President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian armed forces to prepare massive strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, in what he cast as retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries.

"The Russian Armed Forces have been instructed to prepare and carry out massive strikes against Ukraine's energy facilities. Ukraine will receive a response; I have given the order," Putin said after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek on September 1, in remarks reported by UNN. He put it as an answer to Ukrainian strikes on Russian civilian infrastructure and oil refineries.

The order came the day President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told airlines, insurers and foreign governments, through ambassadors in Kyiv and Moscow, that "the Russian sky will de facto be closed" to civil aviation, in a statement reported by Kyiv Independent. Putin answered that directly. "If this is said out loud, it is a declaration of state terrorism. Negotiations are not held with terrorists. We will find a way to respond," he said.

Russia's defence ministry had said on August 30 that it was preparing massive strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Russia has been hitting Ukraine with missiles for over 50 days in a row and Kyiv is under almost continuous attack for the last week.

The increment is that the order is now Putin's own, and that he has tied it explicitly to the refinery campaign, which makes the coming weeks a test of whether the deep-strike war on Russian oil buys Ukraine a bargaining position or costs it a grid. Ukraine's heating season begins in October, and Kherson's combined heat and power plant has already lost all of its remaining generating equipment. As IntelliNews reported, Ukraine generating capacity has been reduced from 54.5GW pre-war to about 12GW now.

Ukraine names the target at Ust-Luga

Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate said operators from its Department of Active Operations and Department of Unmanned Systems carried out the raid on the Novatek-Ust-Luga complex as part of a joint deep-strike operation with the Defence Forces, and that it damaged key components of an oil-processing unit and other technological equipment, causing a large fire, Ukrinform reported on September 2. Leningrad region governor Alexander Drozdenko said the port had sustained damage and that a fire had broken out, later saying it was extinguished with no casualties. He did not name Novatek, gave no facility and gave no extent.

Ust-Luga is one of Russia's largest ports and a principal outlet for crude and refined products. Kyiv Post put its throughput at about 700,000 barrels of oil a day and 32.8mn tonnes of petroleum exports a year, while Euromaidan Press gave 32.9mn tonnes of oil products exported in 2025. No named source has said whether any of that capacity is now offline, and Novatek had not commented in the reporting available.

The scale of the raid is also unsettled. Drozdenko said 52 drones were downed over Leningrad region. Kyiv Independent carried his claim of 38 destroyed across the oblast with 17 intercepted near Ust-Luga itself. Russia's defence ministry claimed 516 Ukrainian drones destroyed across 18 regions that night, a figure no independent source corroborates and which is a claim rather than a count.

Some of the drones sent at the Baltic coast crossed Latvia and entered Estonian airspace, prompting Nato fighters to scramble. Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna confirmed the violation. That reach is what lies behind Zelenskiy's warning to civil aviation, and behind Putin's answer to it.

Odesa hit twice on the same three points

Russia deliberately damaged a border crossing point on the border with Romania as well as export infrastructure, Zelenskiy said of the first night, in remarks carried by Reuters. The Orlivka ferry checkpoint, which handles up to 1,200 vehicles a day and was already suspended, was temporarily closed again. Seven civilians were injured across Odesa city and region.

A Nova Poshta terminal in Odesa that had been damaged in earlier strikes caught fire again on September 1, and the blaze was put out by State Emergency Service crews with no casualties at the site, regional governor Oleh Kiper said in a post reported by Ukrinform. "The enemy continues to strike civilian infrastructure in the Odesa region," Kiper said. "The attack caused a fire."

The following night brought the same list back. Port infrastructure, energy infrastructure, the Orlivka crossing and a Nova Poshta terminal were hit with ballistic weapons, guided aerial bombs and Banderol munitions, Kyiv Post reported. Eight people were injured, one of them a child, and two were taken to hospital, according to the head of the Odesa city military administration, cited by Ukrinform. A 24-storey residential building, office buildings and two educational institutions were also struck, electricity was disrupted and repair crews were mobilised.

Odesa's collapse as an export gateway is now complete. Vessel calls fell from seven or eight ships a day to one over the last days of August, and the arithmetic behind that has not moved: the drone war on ports has done to Ukrainian shipping what the grain port closures have done to the wheat trade.

Warehouses, a supermarket and a double tap

Three warehouse facilities burned in the Bucha district of Kyiv region on the evening of September 1. All three fires were extinguished, and the State Emergency Service said Russian forces "carried out two additional strikes on the warehouses, deliberately creating an additional danger for emergency personnel", in a statement reported by Ukrinform. Air raid alerts complicated the firefighting. Owners and contents were not identified. It is the second time in a week that responders at a Kyiv region warehouse have been struck while working, after the Nova Poshta site at Sviatopetrivske on August 28.

A supermarket was destroyed and stores were damaged in Dnipropetrovsk region in more than 20 attacks from the evening of September 1, with aerial bombs and drones hitting the Nikopol, Pavlohrad and Synelnykivsky districts, Oleksandr Hanzha of the regional military administration said in remarks reported by Ukrinform. No chain was named. Neither were the owners of an industrial facility in Poltava region hit by jet-powered drones overnight into September 2, where damage was not specified and no one was hurt, according to Vitalii Diakivnych of the Poltava regional military administration, reported by Ukrinform.

Through August the chains attacked include: Rozetka, Epicentr, Fora, Avrora, Varus, Nova Poshta. In this period only Nova Poshta and DTEK appear by name, the latter because a worker was injured when a drone hit one of its coal mines in Dnipropetrovsk region on August 31, according to the company's own war updates. The pattern set out in Operation Wildberries has not stopped; the disclosure has thinned.

Nothing new on Russia's side of the ledger

For the first time in this series, a full day passed with no reported Ukrainian strike on economic infrastructure inside Russia. Nothing was added to the ledger for September 2. The only material published that day was the intelligence directorate's confirmation of the Ust-Luga raid of the night before.

Drones hit Tolyatti and Novokuibyshevsk in Samara region on the same night, damaging a multi-storey building, but no source establishes that the Novokuibyshevsk refinery was struck; Kyiv Post notes only that the plant lies about 3 km away, along with electrical substations and Transneft-Druzhba pipeline facilities. Proximity is not a strike. Ukraine's General Staff also reported hitting a fuel and lubricants depot at Borisovka in Belgorod region on September 1 with damage being assessed, but it was listed alongside drone depots and a command post, which places it among military rather than economic targets.

The Russian fuel picture behind those strikes has not been restated since August 30, when Kyiv Post set out the position: the export ban on diesel, marine fuel and gas oil producers extended to September 30 and the general fuel export ban to January 31, 2027; August refining averaging 3.8mn barrels a day against a normal summer requirement of 5.3mn to 5.5mn; 21 Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries during the month; purchase limits of 40 to 60 litres per vehicle at major Moscow chains; and AI-95 at RUB120 ($1.50) a litre. Nothing published in this period changes those numbers in either direction. That is the campaign Putin has now said he is answering.

Arson and sabotage in the EU

This monitor adds a standing section from today on arson, sabotage and drone incidents inside the EU that are connected to the war: attacks on military assets, on the defence industry, on the logistics that carry aid to Ukraine, and on the power grids, airports and cables that carry everything else. Attribution is reported only where a named official or agency has made it, because in most of these cases nobody has.

Two German substations were attacked within about 12 hours of each other on September 1. At Turnow-Preilack in Brandenburg, which connects LEAG's Jaenschwalde lignite plant to the 50Hertz transmission grid, purpose-built rockets carrying conductive material were fired into the extra-high-voltage lines. Conductive material reached the lines in two cases and caused short circuits, and a double-digit number of improvised devices was found on the site, several of them unfired, Brandenburg interior minister Jan Redmann said in remarks reported by Tagesspiegel. "That was no child's prank," Redmann said, adding that these were rockets manufactured for the purpose rather than fireworks. Grid operator 50Hertz said there was a brief line interruption, that all lines were back in service and that general supply was never affected. LEAG chief executive Adi Roesch said one of the plant's 500 MW blocks shut down automatically after the short circuit and was expected back the same evening.

Redmann said the investigation was running in all directions. He ruled out neither foreign powers nor the left-wing militants who have claimed earlier attacks on German infrastructure. Nobody has been arrested and nobody has claimed responsibility.

About 12 hours later a short circuit at the Bergheim substation on the Amprion grid near Cologne took several lines out. RWE said five generating blocks were affected, Neurath G and F and Niederaussem H, G and K, amounting to 4,200 MW of capacity, of which about 3,000 MW was being fed in at the moment of the incident, ZDFheute reported. Amprion said general supply was unaffected and system stability remained guaranteed. Police said they were not assuming a technical failure but a deliberate act, Euronews reported, while calling it premature to confirm a link to Brandenburg.

Both of those sit against a case Germany has now formally attributed. Interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said on September 1 that the drone carrying explosives found on the tarmac at Leipzig/Halle airport in August, beside a Ukrainian Antonov Airlines cargo aircraft used to move weapons to Ukraine, matched Russian technology used in Ukraine, and that Russian state entities had supplied the equipment and expertise while leaving execution to locally recruited operatives. The detonator failed and the device was defused by a robot. Two further drones were found near the airport on August 14 and 25. Foreign minister Johann Wadephul, alongside him, said "the Russian leadership decided deliberately to do significant damage again to our already massively burdened bilateral relationship", in remarks reported by AP.

Germany ordered the closure of the Russian consulate-general in Bonn from September 18, terminated the lease on the Russian House cultural centre in Berlin, proposed further Russian listings on EU sanctions rolls, tightened entry controls for Russian nationals and summoned Russia's ambassador. The Russian embassy called the accusations absurd and foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would respond.

The EU followed on September 2. The European External Action Service summoned Russia's ambassador in Brussels, France's Jean-Noel Barrot summoned the Russian charge d'affaires in Paris, and the Dutch and Belgian foreign ministers summoned Russia's ambassadors in The Hague and Brussels, Asharq Al-Awsat reported. Belgium's Maxime Prevot said the attack "comes in addition to a long series of unacceptable incursions on the territory of other EU and Nato Allies in the past months". EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, at the informal foreign ministers' meeting in Wicklow, said the incident had "all the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism", EU Today reported.

Three defence-industry sites burned or exploded in August and only one of the three has produced arrests. A building used by Milrem Robotics, maker of the THeMIS unmanned ground vehicle supplied to Ukraine, was set alight in Tallinn overnight on August 16 to 17; Estonian state prosecutor Gardi Anderson called the fire deliberate and premeditated and said three suspects had been detained in Latvia, ERR reported. Milrem chief executive Kuldar Vaarsi said deliveries to Ukraine were not disrupted. Explosions tore through ammunition storage at the EMCO plant near Belitsa in Bulgaria on August 10, with no casualties and a partial state of disaster declared within 500 m; BTA reported that all possible causes are being investigated. A fire in the powder-pressing area at KNDS Ammo Italy in Colleferro on August 13 was followed by an explosion, with all 24 workers accounted for, Euronews reported; Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto said the government had seen nothing to suggest Russian involvement.

A Stuttgart court convicted a 30-year-old Ukrainian of spying for the purposes of sabotage on August 18 over test parcels containing GPS trackers, linked to the 2024 incident in which a package caught fire at Leipzig airport before loading onto a DHL cargo plane, and sentenced him to one year and three months, with two co-defendants acquitted, Euronews reported. Poland's Internal Security Agency detained a 29-year-old Russian in Warsaw on August 7 over a plot to kill a person holding US and Ukrainian citizenship whom Prime Minister Donald Tusk described as "inconvenient for Putin's regime", Notes from Poland reported. Germany's domestic intelligence service assessed that a cache holding two live firearms found in a Brandenburg forest was a Russian dead letterbox left for agents tasked with what officials called kinetic operations, Euronews reported, citing NDR, WDR and Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

There is no published tally of hybrid incidents in Europe for 2026. The most recent counts stop earlier: the Center for Strategic and International Studies recorded three Russian attacks in Europe in 2022, 12 in 2023 and 34 in 2024 in its March 2025 study, and the Associated Press documented 145 incidents with proven links to Russia, its proxies or Belarus between 2022 and December 2025, including 26 arson or explosive incidents in 2024 against one in 2023. Neither number can be carried forward to this year.

GPS interference is the constant underneath all of it. Poland's National Institute of Telecommunications recorded significant disruption on about 70% of days in May and June this year and on 63% of days in the first 19 days of August, and attributed the source to electronic warfare activity in the Baltic Sea region without naming a state, Euronews reported. The Polish minehunter ORP Albatros was jammed on August 21.

Weapons and technology

Zircon is not what Russia said it was. Ukraine's Defence Intelligence, publishing through its War&Sanctions portal on August 30, concluded that the 3M22 Zircon is a two-stage solid-fuel ballistic missile and not the scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missile Russia has claimed. It identified a solid-fuel rocket motor, model 3L2211, made by NPO Iskra, a 3G22 warhead weighing about 120 kg made by GosNIImash, a titanium tail section, a Baget-83 onboard computer and 70 Russian enterprises in the supply chain, and put the maximum speed recorded on radar at Mach 6.8 against a claimed Mach 9. The finding rests on fragments recovered in February 2024 and took two years of work with the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise, Defense Express reported. The War Zone reached the same reading of the evidence. This is a demonstrated finding from recovered wreckage, and it lands the day after the air force reported Zircons being fired at Ukraine again.

Interceptor expenditure. The open-source monitoring account AMK Mapping counted at least 18 Patriot PAC-3 interceptors fired across the last two ballistic attacks on Kyiv, nine in each. It put the first salvo's result at seven RM-48U modified S-400 ballistic missiles brought down, and the second at about two Iskander-M, with one Patriot malfunctioning after launch. On its own reading, if the "small package" of interceptors Zelenskiy said had been delivered is no larger than 20, Ukraine is close to empty again, and it argues that the smaller attack of eight modified S-400 missiles the previous week was designed to draw those rounds down. Ukraine does not publish interceptor expenditure and no official has confirmed any of it. The stock question has not moved since interceptor stocks ran dry in July, and it is the reason Putin's order matters.

Volumes and intercepts. The air force said 218 Shahed-type drones, about a third of them jet-powered, were launched on the night of August 31 to September 1, alongside Iskander-M, KN-23 and S-400 ballistic missiles, Zircons, Kalibr cruise missiles, Kh-31P anti-radiation missiles and S8000 Banderol munitions, with 199 targets neutralised, comprising five ballistic missiles, five Kalibr, two Banderol and 187 drones, and hits at 28 locations. The following night it reported 178 weapons launched: two Iskander-M, two Kh-59 or Kh-69 guided missiles and 174 attack drones, about half of them jet-powered, of which 141 were neutralised, including 138 drones and three Banderol, with hits at 16 locations and debris at four more, Ukrinform reported. Both sets of figures are the air force's claims, not counts.

The disclosure held for a second day. Ukraine's air force stopped publishing missile launch and interception numbers on August 11 and began giving ballistic intercept counts again on September 1. It did so again on September 2, with a full launched-against-downed breakdown including missile types and launch platforms. Two days is a pattern rather than an exception, though no source says whether it is a policy change. The arithmetic still does not permit a missile interception rate, because the four missiles fired on the second night are simply absent from the intercept list rather than recorded as leakers.

Propulsion. The jet-powered share of the nightly package rose from about a third to about half across the two nights, on the air force's own figures. No new engine, turbojet or range-extension announcement appeared in the period.

Countermeasures. Russia has covered a Voronezh-DM over-the-horizon early-warning radar at the former Dunayevka airfield in Kaliningrad region with anti-drone netting, Defense Express reported, the first time a strategic radar of that class has been seen physically screened against drones. The radar has a 6,000 km detection range and reportedly tracks up to 500 targets at once. Ukraine struck a Voronezh-DM near Armavir in Krasnodar Krai in May 2024; whether that set has been restored is not known.

Production, announced. Russia plans to produce about 10,000 Dan-T cruise missiles in 2027, a weapon with a 500 km range and a 135 kg warhead costing about 35% less than the Banderol, Militarnyi reported. No combat use has been recorded. This is an announcement, not a capability.

What was not there. No confirmed first combat use of a new weapon type by either side. No Kinzhal, Oreshnik or intercontinental missile use. Nothing new on AI-controlled or autonomously targeting drones, on swarm control, on jamming or spoofing inside Ukraine, or on fibre-optic drone control. The drone arms race continues to be run on volume and speed.

Major strikes and targets

Strikes on targets in Russia

Strikes on economic infrastructure in Russia and Russian-occupied territory since 1 June 2026. Compiled from publicly available sources, including our own reporting and the Centre for Eastern Studies' war reports. Dates are of the strike where known and of first report otherwise; the list is of significant strikes on economic targets and is not exhaustive.

Strikes on targets in Ukraine

Strikes on economic infrastructure in Ukraine since 1 June 2026. Compiled from publicly available sources, including our own reporting and the Centre for Eastern Studies' war reports. Dates are of the strike where known and of first report otherwise; the list is of significant strikes on economic targets and is not exhaustive.

Arson, sabotage and drone incidents in the EU

Arson, sabotage and drone incidents in the EU connected to the war in Ukraine since 1 August 2026. Attribution is given only where a named official or agency has made one, and in most of these cases nobody has. Compiled from publicly available sources; the list is not exhaustive.

The pattern

The tit-for-tat has fallen out of step. Through August the two ledgers grew together, a refinery for a distribution centre, a grain terminal for a port. In this period Russia added six entries and Ukraine none, and the one Ukrainian entry that carried over from the night before was upgraded rather than repeated.

That is not a change in capability. Ukraine reached the Baltic coast, put drones over Estonian airspace and forced Nato fighters into the air, all in the same operation. It is a change in tempo, and tempo is the thing deep strikes cannot sustain: a raid on Ust-Luga is a set-piece, while a Shahed package against Odesa is a routine. Russia can run the routine every night. Ukraine cannot run the set-piece every night, and the ledger shows the difference.

Putin's order collapses the distance between the two campaigns and states the exchange rate out loud. Ukraine is working on the money, the refineries and terminals through which Russian oil turns into revenue, and Russia now says it will answer that on the grid. The winter campaign against Ukraine's grid has a stated trigger for the first time, the heating season starts in October, and Ukraine's interceptor stocks are the variable nobody publishes.

The third ledger is the one to watch after that. Nothing in the EU column has been attributed to Russia by a court, and only the Leipzig drone has been attributed by a government, but the target sets rhyme with the war ledgers exactly: substations, ammunition plants, robotics factories, air cargo. Germany lost 4,200 MW off the grid for a few hours without a single missile crossing its border.

Two details from this period will matter more than the tonnage. The first is that emergency crews at a Kyiv region warehouse were struck twice more while they worked, the second such case in a week. The second is that the target lists have gone quiet on names. When chains stop confirming which of their sites burned, the ledger stops being able to measure the damage to the economy and starts being able to measure only the attacks.