By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 7/24/25

Ukraine’s war with Russia increasingly looks like it is lost. Ukraine is losing ground in the battle with Russia, albeit slowly. At the same time, the formal negotiations on the first cluster in Kyiv’s EU accession bid were supposed to start on July 18, but that failed to happen. However, since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed a law that defangs Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms it now looks unlikely the process will be restarted.

Ukraine’s situation has rapidly decayed in just the last week. It now appears that Zelenskiy has given up on any hope of joining the EU anytime soon and has refocused on consolidating his control over domestic politics. At the same time, the European Nato-pays for Ukraine weapons “big announcement” from July 14 is also rapidly unravelling, leaving Ukraine without the weapons it desperately needs, especially air defence ammo. And the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has recently suffered a string of setbacks on the battlefield that bode ill for the rest of the summer’s campaign.

AFU losing ground

The Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) retook full control of the Luhansk region for the first time since the start of the war on July 1, and at the weekend, as yet unconfirmed reports say that Pokrovsk fell to Russian forces on July 22, a key logistical hub that supplies the AFU’s entire eastern front line.

Ukraine has fought heroically for the last three years, surprising everyone by holding off the bigger and more powerful AFR against all odds.

But despite Trump’s efforts to broker a peace, the ceasefire talks are dead. At the third Istanbul meeting on July 23, nothing of significance was discussed, let alone agreed.

“The Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul predictably ended with nothing but another prisoner exchange. The Ukrainians again proposed a meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin, Trump and Erdogan, but in response they got the predictable answer: first, they need to agree on all contentious issues, and the meeting of the leaders will be a formality for signing the treaty,” The Bell commented in a note. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s announced plan to rearm Ukraine is falling apart at the seams – its only understandable part, the delivery of Patriot air defence systems to Kyiv, will not take place before the spring of 2026.”

Ukraine continues to suffer from a chronic shortage of men, money and materiel. As the war drags into its fourth year, the tide is turning inexorably against Kyiv as heroism and innovation give way to the simple equation of who has more men and the greater industrial production capability. Ukraine loses to Russia on both counts. It was Russia and America’s ability to out-produce Germany and make more planes, tanks and bullets – the famous lend-lease programme – to defeat the Nazis that eventually proved decisive in WWII. Putin put the entire Russian economy on a war footing in the first year of the war and is now reaping the dividends. The EU has only just started talking about making those investments with VCL’s ReArm speech (video) on March 4, after it became clear the Trump administration would close the US security umbrella that Europe has sheltered under since the start of the Cold War. Moreover, the European defence sector is suffering from decades of woeful under-investment and is in no position to replace the US held, as was described in detail in the Draghi report.

Russia is being fully supported by its allies; Ukraine is not. A reported 28 containers of arms and ammo arrived in Moscow last week from North Korea, and a new decoy drone has reportedly appeared on the battlefield this month that is made entirely out of Chinese components. The Russian Ministry of Defence just released video of a drone factory that is entirely based on upgraded Iranian technology. Russia will soon be in a position where it can launch 2,000 Shahed explosive drones a day, according to German intelligence, up from the 750 it current uses.

As bne IntelliNews has been reporting for the last three years, despite the outbreak of the largest war since WWII in its backyard, the EU has persistently refused to sign off on the defence sector procurement contracts needed for private-sector arms-makers to upgrade their factories, and is now scrambling to expand production. For example, the Franco-British power Storm Shadow missiles Ukraine has been using went out of production 15 years ago and manufacture will only be restarted sometime later this autumn.

Ukraine has been holding its own in the drone war that started in early 2023, but it has lost the missile war that is currently underway since May. Russia now produces some 1,200 missiles a year, whereas Ukraine makes only a handful. That makes Kyiv entirely dependent on its Western allies for things such as the Patriot air defence, which is the only weapon it has that can bring Russian missiles down, but with US President Donald Trump’s exit Ukraine becomes defenceless. Even if the US fully equipped Ukraine with all the Patriot batteries it wants – and Trump has made it clear he will not send any US Patriot batteries to Ukraine – then US weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin only makes some 600-650 Patriot interceptor rockets a year, less than half the number of missiles Russia can fire.

Increasingly, Ukraine’s allies are admitting the only effective countermeasure to Russia’s growing arsenal of missiles is to strike launch sites and production facilities deep inside Russian territory with Nato-supplied long-range missiles – something that the West has repeated ruled out for fear of provoking a direct clash between Russia and Nato.

EU bid looks dead

The EU was due to open the first cluster to formal EU accession negotiations at the end of last week on July 18, but in a long interview with European Pravda, then EU Accession envoy Olha Stefanishyna admitted that “multiple” countries – not just Hungary – had concerns about Ukraine’s commitment and the talks did not begin.

Stefanishyna told European Pravda, that the EU is “not currently prepared to take the decisions” Ukraine expects, and she was reassigned the same day and became the special envoy to Washington.

Ukraine’s EU accession bid has now stalled, and it suddenly became a lot more uncertain if it will ever be restarted after Zelenskiy pushed through and signed into law the highly controversial Law 12414 on July 22 that guts Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms.

Zelenskiy immediate faced a backlash from his EU partners. There was a mild rebuke in a joint statement from G7 ambassadors in the first hours saying they were “closely following” the situation. But within 48 hours those comments became rapidly more strident.

“As a corrupt country Ukraine will not make it into the EU,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on July 24. “The fastest way for Ukraine to lose the support of both the EU member states and the public in the member states is to go back to the bad old days of corruption.”

Analysts have pointed out that reassigning Stefanishyna, who has been talking to Brussels for more than five years, at this crucial point in the EU talks will only undermine Brussel’s confidence further and suggests that Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) has given up for now on beginning formal talks about becoming a member of the EU.

Protests in Kyiv and other cites immediately broke out (video) following the passage of Law 12414, even before Zelenskiy had signed the bill into law later the same day. By the second day the protest crowd swelled forcing Zelenskiy to start looking for compromises.

On July 23, the president suggested new legislation to defuse the rapidly escalating tensions between the government and the citizens. He gave the heads of law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies two weeks to prepare the necessary legislative changes to “optimise work without duplicating functions,” according to Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.

“The President gave us two weeks for meetings, for negotiations … so that in two weeks we could come to him and say how we will work. What changes are needed so that everyone can work without duplicating functions,” Klymenko said at a meeting with journalists on July 24. However, few believe at this point Zelenskiy will back down and cancel Law 12414.

While most of the attention has been focused on how the new law will defang Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies, the more worrying aspect of the law is it concentrates all law enforcement power in the hands of the president alone. As some commentators are anticipating a Ukrainian military defeat in the near term, they speculate that Zelenskiy is gathering more threads of power to himself to cope with the inevitable public backlash if he sues for peace.

“Have we woken up in a police state today?” asked Ihor Zhdanov, the former Minister of Youth, in an editorial posted by Interfax on July 23.

“The adoption of yesterday’s law is not just a restriction on the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). The matter is much more serious,” he said. “Today, the “presidential power pool” already includes the Prosecutor General’s Office, the State Bureau of Investigation, the Security Service of Ukraine and the National Police. NABU, SAPO and Bureau of Economic Security (BES), with no director appointed yet, are on the way.”

“In other words, all the country’s security forces are already under the control of the head of state, who is also the Supreme Commander-in-Chief under martial law. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that we have already woken up in a police state?” said Zhdanov.

Georgia and Hungary

Zelenskiy’s decision to concentrate all policing power in his own hands with Law 12414 is seen as a red line for the EU. Brussels was reportedly already having doubts about Ukraine’s bid before the law, but its rushed adoption is a red line for Brussels. Like Georgia’s adoption of the so-called Kremlin-inspired “foreign agents” law that sparked mass protests in March, Ukraine’s Law 12414 will certainly stop the EU accession process, as it has done with Georgia, nominally another EU candidate, and could even bring down sanctions on Kyiv.

The practical upshot of the clash is that Moldova’s bid to join the EU, which was granted candidate status at the same time as Ukraine in June 2022, will now be decoupled in order not to penalise Chisinau which remains on course to meet Brussels demands.

However, both Georgia and Ukraine’s visa-free deals with the EU, one of the most valued wins from the EU accession process, are not thought to be in danger for the moment, say analysts. Visa-free status is Brussels’ trump card in any future negotiations, as it allows European diplomats to threaten the two governments with direct pressure from their own populations if Brussels threatens to rescind the right of unfettered entry to the EU. EU foreign policy chief and former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has already threatened to play this card in Georgia’s case.

European Pravda reports that there were secret negotiations between Kyiv and Brussels in the run-up to the July 18 cluster negotiation deadline.

The European Commission had been grappling with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s veto of Ukraine’s accession bid, but was slow to realise that whereas Orban had used his power to block the process as leverage to extort concessions from Brussels over issues like access to Russian oil exports, his position has hardened significantly more recently.

Having dominated Hungarian politics for a decade, Orban’s Fidesz party is now trailing in the polls to the opposition Tisza Party and its leader Peter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who has become a prominent critic of Orbán’s government ahead of the crucial 2026 general election. Orban has built his opposition to Ukraine’s accession to the EU into the heart of his re-election campaign, and so is unlikely to make any concessions at all.

That has proved to be a huge problem for Kallas and the other EU leaders that were keen to bring Ukraine into the EU as fast as possible. The accession process is usually long and arduous, often taking a decade to complete, but the EC has made numerous concessions to accelerate Ukraine’s bid that could have been completed by 2030, according to European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos when she spoke only last week.

Not anymore. Kallas came up with a Plan B that boiled down to starting the negotiation process without Budapest’s approval, as under the EU Treaty a unanimous vote is not needed to open negotiations on the six chapters, only to close them. However, European Pravda reports that several members were nervous about this approach, as it is legally questionable. Budapest would almost certainly sue the commission – and most likely win – but that process would take at least three years, with a good chance of Orban no longer being in power.

Her alternative plan, to strip Hungary of its voting rights under Article 7 of the EU treaty, is even more legally dubious and if successful would have the side-effect of undermining the entire EU structure, which is founded on unanimous agreements amongst member states.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, the EU is already in danger of falling apart thanks to the combined pressure of the polycrisis and the war in Ukraine, but if Ukraine now drops out, Europe’s prestige will only be further damaged and the fissures will widen further. Last year the EU acted in concert with the US to oppose Russia; this year it has been reduced to the “E3” – the UK, France and Germany – leading the drive to support Ukraine and the US has taken itself out of the game completely.

All these problems were already undermined the attempt to start EU accession negotiations, before Zelenskiy’s Law 12414. According to European Pravda, after the June 18 deadline passed, Bankova seems to have made a decision to give up on the process, which would have taken a decade anyway, and focus on Ukraine’s domestic politics and on lobbying the White House instead.

That partly inspired last week’s Cabinet reshuffle, which as bne IntelliNews reported, downgraded the EU accession drive and refocused Bankova’s diplomatic efforts on bring Washington back to Kyiv’s side. Stefanishyna, one of Bankova’s most experienced diplomats, was appointed a special envoy to Washington and the new Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko is both a Zelenskiy-loyalist and also well-known in Washington, where she successfully brokered the difficult minerals deal with Trump administration that was signed on April 30.

Banking on Trump to come to the rescue looks like a very risky strategy, but Zelenskiy is rapidly running out of other options.

RT, 7/20/25

Russia would inevitably lose its sovereignty if it relies solely on oil and gas revenues and abandons domestic production in favor of imports, President Vladimir Putin has said.

In an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin released on Sunday, Putin defended Russia’s decades-long effort to localize automobile manufacturing, saying it was essential for protecting the country’s economic and political autonomy.

He recalled that in the 1990s many of his government colleagues wanted to abandon efforts to develop the car industry and instead rely on foreign-made vehicles, a view that he opposed.

“We must talk about technological independence… If we buy everything with the oil and gas [revenues] – and now they [the West] are trying to cut us off from oil and gas – then Russia will simply lose its competitiveness, and with it, its sovereignty,” he said.

According to Putin, efforts to improve the domestic car industry began with cooperation with Western partners that were licensed to build assembly plants in Russia. Starting in the early 2010s, the authorities gradually tightened localization requirements, demanding that automakers produce more components domestically.

“This was serious work. We were essentially creating our own cars,” Putin remarked, adding that the effort paid off after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, which saw an exodus of Western companies from Russia as Kiev’s backers introduced sanctions against Moscow.

Russia sold about 1.571 million new passenger cars in 2024 (up 48%), with Lada accounting for roughly 28% (436,155 units) and remaining the market leader, according to the analytical agency Autostat. However, all others spots in the top ten were occupied by Chinese brands. Russia’s Kamaz also distributed the most trucks in the country last year, despite an overall drop in sales, the agency said.

Putin has personally promoted the domestic automobile industry and has often been seen driving Lada and Kamaz vehicles. He also uses a limousine from the Russian luxury brand Aurus as his presidential car. In 2024, he gifted Aurus limos to North Korea’s Kim Jong‑un and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Le Monde, 7/16/25

Confronted with heavy casualties on the Ukrainian front and a wave of retirements, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is struggling to find enough workers to keep its war economy running. Russian companies will need to hire the equivalent of two million workers a year over the next five years to fill both newly created positions and vacancies left by retirees.

“By 2030, we will need to integrate 10.9 million people into the economy. About 800,000 new jobs will be created, and about 10.1 million people will have reached retirement age,” said Anton Kotiakov, the labor minister, on Monday, July 14, during a meeting with President Putin dedicated to demographic challenges.

The minister did not specify how he planned to meet the growing demand for workers – a problem now acute across all sectors of the economy, as illustrated by recent reports from the Central Bank and the current unemployment rate, which stands at its lowest level (2.2%).

This labor shortage became even more severe after the invasion of Ukraine, as around 700,000 men – mostly contract soldiers – are currently on the front lines. Many Russians, lured by the promise of salaries well above average, signed contracts with the military to fight or to work in arms manufacturing. The state pays its recruits generously, overshadowing the civilian sector, which suffers from chronic labor shortages.

Admission of failure for the Kremlin

This shortage is nothing new: Russia has seen its working-age population shrink for nearly 20 years. According to Rosstat, the federal statistics agency, the labor force decreased by 5.8 million between 2007 and 2021. The invasion of Ukraine only accelerated this trend. In spring 2024, Russia was short 1.86 million workers, based on calculations by Rosstat using requests submitted by companies to employment centers.

To help fill the gap, 47,000 foreign workers – mainly from China, India, Turkey and Serbia – were hired in the industrial sector in 2024, according to the labor ministry. Recruitment efforts will continue, particularly in India, which was described as a “natural partner” in this field by Andrei Komarov, a member of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs; Komarov recently expressed support for training foreign workers to meet market needs.

And time is running out, with demographic decline only accelerating, as shown by statistics published by Rosstat in April. In 2024, there were more deaths than births: 1.82 million deaths compared to 1.22 million newborns, with the death toll not including military losses in Ukraine, which authorities have declined to disclose. A total of 195,432 births were recorded in January and February of this year, a drop of 3% compared to 2024. Nationwide, deaths outnumber births by an average of 1.6 to 1, and in some regions, the gap is even wider. In Kaluga and Ivanovo it is 2 to 1, and in Vladimir and Belgorod, 3 to 1.

These statistics amount to an admission of failure for the Kremlin, which sees the birth rate decline inexorably despite its pro-natal policies, efforts to reduce the use of abortion and promotion of “traditional family values.” Since March, a bonus equivalent to €1,000 has been paid to each minor female student who gives birth. A few months earlier, a law was enacted banning “the promotion of a child-free lifestyle,” including a fine of up to five million rubles, or about €55,000.

Raising the retirement age

While the fertility rate for Russian women (1.4 children in 2022) is close to the European average (1.38), excess male mortality plays a major role in dragging down the country’s demographic prospects. Officially, male life expectancy was 68 years in 2023 – 12 fewer years than for women. Considering losses in Ukraine – 100,000 deaths since January, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio – excess male mortality can only worsen. At this rate, the country’s population, according to Rosstat, could fall to 138.8 million (from 144 million currently) by 2046, or even as low as 130 million under a more pessimistic scenario – the size of the Russian Empire in 1897.

If nothing is done to counter this decline, the retirement age will need to be raised to 80, assuming life expectancy allows it, according to an analysis published in May by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center. Days later, independent demographer Alexei Raksha, who participated in the study, saw his name added to a list of “foreign agents” that the Kremlin updates weekly.

The issue of demographic decline is under closer scrutiny than ever by the authorities, who have chosen to censor Rosstat. In its most recent socio-economic report, dated May, demographic data on deaths, births, marriages, divorces and population movements disappeared. Once accessible, these figures have not been updated since March and will no longer be released in the future, except by special authorization.

By Will Schryver, Twitter, 7/19/25

Will Schryver is a geopolitical and military analyst.

As I have pondered these questions over the past few days, I have reached the conclusion that everyone in NATO militaries whose job it is to ascertain the FACTS of anti-ballistic missile performance (Patriot, THAAD, Arrow, SM-3) knows perfectly well that NONE of them have impressed, and the Patriot has been the worst of the bunch.

I understand that claims run from 50% – 95% success rate for Patriot PAC-3 interceptors against Russian Iskander and Kinzhal ballistic missiles.

That is entirely unsubstantiated nonsense.

I have not seen ANY persuasive evidence of those kinds of interception rates — neither in Ukraine nor in Israel.

We have seen multiple videos of US/Israeli systems frantically firing off a dozen or more interceptors, shortly followed by Russian or Iranian ballistic missiles streaking in to hit their targets.

Anyway, with that preface, my point is that western militaries have certainly seen this, and consequently they can’t really have much motivation to hold on tightly to their Patriot systems — especially if they can get a good price for them.

I think the only real problem they have now is a “political optics” issue. Everyone involved has to ACT as though it’s a big sacrifice to relinquish their super-duper fantastic Patriot systems to Ukraine.

You can bet the western arms industry marketers are dangling the “next wunderwaffe” to everyone concerned, and saying: “These new ABM systems we are ready to crank out are world-beating. So ship your rusty Patriots to Ukraine, and you’ll be first in line to receive the next big thing.”

I think western missile technology in general, and air-defense systems in particular, are currently at least a decade behind Russia. Fact is, they always have been. Since the 1950s.

By Kyle Anzalone, Libertarian Institute, 7/23/25

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill that restricts the work of anti-corruption agencies. In response, Ukrainians took to the streets in Kiev, chanting “corruption equals death.”

The new law gives Kiev significant control over Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the affiliated Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). A statement from the agencies said, “In effect, if this bill becomes law, the head of SAPO will become a nominal figure, while NABU will lose its independence and turn into a subdivision of the prosecutor general’s office.”

Initially, Zelensky defended the law, claiming Ukrainians needed to remain focused on the Russian enemy. “I gathered all heads of Ukraine’s law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies, along with the Prosecutor General. It was a much-needed meeting – a frank and constructive conversation that truly helps,” Zelensky wrote on X. “We all share a common enemy: the Russian occupiers. And defending the Ukrainian state requires a strong enough law enforcement and anti-corruption system – one that ensures a real sense of justice.”

In the streets, Ukrainians chanted “Destroy Russians, not democracy,” indicating that the protesters do not have a pro-Russia objective. Zelensky later posted on X that he would introduce a new bill to ensure the NABU and SAPO can continue to operate.

“I will propose a bill to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine that will be the response.” He continued, “It will ensure the strength of the rule of law system, and there will be no Russian influence or interference in the activities of law enforcement. And very importantly – all the norms for the independence of anti-corruption institutions will be in place.”

The anti-corruption street action is the first major protest against Zelensky since Russia invaded the country in 2022.