Russia’s State Duma approved, on second and third readings, a bill sharply raising fees for immigration-related services.
The fee for obtaining or renouncing Russian citizenship rose 12-fold, to 50,000 from 4,200 rubles. The fee for a permanent residence permit increased fivefold, to 30,000 from 6,000 rubles; the temporary residence permit fee rose eightfold, to 15,000 from 1,900.
The fee for hiring foreign workers also increased, to 15,000 rubles each.
Russia’s Finance Ministry proposed the increases. State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said the authorities want to “influence the quality of people coming into the country.”
“They should be people who are established and have achieved a great deal,” he added.
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A military base in the Pechenga district of Murmansk Oblast in a satellite image from Maxar
Russia has been expanding its military infrastructure along its entire western border throughout the winter of 2025–2026, including along the borders with Finland and Norway, according to a joint investigation by Norwegian broadcaster NRK, Swedish broadcaster SVT, Danish broadcaster DR, and the Estonian news website Delfi. The journalists based their findings on satellite imagery from Planet Labs.
New military barracks are under construction in the Pechenga district of Russia’s Murmansk region, on the border with Norway. Marko Eklund, a former Finnish intelligence officer who monitors military activity in border regions, said the complex could hold up to 17,000 people — two to three times what was there before. Pointing to spring 2026 satellite images, Eklund said Russia is building housing to attract professional soldiers and their families.
Russia has also been expanding along the Finnish border. New military facilities — including barracks and warehouses — have appeared there, along with hundreds of vehicles and other equipment. Finnish Army Commander Pasi Välimäki said Russia could deploy 80,000 troops along the Finnish border — up from roughly 20,000 previously.
Finland’s army numbers 24,000 in peacetime, but the country has a mobilization reserve that could expand its armed forces to 280,000 in wartime.
Eklund said Russia is massing forces along the entire border from the Arctic coast to Kaliningrad. NRK journalists analyzed NASA satellite data on nighttime light levels and found that 16 of the 19 locations on Eklund’s map have grown brighter over the past year.
According to Swedish intelligence, Russia’s armed forces number 1.5 million. Thomas Nilsson, the head of Swedish military intelligence, said Russia has shown it can move troops and equipment quickly across vast distances — and that the Kremlin is preparing for a possible confrontation with NATO.
Brian Nissen, the NATO commander for the Baltic states and Poland, said the threat of direct conflict with the alliance remains low while Russia is fighting in Ukraine, but added that the situation could shift rapidly if a ceasefire is reached.
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Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point has completed its first flight test of a new interceptor missile, the FP-7.x, which it developed as a lower-cost alternative to Patriot interceptor missiles, the Financial Times reported. Denis Shtilerman, Fire Point’s chief designer, described the test as “pretty successful.”
The FP-7.x is designed to engage ballistic missiles and drones. A single missile costs about $700,000 — against $3.8 million for a Patriot PAC-3 missile, according to U.S. Army budget estimates for 2026.
Shtilerman said mass production could begin as early as August, provided Fire Point secures an infrared seeker head from the German firm Diehl Defence. The first missiles could be ready by 2027, he said.
The FP-7.x is the missile component of the Freyja air defense system. The rest of the Freyja system — target-detection and tracking radars and a command-and-control system — will be supplied to Ukraine by European partners.
Fire Point is one of the largest contractors for the Ukrainian military. The company has developed the FP-1 long-range strike drone and the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, neither of which has entered mass production. The Flamingo is known to have struck Russian targets only a handful of times.
The Kyiv Independent has reported on ties between Fire Point and Tymur Mindich, describing him as a co-owner of Kvartal 95 Studio and a close associate of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Mindich is at the center of an embezzlement case involving Energoatom, the Ukrainian state energy company. He left Ukraine before police raids began in the case.
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Moscow has named Colonel General Alexander Chayko as the new commander in chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces. Chayko’s biographical entry on the Defense Ministry’s website shows the appointment took effect in May.
As early as May 5, RBC and the pro-war blogger Fighterbomber reported, citing sources, that Chayko had been selected to lead the Aerospace Forces. The reports circulated widely in Russian media, yet officials in Moscow declined to confirm or deny them.
From 2019 to 2021, Chayko led Russia’s forces in Syria before taking command of the Eastern Military District. In 2022, he oversaw Russia’s push toward Kyiv, during which units under his command carried out mass killings of civilians in the region.
Chayko is the third commander of Russia’s Aerospace Forces since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His predecessors were Sergei Surovikin and Viktor Afzalov.
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Ukraine launched a massive overnight drone and missile strike against targets across Russia on June 10. Russia’s Defense Ministry said drones were shot down over 19 regions and occupied Crimea. Authorities declared air alerts across all six regions of the Ural Federal District and, for the first time since the war began, in the Omsk region.
A missile struck Cheboksary, Chuvashia Governor Oleg Nikolayev said. Three people were injured — two in moderate condition, one with minor injuries. The Telegram channel Astra said, citing photos and videos from the scene, that Ukraine had struck the VNIIR-Progress plant. The facility manufactures Kometa navigation modules for drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. The factory has been hit before — in November 2025 and again in early May 2026.
CheboksaryCheboksary, VNIIR-ProgressCheboksary
In the Samara region, three people were injured in Ukrainian drone strikes, Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said. He added that several industrial facilities had been damaged but did not identify them. Astra said the Kuybyshev oil refinery, owned by Rosneft, caught fire in the attack. One of the Volga region’s leading refineries, it specializes in producing premium-grade gasoline and diesel fuel.
SamaraKuybyshev refinery
In the Vladimir region, Ukrainian drones set fire to two facilities in the Kameshkovsky and Alexandrovsky districts, Governor Alexander Avdeyev said without identifying the sites. No injuries were reported. Astra and the Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ said the Vtorovo and Lobkovo oil pumping stations were struck. Both are part of Transneft and supply fuel to the Moscow region, among other areas.
Vladimir
In Sevastopol, a Ukrainian drone damaged the building that houses the panorama “The Defense of Sevastopol, 1854–1855,” said Mikhail Razvozhaev, the city’s Russian-appointed governor.
The panorama was painted in the early 20th century by Franz Roubaud, who depicted Russian defenders repelling the assault on Malakhov Kurgan on June 6, 1855. In 1942, the building caught fire during a German air raid and artillery bombardment. A third of the canvas was destroyed; the remaining two-thirds were cut into sections and removed to safety. Soviet artists later restored the work.
Sevastopol’s Russian-appointed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said on the morning of June 10 that Ukrainian drones had “practically destroyed” Franz Roubaud’s iconic panoramic painting in an overnight attack. The city’s Defense Museum moved quickly to correct the record, however: surviving fragments of Roubaud’s original canvas were untouched — kept in rooms separate from the panorama building. The canvas on display there was painted by Soviet artists, and museum staff said they would need to conduct an expert assessment to gauge the full extent of the damage.
Because of the “operational situation,” according to the museum, a celebration marking the 243rd anniversary of Sevastopol was canceled. It had been planned for June 14 at Malakhov Kurgan.
Volodymyr Zelensky said after the overnight strike that Ukraine was continuing its “long-range sanctions” against Russian military targets and the oil industry. He said Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo missiles had reached Cheboksary — at least 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
The Kuybyshev refinery in the Samara region and two oil infrastructure facilities in the Vladimir region were struck in the Ukrainian attacks, Zelensky added.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down four Flamingo cruise missiles and 766 drones over the course of the day.
We continue to apply Ukrainian long-range sanctions against Russian military facilities and the oil industry. In particular, last night Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingos struck a military plant in Cheboksary that supplies the occupier’s army with components for drones and missiles. I… pic.twitter.com/WdA2yUhsyC
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 10, 2026
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Vladimir Putin met with senior ministers to discuss economic issues, including declining inflation and a possible cut in the key interest rate. Neither Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina nor any of her deputies attended, the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo reported.
Nabiullina had attended all previous economic meetings. The only prior exception was a May 5 session, when Central Bank Deputy Governor Alexei Zabotkin filled in for her.
Nabiullina has not appeared in public for about a week. On June 4, she was scheduled to speak at one of the main sessions of the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, but her name was removed from the list of speakers. She also missed the National Association of Securities Market Participants (NAUFOR) conference on June 9. The Central Bank’s press office said Nabiullina was on sick leave.
Nabiullina’s term as governor expires in June 2027. This is her third and final term. The Bell reported that three candidates have emerged as possible replacements: Maxim Oreshkin, deputy head of the presidential administration; Pyotr Fradkov, head of the state-owned Promsvyazbank; and Andrei Kostin, head of the state bank VTB. Whoever is chosen, the decision is Putin’s alone, the outlet noted.
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Russia’s Digital Development Ministry announced that Roblox is no longer blocked in the country.
The platform’s administration had “fully complied with Russian legal requirements on user safety,” the ministry said.
Roblox was blocked in early December 2025. At the time, Roskomnadzor said that it was hosting “extremist” content and “LGBT propaganda.”
Later, Russian authorities said Roblox’s management was willing to cooperate in order to have the platform unblocked, and that negotiations were underway.
On June 9, the Digital Development Ministry said the platform had created the “necessary conditions to protect the rights and interests of Russian users.” The ministry asked “relevant law enforcement authorities” to lift the restrictions.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law exposing Russians living abroad to administrative prosecution for “offenses against the interests” of the state.
The offenses covered include insulting the head of state or government officials, “discrediting” the army, calling for sanctions, and publicly comparing the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany.
Under the law, authorities may seize the property and bank accounts of Russians who have left the country as a “precautionary measure,” with assets remaining frozen until the fine is paid. The value of seized property may be disproportionate to the fine itself.
The law takes effect on September 1, 2026.
In reality, courts had previously fined people located outside Russia under the relevant administrative statutes — the law merely formalizes existing practice. However, the seizure of property as a precautionary measure had not previously been provided for.
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A spa hotel in the occupied Crimean city of Saky offered guests between 10 and 20 liters of gasoline as a booking incentive, then canceled the promotion after four days when the fuel ran out, the Russian Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported.
On June 5, the Le-Di hotel announced on its social media pages that guests would receive gasoline as a perk: 10 liters for stays of two nights or more, 20 liters for three nights or more. “Gasoline is provided upon the guest’s request at check-in,” the hotel specified.
The fuel did not last long. A hotel representative said guests received a total of 100 liters — 10 liters each for 10 rooms. “We just wanted to do something nice for our guests, a small bonus, but it turned out that Ukrainian channels blew it a little out of proportion,” the representative told the outlet Podyyem. The hotel is now offering to reimburse guests for travel costs or provide a transfer, Ostorozhno Novosti reported.
A sanatorium in Alushta is also covering gasoline costs for guests who stay more than five days, the Telegram channel added.
Crimea began facing gasoline shortages in late spring after Ukrainian forces targeted fuel trucks and other vehicles supplying the annexed peninsula via the R-280 Novorossiya highway. On June 6, Sevastopol introduced QR codes to obtain vouchers for purchasing fuel at certain gas stations. Each voucher allows the holder to buy 20 liters of gasoline. Codes can be obtained only once a week and only through the Max messaging app.
According to Sevastopol’s Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, the codes are snapped up “within a matter of seconds.”
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Combat operations during World War I, northern France, 1916
At the start of 2026, Russia’s war in Ukraine surpassed World War II in length. As of June 10, the war in Ukraine has lasted as long as World War I — 1,568 days. Of course, a regional war of the 21st century has little in common with a global conflict of the 20th. But is there anything to be gained from comparing them? And what lessons might the participants in today’s war draw from World War I? Meduza looks back at why the deadliest conflict of a century ago lasted so long, what it cost the countries involved, and what parallels can be drawn with the war of attrition between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Why did World War I last so long? And what does it have in common with the war in Ukraine?
The nations that entered World War I drew on the experience of earlier great-power conflicts — the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Both were relatively short, decided through troop movements and a series of major engagements. In August 1914, most leaders of the Entente and the Central Powers expected the new war to follow the same script: rapid mobilization, decisive offensives, a crushed enemy, and a negotiated peace.
Within months, it became clear the conflict was something else entirely. What had begun as a confrontation of armies became a clash of industrial societies. The outcome depended less and less on battlefield performance alone and more and more on each economy’s capacity to produce weapons, keep transport running, supply troops, and sustain the continuous mobilization of millions of people.
The nature of the fighting shifted as the war progressed. The opening months were mobile: armies moved quickly, launched major offensives, tried to encircle the enemy, and sought decisive engagements. On the Eastern Front and in the war against the Ottoman Empire, front lines could shift by hundreds of kilometers. Even on the Western Front, both sides initially hoped for a quick finish. Those hopes collapsed on both sides: Germany could not crush France and Russia, and the Entente could not destroy the Central Powers.
The war gradually shifted into a positional phase, most pronounced in the west. Trenches, artillery, machine guns, barbed wire, and fortified defensive positions made offensive action extraordinarily difficult. Even enormous losses no longer guaranteed meaningful advances. The battles of Verdun, the Somme, and other sectors of the Western Front exposed the same underlying problem: armies could inflict devastating losses on each other, but a decisive breakthrough never materialized.
Over time, both sides adapted. Assault groups of infantry and engineers developed infiltration techniques to reach and storm enemy trenches. The Entente refined the tactic of breaking through with tank units. Both sides used aviation extensively for reconnaissance and bombing.
None of it was enough to break the positional deadlock entirely. The problem, as it would be more than a century later on the front lines in Ukraine, was the impossibility of rapidly overcoming a deeply echeloned enemy defense and destroying it through maneuver. Behind the first line that assault troops breached after an artillery preparation lay a second. That second line was supported by the enemy’s artillery firing from deep within its defensive positions, while the attacking side’s own guns could no longer assist the advance — they lacked the range.
The slow pace of advance gave the enemy time to move reserves to the point of the initial breakthrough, and offensives invariably stalled. With resources roughly equal on both sides, neither could shift the Western Front even a few dozen kilometers — and that remained true for years, right up to 1918.
As the war dragged on, what it took to win it changed as well. Early on, what mattered most were the plans of the general staffs, the speed of mobilization, and the quality of command. As time passed, other factors became decisive: how many shells a country could produce and how much coal it could mine, how well its transport network functioned, whether there was enough food, whether the state could borrow and keep industry from crisis. Governments began tightening control over their economies, expanding mobilization, regulating production, and intervening in economic life to a degree unprecedented in history.
The state of society became no less important. As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, governments were constantly forced to seek popular support, justify the need for further sacrifice, and hold their countries back from internal collapse. Combat on an unprecedented scale demanded the participation of virtually the entire society — not just the army — for the first time. Mobilization relied on both coercion and propaganda, and the combination gave governments the ability to keep fighting despite human losses, retreats, and economic hardship. Even so, war fatigue accumulated. By 1917, anti-war mutinies were occurring not only in Russia but also in France — following the failed offensive of April 1917 (the “Nivelle Offensive”).
Another reason the war dragged on was that a compromise peace had become increasingly impossible. After millions of deaths and enormous expenditure, no government was willing to stop fighting without a clear victory. Each side expected the other to crack first — under the weight of economic, political, or military strain.
That, in the end, is what happened in the war’s final six months — though not in the way the commanders of either bloc had imagined. Neither side had managed to devise a tactic for rapidly breaking through the full depth of the enemy’s defenses and transitioning to mobile warfare. In the final phase, the balance of forces shifted quickly for other reasons, and that ultimately led to the destruction of Germany and its allies.
Germany initially gained the advantage. After Russia and Romania left the war, Berlin transferred large forces to the Western Front for a decisive offensive. In the spring of 1918, Germany managed — relatively slowly — to push the front line to the Marne River near Paris through assault operations combined with the maneuvering of reserves. But by that point the balance of forces had shifted in the Entente’s favor: American divisions were beginning to arrive on the Western Front — nearly two million men in total by the summer of 1918 — along with British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand troops freed up from the Turkish theater.
The Entente offensive that began that summer — the so-called Hundred Days Offensive — destroyed the army of the German Empire. When the armistice was signed, on terms extremely unfavorable to Berlin, Germany had still not relinquished some of the territory it had seized in France and Belgium at the start of the war. Entente armies had never set foot on German soil itself. That fact — together with the revolution that had broken out in Germany by the time the armistice was concluded — later gave Nazi ideologues the opening to claim that the empire’s cause had been lost not through outright military defeat but through betrayal.
In reality, the army had been effectively destroyed, even though the other side had invented no new technology for breaking through defenses and had simply made skillful use of its numerical advantage. The genuine military innovations that combined all the technologies developed during World War I into a single mechanism for breaching defenses, waging mobile warfare, and rapidly destroying even an adversary with comparable resources were introduced by the German Wehrmacht in the late 1930s.
How did World War I end for the countries involved?
Formally, the Entente coalition won. Its core consisted of Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire — de facto until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Italy joined in 1915, Romania in 1916, and the United States in 1917. Serbia, Japan, Belgium, Montenegro, Greece, Portugal, and a number of other states also fought on the Entente’s side.
Opposing them were the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria — which formally suffered defeat. But the consequences of the war proved far more complex than a simple division into winners and losers.
Germany capitulated, though it had long maintained a strong army and the capacity to resist. By 1918, its economy had been exhausted by the British naval blockade, its population was suffering from food shortages, and its resources for continuing the war were running out. Its allies — Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire — ceased to exist entirely, breaking apart after the war into numerous nation-states.
France and Great Britain emerged among the victors, but victory came at an enormous cost. France lost a large part of its male population and was left with devastated industrial regions in the north and massive debts. Britain kept its empire but emerged financially weakened and dependent on American credit.
Russia was among the biggest losers. Despite having fought on the side of the eventual victors, the country exited the war through revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and the disintegration of the empire.
The United States was the chief relative winner. It entered the war late, avoided destruction on its own territory, sharply expanded its industry, became the largest creditor of the European nations, and significantly strengthened its position in the global economy.
The war ended not only with the military defeat of the Central Powers but with a serious shift in the global balance of power. The center of economic gravity began moving from Europe across the Atlantic.
World War I therefore concluded not simply with the victory of one coalition over another. It concluded with the exhaustion of the European powers, the destruction of several empires, and the emergence of a new international order — one in which economic resilience and the capacity to wage a prolonged war mattered more than swift military victories.
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Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry will assign female investigators to handle sexual violence cases, Deputy Minister Sanzhar Adilov said, according to Kazinform.
Adilov said the move was intended to limit additional psychological trauma for victims and build greater trust in investigative bodies.
Speaking at a parliamentary roundtable, Adilov said the Interior Ministry had also proposed toughening penalties for stalking by adding a repeat-offense element. Some convicted offenders, he explained, had continued to pursue their victims even after sentencing and serving their punishment. The stalking article was added to the criminal code in July 2025. In less than a year, Adilov said, 83 cases had been referred to court under that provision.
The murder of Saltanat Nukenova sparked widespread public outcry in Kazakhstan. She died after being beaten during an argument in November 2023 by her husband, former Economy Minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev. In April 2024, Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, signed a law criminalizing domestic violence. The following month, Bishimbayev was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
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A car that exploded in Moscow’s Konkovo district on June 9 belonged to an employee of a scientific and industrial enterprise, the Russian Investigative Committee said.
Two teenagers have been detained on suspicion of involvement in the blast. Investigators determined that a girl acting on instructions from handlers retrieved the explosive device from a cache and passed it to a second teenager, who attached both the device and a GPS tracker to the car.
Criminal charges have been filed on suspicion of attempted murder and the illegal manufacture and storage of explosives. Both suspects have been formally charged, the Investigative Committee said.
The car was parked at the intersection of Vvedensky and Butlerov streets when it exploded on June 9. No one was in the vehicle at the time and there were no casualties. The Investigative Committee said the same day that the detonation had been controlled — during an inspection, a suspicious object was found under the vehicle and “neutralized by detonation.”
The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo reported that the car belonged to an employee of the M.F. Stelmakh Polyus Research Institute Technopark, which is near the explosion site. The technopark is a Rostec subsidiary.
Another car explosion occurred yesterday in Balashikha, outside Moscow, in a neighborhood built for retired military personnel. A BMW X3 exploded as the driver got in and began to pull away; he was killed at the scene. The victim has not been officially identified, but Telegram channels claim it was Damir Davydov, head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (GRAU) of Russia’s Defense Ministry.
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Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF) will not field former deputy Valery Rashkin as a candidate in the upcoming State Duma elections, sources told the Russian business daily Vedomosti. Rashkin’s candidacy was blocked both in a single-member district and on the party list.
Rashkin won a State Duma seat on the KPRF ticket six times, first entering the chamber in 1999. In 2022, shortly after he secured another term in State Duma elections, police stopped him in the Saratov region at the wheel of a car with a dead moose in the trunk. He received a three-year suspended sentence for illegal hunting and lost his seat.
His conviction was expunged in 2024, making him legally eligible to run again. In early June, several outlets including RBC and Vedomosti reported, citing sources, that the KPRF planned to run Rashkin in the Angarsk single-member district in the Irkutsk region.
Meduza reported in early June that the KPRF would decline to field prominent politicians in districts, with sources saying the Kremlin had advised party leadership to “take the edge off competition.”
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Franz Roubaud’s panoramic painting The Siege of Sevastopol has been “virtually destroyed” in a Ukrainian drone strike, Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, said.
The attack came in the early hours of June 10. Razvozhaev reported at around 4 a.m. Moscow time that the museum’s roof was on fire. Hours later, he said the blaze had been declared a level four, with more than 80 people working at the scene.
“The situation is extremely dire: it is already clear that Franz Roubaud’s great masterpiece has been virtually destroyed,” Razvozhaev wrote.
He claimed the Ukrainian Armed Forces had deliberately targeted the museum. Ukraine has not commented on the attack.
The museum said, however, that fragments of the original Roubaud painting were undamaged. The museum holds 39 fragments of the original canvas in total; at the time of the fire, all of them were stored elsewhere.
“What was inside the building was a canvas painted in 1954 by a group of Soviet artists,” the museum said.
The panorama The Siege of Sevastopol was unveiled in 1905, marking the 50th anniversary of the first defense of the city during the Crimean War. It was created by Franz Roubaud, widely regarded as the founder of Russia’s school of battle and panoramic painting.
Roubaud spent four years on the work. For his subject, he chose the repulse of the assault on Malakhov Kurgan on June 6 (18), 1855. The building housing the painting was designed by military engineer Friedrich Oskar Enberg.
A fragment of “The Siege of Sevastopol”
In June 1942, a German air raid and artillery bombardment set the panorama building ablaze. To save the painting, workers cut it into sections, but only two-thirds of it — 86 fragments — survived. Those pieces were evacuated to Novorossiysk and then transported to Moscow, where Soviet artists used them to reconstruct the panorama. The museum reopened on the 100th anniversary of the “first defense.”
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Ukrainian drones and missiles struck Russian regions and occupied Crimea overnight on June 10. Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defense forces shot down 326 drones.
Oleg Nikolayev, head of the Chuvash Republic, said Cheboksary came under a missile attack. The Telegram channel Astra, after analyzing videos and photographs posted on social media, reported that the strike hit the defense enterprise “VNIIR-Progress” in Cheboksary — a facility that has previously been targeted by drones and missiles on multiple occasions. According to the Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova, the city was struck with “Flamingo” missiles.
Warning. The video contains profanity.
In the Vladimir region, a Ukrainian drone attack ignited fires at two sites in the Kameshkovsky and Alexandrovsky districts, regional Governor Alexander Avdeyev said. There were no casualties.
Astra reported that the Kuybyshev oil refinery in Samara — one of the largest enterprises in the region’s oil sector, owned by Rosneft — caught fire following a Ukrainian drone attack. Authorities have not officially confirmed this. The region declared a missile and drone alert.
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.
A car bomb killed a senior Russian defense official outside Moscow early Tuesday, June 9. Around 5:30 a.m., a BMW X3 exploded near Koldunova Street in Balashikha’s Aviatorov neighborhood as the driver pulled out of a parking space. Bystanders reached the driver while he was still alive, but he died at the scene.
The Russian federal Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office for the Moscow region confirmed an explosion had taken place in Balashikha but did not name the victim. The Investigative Committee said a criminal case had been opened but did not disclose the charge.
Several Telegram channels reported that the victim was Damir Davydov, head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (GRAU) of Russia’s Defense Ministry. The Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Serhiy Sternenko, and the Ukrainian outlet Insider UA all reported the same name. A source cited by the independent Russian outlet Astra also confirmed Davydov’s death, saying an improvised explosive device had been placed under the vehicle. The Russian business daily Kommersant reported that the device had the explosive force of up to 500 grams of TNT.
Davydov was listed in the Myrotvorets database. According to Ukrainian sources, Davydov was 57 and grew up in the closed city of Penza-19, also known as Zarechny. His father, Rafail Davydov, worked at the Start production association, which manufactured nuclear missiles. Shot, a Russian Telegram channel with ties to law enforcement, put his age at 62.
A December 2009 article in the Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda identified Davydov as commander of the Central Test Technical Bureau attached to the 51st Arsenal of the Defense Ministry’s Main Missile and Artillery Directorate, with the rank of colonel. He appeared again in a 2019 article, which placed him in a Russian Defense Ministry delegation to Kazakhstan — by then serving as head of a GRAU directorate.
By the evening of June 9, neither Russian law enforcement nor state media had officially named the victim. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo noted that in earlier cases involving senior military figures, the victims had been publicly named the same day.
The Aviatorov neighborhood, where the explosion occurred, was originally built as a residential district for military retirees, Agentstvo reported. In April 2025, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, was killed when a bomb destroyed his car in the same neighborhood. The Investigative Committee opened a terrorism case, alleging that the attack was carried out on the orders of Ukraine’s Security Service, and arrested the alleged perpetrator, Ignat Kuzin. In November 2025, Kuzin was sentenced to life in prison.
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.
Last month, four Russian military satellites — Kosmos-2610, Kosmos-2611, Kosmos-2612, and Kosmos-2613 — altered their orbits and moved toward ICEYE-X36, a radar satellite that has been supplying data to Ukraine’s military since 2022, according to a May 22 report by the analytics firm Integrity ISR.
The dangerous maneuvers came several months after the Finnish-American satellite operator ICEYE and Ukraine’s Defense Ministry signed a new cooperation agreement. Under its terms, Ukraine’s armed forces received expanded access to high-quality radar satellite imagery.
Unlike optical reconnaissance satellites, ICEYE’s satellites use synthetic aperture radars — known as SAR — to capture images.
This allows for high-quality surface imaging regardless of weather or time of day.
What do we know about these “hunter” satellites?
They were launched on April 17 at 2:17 a.m. Moscow time from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz-2.1b rocket. As is standard with military launches, Roscosmos disclosed nothing about the payload beyond confirming that “spacecraft in the interests of Russia’s Defense Ministry” had successfully reached orbit. The agency did not disclose how many spacecraft were aboard.
The U.S. Space Force, which tracks all artificial objects in orbit, logged the launch in its Space-Track catalog. That data — also analyzed by independent researchers — shows that a Volga upper stage separated from the rocket after launch. Cosmos-2609 separated from the stage approximately two hours later; two hours after that, five additional spacecraft — Cosmos-2610, Cosmos-2611, Cosmos-2612, Cosmos-2613 and Cosmos-2614 — simultaneously entered independent flight.
No information about the type, purpose, or characteristics of these satellites is available from open sources. Bart Hendrickx, an independent researcher of the Russian space program, told Meduza that these may be a new type of satellite, since the combination of the Soyuz-2.1b launch vehicle and the Volga upper stage is unusual. Previously, the Volga upper stage was used with Soyuz-2.1v rockets, and only once with a Soyuz-2.1a.
What happened in orbit?
The first satellite, Kosmos-2609, was placed into orbit from the upper stage at an altitude of 495–500 kilometers, with an inclination of 98.25 degrees. The others were placed at 547 kilometers, with an inclination of 96.95 degrees.
Between May 14 and 20, the satellites began maneuvering: their orbital inclination shifted by 0.8 degrees. As a result, they ended up in the same orbit as ICEYE-X36, at an altitude of 550 kilometers and an inclination of 97.8 degrees.
Changes in orbital inclination of the Kosmos satellites and ICEYE-X36
By May 29, the satellites had closed in to near-maximum proximity. Four such episodes were recorded between Kosmos-2614 and ICEYE-X36 over two and a half hours. In two of them, the gap between the satellites shrank to roughly 13 kilometers. In the other two, to 16 and 18 kilometers.
According to Space-Track and the public portion of the TAROT Saber Astronautics platform, the Kosmos satellites remain in the same orbit as the Finnish satellite, leaving them positioned to close in again at any time.
According to Integrity ISR, the Russian satellites remain in the same orbital plane with similar inclinations and a small difference in a measurement known as the right ascension of the ascending node, or RAAN. While inclination measures the tilt of a satellite’s orbit relative to the equator, RAAN marks where that orbit crosses the equatorial plane, which can occur at any of 360 degrees. The Cosmos satellites and ICEYE are within 0.01 to one degree of each other on that scale, an extremely tight margin for low Earth orbit.
The behavior of these satellites follows a pattern consistent with so-called inspector satellites — spacecraft that Russia and other nations have long tested and deployed for eavesdropping on, surveilling, and possibly even destroying other spacecraft. Meduza has previously reported on such spacecraft and their potential use for surveillance and sabotage in orbit.
Why this particular satellite? Why now?
ICEYE has been supplying high-quality satellite imagery to government agencies and private firms since 2014. The company’s satellites can capture images at resolutions as fine as 25 centimeters; some newer models can achieve 16.
ICEYE’s satellites and those of similar companies use SAR (synthetic aperture radar) technology. Rather than an optical camera, an antenna sends a radio beam toward Earth and records its reflection from the planet’s surface. Unlike a conventional optical camera, SAR can render precise terrain contours. And because the radio beam penetrates clouds and reflects regardless of lighting conditions, high-precision images can be captured several times a day — at nearly any hour — and changes on the ground can be tracked throughout the day.
ICEYE says that its unique phased array means the antenna does not need to rotate mechanically, which greatly increases the field of view, imaging speed, and the ability to switch between different modes. The technology is used for a wide range of purposes — monitoring sea ice and tracking oil spills, among others — and it is nearly indispensable for military applications.
ICEYE has launched 70 satellites, with Space-Track showing 54 as currently active. The company has contracts with military organizations from several Western nations, including the United States, Poland, Germany, and Finland.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ICEYE has signed an agreement with the Serhiy Prytula Charitable Foundation. Under the terms of the deal, the foundation funded full access for Ukraine’s armed forces to one of ICEYE’s radar satellites.
Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate later said it had obtained more than 4,000 satellite images of Russian military facilities, including airfields, oil refineries, naval ports, and other infrastructure. In 2025, ICEYE chief executive Rafał Modrzewski attended a meeting that included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Finnish President Alexander Stubb and defense industry representatives.
But is this really pursuit? Could the satellites have ended up close to each other by coincidence?
Not all experts agree that the Russian satellites are deliberately pursuing the ICEYE satellite.
Astronomer and space program researcher Jonathan McDowell has suggested that the Russian satellites’ entry into the same orbit as ICEYE-X36 may simply be coincidence. The 500-to-550-kilometer altitude range is extremely popular for all kinds of satellites. In an emailed comment to Meduza, McDowell noted that for the Russian satellites to be tracking ICEYE-X36, they would need to maintain a stable distance of no more than a few hundred kilometers from it. “The orbital data shows that nothing of the sort is happening,” he said.
Fellow astronomer and spy-satellite researcher Marco Langbroek also cast doubt on the space-war theory. Because ICEYE operates more than 40 satellites, he explained, the Russian satellites’ proximity to one of them is more likely coincidental. “Until we see more Kosmos satellites placed into the orbital plane of other ICEYE satellites, I would say this is interesting, but not proven,” Langbroek wrote.
Still, there are reasons to think the close approach is intentional:
First, the artificial satellite nearest to the Kosmos cluster in the same orbital plane is ICEYE-X36 itself. That is the contention of Greg Gillinger, a space intelligence specialist who analyzed the satellites’ coordinates using the Saber Astronautics platform.
Second, after reaching orbit, the Russian satellites changed their orbital inclination using their own engines rather than being inserted directly into the target orbit. This is unusual for spacecraft, since any fuel use shortens their operational lifespan. Estimates suggest the maneuver required a delta-v comparable to what would be needed to raise an orbit by 160 kilometers.
Third, one ICEYE satellite is known to have been dedicated exclusively to intelligence tasks for Ukraine — something the company has publicly disclosed. This could explain the motive for targeting one particular satellite. It should be noted, however, that ICEYE has not publicly disclosed which specific satellite in its constellation performs these tasks. Russian intelligence may possess that information — or it may regard the targeting of one of the satellites as a “symmetrical response.”
In 2022, Konstantin Vorontsov, the deputy head of Russia’s UN delegation, declared at the United Nations that the use of commercial satellites in space could make them a “legitimate target”: “Quasi-civilian infrastructure could turn out to be a legitimate target for a counterstrike.” Russia also possesses anti-satellite weapons: both anti-satellite missiles and satellites equipped with sub-satellites designed to destroy other spacecraft. Such systems are being developed at the Lavochkin Research and Production Association and the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics.
Bart Hendrickx, the Russian space program researcher, told Meduza that there remains a high probability the satellites ended up in the same orbit by chance. Whereas Russian inspector satellites typically track classified American spacecraft, the motive for monitoring a commercial satellite is less clear — why track a satellite whose design and capabilities are publicly known?
“It’s more likely that the Cosmos satellites ended up in this orbit by chance. If you wanted to study the ICEYE satellite or somehow affect its functioning, why would you need five satellites?” Hendricks reasoned. “For now, we should watch what the Russian satellites do in the coming days and weeks. Then we’ll be able to say with confidence whether there’s a link to ICEYE-X36.”
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