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Ukraine has reinforced the defence of its eastern Donetsk region as Russia mounted renewed efforts to seize Sloviansk, a key part of Ukraine’s “fortress belt” of cities that include Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka.
At the same time, Britain and France made a crucial decision to transfer Storm Shadow cruise missile technology to Kyiv, as Ukraine shifts its air defence strategy to destroying Russia’s means of ballistic missile production and launch, rather than intercepting the missiles individually.
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Ukrainian commander-in-chief Mykhailo Drapatyi made the first major decision of his new command on August 26 to reinforce two units defending Sloviansk.
(Al Jazeera)Russia has also been infiltrating the fortress city of Kostiantynivka to the south of Sloviansk, but does not control it.
Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets said Kyiv still maintains positions in central and northern Kostiantynivka.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 70-80 percent of Russian casualties were taking place on the Kostiantynivka front. He estimated Russian losses this year at 267,000, including at least 155,000 killed.
Russian commander-in-chief Valery Gerasimov said on Thursday that his troops were within four kilometres (2.5 miles) of Sloviansk.
But maps published by Deep State and the Institute for the Study of War, which observe territorial changes through geo-located, open-source information, suggest Russian troops are between 12km (7.4 miles) and 16km (10 miles) of Sloviansk.
Ukraine hobbles Russian front line
Ukraine is pressing a campaign to hobble the supply of Russian men, munitions and fuel to the front line by targeting storages, airfields and transport routes.
It has been largely successful in bringing Russia to a standstill.
The ISW estimated Russia has lost 27 square kilometres (10.4 square miles) in August, and at least 233sq km (90sq miles) this year.
On August 20, Ukraine destroyed 18 buildings storing aerial drones at the Primorsko-Akhtarsk airfield in Krasnodar Krai, just across the Sea of Azov from Crimea, and a Sukhoi-24 fighter at the Saky airfield in Crimea itself.
Firefighters work at the site of a household and construction item shopping mall, as smoke and fire rise after Russian drone strikes, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, August 28, 2026 [Reuters]Two days later, Ukraine’s unmanned systems destroyed a Sukhoi-33 fighter and a MiG-29 fighter at the Vityazevo airfield in Krasnodar, along with a strike and reconnaissance Orion drone. On the same day, they struck an oil trans-shipment terminal at Yeisk, in Krasnodar.
On August 24, Ukraine destroyed another MiG-29 at Millerovo airfield in Rostov.
Ukraine also targeted and destroyed ballistic missile launchers and radar complexes.
It has hit a dozen Russian military supply vessels, bringing the total number of ships disabled during the campaign to 242.
Separately, Ukraine has struck 267 Crimean power stations and substations in six weeks. The result has been a near-blackout across the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia-installed head of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov acknowledged “objective difficulties that cannot be resolved in the short term for technical reasons”.
Ukraine’s Commander of Unmanned Systems Forces Robert Brovdi recently suggested Crimean households and businesses had electricity for an average of about an hour a day.
Russian refineries smoulder
Ukraine’s long-range strikes have hit Russian refineries 31 times since the beginning of June.
Since August 20, it has struck the Akhtubinsk refinery and the Astrakhan gas processing plant in the Caucasus, Lukoil refineries in Perm and Nizhny Novgorod – 1,300km (808 miles) and 800km (497 miles) from Ukraine respectively – the Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, and the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar.
Several were hit repeatedly to ensure they remain out of action.
Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs President Alexander Shokhin reportedly said that Ukrainian drone strikes had removed 25-30 percent of Russian oil refining capacity – a conclusion also reached by the Financial Times.
This economic warfare has also incinerated 15 of the largest distribution centres of Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries, causing an estimated three trillion roubles ($35bn) worth of damage.
On August 24, Ukraine also struck Russia’s second-largest online retailer, Ozon, for the first time.
Russian strikes and Ukraine’s response
Russia has been hitting Ukraine’s cities in what it claims are reciprocal strikes.
“[We] have begun to respond to the enemy’s actions against our civilian industrial and logistics facilities. The Kyiv regime has set out to damage our economy. What has it done? It’s opened Pandora’s box itself,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin.
Russia, too, has launched economic warfare against Ukraine, recently striking its main grain exporting ports of Odesa and Chernomorsk.
Zelenskyy said four to five ships were still making it in and out every day, but added that was three to four times fewer than before Russia’s blockade this summer.
Russia has also been striking border crossings between Ukraine and Moldova, an alternative export route for grain.
However, many Russian strikes have also hit residential and civilian sites, causing heavy casualties far from the front line.
Investigators work on the site of a car explosion, which killed a Russian military serviceman, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, August 27, 2026 [Reuters]On August 21, Russian drones killed 16 people and injured 130 who were shopping in Kryvyi Rih, in central Ukraine, far from the front line. On August 27, they injured several people after residential buildings in the Poltava, Sumy and Kherson regions were hit.
On the latter occasion, Russia also used Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles, and Ukraine stopped seven of them – its first interception since the end of July, when it ran out of Patriot missiles, the only weapon in its arsenal that reliably stops ballistics. Two days before the strike, Zelenskyy said: “A few more Patriot missiles have also arrived.”
Zelenskyy told journalists on August 23 that he had been hoping to amass some 360 Patriot missiles ahead of winter, as requested by the Ukrainian air force, but admitted that “when they produce 600 per year, 360 is not easy to obtain”.
The United States has refused to give Ukraine 5-10 percent of its stockpile, and as missile expert Fabian Hoffmann has detailed, investment in higher Patriot production has come too late to help Ukraine this winter, and the Patriot is not a cost-effective solution even in the long run.
At the NATO Summit in July, US President Donald Trump had granted Ukraine licences to build Patriot interceptors at the scale it needs, but soon rescinded the offer without explanation.
“Russia could potentially produce up to 1,300 ballistic missiles per year,” said Zelenskyy. “We are working to prevent [that].”
Ukraine’s long-range strikes have increasingly targeted Russian aerospace industries.
On August 24, for example, they struck the Kamensk-Shakhtinsk factory manufacturing solid rocket fuel for missiles in Rostov. They have also been striking missile launchers and radar stations wherever possible.
On August 6, former Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov promoted a strategy of “counter-ballistic warfare”.
Ukraine is working on putting its own ballistic missiles into scaled production by next year, and Zelenskyy said he would have a firm timetable by early September.
In the meantime, Zelenskyy hopes to strike launchers by building its own version of the Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles, also known as SCALP.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham handed Zelenskyy the blueprints to do just that when he visited Kyiv on its Independence Day, August 24 – a move that infuriated Russia.
