Ukraine cuts its warheads as its operations begin to rise | News of the Russian-Ukrainian war

Ukraine replaced its top military and security forces last week despite its military’s biggest improvement in three years.

The dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on July 15 was followed six days later by his replacement by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii. Both men were followed outside by some of their most talented officers.

Ukraine seems to have found a way to win, making 2026 Russia’s worst year in the war for the loss of workers, sector and economic conditions at home.

About 193,500 of its soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said – the first year Russia lost about 32,000 a month according to Syrskii – and Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry says it cannot meet its demands.

The pain has brought a huge profit of 81.1 sq km to Russia, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank that evaluates regional movements using open sources, and the profit-making process is well underway in Ukraine.

If the month of June was a dangerous month for the Russian operation, gaining only 30sq km, July has been worse, with the Russian army making a loss of 1.6sq km per day, according to ISW.

Meanwhile, Russia’s military economy, which grew in 2022-2024, will grow this year by 0.2 percent, Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted.

Ukraine has replaced defense ministers and senior officials in the past, but this was the first simultaneous shake-up of the war and appears to have come amid an internal dispute over strategy.

The day after Fedorov’s dismissal, which led to street protests against immigration, Syrskii spoke of “a practical solution that shows real results”.

A day after he was fired, Syrskii wrote in an article on the Militarnyi news website that, “A minister should not … be a military expert. This is not his job and not his responsibility.”

“Army operations, operational planning, what’s ahead – legally, I’m responsible to the Commander-in-Chief,” he said.

The problem of conflict seems to have been the wars without people.

Syrskii created the first Unmanned Forces Command, SBS, and fought the first world war in which First Person View drones resulted in 95 percent of the enemy being destroyed.

Ukraine’s medium- and long-range drones have destroyed Russian supplies and oil, reducing its potential frontline capabilities.

Fedorov has been aggressive in his six months in office, buying more drones in four months than the Defense Ministry did in all of 2025, and using military spending to ramp up orders.

Syrskii disagreed. “Fighting us is an enemy that is bigger than anything, that fights, in particular, with artillery, aircraft, and infantry. I cannot transfer a million-strong army ‘to drones’ in two months and say: now we are fighting like this,” he wrote on Militarnyi.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who recently told the Financial Times that “the sky will be tough in this war,” said on July 20 “he continues to know what needs to be changed to the defense system of Ukraine and what is necessary for the production and supply of the military should be implemented as soon as possible.”

What is Ukraine doing?

Ukraine has developed the use of short-range drones on the battlefield to reduce its exposure and minimize casualties. This strategy has had its consequences, hindering Russia’s progress this year.

Syrskii said Ukraine had gained more ground than it had lost in May, the month it began striking Russian artillery using a route from Russia to the southern regions of Zaporizhia and Kherson.

By the end of May, Ukraine was once again disrupting the administration of the Crimean Peninsula. Ukraine then attacked the ships.

Since June 6, the head of the Ukrainian army’s Unmanned Systems Forces Robert Brovdi said, Ukraine has stopped 196 oil tankers and destroyed a third of Russian ships passing through the Kerch Strait, the closest route from Krasnodar Krai to Crimea.

In addition, Brovdi said, Russia was forced to redeploy 200 units of its fleet, called the Rubicon, to protect the fleet, weakening its front line.

“How many ships will be destroyed by SBS” Birds “in the Black and Azov seas during the rest of July and the first half of August – it’s a matter of honor,” he wrote on his channel.

The SBS has also hit 117 power stations and power stations this month, Brovdi said, most of them in Crimea, casting a blackout on the island.

In addition to disrupting the military and the economy, this has caused a stir in Moscow, which is paying five billion rubles ($64mn) in compensation for black houses and laid-off workers, in addition to what was announced last week.

The spokesman of the Ukrainian military Dmytro Pletenchuk said that the Russian ships were stopped in the Sea of ​​Azov, and that the Kerch Bridge was allowed to stop “so that the Russians can leave the Ukrainian Crimea,” because “it will reduce our losses during our future operations in Crimea.”

A long-range strike in Ukraine this week destroyed a Tupolev-95 bomber at the Engels airfield 800km from Ukraine, and a MiG-29 fighter jet at the Khalino airfield in Kursk, as well as several anti-aircraft and anti-aircraft radars.

Ukraine also hit the Slavneft-Yanos refinery in Yaroslavl, which it described as the largest “in the middle of the country”.

In a twist to its military and power ambitions, Ukraine has hit four warehouses belonging to the online trading group Wildberries, which it suspects Russian recruits used to order most of its defense equipment and weapons.

Russia retaliated this month by targeting a Ukrainian port on the Black Sea, preventing it from exporting produce.

Container shipper Maersk said on July 22 it was diverting a number of containers scheduled to be unloaded in Odesa or Chornomorsk to Romania’s Constanta. This also means that Ukraine-bound vehicles waiting in Chornomorsk cannot be loaded unless they move to Constanta.

Ukraine retaliated, saying it had blocked Russian exports from the Don River to the Sea of ​​Azov, where Russia exports 30 percent of its crops.

Russia is retaliating by increasing the number of surface-to-air missiles in its nighttime strikes on Ukrainian cities.

Since June 26, Russia has included missiles in almost every strike, unlike in the past, when it scaled back its missiles to once a week.

Ukraine says it has learned how to use 95 percent of its drones and 87 percent of its cruise missiles, but less than half of Russia’s weapons.

“You hope that football will do for you what everything else has failed to do,” Zelenskyy wrote to Putin in June.

Militarnyi’s analysis showed that Russia is tapping into its missile reserves to meet this target, using its monthly production capacity in the first two weeks of July.