied that they were developing a kind of medicine. Those kinds of tasks were performed only by the team of Anna Bykova (Kurpyakova). She had two assistants, and they worked separately from us.

“You don’t need to know what’s inside the main building”

We entered the building through a shared security checkpoint with turnstiles. Access was controlled by passes. When you arrived, you handed in your pass; when you left, you picked it up again. As I understand it, there was a single checkpoint for the entire compound.

I never found out what was located in the main building, but there were always many cars outside and people going in and out. In winter, the paths leading to it were always cleared. There were large gates where some kind of special vehicles occasionally drove in. The gates were always closed, with grilles and heavy doors.

Once, I was walking together with Inna, a junior research associate, and Igor Ivanov was walking behind us. I asked Inna what was inside that building, but she said she didn’t know either. And then Igor, from behind, said something like: “You don’t need to know that.”

We worked in Building B. The first and second floors of the run-down building had very old, Soviet-era interiors in brown, green, and gray tones. The only new equipment we had was probably a chromatograph. But the third floor had been renovated and turned into a bright, clean-looking space with good ventilation systems.

The second floor housed five laboratory rooms. We mainly worked in two: a small one and a large one. Anna Kurpyakova’s team used two other labs for their experiments. The fifth room was mostly empty. There was also a lab on the third floor, and two rooms on the first floor, where we also sometimes worked.

The lab where I worked looked fairly ordinary: a small room with two fume hoods, cabinets along the walls, and tables where rats were kept. In the larger lab, we had racks for rats so we wouldn’t have to carry them over each time. That was also where the used rats were placed after experiments.

One of the wings of our building housed a vivarium with animals. Two lab technicians there handled the rats: receiving them, forming groups, and delivering them to our labs. For some reason, they always had to carry rats outside and bring them back inside, although I once saw Igor Ivanov use the internal door connecting the labs to the vivarium. The rest of the time, those doors remained closed.

Researchers in Building V worked on something related to radiology and radiation. I went in there once, though I don’t even remember why. I only remember women in white lab coats, just like ours. As for the other buildings, I was never inside them.

A couple of times, we traveled to two other laboratories. I don’t know how exactly they were connected to Silver Pharm. We didn’t get there on our own — military men drove us in private cars, so I didn’t know the exact address. Looking back, I remember that one of the laboratories was located at 65B Suvorovsky Prospect. We went there because, as I understood it, they didn’t have staff who knew how to perform inhalation procedures. They didn’t have the equipment either, so we had to bring our own inhalation devices.

I also visited the company’s registered address at 45A Industrialny Prospect, office 216, to pick up my employment record when resigning. The office, where the secretaries and accountants worked, was located in a standard four-story office building.

“The point of the experiment was for the antidote not to work”

Experiments were carried out almost every day. We worked only with rats, sourced from the Rappolovo breeding facility near St. Petersburg. I remember there were also rabbits in the vivarium, and sometimes mice, but those were for senior research associates. Someone also mentioned they had monkeys, but as far as I know, no experiments on monkeys were conducted in our building.

Experiments on rats were usually very similar. We took a specific number of animals, mostly males weighing around 200 grams, and kept them hungry for some time before the procedures.

After exposure, administered either by inhalation or intramuscular injection, the batch of rats was then divided into groups: a control group that received no treatment at all, while other groups were given antidotes or various medicinal substances. Everything was given as a single dose: first the exposure, and then 10–15 minutes later the drugs. After that, we observed clinical signs: how the animal behaved, how long it took for seizures to begin, when death occurred, and so on. The main symptoms were seizures of varying intensity and pulmonary edema — the animals began to suffocate. There were also cases of cyanosis of the mucous membranes.

Clinical presentation of poisoning by nerve agents

Other experiments tested the animals’ reaction to electric current. There were also experiments involving water: rats were placed in clean water, and researchers observed how long the animals could stay afloat. In this way, they studied how certain substances affected endurance, making animals more or less resistant. The timelines of death also varied: some rats died within a few hours, but some after about 36–48 hours — and sometimes even later.

Symptoms observed in known poisonings

Among all the repetitive experiments we conducted over the course of two years, a few were expected to yield a specific result in advance — not in the sense that the military would come in and explicitly say what exactly was needed, but instead, one of the female staff members might let slip what the client was expecting.

For example, the final group was supposed to die. The point of the experiment was for the antidote not to work. At the same time, we only had limited ways to influence the outcome. If an animal that was “supposed to die” died, no one would save it. In some experiments, such as endurance tests in water, the animal was, on the contrary, supposed to survive, so we did what we could to rescue it. When a rat started drowning, we would resuscitate it. I clearly remember that we knowingly distorted the results.

We knowingly distorted the results to keep our clients happy

By the end of the first year, we were mainly involved in processing data: describing the results of experiments, calculating figures, and preparing reports and scientific papers for publication. My name did not appear on the papers because I did not write any texts, but I sometimes helped prepare materials. I had to search for articles online and rewrite them, or I had to find English-language publications and translate them into Russian.

I mostly processed data, entering experimental results into Excel and calculating the indicators. Everything was stored on corporate flash drives. We were not allowed to bring in our own flash drives, but the corporate ones could be taken home. After I quit, I still had one of those work flash drives for some time, but eventually I threw it away.

I didn’t have any security clearance, although we once discussed the possibility of obtaining some kind of clearance — not a very high-level one. I never really understood what benefits it would offer me, and I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea because I wanted to travel abroad.

“Military personnel would bring in ‘classified’ briefcases with new substances for us to test”

Most of the time, I didn’t even know or care what substances were being administered to the animals. I never prepared the toxic agents myself — only diluted medicinal compounds. Those were handled by junior research associates. I never saw toxic substances being prepared in front of me. Most likely, they were either stored somewhere or brought in by military personnel. They would periodically leave with their “classified” briefcases — as we called them among ourselves — and then return with new substances for us to test.

Svetlana Subbotina worked with soman, as far as I remember. That was already a different level. I also heard about sarin, but we didn’t work with it ourselves — I think that one was also handled by senior research associates.

From what I remember, we worked with chlorine, chloropicrin, phosgene, and ammonia. The chloropicrin experiments were conducted in the large laboratory, but in essence they did not differ much from the others. Almost all experiments involved the use of atropine as the antidote — we were always diluting it.

Possible case of poisoning by chloropicrin

The word “acetylcholinesterase” came up very often in our work. Papers on this topic were constantly being written. I even remember translating materials related specifically to this enzyme from English. Notably, it was the military personnel who asked me to translate these papers, which is why it seems to me that they must have been in charge of those studies.

Later I learned that, under the law, most experiments with hazardous substances of this class are supposed to be conducted by military personnel, and specifically by those who already have children. Civilian women were not supposed to be involved in this at all. That really disturbed me. Moreover, we didn’t have any proper protection — only lab coats, which we brought ourselves, along with gloves and fume hoods.

We had no proper protective equipment — only lab coats that we brought ourselves, along with gloves and fume hoods

The fume hoods worked poorly. I noticed this while working with chlorine: after exposure experiments, the smell of chlorine remained in the room even outside the hood. I was really worried about getting chlorine poisoning. And there were also more serious substances there, some with no smell at all.

At some point, I realized I had to prioritize my health. The pay there was low — only 22,000 rubles a month (around $700 at the time). I had nothing to lose, so I handed in my resignation. My boss Nikiforov tried to persuade me to stay, but I refused. I was then given a two-week notice period, as required by law. I completed my work without any issues and left.

“I did not realize I was working at a military facility”

When I resigned, I had nothing to fall back on. For a while I stayed at home, then got an odd job at an airport as an aircraft cleaner. But I only worked there for a month — the pay was even lower. After that I was unemployed for a long time, and when the [full-scale] war in Ukraine began in 2022, my husband and I left Russia.

After we moved to a new country, I needed to find additional information about my previous jobs. My husband started searching online for everything related to Silver Pharm and saw that it had been shut down in 2025. He also came across a court case involving Vladimir Bykov and Alexander Nikiforov. He asked me if I knew them. I said, “Of course. Nikiforov was my supervisor, and Bykov was his superior.”

So we gradually began reading more and realized that Silver Pharm shared an address with the State Research Testing Institute of Military Medicine, which may have been involved in the development of toxic substances, including those related to Novichok. For me, it was a shock.

I didn’t even realize that I was essentially working at a military facility, and I think my former colleagues, other junior research associates, were in the same state of ignorance. But I’m sure the senior research associates knew more — they worked with other, more serious substances, wrote papers, and did not share much with us.

Comment by physician Alexander Polupan

Alexander Polupan is a Russian anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist who participated in treating Alexei Navalny after his poisoning with a Novichok-type agent in Omsk in 2020.

Clinical presentation and antidotes

Seizures and pulmonary edema are very characteristic clinical signs of all organophosphates and all cholinesterase inhibitors. This could be Novichok, or it could be other, more widespread organophosphates — the clinical presentation will generally be the same.

Of the substances used as antidotes to nerve agents, there are essentially two main groups of drugs.

The first is atropine, which removes only part of the symptoms by blocking muscarinic (M) cholinergic receptors — the receptors responsible for the function of internal organs and glands. It helps prevent death from bradycardia (a dangerous slowing of the heart rate) and bronchorrhea (excessive secretion of fluid and mucus in the bronchi), which involves a person literally beginning to drown in their own secretions.

The second group consists of oximes, such as pralidoxime. These are cholinesterase reactivators — drugs that attempt to displace the toxic agent molecule from its bond with the enzyme and restore the enzyme’s activity.

As a result, acetylcholine stops accumulating, and the effects of disrupted neuromuscular transmission are reduced. In poisoning, this involves continuous stimulation of the neuromuscular synapses: the muscles first undergo sustained contraction and then become paralyzed. The paralysis leads to respiratory arrest, causing death of the exposed person or lab animal. If oximes are effective, they improve all symptoms — unlike atropine, which only works partially.

If they were indeed studying the effectiveness of different molecules in terms of overcoming antidote therapy, then it was most likely oximes rather than atropine. Atropine is needed as part of the treatment to relieve certain symptoms, but it does not affect neuromuscular transmission disorders, since those involve a different type of receptor. Its use mainly indicates that cholinesterase inhibitors were being studied. The effectiveness of oximes, however, depends on the specific molecule: some variants of Novichok can be displaced more easily, while others are harder to reactivate or may not be displaced at all. It is possible that what they were trying to understand was precisely this: how to design compounds against which standard oxime therapy would be less effective.

Endurance experiments

Experiments testing rat endurance in water are most likely related to studying substances that either increase stamina or, conversely, suppress willpower. Such studies were indeed conducted: researchers examined how long an animal would continue to struggle for survival before giving up and beginning to drown. These could involve either doping agents for athletes or psychotropic substances for military use. However, in my view, this is not related to nerve agents or cholinesterase inhibitors.

Chloropicrin, sarin, and soman

Chloropicrin, sarin, and soman are all relatively old and well-studied chemical warfare agents. It is not entirely clear what exactly Silver Pharm was trying to do with the animals — whether the goal was to kill them or, on the contrary, to develop methods of saving them. Therefore, it is difficult to say what new knowledge they could have been trying to obtain about these substances.

Delayed death effect

If we are talking specifically about delayed death, then it is likely that a different class of poisons was being studied, rather than organophosphates. The very idea of nerve agents is to rapidly disrupt breathing: a person stops breathing and, without immediate assistance, dies very quickly.

At the same time, from the known cases of suspected poisonings I am aware of, there are grounds to assume that Russian security services may also use other types of poisons with different mechanisms of action, such as hepatotoxic agents — that is, substances that damage the liver.

We do not know what specific compounds this might involve, but there are several cases which, based on a combination of indirect indicators, appear consistent with possible poisonings. In such situations, delayed lethality can be expected, where severe consequences and death do not occur immediately, but develop over the course of days.

In Vladivostok, the Rosgvardiya directorate for Primorsky Territory organized a celebration at the premises of the Vostok unit, which has participated in the war against Ukraine. As Vladimir Motorin, deputy chairman of the Patriot military sports club, wrote on social media, fighters of the unit and cadets from the local branch of the Far Eastern Law Institute showed children “drill maneuvers and formations used for suppressing mass unrest.” Club instructors also held basic military training workshops for the schoolchildren.

The security forces employees showed children special and armored vehicles, small arms, and riot control equipment. Judging by the photographs, a sniper rifle, assault rifles, machine guns, pistols, grenades, and drones were on display. During competitions, teenagers were invited to disassemble assault rifles. Event participants were treated to porridge and sweets from a local manufacturer.

Similar events took place in other cities as well, DOXA reports. In Novosibirsk, staff from the local FSIN directorate staged a performance simulating combat, and prison service employees and police officers dressed children in their gear and handed them riot shields. In Yakutsk, instructors from the Voin military-patriotic center held workshops for children at the “Festival of Childhood,” training participants to pilot drones, disassemble and reassemble assault rifles, and perform CPR on a mannequin.

In January, Syktyvkar’s Yuri Gagarin School No. 4 published a summary of a field trip by second-graders to the FSIN Directorate Museum, describing the event as “a fascinating and unforgettable journey.” The report noted that children were particularly impressed by the “harsh punishment cell,” and that the excursion could “awaken in them the desire to become worthy defenders of justice in the future.”

According to the SBU, in February–March 2022, Mussagaleyev commanded a reconnaissance platoon of the 104th Regiment of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Russian Airborne Forces during the occupation of the Bucha district of the Kyiv Region. During one of the unit’s “cleansing operations,” his subordinates detained a 29-year-old local resident, Ivan Fitzner, at a checkpoint, after photos of construction materials were found on his phone. Following Fitzner’s detention, he was taken to a forest near the village of Dmytrovka, where he was tortured. Then, Mussagaleyev allegedly ordered Fitzner’s execution. The deceased’s body was left at the scene.

Astra reports that the SBU published footage of the interrogation of a Russian prisoner of war from Mussagaleyev’s company, who confirmed that the order to shoot had been given. In 2023, Ukraine charged Mussagaleyev under Article 438 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code (violation of the laws and customs of war by a group of persons).

In Russia, Mussagaleyev has been awarded the Gold Star of the Hero of Russia, three Orders of Courage, and a Medal of the Order “For Merit to the Fatherland,” Second Class.

In 2024, he completed an internship in the government of the Orenburg Region as part of the “Time of Heroes” program, which was created at Putin’s directive. In March 2025, Mussagaleyev became the head of the Novosergiyevsky district.

Russia has also restricted imports of Armenian flowers, mineral water, brandy, wine, vegetables, strawberries, fish, and fish products from Armenia, along with the transport of such products through Russian territory. The measures coincide with a sharp deterioration in relations between Moscow and the government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Yerevan has been steadily distancing itself from Russian-led integration structures, deepening cooperation with the European Union and the United States while discussing prospects for European integration.

On May 29, the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan demanded that Armenia choose between membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and a path toward joining the European Union. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko then warned Yerevan of a possible repeat of what he called the “Ukrainian scenario.” Vladimir Putin has previously issued similar warnings, linking the war in Ukraine to Kyiv’s efforts to move closer to the European Union.

Pashinyan responded by saying the question of choosing between the EU and the EAEU remained “theoretical” and that holding a referendum to decide the question would be premature. He said Armenia would continue working within the EAEU while acknowledging that relations with Russia were “in a stage of transformation.”

Pressure on Yerevan is intensifying less than a week before parliamentary elections scheduled for June 7. Electoral analyst Roman Udot told The Insider that Moscow has long used import bans as a tool of political pressure on neighboring countries, noting that similar measures had previously been used against Georgia and Moldova. In both prior cases, the consequences of such restrictions ultimately affect Russian consumers by reducing the variety of products available to them while driving up prices.

The court ordered the temporary removal of the “new” leadership and returned control of the party to Kılıçdaroğlu and his team pending a final ruling by Turkey’s Supreme Court. All party decisions and congresses held after November 2023 were also automatically declared invalid, effectively paralyzing the CHP’s operations.

The following day, May 22, the court rejected an appeal filed by Özel’s team against the temporary removal of the party leadership. Ankara’s appellate chamber ruled that the earlier verdict was final in nature and could not be separately appealed.

In response, Özel stated that there were now effectively two CHPs in Turkey: the “elected” one and the “appointed” one. After the rejection of his appeal, Özel and his supporters refused to leave the party’s central headquarters in Ankara, and a standoff between Özel’s team and the court-appointed leadership continued inside the building for several days.

The situation escalated sharply after representatives of Kılıçdaroğlu appealed to the police to enforce the court ruling. On May 24, special forces stormed the party’s central office in Ankara, using tear gas and rubber bullets during the operation. 

Even within the CHP leadership “appointed” by the authorities, Kılıçdaroğlu’s actions triggered a strong backlash. Several lawmakers who had previously supported him publicly refused to join the new leadership after police were brought in to establish control over the headquarters.

Part of the genuinely opposition-minded CHP base reacted even more harshly. During protests outside the party’s central office and in other cities across the country, demonstrators were heard shouting “traitor Kemal.” Videos also spread on social media showing protesters tearing up portraits of the reappointed party leader.

For the first time since the military coup of September 1980, the CHP’s central headquarters was taken over by security forces. Moreover, the new CHP leadership headed by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu used the police against members of its own party. For the Turkish opposition.

From “managed” opposition to a political threat

It is clear that what is happening with the CHP goes far beyond an ordinary intra-party conflict. For a significant part of the Turkish opposition, the current crisis has signaled that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) he heads are no longer confident that they can retain power in the next elections.

The CHP had long been Turkey’s largest opposition party, but the authorities still did not view it as a genuine competitor. The party regularly criticized Erdoğan and maintained a strong presence in parliament and in the country’s largest cities, yet it consistently lost the key elections. During his 13 years as the head of the CHP, Kılıçdaroğlu failed to defeat Erdoğan in a single nationwide campaign.

For Erdoğan and the AKP, this model was quite convenient. Turkey retained formal political competition, with the opposition taking part in elections and remaining a visible political force even as the authorities remained confident that they would ultimately maintain control over the system.

The situation began to change after the 2019 municipal elections, when the CHP won the vote not only in Ankara but also in Istanbul. For Erdoğan, the defeat was especially painful: he had begun his own political career as mayor of Istanbul and repeatedly said that “whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey.”

Particularly painful for the authorities was the nature of CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu’s victory. Initially, İmamoğlu narrowly defeated the ruling party’s candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım, after which the AKP secured the annulment of the election results. However, the repeat vote turned into an even heavier defeat for Erdoğan, as İmamoğlu won by an even larger margin.

From that moment on, İmamoğlu began transforming from a popular mayor into a politician of national stature. Unlike many CHP representatives, he managed to attract not only the party’s traditional secular electorate but also part of the country’s more religious and conservative voting base. His political style differed noticeably from that of the conventional secular opposition: less ideological, more flexible, and focused on building a broad anti-government coalition.

Nevertheless, after the 2023 elections Erdoğan’s position still appeared stable. In the second round, he received 52.18% of the vote, while Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, backed by an alliance of six opposition parties, won 47.82%.

In the second round of the 2023 presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won 52.18% of the vote, while Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.82%

The defeat was a heavy blow for the CHP, and it intensified the internal criticism of longtime leader Kılıçdaroğlu. Despite the popularity of the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara — Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mansur Yavaş — both chose not to compete for control of the party and instead backed Özgür Özel for the role after the 2023 defeat.

The change in the CHP leadership was one of the key consequences of the lost presidential election. After Özel took over, the party gradually moved away from the cautious opposition model associated with the Kılıçdaroğlu era, opting instead for a more aggressive electoral strategy.

The 2024 municipal elections provided a troubling signal for the ruling party. For the first time in decades, the CHP outpolled the AKP nationwide in local elections. The opposition retained control over the country’s largest cities and even succeeded in winning in parts of central Anatolia, long regarded as one of Erdoğan’s main strongholds.

The victory demonstrated that the opposition’s success was no longer confined to a few major cities or to protest voting. The CHP began to be seen as a force capable not only of serving as the main opposition party, but of taking power itself.

How government pressure strengthened opposition sentiment

After the CHP’s success in the 2024 municipal elections, pressure on the party intensified sharply. The main target was Istanbul mayor İmamoğlu, whom many in Turkey already viewed as Erdoğan’s most dangerous potential rival in future presidential elections. Unlike many traditional CHP figures, he proved capable of competing with Erdoğan for part of the conservative and religious electorate — the very constituency on which the AKP’s dominance had rested for many years.

As a result, a series of criminal investigations was launched against İmamoğlu. He was accused of corruption, abuse of office, and ties to people whom the Turkish authorities describe as being involved in terrorism. İmamoğlu and his supporters called the cases politically motivated and linked them to his growing popularity.

In the spring of 2025, the pressure on İmamoğlu escalated dramatically. First, the authorities revoked his university diploma, potentially depriving him of the opportunity to run in the presidential election, since under Turkish law a presidential candidate must possess a degree. Shortly afterward, İmamoğlu was arrested on charges of corruption and abuse of office.

İmamoğlu’s arrest triggered the largest protests Turkey had seen in years. However, the CHP’s response was not limited to street demonstrations. The party launched a large-scale nationwide campaign against Erdoğan, arguing that the pressure on the mayor of Istanbul was politically motivated and posed a threat to civil liberties nationwide.

Initially, many viewed Özgür Özel primarily as a compromise figure, but after İmamoğlu’s arrest he unexpectedly found himself at the center of the largest opposition mobilization in years. Özel began speaking regularly at rallies — twice a week and in virtually every city across the country — sharply escalating his anti-Erdoğan rhetoric and effectively turning himself into one of the opposition’s main public leaders.

There were also rumors in Turkish political circles that representatives of the state had tried to persuade Özel to adopt a more cautious line after İmamoğlu’s arrest. Instead, Özel moved in the opposite direction, launching a much harsher campaign against Erdoğan and the AKP. In response, new criminal cases were opened against opposition mayors, while the government increasingly accused the CHP of corruption and abuse of municipal resources.

At the same time, the economic situation was deepening the problems faced by Erdoğan’s party. High inflation, declining purchasing power, and the rising cost of living remained the main concerns for most Turkish voters. Even official statistics recorded inflation above 35%, while the independent ENAG group estimated it at more than 70%.

The pressure on İmamoğlu and the CHP produced the opposite of the authorities’ intended effect. Instead of weakening the opposition, the CHP managed to consolidate a significant share of the protest electorate around itself at the same time the AKP’s ratings began to decline.

By the spring of 2026, a number of Turkish polling organizations were already showing the CHP holding a steady lead over the ruling party. According to a survey by PİAR Araştırma published on May 21 — the same day as the court ruling on the CHP — the party enjoyed 35.4% support, compared with 31.7% for the AKP.

On the day of the court ruling on the CHP, the party was polling at 35.4%, compared with 31.7% for the ruling AKP

In short, the pressure on İmamoğlu failed to split the new opposition. Instead, the CHP managed to turn the arrest of its most popular politician into a tool of political mobilization, and Özel gradually evolved from a compromise intra-party figure into one of Erdoğan’s harshest public critics, capable of rallying other opposition forces around the CHP.

The logic behind these developments also largely explains the attempt to return Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to the leadership of the party. After all, under his guidance the CHP had remained a largely non-threatening opponent. In the eyes of a significant part of Turkish society, the judicial intervention was seen as part of a broader government pressure campaign against an opposition that was steadily growing in strength.

Under Özel, the longtime strategy of Turkey’s largest opposition party had begun to change. The CHP became more active beyond its traditional electorate, intensifying street mobilization and, for the first time in many years, campaigning as if it were a political force capable not merely of criticizing Erdoğan, but of genuinely competing to replace his government.

Another source of concern for Erdoğan and the AKP was Özel’s constant calls for early presidential elections — the paradox being that early elections remained one of the few ways Erdoğan could legally run for president again after the end of his current term.

However, unlike in previous electoral cycles, an early vote no longer guaranteed Erdoğan victory. Under Kılıçdaroğlu, the CHP had for years maintained a relatively stable result (within the range of 24–28% of the vote), but after Özel took over, the party’s ratings began to rise, exceeding 30–35% in a number of polls.

Against this backdrop, the Turkish opposition increasingly discussed a scenario in which a CHP candidate could realistically defeat Erdoğan in a presidential election even if Ekrem İmamoğlu were barred from participating. Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, who remains one of the country’s most popular opposition politicians, was regularly mentioned as a possible alternative.

Crisis in the opposition party — a problem for the entire political system

The struggle for control over the CHP is still far from over, and Turkish political circles are already discussing possible new steps aimed at increasing pressure on Özel’s team. In particular, media outlets and opposition figures are saying that the authorities may try to strip Özel of parliamentary immunity in order to open new criminal cases against him.

A significant portion of Özel’s supporters view Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu with distrust, fearing that the party leadership imposed through the courts will not obstruct further legal pressure on the current CHP team. Following Kılıçdaroğlu’s imposed return as the head of the CHP, pressure on Özel’s supporters will likely intensify from two directions at onceP through the judicial system and through Kılıçdaroğlu himself.

Perhaps even more importantly, if the Supreme Court upholds the decision to invalidate the CHP’s 2023 congress and the party’s subsequent decisions, it could create a dangerous precedent for Turkey’s entire political system. The issue is no longer merely a conflict within the CHP — in effect, the courts would gain the ability to intervene in the internal electoral processes of any organization and change its leadership after voting has already taken place.

In that case, not only intra-party elections but the very stability of all electoral mechanisms could come under threat — from political parties to professional associations, foundations, and other civic and business organizations whose leadership is chosen through voting. For Turkish society, which has long viewed elections as one of the last remaining pillars of civil liberties, this would be an extremely alarming development.

What is happening around the CHP is already being described as a political earthquake. Just a few years ago, direct judicial intervention in the internal leadership of Turkey’s largest opposition party would have seemed almost unimaginable. Now, however, the courts are effectively annulling the results of intra-party elections, police are storming the CHP’s central headquarters, and the struggle for control over the country’s largest and oldest opposition party has turned into one of the most severe political crises in recent years.

Virtually all opposition politicians have openly backed Özel, and the current situation is being perceived as a threat to all political parties. The court ruling also coincided with the important religious holiday of Eid al-Adha, during which political confrontation is traditionally considered unacceptable.

Against this backdrop, the traditional holiday contacts between Turkey’s various political parties was especially revealing. The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), along with two other opposition forces (the Good Party and the Victory Party) did not include the CHP in their holiday programs. A DEM Party representative, responding to a journalist’s question about a visit by Kılıçdaroğlu to the party headquarters, openly stated that the “appointed leader of the CHP” would not be received.

At the same time, for the first time in three years the ruling AKP will hold a holiday meeting with the CHP — right after Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s return to the opposition party’s leadership. In short, the less predictable future elections become for Erdoğan, the more aggressively the authorities will seek to reshape the political field before the campaigning even begins.

Dodik hardly fits any of these categories. Instead, he retains the status of the Kremlin’s main ally in the Balkans, primarily thanks to his unconditional support for all Kremlin initiatives. Although Dodik has no foreign policy authority (and does not even currently hold any formal government position), he is still frequently received at the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Dodik has cultivated the image of the Kremlin’s main ally in the Balkans through his unconditional support for all Kremlin initiatives

This time, he arrived for a meeting with Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko carrying a declaration adopted by the parliament of Republika Srpska (the Serb entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina) calling on the UN Security Council to abolish the post of High Representative in Bosnia, the international administrator who serves as the ultimate authority on interpreting the Dayton Accords of 1995.

The Balkans are now debating the unexpected resignation of the current High Representative: German diplomat Christian Schmidt, who announced his departure on May 11 after five years in office. Although Schmidt cited “personal reasons” for his departure, many believe he was pushed out by the Trump administration, which was dissatisfied with the German diplomat’s style and his sharp conflict with Dodik. The State Department has not formally confirmed this, but it described Schmidt’s resignation as a timely decision and promised to work actively on de-escalation.

Dodik, Russia, and the U.S. against Europe

It was Schmidt’s disputes with Dodik — along with the position of Russia and China, which never recognized his appointment — that has led to the most severe crisis since the end of the Bosnian War. In June 2025, Dodik was removed from the post of president of Republika Srpska for failing to comply with the High Representative’s decisions. A court even sentenced him to one year in prison (a penalty that was quickly converted into a fine) and barred him from holding public office for another six years.

However, the court could not strip Dodik of his political influence. In November 2025, he secured the election of his ally Siniša Karan as president of Republika Srpska and also succeeded in getting U.S. financial sanctions lifted from himself, his children, and his inner circle. Experts describe Dodik as the main beneficiary of the conflict with the international administration, as it is now much easier for him to demand an end to external oversight by exploiting the contradictions among the main guarantors of peace: the United States, Europe, and Russia.

As Vuk Vuksanović, an international security expert and lecturer in war studies at King’s College London, told The Insider, opinions on the institution of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina have always been divided. The authorities in Sarajevo and most Western countries viewed the institution as necessary for implementing the Dayton Accords and maintaining stability in the country. On the other hand, many Bosnian Serbs, some Croatian politicians, a number of Western analysts, and officials in Moscow argue that the institution of the High Representative has given international officials excessive influence at the expense of democratically elected local leaders.

“The reality is, of course, more complex than either of these positions, but politically the biggest winner in the current situation is Dodik, whose main goal is to preserve his political influence and remain in power, whether formally or informally,” Vuksanović says.

Interestingly, the United States and Russia have ended up in similar positions, albeit for different reasons. Russia has spent years criticizing the institution of the High Representative (and Schmidt in particular), while the Trump administration’s policy has shown a tendency toward more pragmatic and “transactional” relations with local political elites.

“In a sense, Dodik achieved what Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić had hoped for but failed to obtain: the ability to maintain relations with both Washington and Moscow while simultaneously weakening European influence,” Vuksanović explains.

Why sanctions against Dodik were lifted

Observers continue to debate how dramatically Washington’s Balkan policy could change under Trump — and whether this might ultimately undermine the entire settlement model in which the United States originally acted as the main financial donor and security guarantor. The Trump administration has stated that “the United States remains steadfast in its commitment to support stability and security in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans. We work closely with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s leaders to reinforce Dayton and encourage the pursuit of local solutions that benefit all constituent peoples.” Decisive U.S. diplomacy, according to a recent report to Congress, helped end the most severe crisis since the 1992–1995 conflict “while preserving the country’s legal cohesion and constitutional order.”

But the details of last year’s agreements between Washington and Dodik remain unknown. One of the main questions is why all sanctions against him were lifted after years of accusations of corruption, obstructing the peace settlement, and attempts to dismantle Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The United States first imposed sanctions on Dodik in 2017 and later expanded the measures several times, extending them to cover executives of companies linked to the Dodik family, Dodik’s political associates, and to his son Igor and daughter Gorica. In the American documents, Dodik was portrayed almost as a demonic figure who had robbed the public and nearly destroyed the country.

In the earlier American documents, Dodik comes across as an almost demonic figure who robbed the public and nearly destroyed the country

For example, in June 2024 the U.S. Treasury Department stated that it would “continue to expose the fraudulent schemes that allow Dodik and his family to exploit their own people for personal gain.” According to the document, Dodik was not only robbing citizens through corrupt practices, but also undermining national security via his near constant threats of Republika Srpska’s secession.

The Treasury Department explained that Dodik had used his official position to steer government contracts to private companies controlled by him and his son Igor through nominal owners and directors. Among those companies are Prointer, Kaldera, Infinity Media, K-2, Una, and Sirius, which receive lucrative government contracts in the information technology and engineering sectors.

Against all logic

As late as November 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department was claiming to have “exposed” clear attempts by Dodik’s network to circumvent the restrictions imposed on him. Nevertheless, on Oct. 29, 2025, sanctions affecting nearly 70 people and entities were lifted — yet Dodik’s team continued to harshly criticize the international administration and its opponents in Sarajevo exploiting the contentious issues of financial and state property disputes to reiterate Republika Srpska’s main ambition: breaking away.

“Dodik has always found unexpected courses of action to survive on the political stage, and even when it seemed that he was fading into the past, he would rise again against all political logic,” Husnija Kamberović, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Sarajevo, told The Insider.

According to Kamberović, Schmidt’s resignation is pushing Dodik toward even more active measures. Although he was removed from the post of president of Republika Srpska last summer, he remains the central political figure in Republika Srpska’s power structure. In effect, he has retained full power while shifting responsibility for its exercise onto others. Dodik will push new declarations of his own and try to encourage others into the risky venture of annulling previous decisions by the High Representative, Kamberović believes.

Schmidt’s resignation is pushing Dodik toward even more active measures

Over the entire postwar period, the Office of the High Representative has adopted hundreds of decisions on a wide range of issues that local authorities were unable to resolve themselves. These included matters related to property, the return of refugees, the state symbols of Bosnia and Herzegovina, citizenship laws, and election legislation. In addition, around 140 officials — judges, government ministers, civil servants, and members of parliament — were dismissed. Among the most recent measures were the suspension of budget financing for Dodik’s party (SNSD) and the annulment of several resolutions passed by the parliament of Republika Srpska.

The “Americanization” of Republika Srpska

In recent months, delegations from the Bosnian Serb leadership have been making frequent trips to the United States, while Republican members of Congress and other notable allies of Donald Trump have begun visiting Banja Luka. Perhaps most notably, on May 27–28 Michael Flynn’s think tank, the Gold Institute for International Strategy, hosted an international forum on economic and security issues in Banja Luka.

Politicians and “opinion leaders” from Europe, the United States, and allied countries were invited to the event. Particular attention, organizers said, was devoted to the role of Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina “as Europe faces shifting alliances, renewed great-power competition, and evolving institutional frameworks.”

Flynn is known for serving as Trump’s National Security Advisor for only 24 days — the shortest tenure in the history of the position. He left office in February 2017 following a scandal over his undisclosed contacts with  Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian Ambassador to Washington.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the case concerning alleged Russian interference in the U.S. elections, although he later attempted to withdraw the guilty plea. In 2020, Trump exercised his constitutional authority and granted Flynn a pardon.

In the Balkans, Flynn is described as one of Republika Srpska’s main lobbyists, reportedly earning $100,000 a month for providing “strategic advice and analysis and helping establish contacts with decision-makers in Washington.”

Flynn, who has been labeled a “Christian nationalist,” also visited Banja Luka in March, and his lecture there was broadcast live by the pro-government RTRS television channel. Among other things, he accused the European Union of “arrogance” and indirectly supported the idea of Republika Srpska’s independence.

Responding to a question from Dodik about the threat of the Islamization of Europe and European state institutions, Flynn said that “Islam is not a religion, but a political philosophy.” Many interpreted this as a jab at Bosnian Muslims, who make up half of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population.

Following in the footsteps of Gorbachev, Bush, and Blair

At the beginning of April, Dodik and his son Igor — the organizational secretary of the SNSD party — warmly welcomed Donald Trump Jr. to Banja Luka. Although he holds no government office, Igor is considered one of his father’s key advisers.

Donald Jr., for his part, serves as executive vice president of The Trump Organization while simultaneously acting as a “mouthpiece” for the MAGA movement. He also participates in election campaigns and helps shape the president’s team by promoting conservative figures and ideas. The media has discussed the possibility of his participation in future presidential elections.

In Republika Srpska, he was received with special honors fitting of a future head of state. Central Banja Luka was completely sealed off, armored vehicles were deployed, and large numbers of local police officers were mobilized. Igor Dodik said Trump Jr. had arrived in Banja Luka at his invitation, calling it the result of years of work with people who support “common-sense politics.” Dodik Sr. was among the key figures accompanying the American president’s son.

Three weeks later, the Bosnian Serb leader was honored at Judson University, a private Baptist educational institution in Illinois. There, Dodik received the institution’s “Leadership and Defense of Democracy” award in recognition of his commitment to national sovereignty, democratic principles, and courage in the face of complex political and global challenges.

Answering journalists’ questions, Dodik criticized previous U.S. administrations for mistakes in implementing the Dayton Accords and described Bosnia as an unstable country lacking sovereignty. He even compared himself to Trump, claiming that he, too, had suffered from politically motivated prosecution. Dodik named Russia, the United States, and China as his main partners.

What about partners and sovereignty?

In the near future, the main participants in the Balkan settlement process will have to agree on a candidate to replace Schmidt as High Representative, but it is expected that the next officeholder will not enjoy the same freedom of action that previous High Representatives did. For three decades, Washington was one of the principal supporters of an interventionist approach in the region, and with a green light from the United States, international administrators freely removed unwanted officials from office while imposing whatever laws they deemed necessary.

However, at a UN Security Council meeting on May 12, U.S. representative Tammy Bruce said that the future High Representative should have a “significantly more limited mandate.” Britain and France expressed support for the Office of the High Representative, while Russia once again called for its closure.

As Husnija Kamberović told The Insider, it is now quite difficult to find political forces, either in Bosnia and Herzegovina or internationally, capable of helping resolve the crisis. “One would have hoped that over the past 30 years the international community had done more to stabilize Bosnia and Herzegovina’s domestic institutions. But we can see that these institutions, undermined by corruption, have proved insufficiently accountable, while political leaders have been unable to cope with the challenges facing the country.” In his view, “a compromise must be found — otherwise there is a real threat of a new conflict, possibly even bloodier than the one in the 1990s.”

Many observers in the Balkans fear that today’s disputes among global powers could turn into a serious security problem, especially if the separatist bloc led by Dodik chooses the path of escalation. Still, King’s College international security expert Vuksanović believes that “talk of Bosnia and Herzegovina breaking apart would be an exaggeration.”

“Even Dodik understands that such a scenario would be extremely risky and difficult to achieve. Moreover, despite changes in U.S. policy, neither the Trump administration nor even Russia wants such an outcome,” he told The Insider.

On May 18, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he was postponing new strikes against Iran at the request of the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE given that “serious negotiations” on a deal to end the conflict were underway. He also emphasized Iran’s inability to obtain nuclear weapons and Washington’s readiness to resume a full-scale military campaign if the deal fails. Trump later clarified that the talks are proceeding in an “orderly and constructive manner” and that there is therefore no need to rush the talks.

Since April 7, the parties have broadly maintained a ceasefire while simultaneously conducting negotiations to end the conflict. Furthermore, Trump notified Congress that he considers the war against Iran over.

The parties are broadly maintaining a ceasefire while simultaneously conducting negotiations to end the conflict

At the same time, all known peace initiatives have so far diverged on several key points:

• The fate of Iran’s accumulated enriched uranium stockpiles
• The operational status of Iran’s nuclear facilities
• Control over the Strait of Hormuz
• Payment of compensation for damages incurred
• Cessation of hostilities against Iran’s regional allies

Publicly available versions of the Iranian plan either directly contradict American proposals or defer discussion of these issues to an indefinite future date, demanding the following conditions:

• Retention of Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities
• Cessation of hostilities against Iranian allies on all fronts (including Lebanon)
• Lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and removal of American and UN sanctions
• Unfreezing of Iranian assets and compensation for war damages
• Withdrawal of all U.S. troops from regions bordering Iran

Trump has repeatedly stated that he does not intend to accept such terms, and on the key issue of handling enriched uranium stockpiles, he insists either on transfer to the U.S. or destruction under external supervision. Meanwhile, Iranian representatives have so far expressed a willingness to transfer only a portion of the stockpiles to a friendly country, and only temporarily.

Therefore, two options remain for achieving a peace deal with parameters acceptable to Trump: maintaining the blockade on Iranian oil exports in the expectation that economic difficulties will eventually force the leadership in Tehran to make concessions, or resuming hostilities.

How the Americans are enforcing the blockade

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced the start of the blockade at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time on April 13. According to the press release, the blockade applies to all vessels departing from Iranian ports and ports in adjacent waters, effectively shutting down traffic in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

The blockade involves two carrier strike groups led by the aircraft carriers USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77), as well as the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit of the U.S. Marine Corps. The force totals more than 200 aircraft, 20 ships, and 15,000 personnel.

U.S. forces are enforcing the blockade through both vessel seizures and direct strikes against ships, but the actual control line lies east of the Strait of Hormuz, in the waters of the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, a measure taken due to the risk of attacks emanating from Iranian territory. This is precisely why U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that there is no “blockade of the Strait of Hormuz,” since the strait can in theory no longer be freely navigated without the permission of the U.S. Navy.

According to CENTCOM, as of May 27, 2026, a total of 109 commercial vessels have been “redirected” since the blockade began, with four more ships “immobilized” by force. By early May, a total of 70 tankers had been reportedly prevented from entering or leaving Iranian ports. Those tankers’ combined carrying capacity was just over 166 million barrels, and the financial damage to Iran was estimated at more than $13 billion.

In reality, “shadow fleet” tankers disable or spoof their identification signals, making their detection on the open sea a fairly complex task. According to Vortexa estimates, more than 100 tankers and gas carriers have successfully breached the blockade since it began. At the same time, TankerTrackers reports that as of May 12, Iran had failed to export a single shipment of crude oil by sea (excluding petroleum products) since mid-April.

More than 20 tankers have accumulated near the terminal on Kharg Island (compared to four vessels before the blockade began). Some are likely being used as floating storage sites, as onshore storage capacity is nearing exhaustion. The port of Chabahar now holds 14 tankers (the pre-blockade average was five), eight of which are carrying oil previously intercepted and “redirected” by U.S. forces.

How Iranian forces are fighting the blockade

U.S. forces have effectively destroyed Iran’s navy, but the Iranian command still retains a “mosquito fleet” consisting of a large number of small, fast patrol boats. Together with mines, land-based launch systems, and drones, these assets maintain an effective blockade on commercial vessels attempting to independently transit the Strait of Hormuz.

However, patrol boats and drones cannot protect Iranian tankers themselves, meaning Iran’s blockade serves as a pressure tool against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf and also puts pressure on global energy markets, while the American blockade exclusively targets Iran’s oil export sector. Iranian authorities have also declared their intention to monetize control over the Strait of Hormuz in one way or another and to make this issue part of any future negotiations.

The maritime “guerrilla war” in the Strait of Hormuz — in which Iranian patrol boats patrol the waters, lay new minefields, and seize and attack vessels breaking the blockade, while U.S. forces attempt to stop them — has involved a collection of fairly significant combat incidents, each of which could potentially have ended the ceasefire.

In early May, the sides exchanged strikes, with attacks occurring against Qeshm Island and the port of Bandar Abbas. In late May, U.S. forces struck at boats laying mines and onshore launch sites, after which Iran attempted to attack an air base in Kuwait. Despite the ceasefire, since April 7 Iran has launched at least 320 drones and missiles at targets in neighboring countries and adjacent waters.

How the blockade is affecting Iran’s situation

The damage to Iran from the hostilities is estimated at $270 billion, comparable to the country’s pre-war annual GDP. By the end of 2026, its economy will likely have contracted by 10%. Oil export revenues at high global prices could have mitigated the losses, but the U.S. naval blockade is forcing Iran to stockpile oil in onshore tanks and tankers. Loading fell from 2.1 million barrels per day in April to just 640,000 barrels per day in May 2026.

Iran’s oil stockpiles in tankers outside the U.S. Navy’s control zone have dropped from 122 million barrels to 89 million barrels, and an increasing number of tankers are falling under U.S. sanctions, complicating deliveries to Chinese refineries. According to Kpler estimates, if the current situation persists, Iranian oil export revenues will fall to zero within 60-70 days even in the absence of a new military campaign.

If the naval blockade is maintained, Iran’s oil export revenues will drop to zero within 60-70 days

Economic difficulties are mounting inside Iran: annual inflation exceeds 50% (over 100% for food), the national currency is depreciating, and between 3.5 and 4.5 million Iranians have fallen below the poverty line. Nevertheless, the Iranian leadership maintains control of the country and, according to CIA estimates, has a resilience buffer of at least three to four months despite the blockade.

The Hormuz deadlock could drag on

Iranian forces have been maintaining a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz since March 2 (with a brief formal pause on April 17-18). Since April 13, the U.S. naval force has established its own blockade. The combined blockades are effectively restricting Gulf oil supplies to the global market — both Iranian oil and oil from third countries. Before hostilities began on Feb. 28, an average of 138 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz each day. In the first half of May, that figure fell to approximately 10 vessels per day. Iranian oil exports have, by all known estimates, ceased entirely.

Iran refuses to stop obstructing maritime traffic through the strait as long as the American blockade continues, and Tehran plans to maintain control over the strait going forward. Meanwhile, Trump’s recent statements suggest that he is not prepared to lift his own blockade until a comprehensive agreement with Iran is reached and a return to the pre-war status quo is achieved.

The demining of the Strait of Hormuz that was announced by Trump has stalled: according to U.S. Defense Department estimates, the process will take six months and can only be begun after the conflict ends. An initiative to provide U.S. naval escorts for vessels from neutral countries also failed. Despite reports that U.S. forces have been quietly escorting commercial ships through the danger zone, CENTCOM has denied that this is happening.

Demining the Strait of Hormuz will take six months

Meanwhile, the war with Iran has become a domestic political problem for the Trump administration. The official cost of the operation has reached $25 billion, but a more realistic estimate (which includes the cost of lost weapons and damage to military facilities) amounts to $40-50 billion.

Over the brief duration of the conflict, U.S. forces have expended between 25% and 50% of their total stockpiles of precision-guided munitions and surface-to-air missiles. Replenishing these stocks will take the defense industry between 42 and 64 months.

The same applies to certain types of military equipment. For example, between 24 and 30 MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance-strike drones have been lost (approximately 20% of the U.S. military’s total fleet), with a combined value of around $1 billion. At the same time, Iran is estimated to have retained up to 70% of its pre-war missile arsenal and mobile launch systems, and the country has regained access to 90% of its underground missile bases.

On April 28, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was preparing for a prolonged blockade of Iran, having assessed the options of resuming airstrikes and ending the war as riskier. However, if the Iranian regime’s resilience buffer is indeed three to four months, he will either need to lift the Iranian blockade or else find a way to deal with persistently high global oil prices — and high domestic gasoline prices — ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Moreover, there is no clarity on what a new military campaign would look like. “Decapitation strikes” against Iran’s leadership have likely radicalized the surviving regime by significantly strengthening the IRGC’s influence, making an agreement on American terms less likely to be reached.

Before the twelve-day bombing campaign against Iran in June 2025, Tehran was estimated to be 3-6 months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Intelligence assessments circulating in the media now put Iran at approximately 9-12 months away from acquiring its own nuclear weapon, even though the most recent joint U.S.-Israeli campaign primarily targeted facilities unrelated to the nuclear program. If no breakthroughs occur in negotiations over the fate of the nuclear program, what lies ahead is either a prolonged standoff in the form of mutual naval blockades with sporadic episodes of military escalation, or a new round of armed conflict. For now at least, a lasting peace appears to have no chance.

Most of the teenagers were accused of setting fire to railway relay cabinets: trackside electrical boxes that are used to control signaling and train traffic. The count also includes attacks on communication towers, transformers, and military objects including helicopters and aircraft.

Human rights defenders from the NGO Memorial say Russian law enforcement officials are unjustifiably using terrorism charges to get around age limits for criminal liability. According to Mediazona, teenagers convicted in these cases received real prison terms that begin with up to three years in a juvenile correctional colony.

Minors often carried out arson attacks in groups, either with friends or with adults. Memorial said teenagers are especially vulnerable to the “peer effect” — a person’s willingness to take part in a crime rises sharply when friends and older people are also involved.

State investigators have alleged that at least 205 teenagers agreed to carry out arson attacks for money. Anonymous handlers contacted them online and promised payments ranging from 10,000 rubles to 5 million rubles ($125 to $62,000), depending on the target. However, the money was not always paid, and some teenagers received only severe burns for their trouble.

Mediazona’s review suggests many minors did not realize they were targeting sites that authorities associate with the war. In messages, handlers described the tasks as being involved with insurance fraud or disputes with commercial competitors. They also used blackmail to pressure minors into carrying out the assigned tasks.

Russian authorities claim Ukrainian intelligence services are recruiting teenagers. Rights advocates note, however, that since the start of the war, the Federal Security Service (FSB) has actively used entrapment tactics to gather “evidence” in multiple sabotage cases. In March, the FSB branch in the Sverdlovsk Region acknowledged that it had carried out what it called a “social experiment” in order to identify locals who were willing to commit sabotage for money.

Analysts said the number of drones launched in May was an all-time high — 20% higher than in April, when the previous record of 6,500 drones was set. On average, Russian forces launched about 260 drones a day at Ukrainian cities.

Ukraine, in turn, significantly increased the intensity of its strikes on targets inside Russia, OSINT analyst John Felix wrote on X, basing his assessment on available reports from the Russian Defense Ministry.

In May, the number of drones intercepted by Russian forces approached 9,000, with Russia’s Defense Ministry saying it had intercepted 8,973 long-range Ukrainian drones. The previous high was recorded in March, when Russia reported intercepting just over 7,500 UAVs in its airspace.

Ukraine’s May drone strikes reduced Russia’s oil refining capacity in western and central parts of the country, disrupting fuel supplies in some regions. The Ryazan and Moscow oil refineries temporarily halted operations, and gasoline rationing began May 31 in occupied Crimea and Sevastopol due to the resulting shortages.

Dan said the conclusion is based on a range of technical evidence. Fragments found at the scene bore the inscription “GERAN-2” («ГЕРАН-2») in Cyrillic, while the UAV’s electronic components, navigation systems, control modules, engine, and structural elements were identical or nearly identical to those previously found on other drones of the same type. The analysis also found matches in production markings, materials, and fuel.

“The fact that such a device struck a residential building in Romania, causing injuries and material damage, is of particular gravity, and the sole responsible party is Russia,” Dan said, adding that the investigation’s findings would be shared with Romania’s allies, as well as with relevant NATO and European Union bodies.

The strike in question occurred near the border with Ukraine. Two people were injured. After the incident, Romanian authorities declared Russia’s consul general in Constanța, Andrei Kosilin, persona non grata and announced the closure of the Russian Consulate General in the city. Bucharest said the measures were a direct response to the incident.

The Belgrade conference, put together by Serbian pro-Russian nationalist Misha Vacić, who is under U.S. sanctions, was presented as a meeting of the “Alliance for Peace and Freedom,” formed in 2015 by far-right parties from multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany, and Spain. It was held at the media center of the Serbian Journalists’ Association in central Belgrade.

The meeting featured anti-European, pro-Russian, anti-migrant, anti-LGBTQ, and racist remarks. Its participants also rejected the independence of Kosovo and accused the European Union, the United States, and NATO of wrongdoing.

Vacić, who describes himself as the leader of the nonparliamentary Serbian Right party, has been on the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions list since 2023 for “malign activity” carried out on Russia’s behalf. The Treasury Department said that in September 2022 Vacić had served as an observer of Russia’s “sham referenda”  preceding the illegal annexation of Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhizhia regions. In interviews and at news conferences, Vacić claimed he had served as an international observer at Vladimir Putin’s invitation and spoke in favor of Russia annexing those territories.

Among the speakers at Vacić’s conference was Roberto Fiore, chairman of the Alliance for Peace and Freedom and the leader of the Italian neo-fascist party Forza Nuova. The party’s Secretary-General, Gloria Callarelli, was also listed among the official participants. Forza Nuova took part in Malofeev’s St. Petersburg congress last fall.

Forza Nuova is a neo-fascist party founded by Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello in 1997. It promotes Catholic traditionalism, Euroskepticism, and “national reconstruction” while opposing migration, abortion, and LGBT rights. After a terrorist bomb at the Bologna railway station killed 85 people in 1980, Fiore and Morsello decamped to London, returning to Italy only in the late 1990s.

Forza Nuova has never had serious parliamentary representation. Instead, it is known for conducting street actions and harboring ties to far-right movements across Europe. In 2021, its activists took part in the storming of the office of Italy’s largest trade union. In 2022, they were involved in a funeral procession in Rome featuring a Nazi flag. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the party supported Moscow, with Forza Nuova members even taking part in combat on Russia’s side.

Another speaker at the May 31 conference was Gonzalo Martín, vice president of the Spanish neo-Nazi party Democracia Nacional, which also took part in Malofeev’s St. Petersburg congress. The Insider established from photographs that Martín himself was also present at that congress.

Ioannis Zografos of the Greek “patriotic movement K-21” likewise spoke at the Belgrade conference. K-21 was formed after the collapse of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, once the third-largest party in Greece. In October 2020, Golden Dawn was declared by a Greek court to be a criminal organization, and nearly 70 party members were convicted of crimes including the 2013 killing of Greek musician and anti-fascist activist Pavlos Fyssas, as well as attacks on migrants and political opponents.

In addition to Vacić, one of the Serbian organizers listed in connection with the conference  was Goran Davidović, leader of the banned neo-Nazi organization National Alignment (known by the nickname “Führer”). The group was banned by Serbia’s Constitutional Court in 2011 for inciting religious and national hatred and intolerance. In the official list of speakers, Davidović was described as a historian and founder of the Party of Serbian Nationalists.

In Serbia, Davidović was sentenced to one year in prison for attacking participants in an anti-fascist debate at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad in 2005. In 2007, he was again charged with inciting national, religious, and racial hatred — this time over an attack on participants in an anti-fascist march in Novi Sad. Davidović was convicted in absentia but escaped jail by hiding out  in Italy. He returned to Serbia in 2019 after the Belgrade Court of Appeals overturned the verdict.

Another speaker in Belgrade was Pavle Bihali, a representative of the Levijatan and Fortis movements and one of the founders of the Party of Serbian Nationalists. 

According to the U.S. military, the Gambia-flagged cargo ship LIAN STAR (IMO 9072692) ignored more than 20 warnings and continued moving toward an Iranian port. “A U.S. aircraft disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room after Lian Star’s crew failed to comply. The ship is no longer transiting to Iran,“ CENTCOM's statement read.

A U.S. official told The Associated Press that the vessel was left drifting in the Gulf of Oman after the strike. U.S. forces did not board the ship.

CENTCOM said U.S, forces attacked the vessel May 29. According to Starboard Maritime Intelligence, on May 25 LIAN STAR was traveling through the Gulf of Oman when its AIS signal was turned off.

The vessel’s owner is MASHINI S, a company registered in Dubai. MASHINI S is also listed as the ship’s commercial and technical manager.

The specialized maritime database MagicPort lists a company with a similar name, MASHINI SM & CHAPI H, as being linked to another dry cargo vessel with a carrying capacity of about 1,600 tons. The vessel’s contact information lists the Iranian city of Bushehr, and the company is identified as the vessel’s owner and commercial manager.

CENTCOM said the LIAN STAR was the sixth vessel stopped during the naval blockade of Iran. Another 116 ships were forced to change course, while one vessel was allowed to continue sailing.

The United States announced the blockade April 17 after Iran effectively restricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz amid the war in the Middle East. Washington says the blockade is aimed at limiting Iranian oil exports and reducing revenue flowing into the country’s budget.

Iran, meanwhile, insists that passage through the Strait of Hormuz must take place only with Tehran’s approval. On Saturday, Iran’s military command warned that any warships that try to interfere with enforcement of the new shipping rules could become targets.

Tehran has also introduced a fee for passage through the strait that media reports say could reach $2 million per vessel. Some experts consider the fees a violation of the principle of freedom of international navigation.

The ministry said that Russia resumed drone attacks on civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine near the river border with Romania overnight into May 29. One of the drones entered Romanian airspace and was tracked by radar as far as the southern part of Galați before crashing into the roof of a residential building, sparking a fire. Two people were injured.

Emergency crews, Interior Ministry personnel, Romanian intelligence officers, and police were working at the scene.  The Defense Ministry said its radars detected other drones approaching the country’s borders. At 1:19 a.m., two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from the 86th Air Base in Fetești, supported by an IAR 330 SOCAT helicopter from the Romanian Air Force. The ministry said pilots were authorized to engage targets throughout the alert.

The National Military Command Center notified Romania’s emergency authorities, and RO-Alert emergency messages were sent to the residents of Tulcea, Galați, and Brăila counties. The ministry said the situation was developing and that it would release further information as it became available.

“Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte wrote on social media after a call with the Romanian president, Nicuşor Dan. “I affirmed that Nato stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory.”

Russian drones had previously violated Romanian airspace in September last year, when two Romanian fighter jets were scrambled to intercept a UAV in the country’s airspace.

That article was published a month before Armenia’s parliamentary elections by erevan[.]one, a Moscow-registered media outlet supposedly aimed at Armenians living in Russia. Four months before the publication, a report sent from the office of the Social Design Agency (known by its Russian initials ASP) to the Russian presidential administration read: “Project Yerevan First! A licensed media website has been launched. Monthly project targets: 200 long reads, 200 news items, 500 illustrations, 10 video products. Social media management: VK, Dzen, Telegram, Facebook, X.”

The ASP, created by Ilya Gambashidze, is the Kremlin’s main contractor for producing fake content. The agency came to the fore after the death of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023 led to the dismantling of his “troll factory.” The astrological forecast for Nikol Pashinyan, written by Yerevan First authors, was not the first such experiment by the ASP’s writers. They began involving astrologers in producing content for inauthentic publications in 2023 as part of a fake media campaign that Western journalists nicknamed “Doppelganger.”

Inside ASP, that campaign is referred to by the acronym FGIA, formed from its original target countries — France, Israel, Germany, and America — but internal ASP documents show that project staff have become accustomed to the name journalists use for them. The forecast for Pashinyan, authored by Moscow astrologer Vera Zadoroshchenko, had been on ASP servers since mid-2025.

“From Jan. 5, 2026…a positive transiting aspect of Pluto to the Sun. Pashinyan’s willpower and ambitions find support from very influential structures, elites, and ‘shadow players,’” according to a document reviewed by The Insider.

An ambitious project with six followers

“There is success on Armenia: The story about Pashinyan’s corruption through the purchase of elite real estate in Marseille was picked up by Armenian media and opinion leaders in the diaspora. Pashinyan’s wife was forced to deny it, then he himself did, accusing the opposition — former presidents Kocharyan and Sargsyan — of slander and fabricating the scandal. A public spat began, details in the memo.”

That message was sent in June 2025 as part of a report by a Doppelganger headquarters employee to her superiors. It was accompanied by updates on an “investigation” by the Foundation to Battle Injustice — an organization created under Prigozhin and now operating under the control of the presidential administration — claiming that Moldovan President Maia Sandu owned a business selling Ukrainian children to pedophiles. Also included was a report on the spread of a fake claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bought his mother an apartment in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper.

ASP documents suggest that every fake news campaign, as well as the operation of every pseudo-media outlet intended to shape the “correct” opinions from the client’s point of view, was presented as a marketing campaign report. Analysts carefully counted how many views each fake received in local and foreign media, documenting which outlets republished it, how many views the debunkings received, what audience the “fed” bloggers who spread the fake had, and what portion of the story’s reach was “organic.”

After trial fakes targeting Pashinyan in late 2025, several new ideas were pitched to the “client” — meaning the Russian presidential administration — modeled on those already implemented against EU countries and Ukraine under the Doppelganger project. The erevan[.]one portal was the result of one such pitch.

“The outlet’s main narrative: Armenia can prosper only in a close alliance with Russia and under its protection. Target audience: Armenian communities in Russia, Russian-speaking Armenians in Armenia. Audience size: up to 2.5 million unique users per month,” the project presentation said. (Notably though, the authors incorrectly listed the Armenian elections as occurring in 2025 rather than in 2026).

The same memo says the Armenian community in Russia numbers between 1 million and 1.5 million people. It is therefore unclear where a Russian-only project could find an audience of 2.5 million unique users a month. As of May 2026, Yerevan First had 81 followers on the Russian social network VK. The overwhelming majority were project employees or their acquaintances, with no connection to Armenia. On Facebook, it had six followers.

A poor man’s Wikipedia

Another project was a so-called “self-filling knowledge base,” essentially a Wikipedia clone in which some articles would be edited to convey the project’s own versions of events. The client was promised “traffic of about 5,000 visits a day during the first three months, with further growth of 30% per month.” The political strategists were confident the operation would succeed, as a similar project had already been implemented for Germany.

One goal of a project like this would be to attract crawler bots, which collect information for training and generating responses by chatbots and large language models such as Grok or ChatGPT. This makes it possible to “poison” chatbot answers, using them to transmit Kremlin-backed narratives. According to internal ASP documents, by early 2026 the German “knowledge base” already contained more than 200,000 pages, though the figures may have been exaggerated for reporting purposes. One KPI listed was “training six AI platforms on edited articles — 500 per month.”

The Armenian Wikipedia-clone project appears to have been approved, as it appears on the list of ASP projects being implemented in 2026. The specific site is most likely the portal spyurk[.]cyou. Yerevan First often cites it as a source of photographs, even though an ordinary user cannot open the site — instead, all of its pages redirect to Google’s homepage.

There are several internal pages on the portal, and the page code looks fraudulent. Its functionality resembles “doorway” pages, a black-hat search engine optimization technique in which pages are manipulated to rise in search results, only to immediately redirect users to another page, often through a chain of several pages. Such schemes are used to capture search traffic, artificially inflating a target site’s statistics.

The portal does not exist alone. Behind it is an entire network of sites on the same hosting service, all united by Armenian themes: Khachkars, Lake Sevan, Armenian history — each topic is represented at multiple addresses in order to cover search results as widely as possible.

“After six months, links to project pages appear on the first pages of search engines for more than 50% of target queries,” the project’s authors promised in their pitch to the Kremlin as part of a document that also described the techniques typically used in black-hat SEO.

The project was planned to be hosted in Turkey: “First, Turkey does not block such projects; second, a ‘Turkish trace’ is quite organic for use as a ‘false flag.’” At the same time, access from Russian IP addresses was supposed to be blocked from the start “because of legal restrictions and risks.”

The IP address hosting the cloned Wikipedia has been flagged by more than 10 cybersecurity companies as associated with fraud and phishing. Researchers in the VirusTotal community also note that the hosting company Ultrahost, which has an office in Turkey, “is always happy to work with confirmed repeat fraudsters, no problem.”

The ASP-proposed project “Խոսում է սփյուռքը,” or “The Diaspora Speaks,” apparently did not receive funding, since it does not appear on the agency’s list of projects for 2026. However, perhaps the reason is simply that the team implementing media influence projects targeting Armenians has hardly anyone who speaks or writes Armenian.

Who creates disinfo targeted at Armenia

The vast majority of Yerevan First’s 81 VK followers live in Russia’s Primorsky Krai and Tver regions, and almost all of them are either friends and acquaintances of editor-in-chief Pavel Shchetinin, of his longtime associate Alexander Andoni (who was involved in the Primorsky Krai’s politics with Shchetinin), or are friends and colleagues of ASP media department head Alexei Ulyanov (a political strategist and advertising specialist from Tver).

The page has existed since 2009 and was previously a film club group. Only in March 2026 was it renamed “Yerevan Pervy,” or “Yerevan First.”

Ulyanov is one of only two regular, nonanonymous authors at Yerevan First. The second is blogger Georg Khachaturyan, who writes on seemingly any topic imaginable. All other analysis on the Yerevan First site is published anonymously. The Insider found, however, that one of the site’s main authors and producers is actually political strategist Andrei Perla, who is involved in virtually all of ASP’s disinformation tracks. In addition, the content is published by Vladislav Amagayev, a graduate of the correspondence department of foreign languages and international communication at Tver State University.

A report on the Yerevan First project from early 2026 said that a licensed media website had been launched, referring to a license from Roskomnadzor, the Russian state’s media regulator (though the domain name erevan.one was registered back in 2021.) The license was obtained by SNG Media LLC, which also operates the domain. Notably, SNG Media LLC is behind around 15 “pocket media” outlets of the Social Design Agency.

Shchetinin is editor-in-chief not only of Yerevan First but also of other SNG Media outlets, as well as the owner and director of the legal entity.

Shchetinin is best known in Primorsky Krai for his 2014 attempt to hold a referendum using forged documents. He and his ally Andoni also became the first members ever expelled from the Democratic Choice party. Immediately afterward, Shchetinin founded the outlet Vostok.Today, whose slogan was “No propaganda, only news!” He later became the owner of SNG Media LLC while also working at Yandex. Around the same time, he and Andoni, who also works at SNG Media, began regularly flying to Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan.

The organization did not begin registering news sites covering the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) until 2020. In practice, they are now one of the ASP’s “pocket media” outlets, just like erevan.one, which over the past couple of years had been publishing posts in an emphatically neutral tone.

Although the site contains articles dated 2017 to 2020, it was actually registered only in 2021. The older articles have fake publication dates and were copied from SNG Media’s main website. This is done so that search engines treat the site as being older and, therefore, more legitimate.

In late 2025, the site suddenly became useful to the ASP team for spreading Kremlin influence ahead of elections in Armenia. It is this site that the report to the Kremlin said had been registered and licensed, even though the ASP and Shchetinin team had in fact owned it for several years. The site now publishes several news items a day, usually condemning Armenia’s current leadership.

In 2025, together with ASP heads Nikolai Tupikin and Ilya Gambashidze, the organization founded the Strategic Communications Caspian 2030 autonomous nonprofit organization. In 2026, it founded the Union of Journalists of the CIS.

One of its employees, Alexei Ulyanov, is an advertising specialist from Tver. Since 2012, he has written “sales texts,” advertising concepts, and SEO copy. On his LinkedIn page, he boasts that he knows the “secret of the selling word.” Ulyanov now presents himself as a political consultant and is a regular guest on the Tsargrad television channel. He also oversees all writers in the Doppelganger campaign.

Under Ulyanov’s supervision, writers produced texts such as: “Impoverished France continues to help Ukraine. Did you know that in France more than 2,000 children sleep on the street? Yes, in one year the number of these unfortunate children increased by 22%. And there are many times more adults! Companies are closing, people are losing their jobs, then their housing. ...That is why the number of homeless people is constantly growing. Free soup kitchens for the poor can no longer cope with the flow of clients and cannot feed everyone.”

Those texts were then spread on social media by ASP “commenters.” Ulyanov’s analysis is now also published on Yerevan First.

Andrei Perla is also a Tsargrad employee and a veteran of the Doppelganger disinformation campaign, working under the title of chief ideologist. Perla is responsible for conducting fake opinion polls in EU countries and Ukraine. In 2023, the U.S. State Department accused him of spreading disinformation in Latin America. Perla has an account in the Yerevan First publishing system. Like Alexei Ulyanov and Nikolai Tupikin, he logs into the SNG Media admin panel through the Social Design Agency’s internal VPN.

Finally, the former editor-in-chief of SNG Media, Mikhail Ledakov, has spent years calling himself “the Conspirologist” on social media. He came to work with Shchetinin and ASP after collaborating with Prigozhin’s Patriot media group.

Storm-1516: Disinfo about Prime Minister Pashinyan’s health

Although it is not known for certain who is behind the Storm-1516 campaign, the project is closely linked to the Foundation to Battle Injustice, a group founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2021. The foundation’s materials were sometimes also amplified by sites and accounts in the Doppelganger network, though France’s digital foreign interference watchdog, Viginum, believes that happened more situationally than systematically. Since it began operating, Storm-1516 has focused on discrediting Ukraine and spreading disinformation about candidates for office in the United States, France, Germany, and Moldova.

Storm-1516’s campaign against Nikol Pashinyan began in June or July 2025; however, until September the group’s main effort focused on spreading fakes ahead of elections in Moldova. After the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) won in Moldova, Storm-1516 shifted its focus to Pashinyan.

For example, the fake about Pashinyan’s alleged purchase of high-end real estate in Marseille that was reported to the Kremlin as a “success” was launched by Storm-1516. In a report by the European External Action Service, researchers pointed to similarities between Storm-1516 narratives in Moldova and Armenia. In both cases, fake websites and inauthentic accounts discussed the supposed immorality of candidates , invented stories accusing them of corruption, and speculated about the loss of sovereignty that victories by Maia Sandu or Nikol Pashinyan would bring about for their respective countries.

In May, accounts linked to the group began spreading rumors that Pashinyan was ill. One such video, made to look like a report by the Armenian outlet CivilNet.am, claimed that Pashinyan had contracted HIV and that this became known during his imprisonment in 2010, when he was sentenced to seven years on charges of organizing unrest. CivilNet denied having published such a report.

According to Bloomberg’s calculations, the number of narratives spread by the Storm-1516 network in the first three months of 2026 more than doubled compared with the same period in 2025. Since late March, new narratives have appeared almost daily, with several targeting Hungarian opposition candidate Peter Magyar ahead of elections that were held this past April. Bloomberg found more than 25 stories about Armenia, portraying Pashinyan as corrupt and unable to govern the country.

Yerevan First, like other pro-Kremlin sites, republishes Storm-1516’s disinformation about Pashinyan. Reports sent by Kremlin-linked Doppelganger staff to their superiors also covered the spread of fakes produced by Storm-1516. The group’s narratives notably overlap with those pushed by the Doppelganger team.

Matryoshka: Disinfo in the name of respected media outlets

Around the same time that the Foundation to Battle Injustice published the fake about the Armenian prime minister’s alleged property in Marseille, bots from the Matryoshka network began their campaign against Pashinyan.

Matryoshka is a Russian disinformation network that creates fake videos made to look as if they were produced by established Western media outlets. The name refers to the Russian nesting doll, suggesting layers of deception and imitation.

In early June 2025, the Antibot4Navalny project found that accounts in the network were publishing fake videos imitating major global media outlets like Euronews and France 24. In the videos, foreign academics were portrayed as claiming that the Armenian genocide was being hushed up by Yerevan itself. Other fabricated videos spread false accusations about corruption in Pashinyan’s government.

In October, Matryoshka videos criticized Pashinyan for “destroying Armenia’s cultural code” and “imposing nontraditional values of tolerance.” The government was accused of threatening opposition journalists and bloggers.

Other AI-generated videos used the identities of former Auschwitz prisoners, the independent outlet Agentstvo reported. Speaking in their names, the videos claimed that “Nikol Pashinyan is building gas chambers for Armenia’s symbols, testing them on Mount Ararat.” Pashinyan was called a “traitor,” and Armenian citizens were compared to Jews who “waited for tragedy to happen.”

According to Antibot4Navalny, by early May 2026 the Matryoshka network had published 343 fake videos about Armenia and Pashinyan. A month before the election, the scale of the disinformation campaign had already approached the one seen in Moldova. The propagandists put in nearly eleven weeks of nonstop work on Armenia, compared with just under sixteen for Moldova, during which it published 409 videos, according to calculations by the independent outlet Vot Tak. Ahead of the U.S. elections, the network published 180 videos, compared with 97 in Germany and 14 in Poland.

Since early March 2026, Matryoshka has published videos claiming that Pashinyan could start a war with Russia. By mid-May, there were at least 20 such videos.

At a news conference May 9, Vladimir Putin claimed that Armenia’s possible accession to the European Union and withdrawal from the Eurasian Economic Union should be decided in a nationwide Armenian referendum, which he urged Yerevan to hold as soon as possible.

Putin also implied that Armenia should “not push things to the extreme” or follow Ukraine’s path, hinting at the potential for a military conflict: “All this later led to a coup, to the Crimean story, to the position of southeastern Ukraine and to hostilities. That is what all this led to. This is a serious question!” Putin said in his characteristic style. “So there is no need to push things to the extreme. It is simply necessary to say in time that we will do this and that. And the Armenian side needs to calculate, and we need to calculate.”

A print newspaper

In February 2026, a newspaper with an “American”-sounding name, Wyoming Star, began appearing on the streets of Yerevan. The newspaper turned out to be a collection of Armenian-language translations of articles from a U.S.-based website about events in Armenia. Neither the website nor the newspaper listed any authors.

Local outlet Factor TV found that the editor of the Armenian version was Vanik Shukuryan, a “citizen of St. Petersburg.” He brought copies of the newspaper from Moscow but refused to say who financed its printing.

The Insider established that the email address of one Wyoming Star author, Michelle Larsen, actually belongs to Alexander Ionov. In 2023, Ionov was charged with recruiting four U.S. citizens and interfering in municipal elections in Tampa, Florida. At the same time, a grand jury brought formal charges against two FSB officers.

Ionov, a Moscow resident, is the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, the chair of the National Human Rights Committee, and a professional informant. The indictment against Ionov says that since October 2013 he acted under FSB control in the United States and tried to recruit representatives of various political groups to become agents of Russian influence. Those recruited were supposed to inflame conflicts and generally destabilize the situation inside the United States.

In 2021, Ionov began a campaign against independent media in Russia, labeling virtually all independent outlets as “enemies of the people” and submitting reports about them to the Ministry of Justive. That same year, he began cooperating with Prigozhin’s Foundation to Battle Injustice in an attempt to promote a candidate in a U.S. gubernatorial election.

The U.S. State Department is offering up to $10 million for information about Ionov.

With the participation of the Gnida Project.

The document sets out the project’s key parameters and provides for construction to be financed with a Russian state export loan. The plant is scheduled to be commissioned in 2035, by which time Kazakhstan expects to reach a generating capacity of 2.4 gigawatts.

Kazakhstan held a referendum in October 2024 on whether to build a nuclear power plant. In June 2025, it selected Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation, to lead the international construction consortium. In August, specialists from the two countries began engineering surveys at the site of the future plant in the village of Ulken.

Kazakhstan has chosen a site near Lake Balkhash in the Almaty Region. Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev said in 2025 that work to set up the construction and installation base would begin in 2026, alongside preparation of technical and design documentation needed to obtain a license.

Kazakhstan has had no nuclear power generation capacity since 1999, when the BN-350 reactor on the Caspian Sea was shut down. Critics of the project warn that building the plant with Russian technology and specialists could deepen Kazakhstan’s energy dependence on Russia. Environmentalists have voiced concern about the plant’s possible impact on the ecosystem of Lake Balkhash.

The nuclear agreement was one of 16 documents signed during the visit, which included talks between Putin and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. In addition to bilateral cooperation, the two sides discussed the agenda of the Eurasian Economic Forum, scheduled to begin the next day in Astana.

The Insider has previously reported on how Russia uses nuclear projects abroad to create long-term obligations for its partner countries.

Coccia called the lawsuit an attempt to intimidate him.

“I'm convinced of the integrity of my journalistic work — but it does demand a serious reflection on the level of impunity and protection that Russian oligarchs and their associates continue to enjoy in our country,” he wrote. “While Europe debates sanctions and democratic security, shadowy networks keep investing capital through shell companies, frontmen, and hard-to-trace financial circuits, all while trying to intimidate investigative journalism. I will continue to report and document how these envoys of corruption, influence, and war still manage to move between Italy and Europe, investing opaque fortunes and seeking to silence those who do reporting. Without fear and with determination.”

Coccia’s investigation into the Matviyenko family was published by the Italian newspaper Linkiesta nearly a year ago. It alleged that Sergei Matviyenko, the son of the Federation Council speaker, lives in a villa in the Italian city of Pesaro on the Adriatic coast and has moved a significant share of his assets to San Marino, an independent republic surrounded by Italy.

According to Linkiesta, Sergei Matviyenko has an Italian tax number but does not conduct any economic activity in Italy. The outlet wrote that this status gives him access to local banks and that, to preserve his assets, the businessman built a formally legal but opaque system.

Coccia describes the province of Pesaro and Urbino as one of the hubs for a network of companies, foundations, and nominal owners through which, according to the investigation, the Matviyenko family may have circumvented sanctions. Sergei Matviyenko is under sanctions from the United States, Japan, and Canada. Valentina Matviyenko is under sanctions from the European Union, the UK, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Ukraine.

The villa in Pesaro, where the investigation says Sergei Matviyenko lives with his wife, Yulia, was bought by Valentina Matviyenko in 2009. The property was later transferred to Dominanta, a foundation registered in Italy that conducts no activity and exists solely to hold property.

In March 2022, the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), founded by the late Alexei Navalny, reported that the Matviyenko family’s estate in Pesaro includes a three-story home with a floor area of 774 square meters and a 26-hectare plot of land. The property was valued at approximately €10 million.

Memorial wrote that the persecution of independent lawyers has worsened significantly since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and especially sharply in 2025. The rights group said lawyers, above all those working on politically motivated cases, have become one of the groups targeted by the state’s repressive apparatus. The report’s authors link this to the fact that legal work remains one of the few lawful ways to oppose the state, defend critics of the authorities, and publicize human rights violations.

The report says criminal cases against lawyers are opened on a wide range of charges, from “financial” offenses to treason and terrorism. Aside from criminal prosecution, the Russian authorities use other forms of pressure, including unlawful searches and operational measures, administrative cases, disciplinary proceedings aimed at stripping lawyers of their status, designation as “foreign agents,” and travel bans.

Among the examples Memorial cites is the case of Alexei Navalny’s lawyers. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser, and Alexei Sergunin were sentenced in January 2025 to prison terms ranging from three years to 5.5 years on charges of participating in an “extremist community.” Prosecutors claimed their alleged participation consisted of passing information from Navalny in prison to his associates. Two other Navalny’s attorneys, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are currently abroad. They were arrested in absentia and placed on a wanted list.

The report also details the case of Kaliningrad lawyer Maria Bontsler. In 2022, she faced administrative charges of “discrediting” the Russian army over statements she made in court while defending activists prosecuted under the same law. In May 2025, authorities searched Bontsler’s home and detained her in a criminal case. She was first accused of confidential cooperation with a foreign state, but the charge was later changed to treason. Bontsler remains in pretrial detention.

Memorial also described the prosecution of lawyer Igor Popovsky as politically motivated. Popovsky was detained in Moscow on May 21, 2026, on suspicion of fraud. The report notes that Popovsky had for many years specialized in politically motivated cases: he represented Oleg Arkhipenkov, a defendant in the Bolotnaya case; anti-fascist Yury Mikheyev; anarchist partisan Ruslan Sidiki; and other political prisoners. Memorial says the case may be aimed at ending Popovsky’s professional and human rights work.

Another category of prosecutions, according to the report, is connected to lawyers’ personal anti-war stance. Former Udmurtia Bar Association President Dmitry Talantov was sentenced to six years and 10 months in prison in a case involving “false information” about the Russian army and “inciting hatred” over comments about the killing of civilians in Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, and Kharkiv, as well as criticism of Vladimir Putin. Lawyer Nikolai Polozov was sentenced in absentia to 8.5years in prison in a “fake news” case over an interview about the killing of civilians in Bucha.

Memorial also points to growing administrative pressure on the legal profession. According to the report, 12 lawyers have been added to Russia’s “foreign agents” registry, and all were forced to leave the country. In addition, according to the Pervy Otdel (lit. “Department One”) legal rights project, more than 200 lawyers working on cases involving state secrets have been barred from leaving Russia since October 2024, and that number continues to grow.

The report concludes that Russia’s independent legal profession is facing growing pressure from the state, along with other civil society institutions and safeguards of the rule of law. Lawyers who continue to take on politically motivated criminal cases are being targeted for their work and their civic views.

The open source intelligence (OSINT) researcher Necro Mancer found a post about Lobanov’s funeral on his sister’s page on the Russian social network VK. “On May 29, 2026, a funeral service and farewell will be held in the church in the village of Bakhta for our brother, Capt. Dmitry Alexandrovich Lobanov,” the post said. A similar message was published on the page of a user named Yulia Lobanova on the social network Odnoklassniki.

The Russian pro-war Telegram channel Fighterbomber reported on the morning of April 26 that Russia had lost a helicopter in Africa. “The crew and mobile fire group on board were killed. The preliminary cause was external fire impact (an air defense system),” the channel wrote. Clash Report published a video that appeared to show the downed helicopter.

Russian troops were known to have been fighting in Mali late last month from an April 28 statement by Russia’s Defense Ministry about preventing a coup in the country. The ministry said aircraft, helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, and artillery had been used against militants in Mali.

“During fierce battles with superior enemy forces, Africa Corps units inflicted irrecoverable personnel and vehicle losses on the enemy, forcing them to abandon their plans, preventing a coup, preserving the power of the legitimate government and averting mass civilian deaths,” the ministry said.

Dmitry Lobanov, a native of the Kirov Region, served in the 112th Separate Helicopter Regiment, Military Unit 78081, based in the city of Chita in Russia’s Zabaikalsky Krai. According to Ukraine’s Myrotvorets database, Lobanov took part in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He also likely took part in Russia’s military operation in Syria, according to Necro Mancer. The Insider also noted that one of the awards on the captain’s uniform was the medal “Participant in the Military Operation in Syria.”

The Insider was able to confirm that the published photos do in fact depict Andrei Kondratyev and Dmitry Lobanov.

The campaign centered on a real event: Pashinyan’s May 23 announcement during election campaigning that System of a Down would perform on Yerevan’s Republic Square in July. Using his words, Matryoshka built a series of interconnected disinformation posts around the event.

Ten videos distributed by the network maintain a consistent fictional narrative:

• One video, disguised as material from the Armenian opposition outlet Frontline, claims the band’s fee would be a “record $120 million” and that it has already caused “widespread outrage” in the country amid a difficult economic situation. The video also features a fake interview with “political scientist Ekaterina Meiering-Mikadze” — there is in fact a Georgian ambassador with the same first and last name — who explains that Pashinyan is “courting a younger audience who will attend the concert but will not vote for him.”
• A video using the logo of the music magazine NME builds a narrative of gradual collapse: frontman Serj Tankian “announced that the concert has been postponed,” which sparked “a flood of negative comments on social media from fans,” who accused System of a Down of aiding the prime minister’s “political manipulation.”
• Under the E! News logo, the bots spread a story about a “massive wave of ticket returns” for System of a Down concerts around the world, a movement to “cancel” the band, with a Bluesky page calling for the “cancellation of System of a Down” supposedly garnering over 70,000 followers.
• A video using the Euronews logo attributes to Tankian a post in which he supposedly revises his position on the Armenian genocide and says that “400,000 victims is also a tragedy, but the number of those killed is certainly not 1.5 million.” “Music critic David Fricke” — in reality, a person with that name is a senior editor at Rolling Stone — asks “how much it cost Pashinyan to buy System of a Down’s political stance, as it appears to have been bought.”
• Under the Armenpress logo, a fake video features Pashinyan’s press secretary trying to reassure Baku and claiming the band “changed its stance a long time ago” and now “supports the joint efforts of Armenia and Turkey to verify the numbers of the 1915 genocide.” The same video explains the disappearance of the song “Protect the Land” from online streaming services, with it allegedly being removed at the request of the rights holder.
• A video under the CNN Türk logo depicts Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov demanding that the concert be canceled. It claims System of a Down’s performance in Yerevan would “undermine all diplomatic efforts by Armenia and Azerbaijan to achieve peace.”
• A video using The New York Times logo claims Turkish conglomerate Doğan Holding secretly bought the band’s catalog of songs for $200 million, and that a number of rock musicians, from Dave Mustaine of Megadeth to Dee Snider of Twister Sister, refused to take part in “the Yerevan festival in support of Prime Minister Pashinyan.” The footage uses real videos from the streaming service Cameo, where musicians record personalized greetings, with the messages edited to make it appear as though they were talking about Armenia.
• A video with the France 24 logo reports a “terrorist threat” at System of a Down’s Paris concert at the Stade de France. It claims French police “received a flood of calls threatening to bomb the stadium” from “members of the Armenian diaspora in France.”

The network also spread an image supposedly painted by an Armenian artist on a wall in France, showing Pashinyan teasing members of System of a Down with money clenched in his hand. The post claims the artist was then “extradited” from France to Armenia.

To create the appearance of authenticity, the bots use the logos of Western outlets and government bodies, along with real Cameo videos of musicians. A standard tactic used by the network is the formula “it was previously reported,” which links the videos together and creates the illusion of a growing news cycle. The Insider has obtained the videos but will not publish them to avoid further spreading disinformation.

A non-existent concert and the June 7 vote

On May 23, during a campaign meeting with voters in Yerevan’s Avan district, Pashinyan announced that System of a Down would perform in July on Republic Square. Armenia’s parliamentary elections – the first such vote to be scheduled since 2017 – will be held June 7, 2026, and will largely determine Armenia’s future foreign policy.

Pashinyan is campaigning for closer ties with the European Union. In early May, Yerevan hosted a summit of the European Political Community and the first EU-Armenia summit. Turkey lifted a 30-year ban on direct trade, and an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace agreement, whose framework was initiated in Washington with mediation from U.S. President Donald Trump in August 2025, remains a central issue in the election campaign.

What is Matryoshka?

Matryoshka is a Kremlin-linked network of bots, trolls, and coordinated anonymous media resources that specializes in mass disinformation campaigns. Its signature tools are short vertical videos made to look as if they were produced by respected Western media outlets and organizations. The videos are then launched simultaneously on X, Telegram, Bluesky, and in closed group chats. The network’s preferred tactic is to seize on a real-world scandal and build a fictional narrative around it, using real names and credible media brands.

Kuliešius said that at the start of 2025, there were only three antennas on the border of the Russian exclave capable of “spoofing” — or falsifying — GPS signals. There are now 36, a twelvefold increase. He called the interference with GPS signals a “systemic, permanent, unending Russian provocation against European security.”

The range named by the official – 450 kilometers – includes all of Lithuania, major cities such as Riga and Warsaw, and southern Estonia. To the northwest, it reaches Sweden’s coast, and to the west, the Polish-German border.

It is unclear, however, how the Lithuanian authorities measured the range of the spoofing systems.

Cybersecurity expert Alexander Litreev told The Insider that the Lithuanian regulator’s estimates are “quite realistic.”

“To figure this out, you first need to understand how GPS works. These are fairly weak signals coming from satellites in Earth’s orbit. Each signal contains a current timestamp. The receiving device, whether it is a navigator, a phone, or something more serious such as an aircraft, car, or drone, compares its own time with the time sent by the satellite. Based on the time difference and the known speed at which signals travel, the distance from the satellite to the receiver is calculated. With signals from at least three satellites, you can get a fairly precise point on a map.

The satellite signal is very weak, coming from an altitude of more than 20,000 kilometers. To spoof the signal and disrupt GPS, there is no need to jam the satellite signal at all. It is enough simply to transmit a signal imitating the satellite but slightly ‘louder’ than the real one. As you understand, the distance from Kaliningrad, Pskov, or St. Petersburg to Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia is far shorter than the 20,000 kilometers to a satellite in orbit. That means no supertechnology is needed to create such interference,” Litreev said.

The number of transmitters Russia can use to “jam” those signals may constantly change, Litreev said. In July last year, a group of researchers from Poland identified two military sites in Kaliningrad from which signals were purportedly jammed. Both were located close to known electronic warfare units and military antenna complexes. Among them was the GT-01 Murmansk-BN system, a truck-mounted complex with powerful 32-meter antennas.

These systems are fairly mobile and can be easily relocated.

Lithuania’s communications regulator also said the interference is degrading mobile phone service. Public transport tracking apps are also experiencing disruptions because they rely on GPS signals to locate buses. The fluctuations are especially noticeable during Russian strikes on Ukrainian territory.

European countries have repeatedly accused Russia of interfering with GPS systems. In August last year, the Baltic states filed a complaint against Russia at the United Nations over the issue.

The disruptions affect not only mobile communications but also aviation and maritime traffic. This week, The Times reported that a Royal Air Force plane carrying UK Defense Secretary John Healey had recently lost its GPS signal while flying near the Russian border on its way back from Estonia. A plane carrying Romania’s acting defense minister also encountered GPS interference during a flight to Lithuania. In September 2025, Germany recorded a sharp rise in GPS interference affecting civil aviation, which was also linked to Russia.

Litreev said the interference will most likely affect airports first, including automatic landing systems, which are widely used on modern aircraft.

“This is more of an inconvenience than something fatal. Aircraft can land without it. They will use more basic systems instead, such as an instrument landing system, where the aircraft relies not on GPS but on radio beacons near the runway,” he said.

Ordinary consumer electronics are unlikely to experience serious GPS problems. Urban development and natural terrain can obstruct spoofing by reducing interference at ground level. “It is not even certain that a signal from Russian electronic warfare systems would reach somewhere like Riga through hills, buildings, and forests,” Litreev said. Aircraft, by contrast, face no such natural obstacles in the air, making their navigation systems the most vulnerable to interference.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma in mid-January, but the vessel registration amendment was not added until the second reading on May 21.

The measure would amend Russia’s law on countering “unfriendly actions” on the part of the U.S. and other states, creating a “special” state registration procedure for seagoing, river, and mixed river-sea vessels.

Some previously mandatory requirements would no longer apply to those vessels, including rules on documentation, crew hiring, coastal shipping, and access to data on the legal entities that own them.

TriTrace Investigations said the amendments appear intended to hide information about Russia’s “shadow fleet,” including the vessels’ owners and beneficiaries. The project said the changes would complicate the work of sanctions authorities and private Russian entities dealing with such vessels due to the risk of secondary sanctions.

Although much of the “shadow fleet” used to transport oil in circumvention of sanctions is registered in other jurisdictions, some vessels still sail under the Russian flag.

In January, the sanctioned tanker Progress, used to transport Russian oil, lost control in the Mediterranean. Around the same time, the tanker Bella 1, which had tried to evade the U.S. Coast Guard in the Atlantic, changed its registration to Russia. The move did not help: the vessel, later renamed Marinera, was seized.

Rosinkas is Russia’s state-linked cash collection service, responsible for transporting money and valuables. The Courier Communication Central Board is a special postal service handling secure government communications and deliveries.

“The law has been passed, and better late than never. Everyone must defend the motherland! Even throwing a stone is already good,” Kolesnik said.

Under the new law, employees of these organizations may disable drones by jamming or intercepting control signals, disrupting operators’ control systems, or damaging or destroying the aircraft. The organizations will have to pay for the protective measures themselves.

Military analyst David Sharp told The Insider that the powers will likely be given to internal security services.

“Of course, they do not imply that clerks or deputy directors of bank branches are expected to fend off drones, but those responsible for security, I assume. They probably have armed personnel.

They are the ones meant here, and the goal is to make the most of the available resources. Since these organizations have employees capable of handling special anti-drone rifles, standard small arms, or special air defense systems that can be installed at facilities, a law is needed to give them permission to use such weapons in the workplace.

But drones that attack deep inside the country are not the kind of aircraft that can be knocked off course with rifles. Apparently, the idea is that the more people and entities can fight drones at least in theory, the better.”

Anatoly Aksakov, chair of the State Duma’s financial markets committee, confirmed that employees would be issued weapons.

“First, they will create interference to make it harder for [a UAV] to be guided and attack the relevant facilities – that is, they will suppress all kinds of signals. And then, in addition, they will use tools capable of shooting down these drones and thereby protect the relevant facilities,” he said.

A number of Russian security agencies and guard services already have the authority to down drones, including the National Guard (Rosgvardiya), the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Federal Protective Service (FSO), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), as well as departmental security units.

With reporting by Tetiana Popova.

“We need to get the people out”

Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for assistance in evacuating residents of occupied Oleshky, a city on the left bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson Region. The request concerns a humanitarian corridor and security guarantees for those willing to leave. Lubinets also called on the international community to secure access for international missions to the occupied city.

As the ombudsman’s office told The Insider, the negotiations are currently focused on possible options for safely removing people from Oleshky and nearby settlements. Ukraine has already given the ICRC a list of residents in need of help.

“From a legal point of view, evacuation measures must be organized in compliance with international humanitarian law, taking into account security factors and the operational situation,” the office said.

The office emphasized the need for an urgent evacuation due to a rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation. Since the beginning of February, the ombudsman’s secretariat has received 127 appeals from local residents.

“A significant part of the civilian population has been forced to spend long periods in basements and shelters because of systematic shelling and bombing. Among those remaining in the city are children, elderly people, people with disabilities, and those in need of medical assistance.”

Importantly, people cannot evacuate on their own.

“Departure is difficult because there are no safe evacuation routes: the roads are mined, checkpoints are in place, so-called filtration measures are being carried out, and there are no organized humanitarian corridors. Under these conditions, people have found themselves in a situation where they cannot safely leave the area.”

On May 7, the ICRC confirmed it was ready to assist with the evacuation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later repeated the call for international involvement on May 12, describing the situation in the occupied parts of the Kherson Region, including Oleshky and nearby towns and villages, as dire. “It is precisely from this part of the occupied territory that evacuating people is particularly difficult,” he explained.

“It is important that international organizations, everyone who can help with this, be actively involved. We have discussed the process in detail. I am grateful to everyone trying to help: our partners, the Kherson regional authorities, the ombudsman, and the government team,” he said.

Tetiana Hasanenko, the exiled head of Oleshky’s military administration, said about 2,000 people remain in the city, including 47 children.

“The city has been living without gas, electricity, or running water for five years now. Since May 4, there have been no food deliveries to Oleshky. In April, there were no deliveries for three to four weeks, and in winter, for a month and a half. We need to get the people out,” she said.

Oleshky has been under Russian occupation since the first days of the full-scale invasion. After the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam in 2023, the city was almost entirely flooded, leaving local residents without running water. Since late 2025, the city has also been struggling with food shortages.

“All the food that somehow makes it into Oleshky is sold, and the prices are very high, even by the standards of the so-called Russian rubles,” Hasanenko said.

Even when residents have money, accessing it is difficult. Hasanenko said there are no working ATMs in Oleshky or nearby villages, leaving residents unable to withdraw Ukrainian social benefits or payments issued by the occupation authorities. She said people have to give their bank cards to random drivers heading to larger occupied cities such as Skadovsk, with no guarantee the drivers will return with the money.

“There is no authority in Oleshky. It is absolutely impossible to file a complaint or get any kind of help. People have simply been left there to fight for survival,” she said.

Leaving the city has become a paid service, she said. Some volunteers still evacuate people for free, but most drivers charge money. “I do not judge anyone. People are risking the most precious thing, their lives, by entering and leaving the city,” she added.

Hasanenko said 20 ambulances were blown up in the Oleshky area between October and April. One attack killed three medics who were trying to deliver generator fuel to a hospital.

According to the administration head, evacuation from Oleshky has become “a one-way road.” People get into any vehicle they can find, hoping to escape, but not knowing if they will make it.  “In some cases, ambulances evacuating people still came under fire. And they had to walk back to Oleshky, again risking their lives,” she said.

Dense mining of the area poses an additional danger. Hasanenko said mines began to be laid at the start of the fighting, along the river, in the wetlands, and in adjacent areas, but the situation has now become much worse.

“The density of mining is increasing not just every month, but every day. It is unclear why the Russians are mining the roads. Their logic is impossible to understand. If they had logic, they would never have come to our land,” she said.

The Russian occupation authorities, meanwhile, explain the ban on leaving by citing “attacks” from Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Residents are told that humanitarian corridors are not an option because the Ukrainian side would supposedly shell people.

“That is exactly what they write in their Telegram channels,” Hasanenko said.

Even those who manage to leave Oleshky often remain in occupied territory, in places such as Radensk, Kostohryzove, or Skadovsk. Hasanenko said many are afraid to travel to Ukrainian-controlled territory because of constant Russian propaganda, which convinces people that “Russia has conquered almost all of Ukraine” and that “no one is waiting for them” in areas controlled by Kyiv.

“I cannot say it is safe there. There are also strikes there, and people are killed. But it is still safer than in Oleshky because it is farther from the water. We need to remove people from immediate danger. To make sure they have enough food,” she said.

At the same time, Hasanenko said some residents still hope to wait out the war at home and return to their old lives, despite the constant shelling and humanitarian disaster. After years under occupation, many people have also developed severe psychological trauma.

“One woman told me: ‘I already know I will die here.’ She said: ‘You cannot imagine the state I was in when I had been talking to my neighbor, and 20 minutes later that neighbor’s intestines were hanging on the fence. I already know I will die here. I do not want to go anywhere. I will die — either in my own home or on that road.’”

“I will die — either in my own home or on that road”

Drone blockade and bodies in the streets

Judging by drone footage taken by the 34th Marine Brigade, Oleshky looks almost destroyed after four years of fighting. Some apartment blocks have been razed to the ground, while others have partly collapsed after explosions. Footage from March 22, 2026, shows burned-out apartments and torn-down balconies; footage from April 20 shows bombed-out houses and partly collapsed roofs.

Journalist Zarina Zabrisky, who has lived and worked in Kherson since spring 2023, said she began documenting the situation on the occupied left bank of the Dnipro in late 2025. The “left bank” refers to the eastern side of the Dnipro River in the Kherson Region, much of which remains under Russian occupation. She said the humanitarian crisis has long since spread beyond Oleshky alone.

“The problem is that not only Oleshky, but also Hola Prystan and other towns are effectively under a drone and mine blockade,” she said.

She said roads around the settlements are mined, vehicles are regularly blown up, and any movement carries the risk of a drone attack. As a result, it is almost impossible to deliver food, medicine, and fuel to the towns. The hospital in Oleshky has stopped functioning. “It was running on a generator, and now it is impossible to bring in gasoline. People have run out of medicine,” Zabrisky said.

The dead have become a separate problem. With no electricity, the morgue’s refrigerators do not work. “The bodies are just lying there. No permission was granted to move them, to Henichesk, for instance,” Zabrisky said.

Tetiana Hasanenko, head of Oleshky’s military administration, said the city’s morgue effectively stopped working after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The building was damaged during the flooding and has repeatedly come under shelling.

She added that in recent months, bodies have been placed in the hospital basement simply because it was the only building with thick walls left in the city. Burying the dead without a forensic medical examination is prohibited, but the nearest forensics team is in the town of Kalanchak.

“That means you have to travel along this road of death, carrying a dead body — forgive my cynicism — only to lose living people as well. No one wants that,” she said.

Hasanenko said she knows a woman whose son was killed in the winter. In December, his body was taken to Kalanchak for a forensic examination, but there is no way to bring it back.

“The man still has not been buried, because it is impossible to bring the body back to Oleshky, and the mother will not agree to have him dumped somewhere there. Because what guarantee is there that anyone will bury him at all?” she said.

She added that the exact number of deaths is impossible to establish. The administration is trying to keep its own count, but it includes only confirmed cases.

“We collect this information for ourselves, but it is incomplete. We record only confirmed cases: when we know the person’s date of birth and place of residence in the Oleshky community,” she said.

According to Hasanenko, some of the dead remain unidentified. “There are people who were simply left lying there, on the road of death, and that is all,” she said.

There are also bodies still lying in the streets, decomposing as the weather warms. “There are bodies of Russian soldiers. Stray dogs are dragging them away. They already know the taste of human flesh. And these dogs start chasing the living,” she said.

One resident, Hasanenko said, carried food with her when riding around the city by bicycle, hoping to distract dogs if they attacked.

“But they did not react to bread. Because a dog that already knows the taste of human flesh wants a human being. It is a terrible thing. People in Oleshky know one another, and if something happens, someone will at least take a dead body to the hospital on a garden cart. But this katsapnya is not needed by either our side or theirs,” she said.

Residents also report seeing bodies in the streets in local Telegram channels. A March 24 post reads:

“The photo may be fake, but the fact that bodies are lying there and hungry dogs are gnawing at them is true. They destroyed a five-story building where drone operators were sitting. They kept hitting it until it collapsed. After that, the bodies of the rashists were scattered around, with dogs chewing on them. Civilians try to avoid the place because the scene is horrifying.

“You may not believe it, but Oleshky is horror. We still do not know how many people have died from cold, hunger, or lack of medicine. I talk to those who stayed, and it makes your blood run cold. And you are calling on people not to believe it! Yes, not everything should be believed, but unfortunately, not in this case.”

“They won’t survive another winter”

Volunteer Ksenia Arkhipova described how evacuations from Oleshky are now carried out. She has been evacuating residents from the occupied left bank since the start of the full-scale war. In recent months, she said, evacuations have become especially difficult and depend on brief windows when mined roads can still be used.

“We catch the moment when the road in Oleshky is demined. I always know when that happens. Ambulances go there to take the wounded to Skadovsk, because our hospital cannot provide assistance or perform serious surgery, such as amputations. In Oleshky, a lot of people are blown up by mines, by ‘petals,’ including children. And when ambulances leave Oleshky, we understand that the road has been demined and that there is an opening,” she said.

“Petals” refers to PFM-1 antipersonnel mines, small Soviet-designed scatterable mines whose shape resembles a leaf or petal. They are especially dangerous for civilians because they can be hard to notice.

Arkhipova said organizing evacuations is becoming harder because the city is almost completely cut off from communications, and any movement remains extremely dangerous.

She estimated that fewer people may now remain in Oleshky than earlier figures suggested. “I think there are about 1,500 people there, and even that is a stretch,” she said.

Children are a particular concern. Many parents are afraid to evacuate because they lack Russian documents and fear that if they try to leave, the Russian side could take their children away. Even so, volunteers continue trying to persuade people to leave, promising to help them after evacuation with housing and papers.

Arkhipova said that across all evacuation efforts, 153 people have been moved to safer locations. But the situation in the city continues to worsen. She said even utility workers have come under shelling and drone attacks.

“On May 12, there was a drone drop. A utility crew came out in orange vests. There were seven of them. The drop came from a Russian drone, and a woman was killed. The others had shrapnel wounds, and one man lost an eye,” she said.

Last winter, Arkhipova said, many residents were freezing in their apartments, with indoor temperatures staying around 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, or 37 to 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

“There is no gas, no electricity, nothing for them to heat their homes with. People in private houses have already cut down everything, even fruit trees. They built potbelly stoves and burned that wood. They won’t survive another winter. We need to get them out before winter, as many of them as possible, take everyone who agrees to leave.”

Shevchuk said the fracture was discovered during a forensic examination. Police also said Roshchyna was systematically abused by the center’s guards for demanding proper food and detention conditions and refusing to sing the Russian national anthem.

Roshchyna was held in a cell at Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 in the city of Taganrog under unsanitary conditions. The cell had no hot water, and she was only given three minutes for meals, during which she also had to wash her dishes. From morning until lights out, she was forbidden to sit or lie down.

Ukrainian law enforcement officials said the head of the detention facility was aware that Roshchyna was in very serious condition but ignored it. They also said that she remained in critical condition during her transfer to Pretrial Detention Center No. 3 in Kizel, where she later died.

Investigators said  Roshchyna died on Sept. 19, 2024, a week after arriving at the Kizel detention center. They said the cause was the prolonged abuse she suffered while in captivity.

Viktoriia Roshchyna was captured in the summer of 2023 while preparing reports from Russian-occupied territories. Ukrainian media previously reported that she was systematically tortured with electric shocks while in custody. Multiple stab wounds were also found on her body, and her cellmates in a detention facility in Russia’s Rostov Region said she weighed about 30 kilograms, or 66 pounds.

Russian authorities officially acknowledged holding Viktoriia Roshchyna in captivity only in May 2024. She died in September, and her body was later returned to Ukraine in an exchange of remains.  It arrived at a morgue in Vinnytsia in a bag labeled “NM SPAS 757,” meaning “unidentified male, extensive damage to the coronary arteries, serial number 757.” Inside, a tag on her shin read “7390 Roshchyna V. V.”

Later reports said that some of Viktoriya Roshchyna’s internal organs had been removed before the exchange. Multiple media outlets reported that her eyeballs, brain, and part of the larynx were missing, and that the hyoid bone had been broken. 

As The Insider reported earlier, the vessel left the Russian port of Vistino and exited the Baltic Sea on April 6 escorted by the corvette Soobrazitelny, according to the open source intelligence (OSINT) project SONARROW. Russian warships accompanied the tanker on its way to the Atlantic. On April 8, the tanker passed through the English Channel in British territorial waters. The Telegraph reported that the Black Sea Fleet frigate Admiral Grigorovich then took over the escort onward to the Atlantic.

The tanker was able to pass through the English Channel despite UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statements that sanctioned Russian vessels could be detained.

The Universal is under sanctions from several countries. The United States sanctioned the vessel on Jan. 10, 2025. The European Union added it to its sanctions list on May 20, 2025, saying it had transported Russian oil “using high-risk shipping practices.”

Switzerland imposed sanctions on the vessel June 3, 2025, followed by the UK on July 21, 2025.  Ukraine imposed personal sanctions on the tanker’s captain in August 2025 and the vessel itself on Dec. 13. Canada joined the sanctions regime March 25, 2026.

The sanctions target crypto exchanges, Russia-linked companies, and the A7 network – a Kremlin-backed system that British authorities say has been used to evade sanctions, finance military procurement, and process payments from oil sales.

The UK government says more than $90 billion passed through the A7 network over the past year, roughly half of Russia’s annual military spending.

The new package includes a total of 18 sanctions designations. The restrictions also target individuals linked to A7, a bank in Kyrgyzstan that helped process payments for the network, and a major international crypto exchange through which more than $1.5 billion may have entered Russia. Three Georgian companies that operated Russia-focused crypto exchanges were also sanctioned.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Moscow is trying to use “shadow financial systems” and cryptocurrency networks to bypass restrictions, but that London intends to “shut off the financial lifelines that sustain Putin’s war machine.”

According to the statement, Russia’s economy remains under pressure from sanctions. The UK government noted that Russia lowered its 2026 economic growth forecast from 1.3% to 0.4% in May.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the UK has imposed sanctions on more than 3,300 individuals, legal entities, and vessels linked to the Kremlin’s interests. The British government estimates that Russia has lost more than $450 billion due to international restrictions.

The AfD is close to forming a one-party state government

The AfD could come to power for the first time in Saxony-Anhalt, an eastern state that was formerly part of East Germany, according to a recent report by Deutsche Welle, citing polling data. Several months ahead of the September elections to the state parliament, the party’s support stands at about 41%.

That level of popularity could allow it to form a one-party government. The current governing coalition in the 97-seat Landtag, or state parliament, consists of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, and the Christian Democrats. By number of seats, the AfD currently ranks second with 23, behind the Christian Democratic Union, which has 40.

At the regional level, the far-right party has been classified as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization by the regional branch of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence body. Law enforcement authorities have accused the AfD of contradicting the basic principles of Germany’s democratic order, including by promoting a concept of “the people” based on ethnic origin rather than legal equality. The party, in turn, called the decision politicized.

Dmitri Stratievski, a political analyst and director of the Berlin Center for East European Studies, told The Insider that AfD’s rise to power in one region would be a “serious problem” at the federal level.

“If the Greens do not pass the threshold and AfD gets, say, 42.5% to 43%, it is entirely possible that the party would have a real chance to form the government of Saxony-Anhalt on its own. Importantly, Germany is still a country with a bicameral parliament. In addition to the Bundestag, there is the Bundesrat, the chamber of the federal states, where all federal states are represented. Roughly a third of laws passed by the Bundestag require approval in the Bundesrat. German history has seen more than one case, including quite recently, when a law was passed by the Bundestag but vetoed by the Bundesrat, and eventually failed.

Let’s examine a hypothetical situation: AfD becomes the governing party in Saxony-Anhalt. Admittedly, the state is small and not densely populated, so the AfD’s political weight or vote reserve would be very limited compared with major federal states such as North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Bavaria, or Baden-Württemberg.

But, as is well known, serious political battles also take place among democratic parties. It is entirely possible that in the event of a political conflict between democratic parties — say, between the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, and the Greens — that very AfD vote from Saxony-Anhalt could be decisive in preventing a bill from passing.

If the AfD comes to power in any federal state, naturally including Saxony-Anhalt, it would mean not only a reshaping of the political landscape in that state, but also serious, I would say fundamental, changes at the federal level. The AfD would thereby become a serious, established player in federal politics, effectively one of the governing parties, although, of course, it would not join the federal coalition.”

The far right in Saxony-Anhalt promises to restore Russian classes in schools and resume student exchanges

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt, told DW that if his party comes to power, he intends to ensure that all migrants denied asylum in Germany are detained and deported. He also called for reforms of the education system.

“We are going to de-ideologize the curriculum. That means everything ideologically introduced into it in recent years will be removed,” he said.

DW noted that the AfD opposes diversity programs, including seminars on combating racism and education on LGBTQ+ issues. Siegmund also called for Russian-language courses, like those that existed in the East German era, to return to the state’s schools, and for student exchange programs with Russia to resume.

“Why should we now change the direction of cultural policy just because these are the current moods, the spirit of the time? We do not think this is a good idea. We want culture to be separated from that trend,” he said.

The politician also supports lifting sanctions against Russia.

Stratievski said the pro-Russian position can be explained by eastern Germany’s historical proximity to the Soviet Union and by the current attitudes of part of the electorate.

“The AfD, as is well known, is an entirely populist party, and in the past it very often made pipe-dream promises to its own voters or potential voters that cannot be implemented in practice within Germany’s political system.

AfD politicians very often mix up the three levels of government in Germany — federal, state, and municipal, or communal — and deliberately confuse the electorate by making proposals at, say, the municipal or state level that cannot be implemented without the federal level.

But populism alone is not enough to live on, so AfD is trying to professionalize. And this is exactly why the proposal to resume, introduce, or expand Russian-language teaching in schools is interesting. Education issues really do fall under state authority, and if AfD were to come to power, that proposal could be implemented in practice.

Why Russian? I see several reasons, based on the following background. First, Alternative for Germany often demonstrates a pro-Russian course and supports Kremlin narratives. Those narratives find understanding among the party’s regular voters, so such pro-Russian signals and messages are entirely natural for the party.

We also should not forget that Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — the two states where elections will be held in September — are in eastern Germany. And in eastern Germany, traditions of a certain friendship with Russia remain strong to this day. In this idea of friendship with Russians, many people confuse today’s Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. Naturally, during the East German period, Russian was the dominant foreign language in this area and a compulsory subject in the education system, and somehow this was passed down in families. Learning Russian is more natural there than, for example, French or Spanish.

And finally, the third factor is the AfD’s attempt to play on opposition to Western narratives or, as they like to say, the Western mainstream. The message is: whereas pro-Western values were actively imposed on eastern Germany after the reunification, we oppose them in favor of a more global  — or supposedly more global — way of thinking, and we seek to normalize relations with Russia, including in this form.”

Saxony-Anhalt party leader accused of nepotism and named in high-profile “secret meeting near Potsdam”

At the start of the year, the AfD branch in Saxony-Anhalt, led by Siegmund, became embroiled in a nepotism scandal. According to Der Spiegel, Siegmund’s father was listed as working in the office of another AfD lawmaker, Thomas Korell, and was earning more than 100,000 euros a year. The scandal also affected other party representatives in the state: Media reports described the employment of relatives of AfD lawmakers and functionaries in parliamentary offices and the Landtag faction.

Siegmund was also mentioned in an investigation by the independent outlet Correctiv about a secret meeting of right-wing politicians near Potsdam, where a plan for the mass deportation of migrants from Germany was discussed. The report said the leader of AfD’s parliamentary group in Saxony-Anhalt attended the meeting along with other party representatives. There, Siegmund said the “street scene must change” and that foreign restaurants should be put under pressure so that their owners would find it “as unattractive as possible to live in Saxony-Anhalt.”

After the publication, Siegmund said through lawyers that he had attended the meeting as a private individual and denied any intention to “illegally deport people.

The law is expected to enter into force on Sept. 1 after being signed by Vladimir Putin.

The bill was submitted to the State Duma in 2024 and passed its first reading in May 2025. Its authors initially proposed applying the measure to any offenses directed “against Russia’s interests,” without specifying any particular charges. By the second reading, the MPs had added a list of violations, including:

• illegal receipt of classified information
• abuse of media freedom
• violations related to the distribution of information, including among minors, as well as public calls for terrorism
• publicly equating the actions and decisions of the Soviet leadership with those of Nazi Germany
• violations involving the disclosure of information about protected persons
• violations of laws regulating the activities of a “foreign agent”
• petty hooliganism with aggravating elements
• production and distribution of extremist materials

The new law defines the seizure of property as “a prohibition on a person against whom proceedings for an administrative offense are pending…from disposing of the seized property, and, if necessary, the imposition of restrictions on the possession and use of such property.”

“Those who fled abroad and, from there, use money from Western sponsors to call for terrorism and extremism, justify Nazism and insult our soldiers and officers should understand: They will have to answer for what they have done. Both for criminal offenses and administrative violations,” commented State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.

As Valeria Vetoshkina, a lawyer who works with the human rights project OVD-Info, explained to The Insider, property placed under arrest cannot be confiscated.

“They will not be able to confiscate it, as the law does not provide for that. Arrest is a preventive measure to secure the payment of a fine. Regardless of whether a criminal case is opened after a repeat violation, the property may remain under arrest until the grounds for imposing it no longer apply,” Vetoshkina said.

This past winter, an Estonian citizen named Daniil (name changed) crossed the Russian border over the ice of Lake Peipus and requested asylum. As a result, he has spent the past four months in Pskov Pre-trial Detention Center No. 1, complaining about harsh conditions that include cold, mice, and sedative injections administered without his consent.

In a letter to human rights advocates, the 25-year-old explained that he fled because his lack of Estonian language skills made it impossible for him to find work and support himself in a country that had “started banning the Russian language in schools.” As Daniil wrote, “I had long heard that Russia had a resettlement program — that people were moving to live in Russia.”

Russia does in fact have two programs that actively encourage people with Soviet roots to relocate. Since 2006, the country has operated the CompatriotResettlement Program, and since 2024, a separate repatriation program that is also aimed at native Russian speakers and their descendants. By all appearances, Daniil would have been an ideal candidate for either program. The Baltic states are among the key regions where these initiatives are promoted.

Moreover, the Pskov Region where Daniil was locked up in pretrial detention has been actively recruiting Estonian citizens to address labor shortages, Estonian outlet Postimees reported. Estonia’s Department of Statistics recorded that in 2023, a total of 512 residents moved permanently to Russia, and in 2024 the number rose to 868.

The article’s authors point to a growing number of Russian propaganda materials carrying headlines such as “Study in your native language,” “Now they can freely speak their native language,” “In Russia, family and history are respected,” and “Welcome home.” As the outlet concluded, the programs “market relocation as a story of ‘spiritual and moral salvation.’”

Official media in the Pskov Region, along with local officials writing on their personal blogs, constantly promote images of successful relocation stories involving Russian-speaking residents of the Baltics. The Telegram channel of Elena Polonskaya, the Governor’s Commissioner for Work with Compatriots,  regularly posts stories about repatriates. For example, jeweler and artist Irena Pabo said in an interview with Pskov’s Silver Rain radio station that she had been afraid to remain in Estonia because “factories producing explosives and drones are being built there.”

Polonskaya also shared a report by the Russian state broadcaster Vesti describing how Pskov had revived the “historic tradition of church services for settlers from other countries.”

“At the Church of St. George from the Ascent, services for Orthodox Latvians had been held every two weeks since the late 19th century. On the feast day of the Holy Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, more than 70 settlers from various European countries gathered there. The liturgy for our compatriots was led by Metropolitan Matfey of Pskov and Porkhov,” the report stated.

“It was supposed to bring millions”

It remains unclear what circumstances actually drove Daniil to flee alone across the ice. Most settlers and repatriates apply to move to Russia through consulates or intermediary firms that prepare a complete package of documents on a “turnkey” basis.

Nikolai Kozolup, a balding man in a turtleneck sweater, gives the author of this article a video tour of a repatriation office in Moscow’s Taganka district, where thirty employees are engaged in helping foreigners with Russian roots obtain Russian citizenship. On the wall hangs a triple portrait: Donald Trump in the center embracing Putin with his right arm and Kim Jong Un with his left (the North Korean dictator is holding a bottle of whiskey). Another portrait of Putin hangs alone on a second wall, while a huge Russian flag covers the third. “Well, we’re in Russia,” Kozolup explains. He then points to a bell mounted on the wall and says that he and his colleagues ring it “whenever Russia gets a new citizen.”

Aggressive advertising from this company and several competitors has in recent weeks been constantly shown to Russian-speaking Israelis, Britons, Germans, and apparently others as well. Demographer Salavat Abylkalikov of the New Eurasian Strategies Centre (NEST) says he repeatedly encounters the ads in Germany: “I even tried filing complaints, but they still keep showing them. Russia is trying to attract new citizens from Western countries. In the view of the Russian authorities, they are preferable to Tajiks, Kyrgyz, or Uzbeks.”

Russia is trying to attract new citizens from Western countries; in the view of the Russian authorities, they are preferable to Tajiks, Kyrgyz, or Uzbeks

Russian citizenship can be obtained in various ways. The standard migration route is the most common, but also the longest and most rejection-prone. First comes a temporary residence permit, then permanent residency, and only after five years – citizenship.

But in 2006, a shorter route to a passport bearing the double-headed eagle was introduced: the Compatriot Resettlement Program. As its official website explains, the program is intended for people belonging, “as a rule, to ethnic groups historically residing on the territory of the Russian Federation,” as well as to foreigners with Russian roots who have made a “free choice in favor of a spiritual, cultural, and legal connection with the Russian Federation.”

In 2006, Putin declared that demographics were “the most acute problem facing modern Russia.” It was after this statement that both the maternity capital program and the resettlement scheme were launched, Salavat Abylkalikov explains while stressing that the program was never designed as a repatriation effort — rather, it was aimed at solving economic problems and attracting labor to Russia’s regions. Compatriots were expected to match specific professional qualifications, relocate to a strictly designated federal area, and live and work there.

For example, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Moscow Region do not accept compatriots, and Krasnodar Krai only accepts people from certain professions. This differs from repatriation programs operating in Germany, Israel, Greece, or Poland. There, once a person receives the necessary documents, they are free to move around the country.

Russia’s second repatriation program, running in parallel with the Compatriot Resettlement Program, only came into force on Jan. 1, 2024. By that point, it had already become clear that the compatriot resettlement effort had failed, Abylkalikov says, recalling that in 2006 officials expected 300,000 people to arrive in the first few years, to eventually be followed by millions more. The program’s architects believed Russia was sufficiently wealthy and economically attractive to achieve this. At the same time, however, people were being directed toward far-from-prosperous regions. Among the relatively attractive destinations, only Kaliningrad Region stood out.

From 2006 through 2024, according to the highest estimate a total of 1.2 million compatriots returned to Russia, but a significant share of these were Ukrainian citizens arriving after 2014, Abylkalikov notes. Then, in 2019, Putin approved a new procedure for issuing Russian passports to residents of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics.”

Even at its peak, participants in the Compatriot Resettlement Program made up only a minority of those receiving Russian citizenship. The overwhelming majority followed – and continue to follow – the standard, lengthy route. Among citizens of Tajikistan alone, for example, 103,700 people received Russian passports in 2021, and 173,600 in 2022.

The repatriation program that came into effect on Jan. 1, 2024 allows people to relocate quickly to any region and obtain a passport almost immediately. According to figures from Russia’s Interior Ministry Migration Service, in 2024 a total of 1,800 repatriates and their relatives entered Russia, and in 2025 the number reached 7,000.

However, the overall number of arriving repatriates and compatriots has been steadily declining, falling from 108,600 in 2019 to a record low of 26,700 in 2025. One reason is stricter language screening. Under the resettlement program, most arrivals come from former Soviet republics, and according to Kommersant, more than half of applicants are now rejected as a result.

“How do you feel about the ‘special military operation’?”

There is also a language exam for repatriates, but Nikolai Kozolup reassures me that it is not difficult: “The knowledge required is around a sixth- or seventh-grade level. I’m from Donetsk myself and took it seven years ago when I obtained citizenship. After that, there will be an interview. They’ll ask how you feel about Russian policy and how you feel about the ‘special military operation.’ We’ll conduct a role-playing session in advance so you know how to answer correctly.”

“At the exam, they’ll ask how you feel about Russian policy and about the ‘special military operation.’ We’ll hold a role-playing session in advance so you know how to answer correctly.”

The first stage has to be completed in the country of origin – in my case, Israel. If everything goes smoothly, I will receive a so-called “repatriate’s booklet,” a green-colored document allowing for relocation to Russia within five years. After that, I would need to travel to Russia and apply for citizenship.

Once the documents are reviewed, the next step is taking the oath of allegiance. A Russian passport for foreign travel can then be issued immediately.

Most clients, Kozolup admits, do not seek Russian citizenship in order to relocate permanently, but rather to comfortably live between two countries: “We’ve had many more people from Israel become interested since the war in Gaza began. Right now, six Israeli applications are on hold. They’re waiting for the consulate to reopen. For example, there’s one married couple in their sixties. They’re very afraid of the bombings.”

Kozolup tells The Insider that his firm previously specialized in helping Jews repatriate to Israel, but it has now begun working in the opposite direction as well. I ask Kozolup whether I could speak with people who have already obtained citizenship. He replies that no one is willing to communicate, even through messaging apps.

But he is willing to answer the most sensitive questions himself. Is there antisemitism in Russia? Kozolup immediately becomes animated and insists that there is not, adding that “the second most important person in the state, Putin’s right-hand man, is Jewish.” By “second most important person,” he means Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Kozolup also claims that when the war with Iran began, an aircraft was sent to Israel to evacuate Russian citizens — but that is not true.

Could I be sent to fight in the war against Ukraine? No, Kozolup assures me, such requirements apply only to people obtaining citizenship through the ordinary process. According to him, the practice supposedly does not extend to “compatriots” and repatriates.

For its services, the company charges 450,000 rubles ($6,250) for “turnkey” citizenship processing or 300,000 ($4,200) for the first stage alone — up to obtaining the repatriate’s booklet. Of course, everything can be done independently and almost free of charge, Kozolup tells me, but the number of rejections grows every year.

A second company also responds quickly. Its rates are lower – 250,000 rubles ($3,500). I am promised repatriate status within three to three-and-a-half months. Another month would then be needed to prepare the documents, followed by an additional three-month wait for citizenship.

At that office, I am told that most of their clients come not from Israel but from other countries: “A lot of people are arriving from Germany because boys and girls are being forced to use the same bathroom there. Right now, the main thing for you is to decide which program you’ll use. If it’s the Compatriot Resettlement Program, you’ll receive relocation payments. Repatriates do not receive those payments, but they aren’t tied to a specific region.”

Birch trees, warmth, and no transgender people

“If you have a choice of how to move, then go only as a repatriate. No region will be able to reject you,” Anatoly Bublik explains to his TikTok followers. He and his wife moved to Russia from Germany immediately after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and he now heads the movement “Path Home.”

On social media, Bublik alternates between talking about the collapse of Western civilization and offering practical advice to people relocating. For example, he says that the spouse who is younger and has a more in-demand profession should apply under the program. If the family has an adult child, it is best for that child to become the primary applicant. Russia evaluates potential settlers and repatriates them primarily based on their potential usefulness to the country. “The program was created not to save people, but to solve the issue of labor reserves for the regions,” Bublik candidly admits.

“The program was created not to save people, but to solve the issue of labor reserves for the regions”

A major German news portal, T-online, directly describes Bublik as “one of the key figures paving the way for people from ‘unfriendly countries’ to Putin’s Russia.” His movement cooperates with the “Welcome to Russia” foundation, established by Russian spy and current State Duma deputy Maria Butina. In Germany, the foundation also works with “My Russia,” an organization run by German Putin admirer Alina Lipp and Austrian activist Martin Held, as well as with Jakob Pinneker’s OKA agency.

Political scientist Felix Krawatzek, a senior researcher at Berlin’s Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), provided The Insider with the following statistics: as of 2019, Germany was home to 3.52 million people with Russian roots, 39% of whom were immigrants from Russia or their descendants, while 35% came from Kazakhstan.

The number of German citizens who moved to Russia in 2024 totaled 3,210 people, and over the past decade the figure has fluctuated between 2,000 and 3,200 (excluding the pandemic year of 2020). If one includes people residing in Germany without German citizenship, the expert notes, then 11,070 people moved from Germany to Russia in 2024, while 16,525 moved in the opposite direction from Russia to Germany. 

One of the destinations promoted as a place for overseas compatriots to “return to the motherland” is Dobrograd, an entirely private township in the Vladimir Region’s Kovrov District. Galina Guseva, posing among birch trees, explains why she moved to Dobrograd from Israel by saying she never felt at home in the Jewish state, that Israeli homes lack heating and are cold indoors, and that she is very happy now to be living in Russia.

Dobrograd is being built by a local patriotic businessman who made his fortune selling mattresses. As early as 2017, the town’s master plan included a military-patriotic camp, and its residents actively support the war against Ukraine. Maria Butina is now a frequent visitor to the settlement, while advertisements promoting relocation to Dobrograd are shown to Russian-speaking residents of Israel and Europe. The project’s website offers foreign buyers free assistance in obtaining Russian citizenship.

Newly naturalized Russian citizens living in Dobrograd regularly give interviews explaining their reasons for moving. For example, a German man named Maxim, the son of a repatriate from Russia, says on camera: “Russians do not understand how free they are. In Germany now, having an alternative opinion has become bad — an alternative opinion meaning about family, children, God.” What follows is a lengthy monologue about Europe’s transgender people, high taxes, and expensive utility services.

Still, according to political scientist Krawatzek, the main motive for Germans moving to Russia is not “traditional values,” but economics:

“Despite its real economic problems, Russia has managed to project the image of a successfully developing country, and this works especially well on people who are economically dissatisfied in Germany. The second factor is traditional values — the supposed ‘decline of the West’ and LGBT propaganda. These topics are widely discussed and evoke strong emotions, but I don’t think they are the main argument for people leaving Germany.”

Indeed, if one examines advertisements promoting relocation to Russia, the much-discussed traditional values are always mentioned, but they are rarely placed at the forefront. Instead, the main emphasis is on claims that would seem strange to anyone familiar with Russian reality: for example, that “Russia is a country of stability and growth,” that it offers “a high level of service and comfort,” and that it offers “safe streets with low crime rates.”

“They treated me like shit”

“I just couldn’t take it anymore, guys. As someone born in Russia, I can tolerate a lot. I have a very high tolerance for a shitty life. But even I couldn’t handle it anymore, because the internet didn’t work, crime was rising, and the police did nothing. I couldn’t even work online properly. Everything in this country is falling apart,” Russian-American Sergei Bronshtein complains in a video recorded on May 6.

By that point, Bronshtein was already in Turkey and was firmly determined never to return to Russia. The journey from saying “This place is practically paradise compared to America” to fleeing the country took less than six years.

Sergei was born in the USSR, but his parents moved him to the United States while he was in high school. During his 25 years in America, he never came to love the country, and in 2019 he relocated to Moscow, recording an enthusiastic video on Pushkin Square in which he said: “I like everything about Russia! …I even like the police here. People who say the police here are supposedly bad don’t understand what American police are like. At least the police here have some logic and sense of justice… This is basically paradise compared to America.”

For his English-language videos about life in Russia, Bronshtein launched a separate channel called “Meet Sergei.” At first, he filmed videos about borscht, pelmeni, and the Moscow metro system (though in these, too, he continued to criticize the United States).

In 2022, Sergei claimed that “Western sanctions are not working.” However, by 2023 his tone had become more restrained: “Despite everything happening, for the most part everything looks normal, people are living their ordinary lives.”

In February 2024, Bronshtein released a Russian-language video titled “Moving to Russia Was a Huge Mistake.” In it, he says that channels promoting relocation to Russia present a distorted picture of the country. He then describes numerous problems he personally encountered in what he calls his historical homeland.

First, he says he was labeled an LGBT person and became the target of harassment. Second, despite his education and American banking experience, he was unable to find work over the course of four years.

The worst problem of all turned out to be housing. “At first I rented an apartment, and the landlord kept showing up and bothering me. There’s a huge amount of real estate fraud. It’s very difficult to buy anything. So if anyone is thinking about returning to Russia, just know: you won’t make much money here, you won’t find work, but there will be ‘human warmth,’” Sergei says, reflecting on his experience.

“If anyone is thinking about returning to Russia, just know: you won’t make much money here, you won’t find work, but there will be ‘human warmth’”

On Nov. 24, 2025, Sergei posted another video with the same title, this time in English:

“I’m making this video for people sitting in the U.S., watching videos about Russia and traditional values and thinking, ‘I’ll move to Russia because I hate LGBT people, gay pride parades, and all that stuff.’ Well, after living in Russia, you’ll start missing even the gay pride parades. Not literally, of course. But you’ll run into so many other problems that you’ll start missing things that existed in the West.”

In the video, Sergei says that “it is impossible to do business in Russia if you do not deal with criminals.” He talks about low salaries, tiny pensions, and extremely high prices. Even his affection for the Russian police completely disappeared over the course of five and a half years: “People treated me like shit. I have a video on my channel about a terrorist neighbor who attacked me. And when I went to the Russian police, they did nothing…they’re even worse than American police, who at least fight criminals.”

This is no paradise

Stories of settlers who became disillusioned after moving to Russia periodically surface in the media. For example, when African American Francine Villa relocated to Moscow in 2019, Russia Today even produced a propaganda film about her in which she explained that she had left the United States because of racism and in search of safety. But in the summer of 2025, Francine posted a video showing her bruised face. She described being beaten and subjected to racist abuse by neighbors in her apartment building.

A British man named Ben married a Russian woman and has lived in Kursk since 2021, documenting his life on the YouTube channel “Ben the Brit.” In December 2025, he decided to debunk some of the more rosy myths about Russia, complaining about prices, bureaucracy, landlords who are unwilling to rent to foreigners, racism, and interrogations by the security services. At the same time, he explained to viewers abroad that his new home was not a conservative paradise: Russia has extremely high abortion rates and large numbers of children growing up without fathers.

Their new home looked nothing like a conservative paradise: Russia has enormous numbers of abortions and children growing up without fathers

Leo and Chantal Heyr moved to Russia from the United States to get away from LGBT culture. Soon afterward, the Americans found themselves without jobs or means of support. Leo handed over all of his savings to the son of a Baptist pastor who had hosted the family on his farm, and the pastor’s son “invested” the money but never returned it. The Heyrs’ children, who did not speak Russian, were not accepted into Russian school. In the end, the older sons returned to the United States while their parents remain in Russia, where they are still trying to build a life.

In short, after moving to Russia many repatriates encounter a reality very different from what they expected, but very few of them speak publicly about it. People do not like talking about their failures, Dr. Krawatzek explains, which is why Russian television and even personal YouTube channels feature only success stories.

Alina Yashina-Schaefer, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, shared the stories of two repatriate returnees with The Insider.

One of them was a man in his thirties from Petropavl, Kazakhstan, who had earlier relocated to Russia under the Compatriot Resettlement Program. He was motivated not by abstract ideas, but by a sense of hopelessness about his prospects in Kazakhstan. However, the move to Russia completely disillusioned him: “He described his experience in Russia in harsh terms, recalling how he was treated ‘like a pig’ and as a ‘second-class person,’ characterizing the experience as deeply humiliating. Importantly, this disappointment not only changed his perception of Russia but actively reshaped his sense of belonging, leading him to recognize Petropavl as his home — the place where he wanted to be,” Yashina-Schaefer says. In the end, the man returned home.

The second participant in her research was a man from Estonia in his thirties who left the economically depressed city of Narva for Russia. “He moved to Moscow to study, seeking to affirm his sense of self-worth and achieve recognition,” Yashina-Schaefer explains. “However, paradoxically, he recalled that during his studies he began to grow increasingly distant from Russia. Instead of finding a sense of belonging there, he ultimately arrived at a new understanding — that his real sense of home was in Estonia.”

Many settlers note that the social realities of life in Russia are far different from what they had been promised. “Immediate integration into society did not occur. Instead, some settlers encountered indifference, humiliation, or even exclusion from local residents, who perceived them as outsiders,” the researcher says. “A shared language and historical ties did not automatically lead to acceptance into civic or ethnic communities.”

Portrait of a compatriot

In an interview with The Insider, Felix Krawatzek sketches a portrait of the average Russian-speaking German who wants to move to Russia: low economic status, low educational attainment voting for the far-right or far-left, and deeply skeptical of Germany’s traditional media outlets, relying instead on information from social networks. Such individuals either believe that objective truth does not exist at all, or that German media conceal it in the interests of the government and big business.

At the end of 2025, Dr. Krawatzek and his colleagues studied the attitudes of German citizens with Russian or Kazakhstani backgrounds. “There are two key differences,” he explains. When asked whether Russia is “the country that most strongly supports traditional values,” 75% of German citizens answer that it is not; however, among immigrants from Russia, only 50% disagree, while among repatriates and descendants of repatriates from Kazakhstan the figure falls to 44%.

The second question concerned whether Russia and Germany could be partners. Only 6% of overall respondents agreed with that proposition, while among people with Russian or Kazakhstani backgrounds the figure was over 20%.

Interestingly, the views of Russian-speaking Germans who obtained citizenship through Jewish ancestry differ from the broader pattern. For this group, the desire to move to Russia is rare.

There are also people who want to relocate to a more “traditional” place centered on “spiritual values,” but they are unwilling to move to Russia because they do not want to lose the ability to travel regularly to Europe, Dr. Krawatzek notes. Such people instead relocate to countries friendly to Russia — Serbia, North Macedonia, and, until the recent elections, Hungary.

Of course, emigration is always accompanied by return migration. Some people fail to find their place, some get divorced, and many simply miss their homeland, notes Yannis Panayiotidis, a historian and migration researcher at the University of Vienna. However, the repatriation program in Germany, launched in 1987, was designed from the outset to reduce the number of people returning. As Dr. Panayiotidis explains:

“People moved as entire families, sometimes even entire collective farms. In many cases, they no longer have a social network left in Russia or Kazakhstan. Often, the collective farm where they once lived no longer even exists. That means there is nowhere to return to. It is one thing to talk about how much you dislike Germany, and quite another to actually leave. People may be politically unhappy — and many genuinely are. But economically their lives are fairly successful, and in many cases, their children no longer speak Russian, so most simply choose to stay here and vote for pro-Russian parties.”

Before 2022, some people moved for practical reasons. They understood that knowledge of the Russian language was not especially valuable in Germany, while in Russia, knowledge of German could help them secure a good job, Panayiotidis notes. But with the war in Ukraine, everything has changed: “Under the current circumstances, moving to Russia may be more of a political statement. A person has to be very committed to actually do it. This propaganda is not aimed only at Russian speakers — Russia has recently introduced a ‘values visa.’”

A belated decision

The “values visa” is indeed a new phenomenon. Since August 2024, it has been issued to foreigners who “share Russian spiritual and moral values.” It is through this visa that Europeans, Americans, and Canadians without Russian roots are able to relocate to the country. Such people are frequently featured on Russian television, even though their actual numbers remain small. During the first eight months of the program, Russia managed to attract only 800 applicants.

From a demographic standpoint, that figure is negligible, notes Salavat Abylkalikov of the NEST Centre. In general, he is skeptical about the Russian state’s entire policy in this area.

Before the war, professional demographers frequently proposed migration policy measures, but after passing through ministries and government agencies, the proposals would emerge almost unrecognizable, the expert explains:

“The security services tried to ban and restrict things. Economists wanted to attract more young people. Everyone was pulling in their own direction. The previous Migration Policy Concept expired in 2025. Now a new one has been adopted through 2035. Its primary focus is no longer demographics or economic resources, but security and keeping unwanted people out.”

Migration from Central Asia is being deliberately restricted, the Abylkalikov argues. At the same time, Central Asians themselves are increasingly reluctant to move because of rising xenophobic and anti-migrant sentiment in Russia:

“Against the backdrop of war, society needs a scapegoat. Liberals have left, LGBT people have kept their heads down, and people with distinctly Central Asian features became a convenient target. After the Crocus terrorist attack, the situation became even more acute. At the same time, it is completely unclear what can be done about the demographic situation. You can try to raise the birth rate, but so far no one has really succeeded. France and the Scandinavian countries spend 2.5–3.5% of GDP on family policy, and even there the effect is limited. So what can Russia expect, given its tiny spending in this area?”

As the demographer explains, compatriots abroad are subject to the same demographic cycles as Russia itself, and nd those cycles stretch back to World War II. After the war, millions of people were never born because their would-have-been parents died at the front. As a result, the post-war generation was significantly smaller and had fewer children in the 1970s, creating another demographic trough. The cycle repeated itself among their grandchildren in the 1990s. Now yet another generation has turned over, and there simply are not enough young and working-age compatriots abroad to fill Russia’s current gap, no matter how aggressively they are lured back. 

The explosives were defused by FSB specialists together with personnel from the Defense Ministry and the National Guard, according to a report by Russia’s Investigative Committee. A criminal case was opened over illegal trafficking in explosives and an attempted terrorist attack on a vessel that, according to Russian security officials, was bound for the Turkish port of Samsun after refueling in Russia.

Belgium has not yet commented on the allegations. An emailed statement to Reuters from a NATO official said the organization “has not mined any tanker.”

In a video published by the security service, a man identified as the gas carrier’s captain says the vessel spent almost two days anchored in Belgium because of a port strike before entering Antwerp.

“The vessel moored at the pier, and unloading began. It lasted about 25 hours. The vessel was at the terminal. Everything was proceeding normally. We left the port in the morning. We spent the night by the pier. After arriving at the port of Ust-Luga for the next loading, the vessel underwent an underwater inspection. Two mines were found attached near the stern, in the area of the engine room,” he said.

Starboard Maritime Intelligence data reviewed by The Insider shows that the overall timeline of the Arrhenius voyage matches the captain’s account. From the evening of May 12 until the morning of May 14, the vessel was anchored for about 38 hours on the approaches to Antwerp. Corroborating reports of a strike in Belgium during those days are also available, as the port of Antwerp-Bruges had warned of possible disruptions due to a nationwide strike on May 12.

The gas carrier then entered the port of Antwerp, where it remained until May 16, before heading toward the Baltic Sea. The data show no other port calls before Russia.

The Arrhenius approached the port of Ust-Luga in Russia’s northern Leningrad Region on May 20. The vessel had reached the port area by midday and spent a long time stopped or drifting nearby, at times with its signal disappearing. Starboard does not record a full port call in Ust-Luga until the morning of May 22. The data do not make it possible to determine where or when the devices could have been attached to the hull.

The Arrhenius is a Liberia-flagged natural gas carrier built in 2010. Tracking data shows that the vessel regularly travels between Ust-Luga and the Antwerp area. Over the past year, those ports appeared most often in its movement history. Besides Ust-Luga and Antwerp, the vessel was recorded over the past year near Tuzla, the Dardanelles and Istanbul in Turkey; Port-Jérôme in France; Skagen in Denmark; and Primorsk in Russia.

Jakub Janovsky, one of the project’s contributors, wrote on X that the problem was temporarily solved by reducing hyperlink metadata leading to photos and videos of Russian equipment that had been destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured. He said this could complicate work with the archive for researchers looking to verify old Oryx entries or using links to them, but that new losses would continue to be added.

According to Oryx’s current data, Russia’s total confirmed losses exceed 23,000 pieces of equipment. They include 4,390 tanks, 6,429 infantry fighting vehicles, 730 armored personnel carriers, 2,399 armored fighting vehicles of other types, 416 air defense systems, 130 radar systems, 184 aircraft, 175 helicopters, and 33 ships and submarines.

Oryx counts only losses confirmed by photos or videos. The project's authors stress that actual losses on both sides are higher because the tally does not include vehicles lost without visual evidence. The Oryx team also works to avoid duplicates and verifies the status of each item, indicating whether it was destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured.

The Insider examined the villa’s ownership history using financial records from the companies that have formally held the property. The records show that Gazprom-linked entities provided the money to buy the villa and cover debts tied to its upkeep effectively free of charge and with no expectation of repayment. Karapetyan can therefore be seen as the property’s nominal owner.

A gift disguised as a loan

Since November 2016, Villa Maria Irina has been controlled by Leyson Holdings Limited, a company registered in Cyprus. That same month, Samvel Karapetyan became the company’s majority shareholder, and on Dec. 29, its sole shareholder. On Dec. 23, 2016, Leyson (meaning Karapetyan) received a €115 million loan from Gazprombank secured by shares in his companies Subville and Maritime Villa Holding, the latter being the villa’s direct owner.

That collateral appears dubious. In Subville’s 2015 financial report, the value of its only asset — shares in Maritime Villa Holding — was listed as minus €55 million as of Dec. 31. Maritime Villa Holding’s own accounts confirm this: at the end of 2014, the company’s debt stood at €111 million; by the end of 2015, it was €117 million; and by the end of 2016, it had reached €120 million. In other words, the villa was burdened with debts exceeding the €70 million price for which Maritime Villa Holding had bought it. That means Maritime Villa Holding’s shares could not have served as real collateral for the loan.

Leyson’s accounts for the years before the villa purchase and Gazprombank loan show that the company conducted no real business activity and owned no assets. Yet by the end of 2016, a debt of about $121 million (roughly €115 million) to Gazprombank appeared on its balance sheet. Maritime Villa Holding in turn received the same amount as a loan from Leyson.

According to Leyson’s 2017 accounts, interest and exchange-rate differences pushed its debt to Gazprombank up to $137 million. Maritime Villa Holding owed almost the same amount to Leyson.

Starting in 2020, another secured creditor, Megan Agency Ltd., appeared among Leyson’s pledgeholders. According to the Cyprus registry, the company belongs to Vadim Tregub, whom independent outlet Important Stories has described as the “personal wallet” of Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller. According to the accounts, Megan Agency Ltd. provided Maritime Villa Holding with a €50 million loan.

In substance, Gazprom-linked structures transferred money to Karapetyan’s offshore companies as a gift. The loan was not merely unsecured — it had negative collateral given that the shares of Subville and Maritime Villa Holding purportedly backing it obligated the holder to pay off previous debts exceeding the value of the villa itself. Even after the villa’s debts were covered, the transfer of money — also originating from Gazprom-linked sources — continued under the guise of loans.

The villa’s ownership history

Israeli-Russian businessman Shalva Chigirinsky bought the villa in 2001 from the family of African dictator Mobutu for $14.5 million, a fact confirmed by an entry in the French real estate register dated Jan. 7, 2002. Chigirinsky also paid off debts left on the villa by its previous owners. He said maintaining the residence cost about €4 million a year.

Maintaining the residence cost about €4 million a year

On May 12, 2010, Chigirinsky’s company, Tatik, sold the villa to Gazprom-linked Maritime Villa Holding for €70 million. Chigirinsky received only about €20 million, while the rest went to cover his debts to Gazprom-linked structures.

After the sale, corrupt customs official Anatoly Kruglov filed a claim in an English court alleging that Chigirinsky owed him money. On that basis, Kruglov sought to have the villa sale canceled. The court did not grant that request, but it did impose a €43 million compulsory mortgage on the villa, registered in 2014, in favor of Kruglov’s company Slocom Trading Limited. Most of that debt had been repaid by June 2015, and the remainder of less than €1 million was repaid by May 2016.

Who owned Maritime Villa Holding

When Maritime Villa Holding was created in 2010, 14,999 of its 15,000 shares belonged to the Luxembourg company SibVil Holding, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sibir Energy Limited, while one share belonged to Igor Tsibelman. Chigirinsky was one of the directors of Sibir Energy Limited from 2000 to 2008. 

On Feb. 15, 2011, Sibir Energy Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of Gazprom Neft.

• As of Oct. 25, 2011, 14,999 of the 15,000 shares belonged to SibVil Holding, the wholly owned subsidiary of Sibir Energy Limited, and one share belonged directly to Sibir Energy Limited.
• As of Jan. 20, 2015, the shares were held in the same proportions by Luxembourg-based Subville SARL (which until Nov. 24, 2016, belonged to Russian company Zarechye-Club LLC), and directly by Zarechye-Club. The Russian company itself belonged to Cyprus offshore companies tied to the former Sibneft and Gazprominvest.
• As of Sept. 29, 2015, Maritime Villa Holding was owned in the same proportions by Luxembourg-based Subville and Cyprus-based Leyson Holdings Limited. Since Nov. 24, 2016, Subville itself has been under the control of Leyson Holdings Limited.

That ownership structure for Maritime Villa Holding remains in place today. As a result, the villa is fully controlled by Leyson Holdings Limited. Leyson Holdings Limited was previously owned by the Panamanian offshore company Le Gonks Stood before passing to Karapetyan.

Karapetyan in Armenia

Samvel Karapetyan created the Strong Armenia party in late 2025. Since June of that year, he has been under investigation in Yerevan on charges of money laundering, tax evasion, embezzlement, and publicly calling for the seizure of power. Strong Armenia is running as part of a bloc of the same name in Armenia’s National Assembly elections, which will be held June 7. Karapetyan himself cannot run for a parliamentary seat because, in addition to his Armenian citizenship, he holds Russian and Cypriot passports.

In a recent investigation, The Insider found that when Karapetyan received an international passport in Russia in 1999, his passport file listed an Interior Ministry notation in the “place of work” field that read “IC FSB.” An Interior Ministry operative told The Insider that these markings are usually used for foreigners working under FSB supervision or for confidential informants.

The arrests began after Alexei Alexandrov, prefect of Moscow’s Western Administrative District, arrived at the site. In a video, he tells residents: “A military facility is being built. What else do you need to know?” He added that the works would be completed within the next seven to 10 days. Residents said they still had not been shown documents or permits for the tree cutting.

More than 100 residents of Kuntsevo and other Moscow districts gathered near the Medik Stadium on May 24, demanding a halt to the cutting of trees in Moskvoretsky Park, a large protected green area in western Moscow. RusNews and activist Alexander Kupriyanov covered the protest. According to RusNews, residents, workers, district officials, and police linked the work to Russia’s Defense Ministry. The ministry has not publicly commented on the reports.

The start of the deforestation was first reported May 23 by the Kuntsevo Residents’ Community on Telegram. The group said heavy construction equipment and workers with chainsaws arrived in the morning at the forested area near the stadium. Residents said trees were being cut down, construction debris was brought in to reinforce a road, and the entrance to the forest was later paved. They said signs for Avtodor, Russia’s state road-building company, could be seen on the fencing, and that traffic police officers were present at the site.

On May 24, Kupriyanov said he joined forces with a group of locals, trying to stop what he called “[an] illegal forest clearing in Kuntsevo, allegedly for the needs of the Defense Ministry.” He said no documents were available at the site; that workers kept redirecting locals “from one supposedly responsible person to another,” and that one worker used physical force against one of the demonstrators. Kupriyanov said the works were suspended and that residents demanded police draw up an inspection report at the scene.

Local residents have filed a collective complaint with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and are collecting signatures against the clearing. They said a forest strip had been completely cut down and partly paved over within two days. Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented on the incident or the alleged construction plans.

Strikes were also reported in the Kyiv Region. According to Russian pro-war blogs and Ukrainian open source intelligence (OSINT) resources (1, 2, 3), the region may have been struck by an intermediate-range Oreshnik ballistic missile.  The Ukrainian project Oko Hora ✙ News and Analytics said it was the third strike since the start of the war involving such a missile without a warhead. It identified the Bila Tserkva cargo airfield as the likely target. 

Before the May 23 strike, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote, citing Western intelligence, that Ukraine could face a massive attack that night, potentially involving the Oreshnik missile:

“We are preparing our air defenses as much as possible and will respond entirely fairly to every Russian strike. We gave permission for the parade, but Russia was given no permission for madness,” he wrote.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) later confirmed the Oreshnik strike. Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said the target was Bila Tserkva.

President Zelensky addressed the nation following the overnight attacks, naming Kyiv as the main target of the attacks:

“Vladimir Putin can no longer even pronounce the word ‘hurrah’ properly — he slurs it — yet he is still ‘defeating’ residential buildings with his missiles. Three Russian missiles against a water supply facility, a market burned down, dozens of residential buildings damaged, several ordinary schools hit. He launched his ‘Oreshnik’ against Bila Tserkva. They are truly deranged.”

Four people were killed as the result of the strikes, Zelensky reported in a separate post.

The Russian Ministry of Defense described the strikes on Ukrainian cities as a “retaliatory” for the Ukrainian UAV attack on the dormitory and an academic building of the Starobilsk College of the Luhansk Pedagogical University in the occupied Luhansk Region, adding that the Oreshnik, Iskander, Kinzhal, and Tsirkon missiles were used in the attack. 

The Russian bombardment overnight May 24 caused the most extensive damage to Kyiv’s cultural institutions since the start of the war, Ukrainian Culture Minister Tetyana Berezhna wrote on Facebook. She listed the cultural sites that sustained the heaviest damage.

• The National Art Museum of Ukraine
• The National Chornobyl Museum
• The National Philharmonic
• The National Music Academy
• The Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine
• Kyiv Opera

Experts are working at multiple sites to assess damage to the cultural and architectural monuments. Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said the Russian strike overnight May 24 irreversibly destroyed 40% of the exhibits at the National Chornobyl Museum. The ministry said rescuers spent more than 15 hours extinguishing fires and were still dismantling hazardous structures after the attack.

“Russia systematically strikes at the culture and spaces that shape Ukrainian identity. They are trying to destroy our memory ... As of today, Russia has destroyed or damaged 1,783 cultural heritage monuments and 2,540 cultural infrastructure sites in Ukraine. This is further evidence that Russia’s war is also directed against Ukrainian culture and our identity,” Berezhna wrote. 

Ukraine’s system of territorial centers of recruitment and social support (TCRs, or ТЦК in Ukrainian) replaced the Soviet-style military enlistment office system relatively recently: on Feb. 23, 2022, one day before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion (the reform law itself had been adopted by the Verkhovna Rada in 2021). Unlike the old enlistment offices, TCRs were tasked not only with military registration and drafting but also with providing social protection and adaptive solutions for veterans and their families. They were meant to be part of an effort aimed at humanizing and optimizing military service as a whole.

Another important objective of the TCRs was to replace paper-based bureaucracy with digital systems, in order to help transform the cumbersome Soviet-era structure into a “service-oriented” institution, in line with Zelensky’s reforms aimed at building a “state in a smartphone.”

However, under the conditions of full-scale war, the TCRs effectively remained focused almost exclusively on manning the military. In the first year of the war, the system could not cope quickly enough with the enormous influx of volunteers, and queues formed outside offices. However, as the number of motivated recruits was exhausted and it became clear that the war was turning into a prolonged conflict — especially following the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the fall of 2023 — the situation began to change.

Videos showing draft-age men being detained on the streets and forcibly taken to TCRs began appearing online more and more frequently. In 2023 alone, more than 1,000 conflicts between civilians and TCR personnel were recorded. The issue became the subject of public debate, though mostly at the grassroots level.

According to a Kyiv-based source for The Insider, a serviceman with the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “At first, the topic of TCRs was mostly discussed on social media. In 2023, I learned that there were Telegram and WhatsApp chats where people warned each other about TCR patrols appearing in crowded places. Back then, this contrasted sharply with the overall patriotic mood, but it was already a worrying trend.”

In 2024, the situation deteriorated drastically, especially after the mobilization law was tightened in May. The changes expanded the categories of people eligible for service and lowered the mobilization age from 27 to 25. During this period, mobilization became increasingly coercive, and conflicts grew more violent.

The word of the year became the neologism “busification,” derived from the minivans used by TCR patrols to transport mobilized men to recruitment centers. As tensions escalated, protests by relatives of mobilized men broke out, and attacks on TCR personnel became more common, leading to multiple deaths.

Corruption in mobilization

Corruption has exacerbated this society-wide issue. According to Kyiv-based sociologists, a majority (54%) of Ukrainian citizens consider corruption a greater threat to the country than even the Russian military aggression (39%).

Footage of a high-profile detention of TCR personnel in Odesa, complete with gunfire and a chase, even circulated widely in Ukrainian media. On April 21, 2026, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) arrested servicemen from one of the district territorial recruitment centers who had been caught taking bribes and extorting money. According to the Odesa-based outlet Dumska, bats, brass knuckles, and cash were found in the suspects’ possession. Before that, rival TCR teams travelling in two minivans (the infamous “buses”) staged a showdown on Mykhailivska Square.

Such “officers” have become a genuine source of public concern. Since the very beginning of the full-scale war, Odesa has been notorious for incidents connected with the draft. Notices were handed out on beaches and in nightclubs, and the corrupt income over the years of the war was enough for Yevhen Borysov, head of the Odesa TCR, to buy real estate in Spain.

Odesa is far from the only example of draft-related abuses. On April 30 in Bila Tserkva, the SBU detained a group of TCR officers who had been providing “services” involving fake exemptions from mobilization for a flat fee of $5,000. The officers’ accomplice was the owner of a military-uniform manufacturer that fictitiously employed draft evaders.

A resident of one of Ukraine’s regional centers, speaking anonymously to The Insider, said that the “fees” charged by enlistment officers are widely known among the public. Buying one’s way out of a TCR bus costs €1,000, provided relatives manage to bring the money quickly enough. Upon arrival at the enlistment office — but before the medical examination — the fee rises to between $5,000 and $10,000. Another popular scheme involves losing a recruit on the way; in such cases, the team leader is fined 20,000 hryvnias ($455) for the escape, and in return receives a bribe worth several thousand dollars.

Response from society and the armed forces

It is the prevalence of corruption that has made “busification” so odious. At the start of the war, draft evaders and people resisting the delivery of draft notices were ostracized. Ukrainian social media even produced the meme “Ukhilles” — a combination of the Ukrainian word “ukhyliant” (“draft dodger”) and the name of the ancient Greek hero Achilles.

But as the scale of corruption within the TCRs came to light, many more Ukrainians began to see the system as deeply unjust. Some would-be recruits are shoved into minibuses with their arms twisted behind their backs, while others easily buy their way out of service by purchasing fake exemptions or forged disability certificates.

Ukrainians began to view the system as profoundly unfair: some are forcibly taken away in minibuses, while others easily buy their freedom

Ukrainska Pravda cites the account of a serviceman temporarily attached to a TCR: “I was stationed at a checkpoint on the road to [the Carpathian resort town of] Bukovel. The more expensive your car, the more impressive your ‘disability.’ There were Rolls-Royces and Bentleys everywhere. Some drivers had been removed from military registration lists altogether. For the first two days after seeing this, I was simply in shock.”

A worrying signal for the authorities came in the form of a July 2024 Razumkov Center opinion poll, according to which 46% of respondents sympathized with draft evaders — and among respondents under 29, the figure reached half. Commenting on the poll’s results, well-known Ukrainian sociologist Yevhen Holovakha noted:

“From a human point of view, all of this is understandable. But there is a risk: a time may come when there will be no people left who want to fight at all. We have to understand that this problem is not unique to Ukraine. No country has a passionate majority. Ukrainians, in my opinion, have already proven themselves incredibly patient and courageous.”

Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko similarly stated: “Mobilization is unpopular with the public. The instinct for self-preservation and the understanding that the war will drag on mean that no one wants to risk the lives of their loved ones.”

Active-duty Ukrainian servicemen who spoke to The Insider on the condition of anonymity speak of a mixed attitude toward the TCRs within the army itself. “On the one hand, there is contempt for ‘draft dodgers,’ but on the other, there is no particular love for TCR officers either. Officers treat them like ‘rear-line rats,’ while many rank-and-file soldiers ended up in the Armed Forces themselves through ‘busification,’ so any news about incidents involving TCRs is met with a crooked grin,” one source says.

Servicemen also point to another problem: in general, recruits brought in by force are extremely poorly motivated. Commanders are unhappy, but they have no alternative — the army needs personnel.

Ukrainian drone forces commander and former MP Ihor Lutsenko considers “busification” a national disgrace, the result of a breakdown in communication between the authorities and society. In his opinion, grabbing people off the streets demonstrates the absence of any real personnel generation plan, while “the enforcers are only after numbers.”

Lutsenko believes the solution could lie in expanding direct recruitment by military units and allowing prospective recruits to obtain a military specialty before enlistment. That way, people would have a clear understanding of where they would serve and what they would do in the war. This would reduce irrational fears and thereby lessen the drive to evade military service.

According to statistics from the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, the number of complaints concerning unlawful actions by TCRs is alarming. Its head, Dmytro Lubinets, noted that while 3,300 complaints were filed in 2024, the number rose to 5,000 in 2025. In May 2025, officers of an enlistment office in Kyiv beat a man to death right inside the minivan for “resisting mobilization.” In April 2026, a cancer patient died in a Kryvyi Rih TCR after being forcibly brought there.

The harsh methods employed by TCRs provoke resistance from potential recruits, whose efforts to evade the authorities can take violent forms. In some cases, the violence turns bloody, and there have even been armed attacks on TCR personnel. For example, on Feb. 1, 2025, Oleksandr Sikalchuk, a serviceman from a security company escorting a minivan carrying recruits, was shot point-blank at a gas station in Pyriatyn (Poltava Region). The attackers were attempting to free one of the recruits.

In addition, on April 30, 2026, a TCR team in the Rivne Region came under automatic gunfire, leaving a police officer and a serviceman wounded. Although these were largely isolated incidents, they attracted nationwide attention.

Ukrainian mobilization and Kremlin propaganda

The difficulties surrounding Ukrainian mobilization provide ample material for Kremlin propaganda. Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications monitors its key narratives.

In 2022–2023, Moscow’s propaganda focused on encouraging passive draft evasion; however, since the end of 2023, the emphasis has shifted toward promoting violent resistance. The Kremlin uses a combination of methods in these campaigns: media resources targeting Ukrainian audiences (websites, social networks, Telegram channels), bot farms, and “troll factories.”

Between March and November 2023, the center recorded 596 advertising materials containing pro-Russian disinformation aimed at disrupting mobilization. Notably, Russian propaganda actively exploits the topic of the possible mobilization of women and young people beginning at age 21. In reality, military service for women in Ukraine is voluntary, while men are mobilized starting at age 25 (lowered from 27 in 2022–2024). To reduce social tensions, the government even allowed young men aged 18–25 to leave the country freely (while travel remains restricted for draft-age men).

As the backbone of Kyiv’s draft effort, TCRs are an important target for Russian sabotage operations. Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council, stated that a series of explosions near TCR buildings in 2024–2025 were coordinated by operatives from Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) and Federal Security Service (FSB). Some of the plots used Telegram channels to recruit participants.

As the backbone of Kyiv’s draft effort, TCRs are an important target for Russian sabotage operations

A similar incident took place in Bila Tserkva at the end of April 2026, when a local man threw a live grenade into the courtyard of a TCR (fortunately, no one was injured). According to investigators, the man had been manipulated by Russian “handlers” posing as SBU officers. According to the story the assailant’s handlers purportedly told him, the grenade was merely a training device, and the action itself was simply a test of the TCR’s security system.

Russia’s mobilization of occupied Ukrainians

While vividly portraying the “horrors” of Ukrainian mobilization, the Russian authorities are doing everything possible to erase the memory of one of their own war crimes — the forced mobilization of residents of occupied Donbas into the armed forces of the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics.” To maintain the official narrative that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was carried out in support of the “brotherly peoples” of Donbas, the local collaborationist authorities had to demonstrate a convincing number of “allied troops” from the breakaway republics.

The stream of volunteers that had once sustained the Donbas militias dried up long before 2022, and so the collaborationist authorities began forcibly conscripting everyone they could. There are numerous testimonies of how mobilization unfolded in the Donbas. A man from occupied Luhansk Region was forcibly drafted despite poor eyesight and the absence of a finger on his right hand; without any training whatsoever, he was sent to the front, where he was killed in one of his very first battles. A schoolteacher from Perevalsk in Luhansk Region ended up in the “LNR” army under similar circumstances and became disabled. Hastily mobilized residents of occupied territories were used as cannon fodder, with casualties among the “allied troops” during the first six months of the full-scale war reaching as high as 55% of personnel.

Steps taken to restore order

The Ukrainian authorities are fully aware that tensions surrounding mobilization could destabilize the home front, and they are therefore making considerable efforts to remedy the problem.

In August 2023, following the scandal involving the Odesa enlistment center, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed all regional enlistment officers at once, and criminal cases were opened against 112 TCR employees (including the chief enlistment officer in Odesa). In addition, the Ministry of Defense decided to involve ideologically motivated veterans in the work of enlistment offices, believing them to be less susceptible to corruption.

It was also decided that enlistment officers should be appointed to work outside their home regions, as they would lack local ties necessary for building corruption schemes. In April 2025, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrskyi ordered that TCR officers without combat experience and without health restrictions be reassigned to service in combat zones, to be replaced by “war veterans who had suffered injuries or concussions.”

Since the beginning of 2026, resolving draft-related issues has been placed within the purview of the new head of the Presidential Office, Kyrylo Budanov. Corruption within the TCR system was one of the first topics Budanov discussed after assuming office. He set the task of eradicating abuses by ruthlessly dismissing and prosecuting everyone involved.

Earlier this month, a nationwide police operation was launched against officers suspected of committing draft-related abuses. The list of documented violations includes illicit enrichment and false asset declarations totaling 92 million hryvnias (nearly €2 million).

One of the suspects was the head of a district TCR in Odesa Region, who had received 45 million hryvnias in bribes. In addition, on May 6, the SBU detained the head of the Zhytomyr Regional TCR, who had extorted money from a major businessman in exchange for not mobilizing his employees.

In the meantime, Zelensky has announced a mobilization reform. Its implementation will be overseen by the new defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, formerly deputy prime minister for the digitalization of public services. The reform calls for a comprehensive audit of the Ministry of Defense (the TCR system falls under its chain of command), the creation of more transparent mechanisms for military registration and mobilization, and a shift in emphasis away from forced mobilization and toward contract service. Fedorov acknowledges the scale of the problem: 2 million Ukrainians are wanted as draft evaders, while another 200,000 are suspected of being AWOL from their military units.

Additionally, a significant number of draft-age Ukrainian men have left the country in violation of the law. The authorities are trying to bring them back home. During a visit to Germany — currently home to more than 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees, including 349,500 men aged 18–63 — Zelensky asked Berlin to help return Ukrainian citizens who are subject to military service. According to him, this is a matter of justice, since many Ukrainian soldiers at the front need rotation. Chancellor Merz supported his Ukrainian counterpart. However, effective mechanisms for returning such individuals have yet to be adopted.

Neighboring Poland has also declared its readiness to return Ukrainians of draft age to their home country. However, the Polish government — interested in Ukrainian labor resources — has allowed refugees from Ukraine to apply for residence permits, making their return home highly unlikely. Some countries, most notably Norway, are moving toward tightening asylum procedures for men of draft age.

Both Russia and Ukraine are aging European nations whose demographic situation was made even worse by the economic turbulence of the 1990s. Nevertheless, thanks to its demographic advantage and its disregard for human life, Putin’s dictatorship can still afford to “dispose of” generations of Russians in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions. Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is fighting a fully justified defensive war, does not possess such a resource.

As researchers Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes note: “Kyiv is acutely aware that a prolonged war will devastate Ukraine. A long war means not only more people killed and wounded, but also fewer babies born and fewer Ukrainians returning home from abroad. It was because of these demographic fears that, in the first two years of the war, Kyiv decided not to mobilize young men aged 18-24, dramatically reducing the quality of the Ukrainian armed forces but preserving the country’s demographic potential.”

As long as Russian aggression continues, Ukraine has no choice other than imposing mass mobilization, yet the methods used to implement this policy are becoming one of the country’s main domestic challenges. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that no modern democracy is prepared for the level of social strain involved in waging a full-scale war. Ukraine did not choose this path voluntarily, but was forced onto the path of militarization due to external aggression from Putin’s Russia all the way back in 2014. 

According to T-invariant, at least 10 scholars were taken in for questioning, including the acting director of the Institute of Philosophy, 87-year-old Russian Academy of Sciences academic Abdusalam Guseynov. Preliminary reports suggested most were released after questioning under travel restrictions. 

The academic Svetlana Mesyats is believed to remain in custody. The independent outlet Mediazona reported that she was placed under house arrest, and a Moscow City Court case card showed a hearing on pretrial restrictions.

According to the case card, Mesyats is suspected of fraud committed by an organized group or on an especially large scale. “Notes of a Traditionalist” claimed that the institute's employees are accused of “stealing budget money under a state assignment for translations of Aristotle that ultimately never appeared.”

Philosophy Today, a philosophy-focused Telegram channel, wrote the case “concerns an error in reporting on a state assignment under which poor Aristotle was supposed to be translated, and for some reason Svetlana Mesyats was placed under house arrest.”

In 2021, the Education and Science Ministry appointed Anatoly Chernyaev, a scholar of Russian philosophy, to lead the Institute of Philosophy. Staff opposed both his appointment and the fact that it was made without an election. He soon lost the post and was later dismissed from the institute.

The newspaper Zavtra claimed the academic was “dismissed for his patriotic position.” “Chernyaev repeatedly criticized the position of the Institute of Philosophy, many of whose employees not only failed to support the special military operation but also created Russophobic centers abroad,” the publication wrote.

The BBC Russian Service, in turn, reported that the attempted appointment of Chernyaev was backed by “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeev. His Tsargrad TV channel previously called the Institute of Philosophy “a center for the destruction of Russia.”

“The role of institutions such as the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences should not be underestimated by reducing them to a harmless sinecure for ‘so-called philosophers’ who simply siphon off the [state] budget. The institute has long served as the intellectual headquarters of the liberal-destructive, protest-oriented, cosmopolitan movement in Russia, with roots going back to [George] Soros and [Gene] Sharp. It is engaged not so much in philosophy as in a very specific ideology,” Tsargrad wrote.

The Insider confirmed that the newly appointed aide to the Security Council secretary is Andrei Gennadyevich Kozlov, who was previously linked to information security structures close to Russian state defense corporation Rostec. A woman who answered a phone number listed in corporate registries confirmed Kozlov’s appointment and said she would forward The Insider’s request for clarification about his biography.

According to the records in the corporate database SPARK, Kozlov headed the RUSIB Association, which brings together organizations working in information security, from May 2024 to April 2026. Earlier, in November and December 2022, he served as acting general director of RT-Information Security, or RT-IB, previously known as IB Reform. The company is Rostec’s cybersecurity center and is responsible for protecting the state corporation’s information systems and those of its affiliated organizations.

RT-IB describes itself as a directly managed Rostec organization and the “single center of expertise for technological support of the corporate information security system” of the state corporation and its subsidiaries.

The company says it protects critical information infrastructure, monitors and responds to computer incidents, conducts penetration testing and carries out information security audits. Its listed clients include Rostec, the United Aircraft Corporation and Uralvagonzavod. RT-IB also holds an FSB license for work involving cryptographic tools and an FSTEC license for the technical protection of confidential information.

Materials published by the Russian Engineering Union also identified Kozlov as first deputy general director of IB Reform. In 2022, he spoke at a conference on protecting critical information infrastructure at defense industry enterprises and cooperating with GosSOPKA, Russia’s state system for detecting and mitigating computer attacks.

IB Reform, later renamed RT-IB, is under U.S. sanctions. The OFAC database lists it as Joint Stock Company Information Security Reform on the SDN List under the Russia-related Executive Order 14024 sanctions program. The designation cites the company’s information security activities and notes the risk of secondary sanctions.

Leaked border-crossing and flight records reviewed by The Insider show that Kozlov visited Iran in 2021 and stayed in the country for close to a week.

Kozlov’s predecessor, Pavel Konovalchik, was dismissed as aide to the Security Council secretary in March 2026. The Insider previously reported that in the early 2010s, he commanded the GRU’s 180th Separate Special-Purpose Radio Reconnaissance Brigade near St. Petersburg and was also linked to the GRU’s 85th Special Service Center, Military Unit 26165. U.S. authorities accused personnel from that unit of hacking Democratic Party servers in 2016, while cybersecurity researchers have linked it to the Fancy Bear/APT28 group. Ukrainian and Russian sources have also tied Konovalchik to the Defense Ministry’s so-called information operations troops.

On May 19, the Armenian outlet Medianews published an EGRUL extract in which Narek Karapetyan was listed as a Russian citizen. The Insider verified the information and confirmed that Karapetyan is indeed listed as a co-owner of the Moscow-based company Mospromekspluatatsiya LLC with a 2.5% stake. In the extract dated May 20, the “nationality” field stated: “citizen of the Russian Federation.” By the evening of May 21, around 19:50 Moscow time, The Insider found that the data in the same extract had changed. The citizenship field now read: “foreign citizen, Republic of Armenia.” EGRUL records show the changes were made on May 20, 2026. The Insider has a copy of the May 20 extract that listed Karapetyan as a Russian citizen.

The changes were made the same day Armenia’s Investigative Committee announced a criminal case against the younger Karapetyan. Investigators said he concealed his second citizenship in order to run in the upcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 7.  The agency alleges that Narek Karapetyan submitted a false declaration to the Interior Ministry’s migration service, stating that he was not a citizen of another country. The case was opened under an article covering the concealment of information that could bar a person from obtaining or holding public office.

A day earlier, on May 19, The Insider published an investigation into the Kremlin’s attempts to influence Armenia’s political landscape and prevent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s party, which has pursued closer ties with the EU and the United States, from winning. The investigation said  Russia’s efforts in Armenia are being coordinated by the Russian presidential administration and that foreign intelligence (SVR), military intelligence (GRU), and FSB officers had been sent to Yerevan. The Insider also detailed the ties between several Armenian opposition politicians and Russian intelligence services, including those of billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, Narek Karapetyan’s uncle and the founder of the Strong Armenia alliance.

Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the investigation as “spy fiction tales about the omnipresent agents of the Kremlin.”

Over the years of his active political career — and also during his forced absence from politics following a sharp conflict with Merkel — Merz has grown accustomed to accusations of being excessively pro-American and overly devoted to Euro-Atlanticism, charges frequently repeated by his opponents. These criticisms are largely subjective. Still, it is indeed difficult to find another contemporary senior German politician with such close ties to the United States.

Between 2009 and 2021, Merz held prominent positions in major American companies, from chairman of the supervisory board of the German branch of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, to senior partner at the legal giant Mayer Brown.

For ten years, Merz also headed the NGO Atlantik-Brücke (“Atlantic Bridge”), the leading lobbyist for German-American cooperation from politics and economics to cultural and academic exchange.

In February 2025, just days before snap Bundestag elections, Merz, who was then the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary faction and a candidate for chancellor — wrote on the organization’s website about the “opportunities and possibilities” presented by Donald Trump’s second presidency. The article spoke of opening a new chapter in U.S.-European relations, jointly responding to global challenges, and building a positive Euro-Atlantic agenda.

Merz was being sincere. Both as a politician and as a person, he took shape within a worldview that saw America as an unquestioned symbol of freedom and the principal defender of the Western world and its values. For a committed conservative and Euro-Atlanticist, Trumpism was a “system malfunction,” an “alien America” that American democracy would ultimately overcome. Merz harbored no illusions, but he also fully understood the kind of partners he would have to work with.

For the committed conservative and Euro-Atlanticist Merz, Trumpism was a “system malfunction”

Also in February 2025, U.S. Vice President JD Vance was remarkably candid at the Munich Security Conference, claiming Europe had become something close to a “suicide club,” “destroying” itself through mass migration and “violations” of free speech. In his first interview after polling stations closed and exit poll results were announced, Merz, responding to a question about Trump. He replied: “The fate of Europe is, by and large, of no concern to him.”

At the same time, Merz understood that Germany – dependent on the United States politically, militarily, and to a large extent economically – still needed to establish workable relations with the difficult occupant in the White House.

There were even grounds for optimism. Many observers believed the two leaders had quite a few points of commonality. Merz not only speaks flawless English, but thanks to his experience and personal ties within the American establishment, he understands how the U.S. political and business elite functions – the very environment from which Trump emerged.

At first glance, the approach seemed to be working. The first months of contacts were successful for Germany. Following the two leaders’ first phone call and their meeting in Washington in June 2025, the press showered Merz with praise, highlighting the harmonious and almost friendly atmosphere.

Merz was granted permission to stay overnight at Blair House, the official guest residence of the U.S. president. Informally, this is considered a gesture of the highest regard toward a guest. Trump also appeared genuinely pleased with the chancellor’s gift – the birth certificate of his grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf (the original German spelling of the surname), from the town of Kallstadt, now located in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

The chancellor combined displays of friendliness and a willingness to listen to his counterpart, albeit with a certain degree of firmness on key issues. With this strategy, Merz appeared far more successful than French President Emmanuel Macron, whose visit to Washington several months earlier critics had almost unanimously deemed a failure.

The chancellor chose a mixed approach: displays of friendliness combined with a certain firmness on key issues

Progress appeared to be emerging in all four areas of cooperation most important to Berlin: tariffs, access to the American market, support for Ukraine, and the strengthening of NATO unity. Germany’s government and parliament removed defense and security spending from the constitutional fiscal restrictions known as the “debt brake,” making it possible to sharply increase the defense budget. This was a step toward meeting Trump’s demands.

In August 2025, the EU and the United States concluded a temporary trade agreement. Despite justified criticism of some of its provisions, the document still protected the German auto industry from astronomical American tariffs. Merz played the central role in securing the deal.

It seemed that the worst was over and that the new chancellor had indeed managed to find the key to a mutually beneficial format of interaction between Berlin and Washington. Trump described Merz as “a very respected man,” about the highest form of praise the American president appeared capable of offering a genuinely democratic European leader.

Confrontation

The German-American honeymoon did not last long. By late summer of last year, Washington was already accusing the Europeans of violating the “tariff” deal and threatening to raise duties. In fact, the White House continues to do so to this day, periodically issuing ultimatums to the EU.

On the issue of Ukraine, Trump has displayed striking inconsistency, at times promising new sanctions against Russia and at others meeting with Putin and blaming not Moscow but Kyiv for an “unwillingness to make a deal.” Merz and other European leaders found themselves accompanying Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington in order to avoid a repeat of the scandal that occurred during the Ukrainian president’s previous visit.

The White House has also openly questioned the value of continuing to uphold its commitments within NATO. Prominent American politicians openly support the European far right, while the new U.S. National Security Strategy directly stated that present-day Europe could not be considered a reliable ally of America.

In Germany, the message was understood. Even journalists from conservative publications wrote quite bluntly that the American document was openly hostile to the European Union. Some even predicted that, under a worst-case scenario, “Europe would face two adversaries” – Moscow and Washington.

Merz found himself in a difficult position. On the one hand, he did not want to lose his communication channel with Trump and thus tried to preserve the remnants of their former understanding. He stated that certain elements of the current U.S. foreign policy course “can be understood,” while others are “unacceptable from a European point of view.”

On the other hand, the chancellor was under both domestic political and European pressure. By the autumn of 2025, he was already facing falling approval ratings, serious problems within the ruling coalition, and even pushback from within his own party. In addition, Germany’s European partners expected him to strengthen the country’s role in world affairs – one of Merz’s central campaign promises. Passivity would have been politically disastrous.

And so the chancellor struck back. “With great regret,” he noted that the United States “has changed so fundamentally that it no longer follows the rules; it calls freedom of speech into question and represses the independence of the judiciary.” Driving the point home, Merz acknowledged: “Today, authoritarian political systems are no longer the only ones in the world questioning the rules-based international order and adherence to international law. Unfortunately, this also applies to America.”

A logical continuation of these remarks came in another statement by the chancellor, in which he concluded that Pax Americana, in its familiar form, no longer exists. Europeans, he argued, must recognize the “fundamental changes in transatlantic relations.”

Chancellor Merz concluded that Pax Americana, in its familiar form, no longer exists

The new year of 2026 brought the most severe crisis seen within the Western world in decades: the Greenland affair. Even committed critics of Trump did not expect such an intensity of passions and such undisguised expansionism from Washington, including a readiness for the forceful annexation of the Danish island — even at the expense of an armed confrontation with allies.

At the beginning of the conflict, Merz tried to avoid sharp statements. He said that he shared American “concerns regarding Greenland’s security,” dispatching two his vice chancellor and foreign minister to Washington.

As the situation developed, it was not politicians who traveled to Greenland, but European soldiers, including German troops. Merz’s next statement was: “Denmark and Greenland can count on us.” A month later in Munich – on the same stage where Vance had listed all of Washington’s grievances against Brussels a year earlier – the German chancellor noted the existence of a “deep abyss between Europe and the United States.”

Another source of tension between Germany and the United States – and to a large extent between Merz and Trump personally – was Berlin’s assessment of Washington’s military operations against Venezuela and Iran. For Germany, Venezuela was a distant periphery, and the country’s then-leader Nicolás Maduro did not inspire a shred of sympathy within the German establishment. As a result, Merz clearly did not want to quarrel with Trump over this issue as well.

But the domestic political climate in Germany did not allow him to stay on the sidelines. The chancellor’s weak initial reaction to Maduro’s abduction by an American special forces unit triggered a unified wave of criticism in Germany, including accusations that he was condoning violations of foundational UN documents and even creating a situation in which the government found itself in an “idiotic position.” Merz was ultimately forced to instruct his press secretary to state that there was an “absence of convincing evidence that the actions of the United States complied with international law.”

The events in Venezuela did not directly affect Germany, but merely confronted Berlin with a moral and legal dilemma. The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, however, struck Germany economically, given the country’s heavy dependence on energy supplies and export chains. The previous operation against Iran in 2025 had met with Merz’s approval — “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us” — but in March 2026, his reaction was fundamentally different. It took only six days to move from “we understand the concerns but see risks” to warnings about the danger of an “endless war”.

Merz’s tone then became even harsher. He directly refused Trump’s request for the participation of the German armed forces in operations in the region and stated that the current war against Iran “does not involve NATO.” In addition, he shared with the public his view that regime change in Tehran – or indeed any meaningful results at all – could not be achieved through bombing alone. He then went even further, reproaching Washington for lacking a strategy altogether.

Merz’s outrage was understandable: the United States not only failed to inform its European allies about the planned strike on Iran, but also did not consider it necessary to take into account the negative consequences for Europe that were easy to foresee. The possibility of Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz in the event of war was obvious.

It was clear that any escalation in the Persian Gulf – through which not only oil shipments for Germany pass, but also supplies of electronics, spare parts, and raw materials for German automotive and chemical corporations – would hit Berlin hard. Merz’s government, already going through difficult times, was forced to take urgent measures to curb rapidly rising fuel prices at gas stations across the country. In addition, the United States appeared little concerned about the growth of Russia’s oil revenues and, consequently, the additional resources Moscow would gain for waging war.

The growth of Russia’s oil revenues and the resulting increase in resources available for waging war appeared to concern Washington very little

The chancellor could not afford to take a wait-and-see approach in hopes of preserving what remained of his understanding with Trump. The American president likewise did not hesitate to respond, openly mocking Merz and his country. Under the circumstances, Trump’s decision to partially withdraw American troops from Germany and refrain from deploying missile defense systems came as a predictable move.

As long as Trump remains in the White House

Jeff Rathke, president of the American-German Institute, describes the current relationship between the leader of Old Europe and the nominal leader of the Western world as a “partnership with limits.” Both sides recognize the boundaries of their capabilities.

Of course, it cannot be said that Merz is focused exclusively on confrontation. He still displays optimism and continues to try to establish contact with Trump.

But there are serious doubts about the viability of this model. Merz’s March visit to Washington – his third in less than a year – may have outwardly resembled the previous June’s trip (complete with another prestigious overnight stay at Blair House and compliments from Trump), but in substance it was fundamentally different. Even the chancellor’s silence in response to Trump’s attacks on Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez – which triggered a crisis in relations between Madrid and Berlin – failed to salvage the situation. What the world witnessed was not a meeting of friends, but one between reluctant partners compelled to cooperate with one another.

From the standpoint of logic and political expediency, the White House should have wholeheartedly welcomed the arrival of an “American” in the German chancellor’s office and extracted maximum advantage from Merz in the spheres of politics, trade, and the exercise of soft power – especially given Germany’s forced reassessment of defense and security issues amid its ongoing confrontation with Russia. Because of his personal background and worldview, Merz is the most pro-American German leader in decades, one willing to make concessions in order to preserve Euro-Atlantic solidarity. And yet, the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction. U.S. actions are not only pushing Merz toward criticizing America, but are also turning him into one of the leaders of Europe’s move toward political emancipation.

The United States is not only pushing Merz toward criticizing America, but also turning him into one of the leaders of the project of Europe’s political emancipation

The rapprochement between Berlin and Washington failed to materialize, but the reason was not because Merz had made mistakes in communicating with Trump. The German politician exploited the “chemistry” factor as much as possible, explaining the European position to the American president in language he understood – both literally and figuratively – by speaking in terms of interests and profit. For Trump, the personal dimension does indeed matter greatly. But the worldview of the current administration shapes its perception of Germany and Europe far more strongly.

In his book The Second World War, Winston Churchill quotes Joseph Stalin’s famous question during a prewar round of Soviet-French negotiations: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” For Trump as well, a partner’s importance is determined by its strength – or more precisely, by its ability and willingness to project that strength. The concept of the European Union, with its endless search for consensus, its prioritization of diplomacy and respect for international law, and its largely liberal approach to migration and environmental programs, is perceived by the current White House as weakness and nonviability.

The American president operates within a different frame of reference. For him, the ideal is the Europe — and the Germany — of his grandfather’s era. To the current White House occupant, the true German patriots are the far-right Euroskeptics who want to return the continent to the period before integration, liberalization, and globalization. And if a partner appears weak in his eyes, Trump is tempted to extract the maximum possible concessions without paying much attention to that partner’s interests.

Merz is a conservative – for many, even a right-wing conservative, albeit only by contemporary German standards. He heads a coalition government and is forced to take into account the demands and expectations of a wide range of actors in Germany, from political parties and social movements to trade unions and lobbying organizations. He is not only a Euro-Atlanticist but also a Euro-optimist, deeply rooted in the traditions of German parliamentarianism and the project of a united Europe — with an emphasis on the latter. Such a priority lies outside the boundaries of “Trump’s world.” As a result, German-American and broader U.S.-European relations under the current American president cannot be those of true allies.

Beyond the transatlantic dimension, the foreign policy results of Merz’s first year as chancellor have been mixed. His unquestionable achievements include systematic support for Ukraine – far more consistent than that of his predecessor – along with a noticeable improvement in relations with France and especially with Poland, traditionally a difficult partner for Germany. Berlin unequivocally supports NATO unity and the strengthening of the EU’s defense component despite the multibillion-euro costs and the country’s difficult economic situation. Germany’s allies have noticed and appreciate this.

Merz also tries to engage with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as equals, an approach that has been positively received in capitals east of Berlin. Until quite recently, that was not the case. Though clearly not Europe’s most charismatic politician, over the past year Merz has repeatedly seized the role of “Europe’s spokesman” from his rivals, above all Macron. The German chancellor has managed to strike a fairly accurate chord in contemporary European discourse – the desire to emancipate Europe from the United States while at the same time avoiding the complete destruction of ties with Washington.

On the other hand, the chancellor’s policy remains largely Western-centric. The Global South receives relatively little attention, and even successes such as the signing of a free trade agreement with India after twenty years of negotiations (in which Merz’s team played a significant role), are overshadowed by the absence of a coherent strategy toward China, one of Germany’s most important markets. During the chancellor’s visit to Beijing in February 2026, he managed to do little more than preserve the status quo. Additionally, entire regions of Africa and Latin America, where Germany’s political and economic influence is declining or absent altogether, also remain outside Berlin’s focus. Like his predecessors, Merz remains in many ways a European leader rather than a global one.

For Russia, the Arctic is central to the country’s identity, economy, and policy direction — both foreign and domestic. The Arctic was outlined as a priority region in Russia’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept, and economically, the region contributes 6% of Russia’s GDP and 10% of exports, according to official statistics.

While Moscow has long preferred to see the region function as an effective Arctic-states-only zone, ever since 2022 enforcing such an initiative is no longer a real option. Sweeping sanctions make any new form of cooperation in the North nearly impossible, and Russia’s economic troubles make it difficult to invest in the region independently. In February 2026, Russia and China ratified a protocol to cooperate on the Yamal LNG plant in Siberia, a move necessitated by the EU’s plan to phase out all Russian LNG imports by 2027. But while the visible trade and military cooperation between Russia and China project an image of partnership, the reality is far less clear.

The price of isolation

Russia's need to seek out alternative buyers for its Arctic energy reserves sheds light on Russia’s growing economic dependence on China. South Korean firm Samsung Heavy Industries, which was previously contracted to supply icebreaking LNG carriers to the project, has terminated its contracts with Russia’s Zvezda shipbuilding complex over sanctions concerns. Sanctions have also blocked the delivery of a floating dock, built in Turkey, that Russia needs if it is to service its nuclear-powered icebreakers.

The problem is not only external. Russian state-owned nuclear corporation Rosatom planned to develop and build modernized floating power units for the Baimsky Mining and Processing Plant in Saint Petersburg’s Baltic Shipyard. However, due to capacity constraints, three out of four hulls for the units were outsourced to Chinese company Wison (Nantong) Heavy Industry. “There's limits to what a heavily sanctioned Russia can do on its own from an infrastructure and commercial perspective. That leaves the Kremlin in a very hard place,” says Mathieu Boulègue, a non-resident senior fellow in the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at CEPA.

What’s more, Ukraine's attacks on Russian oil terminals have taken roughly 40 percent of Russia's oil exports offline, meaning Russia cannot count on the commodity windfall that might otherwise offset its current constraints.

“They need investors and customers for Arctic resources,” explains Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist in China studies at CNA, a non-partisan analytic organization. “But they also don't want to depend too much on any one country, even their strategic partner, in a very sensitive region that's so important to the Russian economy.”

Russia needs investors and customers for Arctic resources, but it doesn't want to depend too much on any one country

Moscow remains clear-eyed about the risk inherent in its overdependence on China, looking to India and the United Arab Emirates as potential alternatives. “India is an important partner for Russia in the Arctic. Indian naval personnel are being trained in Vladivostok to work in Arctic waters,” adds Wishnick.

In order to help alleviate this dependency, Russia sells natural gas to these buyers at a heavily discounted price. But even so, this isn’t enough to ensure a sufficient diversity of customers. “The demands that China has, but also the funds that the Chinese state-owned companies can come with, are very difficult to replace with anything else,” explains Camilla T. N. Sørensen, an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Defence College.

There is a strong need for investment in Russia’s Arctic infrastructure and resources, but as Sørensen notes: “There are Russian local leaders or business people who are somewhat frustrated by the lack of interest and lack of financing from Moscow, and they see opportunities also by engaging the Chinese.”

This frustration reflects a broader reality in the North. High rates of respiratory illnesses, food insecurity exacerbated by climate change, and lack of public services all contribute to a low standard of living in a region with a population of approximately 2.5 million. “They have to deal with the impact of climate change in the region and the precipitated consequences: mostly coastal erosion, unstable soil, and subsoil that is also endangering the infrastructure,” says CEPA’s Boulègue. “And the cost is rapidly rising for the Kremlin.”

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has compounded these pressures. Wishnick points out that the region is now “facing outflows of population worsened by the need to enlist people in the military.”

A transactional relationship

China, meanwhile, is largely satisfied with its current role in the region. After years of Arctic institution-building — observer status at the Arctic Council, research stations in Svalbard, Sweden, and Iceland — Beijing grew increasingly assertive, declaring itself a “near Arctic state” and outlining plans for an “Ice Silk Road” in its 2018 Arctic Policy. “It was an exercise in Chinese soft power to try to be more visible in the Arctic. It failed very largely because it was seen as too aggressive by actual Arctic states,” explains Boulègue. China has since engaged in what Sørensen calls a “tactical retreat” from the region.

The real Arctic states saw China's attempt to become more visible in the Arctic as overly aggressive

Despite their economic cooperation, Russia and China hold fundamentally different views on Arctic sovereignty. China considers the Arctic a “global commons” open to multilateral use, while Russia insists that Arctic states alone should determine Northern policy.

The name “Ice Silk Road,” which was laid out in China’s Arctic Policy of 2018, didn’t help either. “That implies that Russia is a through space for China en route to Europe,” explains Wishnick. It was only after China agreed to accept the territorial rights of the Arctic states that Russia became amenable to China’s involvement.

Necessity, more than trust, has created a “transactional” relationship with an undercurrent of suspicion. According to a report by the New York Times, a Russian FSB document allegedly outlined Moscow’s fears about Chinese espionage in the Arctic conducted via mining firms and university research centers tasked with acquiring strategic data that could threaten its autonomy. This wasn’t an isolated concern. In 2020, a professor at Saint Petersburg's Arctic Academy of Sciences was arrested and charged with high treason for allegedly providing classified intelligence on submarine hydroacoustics to China.

“Right now there is simply a complementary interest,” Sørensen underscores. “When that's no longer the case, the Russians would find ways to try to work with states other than China or even turn again to the other Arctic states.”

It's not an abstract scenario. When Trump and Putin met in Alaska at the 2025 Russia-United States summit, Sørensen notes, it sparked a genuine moment of anxiety in Beijing.

Treading Arctic waters

For the moment, Russia remains China's gatekeeper to the Arctic, though one increasingly reliant on Chinese support. Russian capacity to sail through the eastern part of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is constrained by the limits of its icebreaker fleet and the difficult conditions in the eastern Arctic. This is where China has stepped in, taking on the central foreign role on the route.

In 2024, Russia and China established the Russian-Chinese Subcommittee on Cooperation on the NSR, a joint body headed by Rosatom and China's Minister of Transport to coordinate navigation safety, cargo traffic, and logistics development. That same year, Rosatom and the Chinese company NewNew Shipping Line signed a deal permitting Russian and Chinese firms to access the route year-round. In 2025, NewNew Shipping Line signed another deal with the Murmansk regional government to develop container transport through the Port of Murmansk, a key point on the route. And at the moment, the vast majority of container traffic along the route runs between Russia and China.

As CEPA’s Boulègue explains, the NSR, while important, is not among Beijing’s top foreign policy priorities: “[The Arctic] is not a key strategic priority. It doesn't define the foreign policy of China. It is just an aspect of regional politics.”

Instead, what’s most important for Beijing in the long-term is a China-friendly attitude in the Arctic providing for technological cooperation with regional states. Beijing sees the Arctic as a prime location to develop drones able to function underwater and in frigid Northern climates. Russia's expertise in navigating the region's environment, explains Sørensen, is particularly indispensable here.

But not all of the traffic along the NSR operates in the open. Russian shadow vessels have exported sanctioned LNG to Chinese ports via the route, cycling through names, flags, and registered owners. NewNew Shipping’s vessel NewNew Polar Bear was accused of cutting undersea cables in the Baltic Sea in 2024.

Yet the most significant security threat, according to Boulègue, is playing out far from the headlines about Greenland or the Baltic: “If you are looking for Russian and Chinese ships somewhere in the Arctic, they are around the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea, which is directly on the U.S. border, the exclusive economic zone, and the air defense identification zone.” It is here, along the Alaskan coast, that Russia and China have conducted joint bomber exercises and joint naval patrols and where Chinese Coast Guard vessels have entered the Arctic Ocean via the Bering Strait. The danger, Boulègue argues, is less about sustained provocation than the possibility of a single miscalculation followed by an unwanted escalation.

China, meanwhile, remains reluctant to be drawn into a direct confrontation with Washington, preferring to cast itself as a stabilizing presence in the Arctic rather than as an adversarial one. Beijing’s calculus is fundamentally about economics and norm-setting, not military gamesmanship. On Greenland specifically, “China has generally tried not to play up the whole crisis,” Sørensen observes, “because it's been coming at the same time as they've tried to improve relations with the U.S. themselves."

Complementary interests, mutual constraints

While Trump's comments about Russian and Chinese ships in Arctic waters are not necessarily unfounded, they tell only part of the story. As long as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, Moscow will rely on Chinese investment in the Arctic. In turn, China will continue to depend on Russia as a gatekeeper for maintaining access to the region. “China's trying to get along with Russia, not to step on sensitive areas, but also to achieve its own goals, which may be different from Russia’s,” says Wishnick.

The limits of the partnership between Moscow and Beijing are written into its military dimension. Narrow in scope and concentrated in the Bering Sea, Russia-China defense cooperation is largely absent from the Baltic Sea and the waters around Greenland, the theatres that dominate Western headlines.

China's trying to get along with Russia, not to step on sensitive areas, but also to achieve its own goals

The Russia-China Arctic partnership projects an image of unity, and that projection is largely the point. Beneath the joint military exercises and energy deals lies a relationship built on mutual constraints rather than genuine alignment: Russia needs Chinese investment and export markets after Western sanctions left it isolated, while China is content to consolidate its existing foothold, pushing for a China-friendly policy.

“It's clearly driven by complementary interests. Russia needs to export and China needs to import,” explains Sørensen. Their cooperation is real but transactional, held together by overlapping interests — for now.

Ott was also convicted of abuse of office, corruption, embezzlement, disclosing state secrets, and violating the Foreign Trade Act. He denied all charges at the final hearing, as he had throughout the trial. The jury deliberated for more than eight hours.

Ott was arrested in March 2024 after a joint investigation by The Insider and Der Spiegel reported that he had worked for Marsalek, the Wirecard COO who fled to Russia in 2020. A few days later, Ott was released from custody pending investigation. Ott took part in the surveillance of The Insider’s lead investigator Christo Grozev and editor-in-chief Roman Dobrokhotov. Correspondence between Marsalek and his subordinates suggests the purpose of the surveillance was their kidnapping or murder.

As early as 2017, foreign intelligence services, believed to include the CIA and MI6, raised concerns about Ott. He had repeatedly forwarded data from his official BVT email address to a personal account and was suspected of spying for Russia. At the time, Ott’s direct superior at the BVT was Martin Weiss, another Marsalek associate. Ott was suspended, but his agent network continued to operate.

The Sahel, a vast region south of the Sahara where desert gradually turns into savanna and tropical forest, usually draws global attention only when a military conflict escalates in the area, as it recently did in Mali.

The geographic and political core of the Sahel is traditionally understood as five countries: Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. Sudan is sometimes added to that list, but today that is more of a formality. Since 2023, Sudan has been consumed by its fourth devastating civil war and is following its own trajectory. The five core Sahel states, however, share a similar historical background and a whole set of acute modern problems.

These states are first and foremost united by their colonial legacy. The countries, which gained independence from France in the 1960s, remained within the former colonial power’s sphere of influence for decades. A major factor was the use of the African franc, which firmly locked them in their economic dependence.

Another important factor is religion. Islam dominates the region, with Muslims making up more than 90% of the population in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, and about 65% in Burkina Faso and Chad. At the same time, large territories are de facto controlled by radical groups operating under the banners of al-Qaida or the Islamic State. The economic situation remains dire, with the Sahel consistently ranking among the poorest regions in the world. GDP per capita ranges from $1,500 in Mauritania to a very modest $550 in Niger.

GDP per capita in the Sahel ranges from $1,500 in Mauritania to a very modest $550 in Niger

Extreme poverty is accompanied by a deep crisis of statehood. With the possible exception of relatively sparsely populated Mauritania, these are classic failed states, where authorities have weak control over borders and cannot provide the population with basic services, from education and health care to justice. The situation is aggravated by high birth rates, ranging from 4.4 children per woman in Burkina Faso to 6.7 in Niger, which could double the region’s population by 2050.

All these factors predictably led to political turbulence. About 10 to 15 years ago, the fragile stability there broke down. The rise of Islamists and the inefficiency of old pro-French elites triggered a series of military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, finally undermining the legitimacy of state institutions.

From France to the jihadists

In the middle of the last century, much of Africa was under French rule. Unlike Algeria, which went through a brutal war of independence, the Sahel countries parted with the colonial power relatively peacefully. That left hope for constructive ties in a new format.

France’s strategy in Africa was based on maintaining its presence through military bases, economic projects, and development programs. But no clear long-term plan was ever developed. Memories of the Algerian conflict and discontent in newly independent states made the policy highly vulnerable: almost any action by Paris could easily be interpreted as neocolonialism.

For a long time, the Sahel remained on the margins of attention, overshadowed by more prosperous African neighbors. Local governments cooperated with the French military and French companies, for example, in uranium mining in Niger or gold mining in Mali, while periodically invoking historical injustice.

Another pattern was also visible: the more successful a state became, like Senegal or the Ivory Coast, the easier it was to build dialogue with France. Others, meanwhile, often sought to justify their failures by blaming the negative influence of the former colonial power.

States often sought to justify their failures by blaming the negative influence of France, the former colonial power

The colonial past is a difficult legacy, but more than 65 years of independence now make it possible to speak of different trajectories among various African states. Some have developed dynamically, even as others have remained stuck in ineffective models of corrupt and incompetent regimes that continue to seek legitimacy by settling scores with the former colonial power. Nevertheless, Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, and several other countries have workable relations with France.

A new phase for the region began in January 2013, when jihadists in Mali launched their first offensive toward the capital, Bamako. Mali’s government formally requested help from Paris, and France responded with Operation Serval. Relying on bases in Niger and Chad, French forces quickly defeated the militants and restored government control over the north of the country.

But local military success did not solve systemic problems. To consolidate the gains, Paris launched Operation Barkhane. Its goal was to help the Sahel countries provide their own security with minimal external support. Still, even at its peak, the contingent numbered only 5,500 troops — far too few to control an area the size of Europe. The strengthening of national armies played an unexpected role: they developed political ambitions.

In the end, the initiative failed. Local governments remained passive, and the French presence, which had produced positive results at first, increasingly came to seem useless and reminiscent of the recent colonial past. A deepening internal crisis led to a series of military coups: two in Mali (in 2020 and 2021), then one in Burkina Faso in 2022, and finally one in Niger in 2023. Events in Chad, where President Idriss Déby was killed in an armed clash in 2021 and power passed by default to his son, must also be added to this list. In short, nearly all of the region’s weak and corrupt (but legitimate and pro-French) governments were replaced by military juntas with revolutionary ambitions.

France’s postcolonial policy is changing before our eyes. Operation Barkhane was Paris’ last attempt to build a major regional coalition against radical Islam and in support of development programs. However, France lost 58 troops during Operations Serval and Barkhane, a toll that French society expected ought to produce visible results. Those results did not materialize. As hostile forces seized power in key countries, the mission lost its purpose. In 2025, France officially closed its bases in Senegal and Chad. Now, in the event of a new crisis, France no longer has the infrastructure in place for a rapid military response.

Even before that, Paris had reacted cautiously to regime changes. Sanctions and diplomatic pressure from regional bodies such as the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS (also known by its French acronym CEDEAO), did not shift the new authorities’ positions. Neither did threats that lacked military backing. When Assimi Goita led a mutiny in Mali in 2020, France stopped short of forceful intervention. Paris accepted the new political reality, seeking to avoid accusations of occupation after concluding that past direct military interventions in similar cases had been a mistake.

Russia enters the fray: Security for minerals

France’s departure created an opening for Russia. Moscow offered a model of cooperation through private military companies, in which protection for the ruling regime is exchanged for access to natural resources.

Since the 1960s, the Soviet Union viewed Africa as an important theater for anti-Western operations during the Cold War. Countries in the Sahel did not play the main role in those projects, but some of them, particularly Mali and Burkina Faso, declared that they had chosen a socialist path of development and received arms supplies, economic aid, and student training programs in return.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia struggled for years to define its inherited relationships with African countries. With the emergence of the Wagner private military company in the 2010s, a solution appeared — providing security services for African governments in exchange for access to mineral resources. Russia had already tested that approach in the Central African Republic.

Two points are worth noting. First, the regimes most in need of PMC support were the most unstable, seeking to preserve the personal power of their leaders by any means possible, from police repression to aggressive propaganda. Second, there are questions about the economic profitability of these projects, since their costs can be enormous. They are not always possible without strong political backing. However, Vladimir Putin has revealed that Russian PMCs were funded by the state. 

The regimes most in need of PMC support were the most unstable, seeking to preserve the personal power of their leaders by any means

Military juntas, disillusioned with Paris, turned to Moscow. Mali was the first to initiate the withdrawal of French troops, specifically to replace them with Wagner units. Around the same time, the military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger fell into international isolation and came under sanctions from neighboring countries. They then created the Alliance of Sahel States and officially left ECOWAS. Russia, meanwhile, remained in the region after the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, with Wagner’s functions transferred to the Africa Corps, which is controlled by Russia’s Defense Ministry.

But changing partners has not brought stability. In July 2024, Mali’s army and Russian mercenaries were ambushed in the north of the country and suffered heavy losses. In November 2025, Bamako faced a blockade by radicals, and in January 2026, militants attacked the airport in Niamey, the capital of Niger. The recent killing of Mali’s defense minister offers another example.

In foreign policy, however, Moscow strengthened its position through support from these countries. In February 2025, the three Sahel states voted against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Niger’s uranium illusion

Before the 2023 coup, Niger was France’s second-largest uranium supplier, with extraction carried out by the company Orano. Ore from Niger was transported south to the Beninese port of Cotonou, from where it was shipped by sea to France. There, uranium was enriched to the level needed for use in nuclear power plants. But Niger’s new leadership decided to revise the agreements, leading to litigation and a halt in production. In 2025, Niger signed a cooperation memorandum with Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation.

Niger’s generals may have expected Russian companies to replace Orano quickly and easily. Instead, the plan ran into a logistical dead end. The problems include not only uranium extraction and storage, but also exports. Previously, uranium was shipped through Benin, a country friendly to France. However, that border is now effectively closed. An attempted coup in Benin in December 2025, in which Russia was suspected of involvement, failed.

Unlike the departing French — or representatives from China, India, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies, which are moving in — Russia has little to offer beyond military support for the current regime. It lacks experience operating in modern Africa through development programs, despite talk of possibly launching them.

Niger’s uranium sector shows that even where Russian companies may have potential advantages, the support of a military junta does not offset practical obstacles. The region’s main telecommunications operators, for example, still belong to international groups with no Russian involvement.

Dark prospects: Islamists, bandits and dictators

The Sahel is at an impasse. Military governments are in no hurry to hold elections, fearing the loss of power. The fight against jihadists is producing no clear successes, while interethnic conflicts remain acute. There is a serious risk that if radical groups create a caliphate here, it would be a structure modeled on ISIS, recognizing no borders. It would not look like Afghanistan, where the Taliban, while imposing its order inside the country, understood that borders existed and that neighbors were ready to defend them. In that sense, the Taliban could be considered a local phenomenon.

High birthrates, meanwhile, are creating an explosive demographic mix of rising unemployment and a low average age. The situation is partly eased by growing emigration, mainly toward the EU. But even those who fail to reach Europe try to settle in the Maghreb or the Middle East. This is not a free exodus, but an extremely risky undertaking given the prevalence of criminal trafficking through parts of the Sahara where no laws apply. Young people from the Sahel are not seen as welcome guests in more developed parts of Africa, let alone in Europe. The absence of life prospects leaves them with a narrow choice among attempted emigration, radical Islam, or criminal groups.

The young people of the Sahel are left with a narrow choice among attempted emigration, radical Islam, or joining criminal groups

Destabilization around the Sahel is unfolding almost on its own. It threatens, above all, the more prosperous countries of the Gulf of Guinea. The Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon feel this pressure on their northern borders, and the attempted coup in Benin in December 2025 can be seen as a sign of an expanding zone of political chaos. The Sahel risks becoming a vortex of instability that is already projecting threats onto neighboring states. Without large-scale international support, which is so far absent, it will be extremely difficult for the region to overcome this crisis.