Russo-Ukrainian war, day 1657: Ukraine’s newly appointed top commander wants to break with a Soviet-inherited system

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Ukraine's Swedish radar planes have flown inside Russian missile range for six months. None has been shot down.. Kyiv said nothing until this week. The planes can see 450 km, and Russia's best missile flies nearly as far.

Ukraine put its own peace proposals on the table as two US envoys reached Kyiv for the first time. Security guarantees topped the Ukrainian list, and the day's diplomacy ran in consecutive sessions that widened to include three European governments' security chiefs.

Ukraine logged impacts at 11 sites while the American peace delegation was still in Moscow. The strike package mixed jet-powered attack drones, decoys, and cruise missiles across several oblasts.

Ukraine is running short of its best missiles for hunting Russia's jet drones. Now MiG-29s are firing 1970s weapons. The R-73 was the missile for the job. Ukraine has burned through enough of them to bring back a weapon that was obsolete in 2022.

Ukraine is taking 1980s Leopards from across Europe and giving them radar-guided anti-drone guns and gunner-less turrets. Thirty-one get a Belgian turret the crew doesn't sit in. Others become radar-guided drone killers, built in Rome and paid for with frozen Russian money.

Team news

Vacancy: deputy editor-in-chief.

Military

Ukraine's new top commander is pushing to unwind a Soviet-inherited command model mid-war. He wants combat-tested sergeants to have real authority. Ukraine inherited a system where officers decided everything and sergeants were senior soldiers with no ladder of their own.

Russia deploys missile brigade to Belarus as fears grow over new threat to Kyiv. The move comes as Russia steps up aerial attacks on Kyiv from the north and Belarus allows Moscow to use its territory to help guide strikes against Ukrainian targets.

Some ten robot boats. Five hundred Russian air sorties. One very lopsided hunt. Missions that once took a night now stretch to five days, and Russia keeps its fleet hidden, a naval drone unit commander says.

Ukrainian drones took Ryazan's blending unit after knocking out two of its four crude units. Satellite imagery in August showed half the plant's primary distillation capacity already out of action.

Ukraine's drone forces say they hit 58,465 Russian targets in August, nearly 1,900 a day. Three named campaigns did the strategic damage. Most of the volume is small front-line hits.

Intelligence and technology

Ukrainian AI targeting module placed third among 60-plus entries in NATO contest. NATO and Ukraine ran the challenge through their first jointly staffed body.

Ukrainian university and the Flamingo missile-maker opened an engineering course. On the first try, zero of 150 passed. Even students who scored well on the university entrance exam flunked the physics round.

Ukraine's Brave1 says it can down Russia's Banderol missiles with cruising speed 650 km/h for less than what they cost, and has destroyed at least four. In July, Ukrainian troops downed Banderols with Swedish Bofors L70 anti-aircraft guns designed in the late 1940s.

Ukraine has 67 companies working to shoot down Russia's jet-powered drones en masse, Zelenskyy says. Only three to five have real results. He called the whole air-defense push "Plan B" to diplomacy's "Plan A".

China calls itself neutral—but its fiber ends up in the drones that hit Ukraine. The papers, reviewed by Western governments, trace drone-grade material straight from a Chinese state firm to a sanctioned Russian plant.

International

Ukrainian journalist asks Trump's envoy to his face whether he was disgusted to sit across from "international criminal" Putin. Witkoff wouldn't answer directly. Earlier, Russia's FSB put a $400,000 bounty on Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russia burns occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant's last-resort generators as everyday power, Ukraine says. Off-site power has been gone since 20 August, and the plant has cut its running generators to two to stretch the fuel that is left.

"Now on the 1,657th day": Ukraine's crews restored power to over 900,000 homes last week as Russia keeps striking grid before winter. Crews brought it back to 596 settlements, most of them in Odesa and Donetsk.

Kyiv stockpiles food and water as Russia's new aerial tactics threaten a brutal winter. Russia has already targeted food storage around Kyiv, while Ukraine's limited air defenses struggle to stop ballistic missiles and faster drones.

Political and legal developments

Russia's FM says war must end so there is "no more Nazism" in Europe. Russian occupation official already said what that means: erasing Ukraine and stopping its aid. The collaborator put it plainly: "denazification is re-Russification".

Read our earlier daily review here.