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Morning Headlines
Reuters: A Ukrainian drone smashed into a building in central Moscow on Friday after Russian air defences shot it down, disrupting air traffic at all the civilian airports of the Russian capital, Russian officials said.
WP Exclusive: U.S. intelligence says that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key city of Melitopol, people familiar with the classified forecast told The Post, which would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its objective of severing Russia’s land bridge.
ISW: Russian forces have dedicated significant effort, resources, and personnel to hold settlements such as Robotyne and Urozhaine, and recent Ukrainian advances in these areas are therefore likely reflective of a wider degradation of defending Russian forces.
More News
Reuters: The United States has approved sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands to defend against Russian invaders as soon as pilot training is completed, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
The Kyiv Independent: Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko admitted that Russian forces had invaded Ukraine from the territory of Belarus in February 2022 in an interview with a pro-Kremlin presenter published on Aug. 17.
Reuters: Ukraine has received two IRIS-T air defense systems from Germany, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his address on Thursday.
NBC News: A U.S. citizen was charged with espionage in Moscow on Thursday, according to the Russian state news agency Tass. Gene Spector, a former pharmaceuticals executive, was convicted bribery in a Russian court last year, the agency said. He allegedly admitted to bribing former Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich and was sentenced to 3½ years in prison.
The Kyiv Independent: Leaked documents show that Russia "has made steady progress" with its plans to produce its own version of the Iranian Shahed kamikaze drone for use against Ukrainian targets, the Washington Post reported on Aug. 17.
AFP: Turkey warned Moscow to avoid further escalations after a Turkish-owned cargo vessel was attacked by the Russian navy last weekend, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said Thursday.
Reuters: Putin is not trying to push Belarus into joining the war in Ukraine, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in an online interview published on Thursday.
The Kyiv Independent: Ukraine may receive Soviet-made Mi-24V/35 helicopter gunships from Czechia's stocks as the Czech military is decommissioning them in favor of newer U.S. models, the Czech News Agency reported on Aug. 17, citing the country's defense minister.
The United States has imposed sanctions on four Russians who it says were involved in the 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
The Moscow Times: While formally designed to fight crime, Russia’s facial recognition system has been more effective in identifying anti-war activists and draft dodgers.
Meduza: Russian colleges will start training students to operate drones, the country’s education minister said Thursday. Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Vasily Osmakov said the Russian authorities will need 1 million drone operators by 2030.
Bloomberg: The top international envoy to Bosnia-Herzegovina accused the country’s Serb leader of playing into the hands of Putin, who he says is exploiting the Balkan nation’s ethnic divisions to divert attention from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
AP News: The Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into one of the leaders of a prominent independent election monitoring group, his lawyer said Thursday. The case against Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Russia’s leading election watchdog Golos, is the latest step in the months-long crackdown on Kremlin critics and rights activists that the government ratcheted up after sending troops into Ukraine.
ERR: In a joint statement released on Thursday, the prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania announced that all three Baltic countries are joining the G7 Declaration of Support for Ukraine, which was adopted in July.
RFE/RL: Central Asian migrant workers were forced to fight alongside Wagner mercenaries after just three days of training in how to use weapons.
Meduza: The Russian airline industry, largely dependent on the IT products developed by the Swiss corporation SITA for booking, flight messaging, baggage tracking, and other industry-specific applications, is bracing itself for disruptions when SITA leaves the Russian market this fall.
Reuters: NATO has not detected any changes to Russia's nuclear forces and the Western alliance has seen no reason to reconsider its own corresponding setup, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg told a conference in Norway on Thursday.
AFP: Russia is pressuring African governments to deepen ties with Moscow, Ukraine's foreign minister has told AFP, claiming the Kremlin's most powerful exports in the region were fighters from the Wagner mercenary group and "propaganda".
Bloomberg: A recently manufactured Russian missile recovered by Ukrainian forces suggests the invading army is running low on stocks of some advanced weapons, and is having to produce them more quickly to maintain the intensity of its war.
worth mentioning
How Storm Shadow missiles and kamikaze sea drones are cutting off Crimea from Russia
Belarus declares 19th Century nationalist poems 'extremist'
Brazil Binges on Russian Fuel Like Never Before
Dud Russian general dies after ‘long illness’
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