U.S. President Donald Trump said he is open to a three-way meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Reuters reported.
“If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” Trump said.
He said the meeting could focus on nuclear disarmament. “We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” Trump told reporters.
On October 19, sources told The Wall Street Journal that Putin had proposed a three-way summit with Trump and Xi to discuss Ukraine. Putin reportedly wants to negotiate an end to the war on terms favorable to Moscow, without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky taking part. Beijing has indicated that it would not object if Trump agrees to the meeting, the Journal’s sources said.
In recent weeks, Trump has renewed pressure on Ukraine, demanding that it stop striking Russian oil refineries, hold a presidential election, and reach an agreement with Russia. Trump has also authorized imports of Russian diesel fuel into the United States and decided against imposing “sanctions from hell” on Russia.
It is unclear exactly why Trump decided to escalate tensions with Ukraine. He is thought to have agreed to the diesel deal with Putin to appease Americans unhappy with rising diesel prices caused by the U.S. war with Iran and to improve his approval ratings ahead of congressional elections. Trump himself maintains that he simply does not want to “push” Russia “away” from peace talks with Ukraine.
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Russian forces used a drone to strike the central park in Nova Vodolaha, a town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, said Ivan Vyhivskyi, head of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
Six people were killed: a man, three women, and two girls. One girl was 11, and the other was just over a year old, said Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional military administration.
Another 15 people were wounded, including seven children, he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the younger girl was named Angelina. Her mother, Inna, also died. Zelensky said a Shahed drone struck the park.
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Grozny’s Akhmatovsky District Court fined St. Petersburg resident Lena Patyayeva 150,000 rubles for holding a solo picket on the third anniversary of the disappearance of her friend Seda Suleimanova, a Chechen woman, according to a post on Chechnya’s Supreme Court website.
The post does not identify the person fined, but Mediazona reported that it was Patyayeva.
The court found her guilty of a repeat violation of protest laws under Article 20.2, Part 8 of Russia’s Code of Administrative Offenses. In November 2025, Patyayeva was sentenced to nine days in jail under the same provision for a solo picket.
Lena Patyayeva held a solo picket in Grozny on August 23, 2026. She stood at a monument to fallen journalists, holding a sign that read “I demand an investigation into the murder of Seda Suleimanova” and, in Chechen, “Where is Seda?” Patyayeva was detained shortly afterward.
Seda Suleimanova fled her relatives in 2022 because they were planning to force her into marriage. She lived in St. Petersburg. In August 2023, police officers came to her apartment and told her she was suspected of stealing jewelry worth 150,000 rubles, following a complaint from her mother. They detained her, took her back to Chechnya against her will, and handed her over to her relatives. A few days later, Chechnya’s human rights ombudsman, Mansur Soltayev, published a photograph and a video of Suleimanova. She has not been seen since.
In February 2024, the SK SOS project reported that Suleimanova might have been killed by her relatives. Shortly after a public campaign demanding that she be found, Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a murder investigation. In May 2025, authorities declared Suleimanova a missing person and launched a search for her.
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“Imperium,” a documentary by Sergei Loznitsa, won the best film award at the British Film Institute’s 70th London Film Festival.
“Imperium” consists of archival footage shot by Italian documentary filmmakers in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Loznitsa discovered the footage at the Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement in Rome. The film opens with a parade on Red Square, then moves to other regions of the country to show everyday life and celebrations.
The jury said “Imperium” offers a fresh perspective on life in the Soviet Union before its collapse. “The film offers a broad view of life in a country with an extraordinarily diverse social and cultural landscape, many aspects of which have rarely appeared on-screen,” it said in a statement.
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The U.S. and Ukrainian presidents have continued their long-distance war of words. Donald Trump wrote on social media that Volodymyr Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war.”
“[W]ith all of the money that Europe is famously giving him, and that Crooked Joe Biden gave him in the past, he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The U.S. president said Zelensky could have “made a better deal two years ago than he can now.” “His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost,” Trump said. He also said Ukraine had lost access to seas and oceans and that its male population had shrunk — “wounded, and/or dead.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Zelensky “presents a false binary” by linking an end to the war with a Ukrainian victory. “The war must end, and that will be with some kind of a negotiated settlement, and President Trump is working on that every day. He’s done it since he came into office,” Bessent said in an interview with NBC News.
He also urged Zelensky to “be very careful” about accusing the United States of restricting Starlink in Ukraine. Bessent said those claims were untrue.
Zelensky said Ukraine, rather than Russia, was being pressured to make concessions. “I believe steps have been taken to convince Ukraine to capitulate,” Zelensky said in an interview with Bloomberg.
I’m not saying that’s what our partners are trying to achieve. I don’t want to think our American partners believe the war can end sooner at Ukraine’s expense. But that’s how it looks.
Zelensky again said the United States had deliberately slowed Starlink service in Ukraine, putting Ukrainian military operations at risk, and was also delaying deliveries of missiles for Patriot air defense systems.
“My latest model was: We don’t target Russian diesel, you give us missiles for Patriot systems to protect our facilities. But they just want us to stop attacking diesel. And if we strike that, they will disconnect us from something,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian president tied the U.S. actions to the November midterm elections, in which Trump is trying to shore up his Republican Party. “Politics is very aggressive during election time,” he said. “I think it is agony now, but after elections, life will continue, and I believe it will be calmer.”
The war in photographs: The aftermath of a strike on Kyiv
As Trump and Zelensky trade barbs over who should make concessions to end the war, Russian forces continue to strike Kyiv every day. Ukraine receives no advance warning of the strikes.
Kyiv. October 19, 2026A damaged shopping center in Kyiv. October 19, 2026A confectionery shop after a Russian strike. Kyiv. October 19, 2026A clothing store after a Russian strike. Kyiv, October 19, 2026A damaged subway station in Kyiv. October 19, 2026
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Wagner fighters escort CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, July 17, 2023
After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, Russian authorities took control of the Wagner Group and created the Defense Ministry’s Africa Corps, which was supposed to take command of Wagner’s mercenaries in Africa. But Prigozhin’s son Pavel managed to retain control of Wagner fighters in the Central African Republic (CAR) and expand his father’s business, The Wall Street Journal reported.
CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra helped him by asking the Kremlin not to replace Wagner fighters with Russian Defense Ministry troops, the newspaper reported. Touadéra integrated Prigozhin’s mercenaries into the country’s police, army, and intelligence units.
About 500 Wagner fighters are based in the capital, Bangui. They guard the president, fight rebels, and make money from gold mining and trafficking in drugs and weapons, the Journal reported.
The younger Prigozhin controls the CAR’s largest gold deposit, which generates $250 million a year. Local authorities help ship the gold abroad by labeling it as government property. Over the past three months, shipments have gone through Belarus, according to the newspaper.
Prigozhin also controls a substantial share of the local tramadol market and sells weapons to rebel groups in Sudan and Libya. Wagner also produces vodka and beer in the CAR.
In total, the Prigozhin family earns more than $400 million a year, according to an estimate by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Experts who spoke to the Journal believe an agreement with the Kremlin may have helped the younger Prigozhin strengthen his position in the CAR. The Wagner Group also owns radio stations in the country that broadcast anti-Western propaganda, glorify Touadéra, and praise Russia, the newspaper reported.
Pavel Prigozhin lives in St. Petersburg but regularly visits Bangui, according to the Journal. During these visits, he stays at the Ledger Plaza hotel, which has effectively become Wagner’s headquarters in the CAR. Fighters armed with assault rifles guard the hotel grounds, and even senior government officials go through security checks to meet him.
Pavel was 25 when his father died in August 2023. He inherited his father’s entire estate, valued at 12 billion rubles.
The elder Prigozhin was also survived by his wife, two daughters, and mother. Under the will, Pavel was required to provide them with a “decent standard of living.” The news outlet Port, citing an unnamed source, claimed that Pavel’s unwillingness to share the inheritance had caused a family dispute.
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The Russian military satellite Cosmos 2612 has come very close to ICEYE-X36, a radar satellite operated by the Finnish-American company ICEYE, according to LeoLabs, which monitors activity in space.
In an October 16 statement, LeoLabs said the Russian satellite’s movement “appears to be a deliberate approach toward” ICEYE-X36. As of Friday afternoon, Cosmos 2612 was about 4.8 kilometers from ICEYE-X36, down from more than 320 kilometers a day earlier. Dutch satellite tracker Marco Langbroek estimated the distance between the satellites at 1 to 2 kilometers.
“That is very worrisome. This RPO (Rendezvous and Proximity Operation) is completely non-consensual.
“If ICEYE-X36 is indeed used by Ukraine, this means that a satellite from one country (Russia) is closely approaching a satellite of another country (Ukraine) with which it is at war,” Langbroek wrote.
By Monday, October 19, the distance between the spacecraft had shrunk to 26 meters, according to rocket launch analyst Georgy Trishkin, who runs the Telegram channel Tekhassky Vestnik. He said any approach that brings spacecraft within a kilometer of each other in orbit “is considered critical.” “And here they’re also flying in tandem without coordinating with each other. In this case, the maneuvers aren’t accidental — they’re very much deliberate,” Trishkin said:
The know-it-alls are all rattling off the same lines about “intelligence gathering” and “jammers” — typical output from an AI chatbot. But the actual purpose of these maneuvers is less obvious. What we’re seeing is one of the first demonstrations of a new kind of confrontation in orbit — noncontact deorbiting through fuel depletion.
Trishkin added: “Directly interfering with other spacecraft is dangerous — whether through kinetic or electromagnetic means, it’s an outright act of aggression.”
The U.S. Defense Department and ICEYE representatives declined to comment. An unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios that Ukraine’s military works with the Finnish company and “uses its capabilities,” but could not say whether ICEYE-X36 was involved.
In 2024, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate said it had been using an ICEYE satellite for almost two years to identify “hostile targets” and “defend the country” and had taken more than 4,000 images of “enemy facilities” during that time. ICEYE and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry signed a new cooperation agreement in January 2026, giving Ukraine’s military expanded access to high-quality radar satellite imagery.
Russian satellites have made dangerous maneuvers before. In the summer of 2026, four Russian military satellites — Cosmos 2610, Cosmos 2611, Cosmos 2612, and Cosmos 2613 — changed their orbits and approached the ICEYE-X36 radar satellite.
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The Voroshilovsky Interdistrict Court in annexed Donetsk has sentenced military blogger and RT columnist Tetyana Montian to 18 months in a penal colony over calls for “extremism,” Mediazona reported.
The prosecution stemmed from Montian’s remarks during a December 2022 livestream about “regime loyalists,” whom she urged viewers to “take out without a shred of regret.” Montian said she meant government supporters who conceal problems at the front and change their views to match those of their superiors.
The criminal investigation into Montian became public in October 2025, when she was added to the list of terrorists and extremists maintained by Russia’s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring. Before that, Yekaterina Mizulina, who heads the Safe Internet League and reports people to the authorities, said she had contacted the Interior Ministry after receiving numerous complaints about Montian’s posts “discrediting” the army.
Montian also faced criticism on propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s channel, where host Boris Yakemenko alleged that she was involved in stealing money from fundraisers she had organized to support Russian soldiers.
Montian was born in Crimea and practiced law in Ukraine before moving to Russia in 2021. She began writing columns for RT in 2023. Her Telegram channel had more than 400,000 subscribers. Ukrainian authorities have opened several criminal investigations into her.
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Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said Russia and Ukraine had “begun working out the final details” of a plan to evacuate residents of Oleshky, also known as Aleshki, in the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region.
According to Ukrainska Pravda, Lubinets stressed that residents would not simply be taken out of Oleshky but brought directly “to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.”
“So there are still some difficult issues, let’s put it that way, but I hope we’ll all see concrete results from these talks soon,” he said.
Lubinets said talks with Russian officials were taking place every day. “I can’t share many details, but I’ll put it this way: In my view, we’ve made as much progress as possible,” he said.
Lubinets said there were also plans to evacuate residents of six nearby towns and villages. Preliminary estimates put the total number of people to be evacuated at 6,000, including up to 200 children.
Russia occupied Oleshky at the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By the fall of 2026, conditions there had become dire — residents were left without food, electricity, or adequate medical care. They cannot leave the city safely. Pope Leo XIV appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the situation in Oleshky. In a phone call, the pope called for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid deliveries and let residents evacuate voluntarily and safely.
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Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court has ordered the arrest of Denis Yeskov and Anatoly Nagornov, administrators of the train photo site RailGallery, the press service of Moscow’s courts reported on October 16.
Yeskov and Nagornov are charged under Russia’s criminal statute against unlawful interference with critical information infrastructure causing serious consequences, which carries a prison sentence of five to 10 years. According to investigators, Yeskov and Nagornov gained unlawful access to a trade secret belonging to an organization, copied information stored “in a critical infrastructure facility of the Russian Federation,” and posted it on their own site.
Denis YeskovAnatoly Nagornov
The specialized Telegram channel “1520. Vse o zh/d” (All About Railways) noticed on the evening of October 15 that RailGallery had stopped loading, and the site remains inaccessible. The court had already ordered the arrest of the site’s administrators on October 14, according to case files published on the court’s website.
Telegram channels also carried a statement from RailGallery’s editorial board confirming the detentions:
We are all in shock over what happened, and this news came as a complete surprise to us. I think each of us is now feeling confused and trying to make sense of what happened, understand what occurred, and what to expect going forward.
At the moment, the situation remains uncertain. It’s too early to say what will happen to the site going forward, whether its usual operation can be maintained, or who will take over its management. Right now we don’t have enough information to draw any conclusions or make assumptions about the future. For many, RailGallery is not just a resource, but part of daily life, a place to communicate, share experience, and bring together people with shared interests. So it’s only natural that what’s happening is causing concern.
RailGallery launched in 2022 after the popular railway photo site TrainPix shut down. the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported that TrainPix was created by Ukrainians, who announced its closure in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. TrainPix’s administrators deleted the site’s entire archive and urged people to support the Ukrainian army.
RailGallery’s homepage in late April 2022
Yeskov spoke about RailGallery’s launch in August 2022, saying that within six months, the Russian community had restored half of TrainPix’s archive, or about 150,000 photographs. By the end of 2022, more than 3,200 users had registered on RailGallery and posted 194,000 photographs, including 161,500 restored images. According to “1520. Vse o zh/d,” the site became more than a photo gallery: an extensive database on the history and operation of railway equipment from various countries.
In 2023, Dossier Center published an investigation into an armored train that Vladimir Putin presumably rides. The investigation included a photo of a train belonging to the company Grand Service Express, taken from RailGallery’s site. Journalists found special communications antennas on the roofs of the train cars, and the train was pulled by three locomotives at once. Whether Putin actually rides the train pictured remains unknown.
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Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva has resumed training with Eteri Tutberidze’s team, a source told the Russian state news agency TASS. There had been no official statement on the matter as of the time of publication.
Valieva, 20, trained under Tutberidze for years, setting world records in the short program, the free skate, and the combined score of both programs. She was considered one of the top contenders for medals heading into the 2022 Winter Olympics. During the Games, one of Valieva’s doping tests came back positive. She won gold in the team event but left the individual competition without a medal.
In 2024, Valieva was still disqualified for four years over doping, and the results of Russian figure skaters’ performances in the team event were revised. In 2025, Valieva and Tutberidze ended their partnership, and Svetlana Sokolovskaya became her coach.
In January 2026, Valieva resumed her career after her disqualification ended (calculated from the date the violation was recorded) and even obtained neutral athlete status. But in September, the International Skating Union (ISU) revoked that status.
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U.S. Ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told the Financial Times that European companies would face “devastating” retaliation from Washington if Brussels moves forward with plans to restrict American competitors’ access to parts of the European market.
The dispute centers on a European Commission proposal to reserve part of the radio spectrum that lets smartphones connect directly to satellites for European companies, a move that would restrict spectrum access for Chinese and American companies, including SpaceX.
Asked whether European companies should fear retaliation, Puzder said they “should be wary that it could happen and it would be very devastating for those companies,” given the size of the American market.
Puzder said that if the goal “is to make United States less competitive, I think that that’s not a legitimate goal of this kind of legislation.” “You don’t make European companies more competitive by making US companies less competitive,” he added.
SpaceX has sharply criticized the European Commission’s proposal, warning that the move risks degrading communications quality in Ukraine, where Starlink plays a critical role.
On October 14, Ukrainian military officials reported restrictions affecting the operation of Starlink satellite communication terminals, or more precisely, their military version, Starshield. The restrictions emerged amid growing tension between Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, who, however, claims he did not order the terminals’ operation restricted. The Telegraph’s sources said that SpaceX head Elon Musk proposed restricting Starlink’s operation in Ukraine to Trump, and the U.S. president agreed.
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Vladimir Putin has proposed a trilateral summit with President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported. Putin wants to reach a deal that ends the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Moscow, according to sources cited by the newspaper.
The Kremlin proposed holding the trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the APEC summit, set for November 18–19 in Shenzhen, China. Moscow conveyed the idea to the Chinese side through diplomatic channels, and Beijing has signaled it would not object if Trump agrees to the meeting.
Trump has not yet agreed to the idea, but he could “be receptive” given his desire to fulfill a campaign promise and end the war, a senior Trump administration official told the newspaper.
Putin raised the idea during an October 9 phone call with Trump. He views this trilateral format, which would exclude Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders, as a new Yalta Conference.
Relations between Moscow and Washington have improved recently. During the same October 9 phone call, Trump and Putin agreed on supplies of Russian diesel fuel to the United States.
Trump also declined to impose so-called “sanctions from hell“ on Russia. The law, signed September 18, allows him to impose 100% tariffs on the largest importers of Russian oil and gas and 500% tariffs on Russian goods. He said the lenient decision stemmed from a reluctance to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
At the same time, Trump has intensified his criticism of Zelensky. He has repeatedly called on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries, and in an October 16 interview he said he is “not a big fan” of Zelensky, adding that it is harder to reach an agreement with the Ukrainian president than with Putin.
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Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin presented Vladimir Putin with “proposals for a number of personnel changes in the government,” the Kremlin’s press service said. The two discussed the changes at a meeting held the morning of Monday, October 19.
Mishustin proposed making Finance Ministry head Anton Siluanov a deputy prime minister as well (Siluanov held both posts from 2018 to 2020). He also nominated Primorsky Governor Oleg Kozhemyako for deputy prime minister and presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District, a post currently held by Yuri Trutnev.
Mishustin has also nominated Transport Ministry head Andrei Nikitin for deputy prime minister. He is proposing Dmitry Yadrov, head of Rosaviatsia, as transport minister.
Mishustin has also nominated First Deputy Finance Minister Irina Okladnikova for deputy prime minister and head of the government’s staff, a post currently held by Dmitry Grigorenko.
“These proposals have received the support of President Putin,” Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
Under the Russian Constitution, candidates nominated by the head of government must be confirmed by the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.
Anton Siluanov previously served as deputy chairman of the Russian government, holding the post of first deputy prime minister from 2018 to 2020.
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Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoys, proposed to European Union officials that they resume larger purchases of Russian gas, which had declined after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sources told The New York Times.
Witkoff and Kushner also proposed that Ukraine resume transit of Russian gas.
The envoys see restoring Russian gas exports to Europe as part of a peace settlement. They argue it would benefit both Ukraine, which would recover revenue lost when transit stopped, and European politicians, whose constituents are unhappy about rising energy prices.
Europeans rejected the proposal, The New York Times’ sources said. Some European and Ukrainian officials believe the United States wants Russian gas to return to Europe partly because it wants a stake in the exports, according to those sources.
The European Union still buys Russian gas, though purchases have fallen sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: Russian gas accounted for 45% of the EU’s gas demand in 2021, compared with just 13% in 2025. Ukraine has halted the transit of Russian gas to Europe since 2025, losing about a billion dollars a year in transit fees.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump reached an agreement with Vladimir Putin to supply Russian diesel to the global market, declined to impose “hell sanctions” on Russia, and began pressuring Ukraine to stop its strikes on Russian oil refineries. Trump has said the strikes are driving up diesel prices worldwide, including in the United States, though the main reason for the increase is the U.S. war with Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
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President Donald Trump said the diesel deal with Russia and his refusal to impose ‘hellish sanctions’ were an attempt to start peace negotiations.
“My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” the U.S. president wrote on his Truth Social platform. Trump also said Russia is doing almost nothing to support Iran “compared to what they could be doing” and that he would like to keep it that way.
Trump again criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying: “Zelensky is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” According to Trump, Russia “sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World,” but Zelensky “doesn’t care.”
Trump claimed that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
“Two years ago, he could have made a better deal than now,” the U.S. president said.
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Russian forces struck Kyiv with ballistic missiles overnight on October 19, damaging buildings in the Desnianskyi and Dniprovskyi districts, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Three people were injured, and a 21-year-old woman was killed.
In the Solomianskyi district, debris hit the first floor of a 25-story residential building, injuring five people. Klitschko also said one of Kyiv’s metro stations on the left bank of the Dnipro was damaged but did not elaborate. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported that the strike killed one person and injured eight.
RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service journalist Alex Raufoglu said Ukraine once again received no warning of the ballistic missile strike on Kyiv. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, responding to Raufoglu’s question about the strike, said:
“What happened last night, I don’t know exactly. I know a few nights ago there was a software problem involving their early warning system. I know EUCOM [U.S. European Command] had been involved in looking at it,” Rubio said, declining further comment.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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Ukraine launched drone strikes on St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad region overnight on October 18. The attack appears to have been the largest in the region since the war began. In St. Petersburg, the strikes damaged an oil terminal at the port, the Ruchyi oil depot, an Ozon warehouse, a VK data center, the Vostochnaya electrical substation, a cable-stayed bridge over the Korabelny shipping channel, and an addiction treatment hospital on Vasilyevsky Island. Residential buildings and dozens of cars across the city and the surrounding region were also damaged. One St. Petersburg resident was killed, and 15 others in the city and the region were injured. Meduza has compiled photos and videos showing the aftermath of the attack.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Lev Stupnikov came to public attention in September 2025. In an interview that month with Ukrainian YouTuber Dmytro Karpenko, he revealed that he was a Russian officer sent to fight in Ukraine who had spent more than six months supplying Ukrainian forces with targeting information to help them strike his fellow soldiers. RT said more than 200 Russian soldiers had died because of him. Chechen special forces announced a manhunt for Stupnikov, who by then had crossed the front line and was fighting with the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Wall Street Journal recounted the story of Stupnikov, his family, and his decision to help Ukraine target Russian troops. Meduza summarizes the report.
Lev Stupnikov is 26. He was born in Kazakhstan. His father left the family when he was very young. His mother, Tatiana Yantsen, raised him and his younger sister, Alisa, alone. When Lev was a teenager, Tatiana moved to Russia through a government resettlement program for people with ties to Russia and settled in Omsk. Stupnikov attended a cadet school there, then moved to St. Petersburg to study at the Military Academy of Communications from 2018 to 2023.
In 2021, Lev married his girlfriend, Liza, and was considering giving up his military career. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed everything. Stupnikov was shocked by the invasion. In the summer of 2023, he graduated from the academy as a lieutenant and was assigned to the 36th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade, based in Russia’s Zabaykalsky region. His deployment to Ukraine was only a matter of time — it came in November 2023.
By then, Tatiana Yantsen had long since become disillusioned with the Russian authorities. The war shocked her as much as it did Lev. She took Alisa out of school to protect her from pro-war propaganda and contacted human rights advocates to try to get her son out of the army. Most advised arranging an escape through Belarus and Armenia. Tatiana knew Lev would have to change planes in Moscow on his way to the front. She urged him to board a flight to Kazakhstan and hide with relatives. He rejected the plan: It was too dangerous.
In February 2024, three months after her son was sent to the front line, Tatiana contacted Dmytro Karpenko. A Ukrainian programmer and blogger, he posted interviews with Russian prisoners of war and defectors on YouTube and offered payments to people willing to help the Ukrainian military. Tatiana wanted to know whether he could help her son desert. When Lev learned that his mother had been corresponding with Karpenko, he began watching the blogger’s videos, then contacted him on WhatsApp. He said he was ready to cooperate and surrender. Lev declined payment.
Stupnikov later told Karpenko in an interview that, while still serving in the Zabaykalsky region, he had decided he would find a way to surrender if sent to the front.
After that first WhatsApp message, Karpenko and Stupnikov spoke by phone and agreed to work together. They devised a code: Each greeting had to be followed by a prearranged number, the day of the month plus five. A message sent on February 20, for example, had to begin with “Hello 25.” Without it, Karpenko would know his source had been compromised.
The very first strike Stupnikov helped direct killed scores of his fellow soldiers. He sent his handler the coordinates of a training ground near Volnovakha where Russian soldiers were lined up. A HIMARS rocket strike killed 68 people and wounded another 60. Among the dead was Colonel Gusein Musayev, commander of the 36th Motorized Rifle Brigade. Stupnikov survived by pretending he urgently needed to use the bathroom.
It was the most successful operation Karpenko and his “moles” had organized to date. Over the following months, Stupnikov shared radio frequencies, troop locations, and battle plans with his handler. His 36th Brigade was rapidly losing personnel. Eventually, of all the officers he had started out with in his battalion, he was the only one left. The others had been killed, wounded, or transferred to other parts of the front.
Stupnikov was deeply anxious. At night, he dreamed of the explosions he had helped cause. Trying to shake off his guilt, he told himself that those killed had been bad people. The more successful he was, the more he feared being exposed. “It was constant, endless tension. Real spies get training in espionage. I had received no such training at all,” he said.
In July 2024, Stupnikov crossed the front line. Under surveillance by a Ukrainian drone, he reached a Ukrainian reconnaissance team and gave the password: “Peanut shop.” He was blindfolded and taken to Ukrainian positions. Soon afterward, Denis Kapustin, commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, visited him and offered him a place in the unit. Stupnikov wanted to start a new life somewhere else, but he understood that Ukraine was safer than other countries for defectors like him. He agreed to join.
With Ukrainian help, Stupnikov got his mother and sister out of Russia. His wife refused to leave. When he gave his interview to Karpenko a year later, she spoke to RT. “He asked me to move abroad with him. He didn’t say it was Ukraine. He just said I should come join him. I made it clear right away that I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d never been interested in moving abroad anyway. He started freaking out, saying I was betraying him, saying I was a bad wife if I wouldn’t follow my husband. I told him then that I might be a bad wife, but I would never, ever abandon my parents or my country,” Liza said.
RT also spoke to several people it identified as relatives of soldiers killed in strikes directed by Stupnikov. Among them was Tatiana Guryeva, whose son Pavel was killed in the February 2024 strike on the training ground near Volnovakha. Guryeva said Pavel and Lev had been friends. “My son told me about him more than once. He thought Lev was a kind, good-hearted person. He fit right in with the unit. And Pasha liked his name so much that he even started calling himself Lev on social media and dreamed of giving his son the same name… Now that I know who directed the missiles at that training ground, I’m just so shocked…” she said.
Citing Russian military personnel, RT reported that Russian military losses from strikes directed by Stupnikov exceeded 200. The Wall Street Journal put the figure at more than 300.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
Semyon Krasotkin, a 27-year-old mathematician and journalist from Moscow, has been jailed on treason charges, the news outlet Vot Tak reported.
Krasotkin was detained at Domodedovo Airport in mid-August 2026 after a trip to Kyrgyzstan, a source told Vot Tak. Border guards searched his phone and found “stars” — paid reactions that serve as Telegram’s virtual currency — that he had left on posts in opposition and Ukrainian Telegram channels.
Krasotkin was then kept in custody through a series of back-to-back jail terms for the administrative offense of “petty hooliganism.” Before that, Vot Tak’s sources said, he had been threatened with treason charges, torture, and violence.
Krasotkin was due to be released on September 17 but was again kept in custody. He was taken to the Moscow office of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic security agency, where authorities opened a treason investigation into him, sources told Vot Tak. On September 19, a court ordered him held in pretrial detention for two months.
One source told Vot Tak that investigators listed “star” reactions worth a total of 2,200 rubles in Krasotkin’s case. Another said Krasotkin had sent “stars” to a Ukrainian Telegram meme channel that was probably raising money for Ukraine’s armed forces.
Krasotkin earned a master’s degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and worked as a mathematician at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences. He also joined Russian Wikinews at 16. The project’s website lists him as one of its nine administrators; he has published more than a million news items.
Criminal investigations over Telegram “stars” have been reported since early 2026, though the initial investigations involved allegations of financing terrorism. In the summer, the Telegram channel Tyuremny Advokat reported the first treason investigations over Telegram “stars.” In September 2026, human rights advocates asked Telegram founder Pavel Durov to make paid reactions to posts anonymous because Russians were facing criminal prosecution over them.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
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