Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
On the frontline with one of Ukraine’s deadliest drone pilots
Before Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Olexsandr, 32, had been an IT guy at a logistics company. “I think you know it because we have a big warehouse in England. I haven’t been,” he told Daniel Boffey.
Today, Olexsandr’s reputation is not built on his skills in fixing software glitches for a multinational company, but on a kill tally that makes him perhaps Ukraine’s deadliest kamikaze drone pilot on the frontline. “I haven’t met anyone who has destroyed more,” he reluctantly admits.
Since last May, Olexsandr, who has not enlisted in the army but floats around the frontline offering his deadly thumbs to brigades in need, has acted as a one-man wrecking ball through the Russian army.
He pulls out his mobile phone to examine an inventory. He has destroyed five tanks, five combat infantry vehicles, five armoured personnel carriers, one combat reconnaissance vehicle, two multipurpose lightly armed transporters, an infantry fighting vehicle and an airborne combat vehicle. That is 20 pieces of deadly and highly valuable pieces of Russian hardware taken off the battlefield.
Kyiv claims victories near Bakhmut
Ukrainian forces have recaptured the heights over Bakhmut and are successfully encircling Russian troops in the city, a defence minister in Kyiv has said.
In an interview with the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey, Hanna Maliar said Russian soldiers could no longer move around Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region and progress was being made in outflanking enemy forces after months of deadly battle.
With Ukraine on the advance on the outskirts of the city, she claimed that Russia had been seeking to draw their combat units away by attacking areas of the Kharkiv region liberated from Russian occupation last September.
Maliar warned of a “nightmare” situation in Kharkiv after 12,000 civilians in the Kharkiv region were ordered to evacuate. On Thursday, Ukrainian authorities ordered a mandatory evacuation of 37 towns and villages in the Kupiansk district, in the Kharkiv region, which lies north of Bakhmut.
You can see an interactive showing how Bakhmut became a pivot in the war.
Zelenskiy assassination plot foiled, says security service
Ukraine claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelenskiy after the arrest of a woman suspected of gathering intelligence about his movements, Daniel Boffey reported.
The unnamed woman was said by the security service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, to be gathering information about Zelenskiy’s visit to the southern Mykolaiv region, on which it was said Russia was planning to unleash a major air assault.
On his Telegram channel, Zelenskiy said the head of the SBU had updated him on the “fight against traitors”.
A drone attack on Moscow earlier this year, attributed to Ukraine’s military, had been described by the Kremlin as an attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin, for which it was claimed there would be reprisals.
Russia’s war on food
After failing to conquer Ukraine by conventional means, Russia tried an energy war, seeking to hobble the power grid and freeze the nation into submission. Now it has launched a food war, wrote Julian Borger.
The mining of the Kakhovka dam in June threatens to turn southern Ukrainian farmland into a dustbowl. Since Moscow pulled out of an UN-brokered deal to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea last month, it has announced a naval blockade of the country’s ports, and directly targeted food (destroying 220,000 tonnes of cereals awaiting export in silos) on the sea coast but also inland with attacks over the past two weeks on the Danube ports of Reni and Izmail.
By turning food into a weapon, Russia has resorted to one of the oldest forms of warfare; ancient armies burned the granaries of their foes to starve them into submission.
In this case, Ukraine’s economy has been further damaged and Russian exports have fetched higher prices. But the threat of starvation is thousands of miles away in the very poorest countries, which could be pushed further towards famine by higher prices and fewer humanitarian deliveries.
Tracking art linked to sanctions-hit Russians
From Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi to Andy Warhol’s Four Marilyns, it amounts to an art collection that could grace any gallery in the world.
But rather than being the highlights of a blockbuster exhibition at a major gallery, these are just some of the 300, and counting, pieces known to have been recently owned by Russian nationals under western sanctions that have been entered into a searchable database set up by Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention, Daniel Boffey reported this week.
The agency’s “war and sanctions portal” lists paintings and sculptures thought to have been bought and sold in recent years by the Russian super-rich accused by the west and Kyiv of aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The Russian exiles getting a hostile reception in Georgia
Dima Belysh stood in the empty park amphitheatre in his orange hoodie and dirty white sneakers. It was November in Tbilisi, Georgia, and he was in the middle of a 24-hour performance art piece dedicated to his hasty flight to the Georgian capital from his home in St Petersburg, Russia. When Joshua Kucera showed up he was the only spectator, so Belysh had plenty of time to talk.
“It’s ironic,” Belysh told . “I went from a place I didn’t feel at home to a place that is not welcoming me.”
He had been openly against the war in Ukraine, but his prospects outside Russia – he didn’t have much money and doesn’t speak any language other than Russian – were meagre. So at first, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, he stayed. But when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, announced a general mobilisation at the end of September, Belysh, as a man of draft age, had no choice but to leave the country or risk being conscripted into an army he did not support, to fight a war he found unjust.
China ‘backs further Ukraine peace talks’
China is said to be in support of a third round of talks to find a framework for peace in Ukraine after senior officials from about 40 countries met in Saudi Arabia over the weekend, Lisa O’Carroll reported.
The two-day summit in Jeddah was the second of its kind, after a similar forum in Copenhagen earlier this summer, and aims to draft key principles on how to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he hoped the initiative would lead to a “peace summit” of world leaders this autumn to endorse the principles, based on his own 10-point formula for a settlement.
