Russian drones struck a warehouse and a petrol station in Kyiv overnight, the city military administration said, a day after jet-powered drones hit fuel storage tanks in the capital.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on September 22 Ukraine was ready for an energy ceasefire, offering to stop striking Russian refineries if Russia stops striking Ukrainian power, with Washington to carry the offer to Moscow. The Kyiv strikes came the night after he made it.

Ukraine's General Staff confirmed strikes on two Russian oil refineries, at Ufa and at Samara, on September 22 and named both plants for the first time. Ukraine is taking Russian refining offline faster than at any point in the war, and the closer it gets to succeeding the harder Washington leans on it, because the diesel comes off the same world market that sets the price at an American pump.

No Russian official account of the night of September 22 to 23 on Russian territory, and no Ukrainian General Staff statement on it, had reached this monitor at the time of writing. Russian governors and the monitoring channels often post the previous night's strikes late, and nothing should be read into the silence.

Kyiv's fuel network, two nights running

A warehouse facility in Kyiv's Holosiivskyi district was damaged in a drone strike and a fire broke out afterwards, the Kyiv City Military Administration said, in comments reported by Ukrinform. Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a petrol station was also hit. Casualties were being clarified.

Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications added two more sites. In the Darnytskyi district a transport infrastructure facility was hit and a fire broke out on the roof of a petrol station, and in Solomianskyi debris reportedly fell between residential buildings, with a fire at a transport company's premises. It reported one injury in its preliminary account. Its Solomianskyi account matches the one in the Kyiv Independent rather than Ukrinform's, which said the debris fell in an open area.

The night before, jet-powered strike drones hit fuel storage tanks and a non-residential building in the Obolonskyi district, Klitschko said in comments reported by the Kyiv Independent. Eight people were injured, three of them taken to hospital and five treated where they were found. Debris fell on private residential ground in the Dniprovskyi district and two more people were hurt in Pecherskyi. Neither the operator of the tanks nor the operator of the warehouse has been named, and no source reports a shutdown or a loss of stored volume at either.

Petrol stations and fuel facilities have been a recurring Russian target since September 10, and the two nights added the Obolonskyi tanks, the Holosiivskyi station and the fire on the Darnytskyi station roof to the list.

The daytime raid on September 22 produced no damaged facility but did stop trains. Kyiv's ring-line commuter services were suspended in both directions on the instruction of Ukrainian Railways' monitoring group, to resume once the air threat passed, NV reported. Drone debris fell on a car park in the Darnytskyi district without starting a fire. No rail infrastructure was damaged.

A warehouse destroyed for the second time

In Odesa oblast the consumer goods maker Snow Panda said its warehouse complex was completely destroyed on September 22, the second time the same site has been flattened. "On 22 September, as a result of a Russian strike, our warehouse complex was completely destroyed for the second time," the company said in a statement reported by Euromaidan Press. The complex was first destroyed by a missile on July 1. No drone or missile model was specified for the second strike.

More detail also emerged on an Odesa warehouse hit in the raid of September 21 to 22. The site was a 14,000-square-metre logistics warehouse belonging to Berger Cargo, and it processed humanitarian shipments for southern Ukraine. "It was a missile strike; two missiles hit," Valerii Baranovskyi, the company's director and co-founder, told NV Business.

A shopping centre in Zaporizhzhia was struck on the evening of September 22 and caught fire, Ivan Fedorov, co-chair of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Defence Council, said in comments reported by Ukrinform. The centre was not named, the weapon was not disclosed, casualties were being clarified and no closure has been announced.

Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications later put the fire at 6,000 square metres and said two men, aged 37 and 39, were injured before firefighters put it out. It described the attack as overnight rather than in the evening. Russia's campaign against Ukrainian retail has been running for months.

Russia's night: three cities, a substation and a distribution centre

Russia sent a combined package overnight: 212 Shahed-type drones with Gerbera and Parodiya decoys, eight Banderol or Dan-T, four sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, an unstated number of Oniks anti-ship missiles and an unstated number of Iskander-M and KN-23 ballistic missiles. Ukraine's air force said it destroyed or suppressed 186 targets by 08:00, with hits at 22 locations and debris at four more. The widely repeated figure of 212 is the drone count alone and is not the total.

The sharpest element was a simultaneous strike on industrial enterprises in Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih and Pavlohrad at about 01:58. Oleksandr Hanzha of the Dnipropetrovska regional military administration said the three cities were hit at the same time. Oleksandr Vilkul, who heads the Kryvyi Rih defence council, confirmed ballistic missiles there and said cruise missiles were launched at the same targets.

The air force had warned of ballistic launches from Voronezh oblast.

The Dnipro toll rose through the morning from three wounded to three killed and six injured, with a Reuters count putting it at four killed. Four more people were injured at Mykolaiv, one of them critically.

Iuliia Mendel, a former press secretary to Zelenskiy, wrote on X that the Dnipro strike hit Interpipe, one of the country's biggest pipe makers, killing four workers and wounding seven. Neither Interpipe nor the regional administration has been found confirming it, and the claim is hers alone.

An energy facility was hit and about 100,000 consumers in Chernihiv oblast lost power. Ukrenergo has since said the facility was in a neighbouring region rather than in Chernihiv oblast itself, as first reported. One grid hit does not establish that the autumn campaign against Ukraine's power system has resumed.

In Odesa oblast the warehouses of the Silpo supermarket chain's distribution centre burned, confirmed by Oleh Kiper of the regional military administration, with more than 80 emergency service personnel deployed. Nobody was injured. Silpo said it was assessing the consequences and reconfiguring its processes to route deliveries around the damaged site.

Poltava oblast took what Ukrainian media called a large-scale attack on an industrial facility, which the regional authorities have not named. Naftogaz has since said that one of its gas facilities in the oblast was damaged beyond repair that night; whether it is the same site has not been established.

Nova Poshta has started suspending branches during every air raid, and says it may shut a site on its own monitoring without waiting for an official alert. A parcel network curtailing itself is a cost that never shows up as damage.

The grid, and a gas asset written off

Power went out across seven oblasts on September 22, the grid operator Ukrenergo said in comments reported by NV: Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Sumy. About 100,000 consumers in Chernihiv oblast lost supply after a strike on an energy facility in a neighbouring region, which took out the Koriukivka, Novhorod-Siverskyi, Nizhyn and Chernihiv districts. Ukrenergo asked households and businesses to conserve power voluntarily between 10:00 and 22:00 and imposed no mandatory industrial restrictions.

Ukrenergo attributes those outages to two causes at once, Russian drone strikes and artillery on one side and severe rainstorms and high winds on September 21 on the other, the weather having already blacked out three oblasts before the overnight attack arrived. The seven-oblast figure is not a strike tally.

Naftogaz Group said a gas facility of its own in Poltava oblast had taken critical damage in the previous night's ballistic attack, damage that "effectively makes it impossible to restore or resume operation", in a statement reported by NV. At least five ballistic missiles were used. The company said the equipment had already been withdrawn from service for the long term and the facility was already shut down when it was hit. The facility was not producing when it was hit. It is an asset written off rather than output lost, and reporting it as a hit to Ukrainian gas supply would be wrong.

Two refineries and a drone base

The General Staff's statement, issued on the morning of September 22, identified Bashneft-UNPZ in Bashkortostan, which it put at about 7.5mn tonnes of crude a year, and the Kuibyshev refinery at Samara, at about 7mn tonnes. It said both produce fuel for the Russian armed forces and cited Article 51 of the UN Charter. Neither Rosneft, which owns both, nor any Russian official has confirmed damage.

At Samara, the Kuibyshev plant caught fire in the early hours. Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said one person was killed and four injured in the region and that industrial enterprises had been targeted. He did not name a refinery. The regional drone danger regime ran from 01:35 to 07:00 local time and Kurumoch airport closed.

The capacity figures do not agree. The General Staff puts the Kuibyshev plant at about 7mn tonnes a year. Kyiv Independent, citing Reuters, puts it at about 3.7mn tonnes a year and up to 10,000 tonnes a day. Both cannot be right and no independent figure settles it. What is agreed is that a fire burned and that no source, Ukrainian or Russian, reports the plant stopping.

Euromaidan Press gives the plant's designed capacity as about 7mn tonnes a year and its 2024 throughput as 4.7mn tonnes.

Further outlets have reported the claim that the plant's AVT-5 primary crude unit was damaged. It now carries the names of two outlets, Militarnyi and Inkorr, rather than an anonymous monitoring channel. Militarnyi still hedges it as likely rather than established, no satellite analysis has been published and nobody official has confirmed it. It is reported, and it is not confirmed.

Euromaidan Press goes further than Militarnyi, reporting that FP-1 drones made by Ukraine's Fire Point struck both the AVT-4 and the AVT-5 atmospheric-vacuum distillation units, with a smoke plume about 100 km long by morning. The two accounts do not agree and neither is confirmed by a Russian source. Early on September 23 a monitoring account on X posted night footage it said showed the refinery burning, with two processing units hit and about half the capacity gone. The footage is undated, and it is not clear whether it shows the strike of the night before or a new one.

Ufa is clearer than it was. Until the General Staff statement nobody had said which of the three plants on the site was the target, and the combined capacity of all three runs above 23mn tonnes a year. Bashneft-UNPZ is now named, with a figure attached. What has not been resolved is the timing: Russian regional reporting dates the fire at Ufa to September 21, so one statement may still bundle two nights. Radiy Khabirov, head of Bashkortostan, said the attack was repelled and debris fell in the industrial zone, which is not the same as saying the plant was hit.

Russia's defence ministry said it destroyed 297 drones overnight across 15 regions. It published no breakdown, so that figure cannot be read as the sum of what governors reported: more than 70 over seven districts of Rostov oblast, according to Yuri Slyusar, and 28 over Voronezh oblast, according to Alexander Gusev, who reported a damaged country house and no casualties. Ten airports across the Volga, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan announced restrictions.

Behind all of it sits the plant that has already stopped. The Gazprom Neft refinery at Kapotnya in Moscow halted crude processing on September 21 after being hit on the night of September 19 to 20. It processes about 11.6mn tonnes a year and supplies 35% to 40% of the fuel burned in Moscow.

How much of Russia's refining is actually down is contested and every number comes from an interested party. Ukraine's General Staff says more than 45%. Poland's foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski says 30% to 40%. Kyiv Independent reports that half of Russia's six largest diesel-producing refineries have cut or halted output this month. No independent audit supports any of them. The cleanest available proxy is what Moscow does with its export rules, and it is reported to be preparing to extend its diesel export ban past the end of September for the third time since July.

Trump, speaking before meeting Zelenskiy, said Russia had "lost control" of its diesel industry because of Ukrainian attacks, without attaching a number.

Ukraine's General Staff said its drones hit a Russian drone storage and launch site near the settlement of Tsymbulova in Oryol oblast, about 150 km from the border. "At least three drone storage warehouses were hit and caught fire, a launch site used for jet-powered strike drones was damaged, and five launchers were also damaged," the General Staff said, in comments reported by the Kyiv Independent, which said it could not independently verify the extent of the damage. No Russian official response has been reported.

Three villages in the Lyman sector

Lieutenant General Andrii Biletskyi, who commands Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps, said his forces had cleared Shandryholove and Derylove and held Drobysheve, in the Lyman direction. The Institute for the Study of War carried the same three settlements in its assessment of September 20.

The figures are the corps' own. Biletskyi put Russian dead in the second stage of what Ukraine calls Operation Vivaldi at more than 800, and total Russian losses including wounded and captured at more than 3,000. Across both stages he claimed 125 square kilometres returned to Ukrainian control, of which 50 square kilometres were de-occupied rather than simply cleared of Russian raiding parties.

Biletskyi's larger claim is the one worth watching: that the operation has broken the northern arm of a Russian plan to encircle Kramatorsk. If that holds, it matters more than the villages do. It is also, for now, the claim of the commander whose operation it is.

The other side is not disputing the direction of travel. Rybar, among the most widely followed Russian military bloggers, has conceded that the situation north and south of Lyman is critical and that Ukrainian forces are gaining ground, according to a translation of its post shared on X. That is second-hand, but it is a hostile source describing the other side's progress.

The corps also says it is the first force anywhere to deliver ground robots by air, dropping kamikaze ground vehicles more than 10 kilometres behind Russian lines from heavy bombers. "Wars are won by infantry, but we protect our infantrymen, so robots go to the enemy first," was how the claim was relayed. No independent confirmation exists and the first-in-the-world framing is the claimant's own.

Two caveats apply. The announcement was made on September 20 and the captures themselves are undated, so this is a disclosure about an operation rather than a battle report. And the Institute for the Study of War, in the same assessment that carried the settlement names, recorded that neither side advanced that day, because it maps confirmed front-line change rather than operational narrative. The two are not necessarily in conflict, but they are not the same claim.

Washington's problem, and now Paris

The American position is not subtle. "Mr Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia, because he's causing a shortage of diesel," President Donald Trump said on September 13. Axios reported on September 20 that he has raised the subject repeatedly and that the White House sees the refinery strikes as one factor in rising global fuel prices.

Kyiv's answer, delivered the day before, was to widen the ask rather than narrow it. Zelenskiy said Ukraine's energy sector, its critical infrastructure and its food exports must stop being targets, and that matching de-escalation would follow. Turkey's foreign minister Hakan Fidan said Ankara has sent both sides proposals for de-escalation in the Black Sea, framing it around food security.

Kyiv has also asked Moscow to show its hand. "If the Russians are serious about this, then let them provide lists of objects, clarify the details. We are waiting for this," foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said on September 20, adding that any truce must protect all Ukrainian energy facilities from every type of weapon.

A third mediator joined on September 22. French President Emmanuel Macron said he had discussed a moratorium on strikes against energy infrastructure with Trump, along with air defence for Ukraine, and then met Zelenskiy in New York on the same subject. Three tracks are now running, one American and about diesel, one Turkish and about grain, one French and about the grid, and each side still wants the other's half of the bargain first.

What the war now costs Ukraine

Yehor Chernev, who chairs the Rada committee on national security, defence and intelligence, put numbers on the arithmetic at a conference in Kyiv on September 18. The war cost Ukraine about $115mn a day in 2022. It costs about $190mn a day now.

The increase is not inflation. Chernev attributed it to the volume of weapons being consumed, the higher price of more advanced systems, the number of wounded who can no longer serve and the expansion of the army itself. Ukraine faces a shortfall of more than $20bn this year, and domestic tax revenue is coming in below projection, which he put down to Russian strikes on Ukrainian businesses. The strikes that halted 90% of Ukraine's steel output are the same strikes that take the tax base out from under the defence budget.

The draft 2027 budget allocates Hr4.9 trillion ($110bn) of a total Hr8 trillion ($179bn) to security and defence, a record, with about two thirds of the defence share going on weapons and equipment.

Chernev's ask of European governments was unusually specific, and unusually cheap. "You have missiles in your warehouses now, do not give them to us for free. Replace them with those that will be made in five years and put them in your warehouses," he said. Ukraine has interceptors contracted five years out; it needs them this winter.

Moscow's answer is to take the shops

Russia has found a use for the damage. In August President Vladimir Putin signed a decree letting the government take control of strategically important facilities if their owners fail to protect them from Ukrainian attack or to repair strike damage quickly. It is an expropriation mechanism with an air defence justification bolted on.

It is being used, and the list is lengthening weekly. On September 21 Putin placed Aptar Vladimir, the Russian subsidiary of the Illinois packaging group AptarGroup, under temporary government control. On September 17, the Russian operations of Auchan, Nestle, Lemana PRO, formerly Leroy Merlin, and the French logistics operators FM Logistics and Bati Logistics went under the control of L.E.V. Management. Kommersant valued that batch at at least RUB600bn, about $7.14bn. A Russian police general has publicly promised to protect the seized Auchan stores from drone attack.

Read alongside the strikes, this is the same war conducted with paperwork. Both sides are now targeting each other's civilian economy directly, and Moscow has worked out how to convert incoming drones into a legal basis for taking foreign-owned retail and logistics assets it wanted anyway.

Weapons and technology

The strongest item of the week is not a weapon but a machine tool. Kyiv Independent published leaked documents showing contracts worth nearly $3mn between Galika-Service, the Russian arm of the Swiss firm Galika AG, and 87 Russian companies, 51 of them in the defence sector. The largest client was Kalashnikov Concern, at nearly $800,000, followed by the Imperial Tula Arms Factory at about $500,000. Allen Maggard of C4ADS put the policy problem plainly: Brussels needs to go after the consumables that keep already-imported machine tools running.

Russia is mass-producing the Dan-T, a weaponised version of the Dan-M target drone that Russia's Sokol bureau built in the early 1990s to imitate US Tomahawks for air-defence training. Stripped of its recovery parachute and fitted with a warhead, it navigates on satellite and inertial guidance. RBC-Ukraine, citing unnamed sources, reported plans for up to 2,000 units by the end of this year and up to 14,000 in 2027, with a range of up to 500 km launched from aircraft such as the Su-35 and about 250 km from ground launchers. The same report says Russia intends to raise turbojet-powered drones from 50% to 60% of attacks now to 80% by November.

Whether the Dan-T is already in combat use is contested. Euromaidan Press says there is no documented combat employment. Yet the Ukrainian Air Force's own breakdown of the raid of September 21 to 22 carries a combined "Banderol/Dan-T" line, listing eight of them launched and eight downed alongside four Kalibr cruise missiles and 212 Shahed-type drones including jet-powered variants and Parodiya decoys, Ukrinform reported. The air force put 186 targets down or suppressed and recorded hits at 22 locations. Those are the defending force's figures for its own performance. Rostec said on September 14 that the Dan-T had been launched hundreds of times in Ukraine, which is the manufacturer's holding company talking about its own weapon.

That compounds a gap Ukraine has admitted. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russia has been using jet-powered Geran-4 drones against Ukrainian radar stations since early September, and that Ukrainian air defence can counter jet drones effectively only with air-to-air missiles, of which Ukraine is short. Ukraine's military intelligence says Russia built about 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4s and Geran-5s in August against about 2,800 piston-engined Geran-2s, the first month jet output has passed conventional.

A caution on how those numbers get made. Serhiy Beskrestnov, the Ukrainian radio-electronic warfare specialist known as Flash, says Russia is now flying rocket-propelled Shaheds that arrive "literally straight from the factory", and that the date visible in photographs of a recovered drone records when a single component was manufactured, not when the airframe was built. Production estimates inferred from component date stamps are therefore softer than they look, including some in this monitor.

Against that volume, two Ukrainian interceptors appeared within a day of each other. Vluchnyk unveiled the Zorelit v5, giving a maximum speed of 416 km/h, a range of up to 47 km per charge, about 17 minutes of endurance at a 200 km/h cruise, a warhead of 300 to 600 grams and optional AI target detection in the terminal phase, Militarnyi reported. Those are the maker's figures and no combat use is claimed for the v5. Wild Hornets said its STING S had downed about 10 Geran-4 drones and several Geran-5s in limited deployment and would go to mass production about a month after combat testing ends, Euromaidan Press reported. That kill count is the manufacturer's claim about its own product. Zelenskiy has said 67 companies are working on interceptors and two have completed combat tests.

Christopher Miller, a correspondent who covers the war, noted that Zelenskiy has twice said the SBU's air defence units have used a new Ukrainian interceptor against the jet-powered Gerans, and that the air force said this month it was knocking out only about 60% of the new high-speed models. His point was that a fix which scales in the next month or two would arrive just ahead of the winter campaign.

The gap the interceptors are chasing is a countermeasures failure that a Ukrainian official has now conceded in public. Beskrestnov said Ukraine spent roughly a year without systematic countermeasures against the MESH radio networks Russia uses to control its Geran jet drones, and warned against repeating the mistake with Russia's Rassvet satellite constellation, which would give permanent space-based command links to drones and missiles. Russia has launched about 32 satellites and needs 200 to 250 for continuous coverage, Euromaidan Press reported, and Rassvet-3 has not reached its 800 km target orbit. The supply chain runs through the same box: a teardown published on Ukraine's War and Sanctions portal in January identified the Geran-5's MESH modem as a Xingkai Tech XK-F358, sitting alongside Texas Instruments, CTS Corporation, Monolithic Power Systems and Infineon parts, Militarnyi reported.

Russia is also digging. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russia is expanding production of the composite materials used in Geran-type drones and building underground facilities at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone to shield drone production from Ukrainian strikes. That is a hardening measure rather than a capacity measure, and it is a direct answer to the campaign Ukraine has been running against the plant.

Russia is also dropping more from the air. Military Summary, a pro-Russian account on X, relayed Ukrainian figures that Russia used 8,766 glide bombs fitted with UMPK conversion kits in August, or 283 a day, and put the range of the upgraded UMPK-PD at up to 95 km. The Ukrainian original was not located and the figures are carried as a claim.

Europe's temper

Sikorski disclosed that Poland has told Moscow it would answer an attack offensively. "So if you do something that no one wants, we won't just sit back and do nothing. We will respond both defensively and offensively," he said he had told Russian officials, adding: "be careful, because we have more combat aircraft than you do." He would not say when the warning was given or to whom.

It lands in a fortnight of similar statements. Poland's Donald Tusk said on September 17 that intelligence indicated Russia could stage drone or missile attacks against countries supporting Ukraine and present them as accidents; Lithuania's Kestutis Budrys confirmed the same intelligence and raised the possibility of a false flag. Michal Koudelka of the Czech security service BIS said Moscow could attempt a limited incursion into a border state of the alliance. Estonia's Jonatan Vseviov was drier: "Until then, keep calm, carry on and support Ukraine." Baltic officials say they see no sign of an imminent attack. Macron has ordered a plan to protect French critical infrastructure and defence plants from drone and cyberattack, saying: "The day we are attacked physically, we will not be warned."

The bloc's own sanctions regime meanwhile came within hours of lapsing. EU ambassadors failed to agree the renewal covering nearly 3,000 listed Russian individuals and entities and reconvened at 08:00 Brussels time on September 22, with the foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas pressing publicly. The renewal went through, for three years, at the price of delisting the billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman. Separately, the European External Action Service is proposing the largest single listing package to date, 827 entities and 744 individuals.

Two smaller entries, and the value of both is in what the authorities would not say. Latvia's National Armed Forces issued a yellow alert late on September 21 over a possible threat to airspace in Kraslava municipality on the eastern border, then declared it over; no violation was reported, nothing was downed and no actor was named. Accounts circulating that fighters of the alliance were scrambled rest on a headline service alone. And Russia's Federal Security Service closed its side of the border crossing opposite Narva in north-eastern Estonia from September 16 to 26. Estonia's interior ministry said its eastern border remains calm. It is recorded because a unilateral border closure is the sort of step that precedes others.

Arson and sabotage in the EU and the UK

Three incidents were recorded, two without attribution.

German investigators found a wrecked drone near Wunstorf Air Base, a Luftwaffe transport airfield in Lower Saxony, and days later what Sueddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR describe as a suspicious substance that is likely explosives, with forensic analysis incomplete, liga.net reported. Investigators are said to believe the drone may have been near the airfield for a long time, possibly about two years. No damage to the base is reported. The case sits with the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the Federal Criminal Police Office, and no German official has attributed it to anyone. The Russia attribution that appears in the surrounding coverage belongs to the separate drone attack on Leipzig Airport in early August, not to Wunstorf.

Poland's Defence Ministry disclosed that a drone had operated for about five minutes roughly 500 metres from the US Navy's Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defence installation at Redzikowo on September 15. The ministry said the drone "did not approach the base's critical facilities or fly over the base" and that "the drone was detected, and the location from which the operator controlled it was also identified", the Kyiv Post reported. A duty officer called the civilian emergency number 112, which the ministry calls standard procedure for activity outside the perimeter. The operator has not been identified and no link to Russia has been stated.

Moldova put a number on its own year. President Maia Sandu said after chairing a National Security Council meeting on September 21 that there had been 39 Russian drone incursions into Moldovan airspace in the first eight months of 2026, against 17 in the whole of 2025, Euromaidan Press reported. The meeting also took decisions on protecting energy infrastructure and accelerating air defence. Unlike the German and Polish cases, this one is attributed, by name, by a head of state.

Nothing new was recorded in the period on undersea cables or pipelines in the Baltic and the North Sea, on arson, on rail sabotage, on parcel devices, on arrests or expulsions, or on GPS jamming, and no new EU or national counter-drone measure was announced.

The ledgers

The running ledgers have become too large for this publication and moved to three spreadsheets at permanent addresses so they can be bookmarked and checked rather than scrolled past.

Russian strikes on Ukraine's economic infrastructure, 222 rows

Ukrainian strikes on economic infrastructure in Russia and occupied territory, 130 rows

Arson, sabotage and drone incursions in the EU and the UK, 46 rows

All three are non-exhaustive. Every row is sourced, and where only one side has spoken the row says so. Defence ministry figures are recorded as claims. In the sabotage table, attribution is given exactly as the authorities state it and no further.

Tit for tat

Read across the two ledgers and the exchange is no longer really about the front. Russia is spending jet-powered drones on a toilet paper maker's warehouse in Odesa oblast, a shopping centre in Zaporizhzhia, a petrol station in Kyiv. Ukraine is spending long-range drones on distillation units at Samara and a drone shed in Oryol. Each side is targeting facilities that keep the other's civilian economy running.

What is new is that Ukraine's success has acquired a cost in Washington rather than in Moscow, and that three capitals are now offering to broker the same truce while neither combatant will move first. Moscow, for its part, has stopped treating the damage purely as loss and started treating it as a legal instrument, seizing foreign-owned shops and warehouses from owners it says failed to defend them.

And one side has now offered to stop. Zelenskiy's energy ceasefire proposal is narrow and self-interested, trading a Ukrainian capability that is working for a Russian one that is hurting, and Moscow has not answered it. Trump has his own reason to want it, which is diesel on the world market. Nothing in the two nights just covered suggests either side has begun behaving as though a truce were close, and Zelenskiy said on September 22 that Ukraine had intelligence that Russia was preparing a new massive attack.

For one week the ground moved as well as the air, and three villages in the Lyman sector went back onto the Ukrainian side of the map. Against a war that costs $190mn a day, that is what Kyiv has to show, and it is why the argument in New York is about whether it can go on hitting the one target that is working.