标签： Europe

In a rare on-the-record interview with the BBC from a hidden, heavily secured launch site in eastern Ukraine, the commander of all of Kyiv’s unmanned military forces has laid out Ukraine’s escalating strategy of deep strikes into Russian territory, a campaign that has grown in intensity over recent weeks to levels never seen before in the full-scale invasion.\n\nRobert Brovdi, an ethnic Ukrainian Hungarian from the western city of Uzhhorod who goes by the military call sign “Magyar”, says his drone units have become a constant, disruptive threat to Russian forces, bringing the war home to Russian territory that Moscow has long considered an unassailable, peaceful rear. “We’re like a red rag to the enemy. Because we’re taking the war to their territory so that they feel it too,” Brovdi told the BBC. “1,500 to 2,000km inside Russian territory is no longer the ‘peaceful rear’. The freedom-loving Ukrainian ‘bird’ flies there whenever and wherever it wants.”\n\nOn the drizzly, unmarked field where the reporting team visited, crews worked at breakneck speed to assemble and prepare a long-range drone for launch, racing against the clock to avoid detection by Russian electronic warfare systems and subsequent ballistic missile strikes. After a shouted launch command, the engine roared to life, and the small, jet-like drone lifted off in a flash of white streaking skyward, bound for targets deep inside Russia.\n\nIn recent weeks, these deep strikes have overwhelmingly prioritized Russian oil export and energy infrastructure, causing what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described as tens of billions of dollars in critical losses for Moscow’s energy sector, even amid the recent rally in global crude oil prices. Brovdi defends the targeting of energy facilities, arguing that Russian fossil fuel revenues directly fund the invasion of Ukraine. “Putin extracts natural resources and converts them into blood dollars that they then direct against us in the form of Shahed drones and ballistic missiles,” he said. “If oil refineries are a tool to make money that’s used for war, then they are a legitimate military target, subject to destruction.”\n\nFollowing repeated strikes on the Tuapse refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast, local residents have reported toxic rain and widespread disruption to daily life, a outcome Brovdi views as an intentional, necessary consequence of the invasion Russia launched.\n\nThe expansion of Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has been enabled by two key shifts: advances in domestic drone manufacturing, and a deliberate strategic reorientation to prioritize these deep strikes. Locally produced Ukrainian drones are now cheaper than ever, with extended flight ranges: the model launched during the BBC’s visit can travel more than 1,000 kilometers, and other models already in service can fly twice that distance.\n\nBrovdi commands Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces from a high-tech underground command bunker, accessed through blacked-out van rides and reinforced staircases lined with sleeping quarters for personnel. The cavernous operations room is lined floor-to-ceiling with display screens, where dozens of operators in casual clothing monitor real-time video feeds from drone pilots across the frontline and deep inside Russia. Despite making up only 2% of Ukraine’s total military manpower, Brovdi says his forces are responsible for one-third of all Russian targets destroyed in Ukraine, with an annual casualty rate for his own personnel of less than 1% – a stark contrast to high frontline casualty rates for conventional infantry units. All strikes are recorded for verification and logged in a real-time public scoreboard displayed on one wall of the command center.\n\nBefore Russia’s full-scale invasion, Brovdi was a wealthy grain dealer and art collector, comfortable in international auction houses like Christie’s rather than underground military bunkers. Fragments of his pre-war life remain: works by Ukrainian artists are displayed throughout the command center alongside decommissioned missile casings and captured Russian drones. A clean-shaven civilian before 2022, he now sports a long, mixed ginger and grey beard.\n\nBrovdi joined Ukraine’s Territorial Defence forces just weeks before the full-scale invasion, saying “we all knew war was inevitable.” He fought in some of the war’s bloodiest engagements, including the months-long battle for Bakhmut. His interest in drone warfare began unexpectedly when he was pinned down by Russian fire in Kherson: he recalled a small recreational drone he had bought for his own children, and began integrating similar devices into his unit’s operations. What started as a tactic for self-preservation quickly transformed his unit’s capabilities, allowing them to spot Russian positions and relay coordinates to artillery units for precision strikes. Within months, his unit was building its own armed drones, and gained renown as the 414th Brigade, nicknamed the “Birds of Magyar.”\n\nBrovdi’s strategy goes far beyond deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. A second core priority is eroding Russia’s manpower advantage, a pressing need as Ukraine faces its own challenges mobilizing new frontline troops. “Those who wanted to fight are already fighting,” Brovdi acknowledged. To offset this disadvantage, he has ordered his units to kill more Russian soldiers each month than Russia can recruit new personnel – a target of more than 30,000 enemy casualties per month. “30% of all drone strikes have to be against military personnel. You can call it a kill plan, yes, and right now we are exceeding it,” he said, adding that his forces have hit the target for four consecutive months, with every casualty verified by video footage to be counted. The BBC was not able to independently verify this casualty claim.\n\nBrovdi frames the brutal strategy as a matter of survival for Ukraine. “Russian troops are far beyond their own borders, sent by Putin who wants to destroy our nation. If we don’t kill them, they kill us. That is clear,” he said. He rejects any suggestion of moral ambiguity, refusing to “be gnawed by pity” for enemy troops deployed to attack his country.\n\nA third, less discussed pillar of Brovdi’s strategy is targeting Russian domestic morale. He says Putin cannot afford to end the war given the catastrophic political risks of a failed invasion, so putting constant pressure on Russian civilians and institutions deep inside the country is critical to creating domestic discontent with the war. Viral footage of distraught Tuapse residents whose lives have been upended by drone strikes, he argues, is a sign that the cost of the war is finally reaching ordinary Russians, beyond the small circles of opposition that have criticized Putin since the invasion began. “With every drone, I aim to make more Russians question the war their country is fighting and the president who started it,” he said.\n\nUnlike some Ukrainian military and political leaders who have framed the war’s goal as a full reconquest of all occupied Ukrainian territory through large-scale counter-offensives, Brovdi says he has no illusions about his forces’ role. His goal, he says, is not seizing large swathes of land, but containing Russian advances and slowing any offensive progress. “We have an effective weapon: not to conduct an offensive war, but to prevent the enemy advancing effectively on our territory,” he said. He dismissed Putin’s stated goal of seizing the remainder of Ukraine’s Donbas region within months as absurd. “What is he smoking? That’s not realistic. It’s absurd,” he said.

On the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, a wave of reciprocal drone and missile strikes across Ukraine, Russian-occupied territories and mainland Russia has left at least 16 people dead, amplifying urgent global warnings about nuclear risks stemming from more than two years of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In southern Ukraine’s Dnipro, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha announced Sunday that the death toll from recent Russian drone and missile attacks on the city climbed to nine. Cross-border strikes have extended into Russian-held areas as well: Moscow-appointed officials in Sevastopol, the main port on the annexed Crimean Peninsula, reported one fatality from a Ukrainian drone strike. Since Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, the peninsula has functioned as a key military staging and supply hub for Russian forces in the ongoing war. Further north, in Russia-claimed Luhansk Oblast of eastern Ukraine, Moscow-installed leader Leonidypasechnik stated three civilians were killed in an overnight Ukrainian drone attack on a rural village, following two deaths from a separate strike in the same region early Saturday. Ukraine has not issued official comment on any of these strikes against Russian-held territory, and the details of the attacks could not be independently verified by the Associated Press.

The streak of cross-border attacks preceded these fatal incidents: Russian local authorities reported one woman killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on the border region of Belgorod just days prior. On Sunday, Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed it had targeted a major oil refinery in Yaroslavl, a facility located hundreds of kilometers inside Russian territory. The strike ignited large fires at the refinery, which processes 15 million tons of crude annually and supplies gasoline, diesel and jet fuel directly to the Russian military. Moscow has not yet released an official response to the Yaroslavl attack.

Kyiv’s expanded long-range strike capability is rooted in its domestically produced drone program, which has developed systems capable of reaching targets 1,500 kilometers deep into Russian territory. In recent weeks, Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russian energy infrastructure, particularly oil processing facilities. These strikes come after the Trump administration granted Russia a temporary sanctions waiver to boost energy exports, a move Kyiv has openly criticized, arguing that the additional export revenue will be funneled into new military weapons to intensify attacks on Ukraine.

The flurry of attacks coincided with global commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, drawing renewed attention to the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe at the abandoned plant. In his official address marking the anniversary, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian military aggression risks repeating the 1986 disaster. “Through its war, Russia is once again bringing the world to the brink of a man-made disaster,” Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook. “Russian-Iranian Shahed drones regularly fly over the Chernobyl plant, and one of them struck the confinement structure last year.” He added, “The world must not allow this nuclear terrorism to continue, and the best way is to force Russia to stop its reckless attacks.”

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi echoed these warnings during a visit to Kyiv, stressing that urgent repairs to the plant’s damaged outer protective shell must begin without delay. Grossi noted that IAEA safety assessments confirm damage from last year’s strike has already compromised a core safety function of the structure. Leaving the damage unrepaired for years, he warned, would increase risks to the original reinforced sarcophagus that contains radioactive debris from the 1986 reactor explosion. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that critical repairs will cost at least 500 million euros ($586 million).

Ukrainian officials say a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement, a $2.1 billion arch-shaped protective enclosure completed in 2019 over the ruins of Chernobyl’s Reactor No.4, in February 2024. Moscow has repeatedly denied targeting the plant, claiming Kyiv staged the incident to rally international support.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Law enforcement in Northern Ireland has activated a major security alert in Dunmurry, a suburban town on the edge of Belfast, following confirmation that a vehicle-borne explosive device detonated close to a local police station. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced Sunday that residents living in the surrounding area have been evacuated from their homes, and the general public has been urged to steer clear of the cordoned-off zone to avoid potential risks from further explosive hazards.

Local UK Member of Parliament Sorcha Eastwood, who represents the Lagan Valley constituency southwest of Belfast, spoke publicly about her reaction to the overnight incident, describing the news as deeply unsettling. “It is distressing and disturbing to wake up to the news that a car bomb exploded outside Dunmurry police station last night,” Eastwood said. She went on to note that the targeted area is a densely populated hub that is home to residential neighborhoods, local small businesses, and regularly sees large numbers of residents out for social activities or work on weekend evenings. She emphasized that the absence of any injuries or fatalities was nothing short of a stroke of luck. “It is only through the grace of God that there are no casualties,” she added.

As of Sunday, investigators have not released any confirmed details about potential suspects or the underlying motive for the attack. The incident also comes in the wake of a similar attempted bombing just one month prior roughly 32 kilometers southwest of Dunmurry, targeting another PSNI station in the town of Lurgan.

According to law enforcement accounts of the Lurgan incident, two men wearing masks intercepted a delivery driver, forced the driver at gunpoint to drive a vehicle fitted with a crude but functional improvised explosive device to the station’s entrance. The incident forced the evacuation of more than 100 local homes before a controlled explosion could be carried out to disable the device. Officials concluded the attack was orchestrated by dissident Republican factions opposed to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a landmark peace deal that brought an end to decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. PSNI characterized the Lurgan attack as a “pathetic attempt to remain relevant and provoke fear” among local communities.

The Good Friday Agreement, brokered in 1998, effectively ended 30 years of violent unrest known as The Troubles, which pitted Republican groups seeking unification with the Republic of Ireland against pro-union factions that wish to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom. While the peace deal has drastically reduced large-scale violence, small dissident groups that reject the power-sharing framework of the agreement continue to carry out sporadic low-level attacks targeting police and government infrastructure.

Four decades after the world’s worst nuclear disaster shattered communities across what is now northern Ukraine, residents of Slavutych defied wartime curfews and official warnings against large public gatherings to honor the dead and heroes of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in a midnight commemoration held on the 25th of April, 2026.

Slavutych, the purpose-built city located roughly 50 kilometers from the shattered remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is inextricably tied to the disaster’s legacy. Built in the aftermath of the April 26, 1986 explosion to house displaced plant workers and their families, the city welcomed its first permanent residents in 1988. Today, it holds the collective memory of a catastrophe that exposed decades of dangerous negligence and institutional secrecy under the former Soviet Union. For 48 hours after the reactor exploded, Soviet authorities hid the scale of the accident from the public, only acknowledging the disaster after radioactive fallout drifted across Northern Europe and Swedish scientists raised public alarm.

An estimated 600,000 emergency responders and cleanup workers, widely known as Chernobyl’s “liquidators,” were drafted into the deadly work of extinguishing the reactor fire and containing radioactive contamination. Thirty workers lost their lives within months of the accident, claimed by the blast or acute radiation sickness. Millions of people across Ukraine and neighboring Belarus were exposed to life-threatening radiation levels, and hundreds of towns and villages were permanently abandoned, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents into mass permanent evacuation.

Like much of northern Ukraine, Slavutych has faced new upheaval amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The city was briefly occupied by Russian forces early in the war during Moscow’s failed push to capture Kyiv, and it has endured brutal winters marked by widespread power outages that left some residents cooking meals over open fires in city streets. Even with these risks and ongoing restrictions, the annual commemoration vigil has gone ahead without fail, drawing crowds of all ages to the city’s central square.

This year, attendees streamed into the plaza before midnight, many arriving as families carrying armfuls of spring tulips and daffodils. They arranged candles across the ground to form a giant radiation hazard symbol, a quiet tribute to those who lost their lives to the disaster. The gathering unfolded against a backdrop of Soviet-era apartment blocks, with a war memorial honoring local residents killed in the ongoing invasion standing a short distance away.

For many attendees, the vigil is a deeply personal ritual. Seventy-one-year-old Liudmyla Liubyva once attended the ceremony with her husband, a former Chernobyl plant worker who developed a radiation-linked disability that left him unable to walk. She told attendees that while honoring the sacrifices of liquidators remains a critical duty, Russia’s war has reignited long-dormant fears that the nuclear danger was never fully laid to rest. Referencing a 2025 Russian drone strike that damaged the New Safe Confinement — the massive steel dome constructed to seal radioactive contamination from the destroyed reactor — Liubyva said, “When the drone struck the arch, it felt like the world could return to 1986. We all — young and old alike — must protect our land, because it is so vulnerable.”

As soft instrumental music played, poetry about the disaster echoed across the square through loudspeakers. “Years pass, generations change, but the pain of Chernobyl does not fade,” a woman’s voice recited. At the front of the gathering, attendees dressed in white protective suits and face masks, symbolic of the gear liquidators were often forced to use during cleanup, stood in silent vigil holding lit candles.

Sixty-seven-year-old Larysa Panova, who was forced to abandon her native hometown of Chernobyl and resettle in Slavutych after the accident, said the new city has become her home, but she still longs for the forests and open land of the community she left behind. Before the full-scale invasion, Panova regularly traveled back to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to visit remaining relatives or revisit the places of her childhood. The war has cut off that access, leaving her with only memories. “I never stop thinking of Chernobyl as my homeland,” Panova said. “You remember your school, your childhood, your youth — everything happened there, in Chernobyl.”

This reporting was contributed by AP correspondents Vasilisa Stepanenko and Volodymyr Yurchuk based in Kyiv, with financial support for nuclear security coverage provided by the Outrider Foundation. The Associated Press retains full editorial control over all content.