Russia launched a new large-scale ballistic missile attack on Kyiv early this Wednesday, causing damage in a residential neighborhood and hitting several power plants in the Ukrainian capital. The attack confirms that Russia is not committed to the energy truce announced by Donald Trump last weekend. The attacks have left at least 3 dead and 22 injured in the Ukrainian capital. Authorities have yet to comment on the attacks against the power plants or the extent of the damage caused.

Vladimir Putin is intensifying both his full-scale war against Ukraine and his shadow war against the rest of Europe. His main goal against Europe is to end the support that the continent gives to Ukraine, in order to be able to subjugate the country, a milestone he considers existential both for the future of Russia and for his own future. While in Europe we must prepare as well as we can to defend ourselves against all kinds of hybrid attacks, the central axis of our response should be to redouble support for Ukraine. Ukraine is his main target. It is there – and only there, not in a struggle of a thousand small hybrid attacks – where Putin's Russia can be defeated and effectively deterred.

United States President Donald Trump is escalating his tone against his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. "It is time for Ukraine to have a new president," Trump said, following Ukrainian attacks against a Russian oil export terminal. "We told him he could do whatever he wanted with Russia, but no attacks on the refineries because it is causing a global problem," the United States President asserted, in reference to the increase in diesel prices.

The city of Oleshky, in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson, has become a symbol of the human tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Trapped on the front line since 2022, in recent months its residents have stopped receiving food because the road that connects the municipality to the outside is completely mined and at the mercy of drones. Without water, electricity, or heating, and now also without food, its inhabitants are trying to survive as best they can and fear the arrival of winter, while the Kremlin refuses to evacuate them and accuses Kyiv of being responsible for the siege.

At least 33 people have died in a Russian bombing in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, in the east of the country, against two city buses that were in circulation at the time and were full of passengers. According to Ukrainian authorities, 18 more people have been injured due to the bombing, which Kyiv has described as selective against civilians in a key bastion for Moscow.

The center of Kyiv filled with dense black smoke this Monday afternoon. The Russian army bombed the center of the Ukrainian capital in broad daylight, leaving at least one woman dead and 21 injured, including three children. The city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, reported that Russian drones attacked non-residential buildings in three districts of the city at four in the afternoon. One of the bombed buildings is the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the country's main public scientific research institution, located in one of the most central areas of the city, very close to important monuments, such as the National Opera and the German embassy.

Denmark has joined this Thursday the increasingly frequent and more serious warnings about a potential Russian military attack against NATO territory. Just a week ago, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was the first to warn that Moscow is planning missile attacks against border countries, and the next day it was French President Emmanuel Macron who assured that the Russian threat to Europeans has intensified and announced a protection plan. Today, the Danish intelligence services have joined in, stating that Russia will likely intensify its hybrid war in the coming months and adding that a military attack against a NATO country cannot be ruled out.

Three people have died and six others, including two minors, have been injured this Sunday in the Moscow region due to a Ukrainian drone attack during the main day of the parliamentary elections in Russia. The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, stated that the fatalities are a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man who were in their home at the time of the attack.

Vladimir Putin has already achieved the popular endorsement he so desired for his war and that no one doubted he would obtain. His party, United Russia, has received almost 58% of the votes in the legislative elections, with more than 95% of the results counted, and will have the highest number of deputies in history: 355 out of the 450 in the Duma. Figures higher than those of five years ago, when it scraped 50% of the votes, and which will even allow him to expand the constitutional majority, but which does not correspond to the unrest expressed by the population in recent months.

“They have opened Pandora’s box,” Vladimir Putin warned recently, after a month of the Ukrainian campaign against Russian online retail warehouses. That threat seemed like a new step in the rhetorical escalation with which the Kremlin has been pressuring Volodymyr Zelenskyy for months, and which until now had not translated into the promised wave of systematic attacks. In recent weeks, however, this warning has become a reality. Russia has been relentless day and night against Kyiv and its region, causing dozens of deaths. Moscow is chest-thumping about having turned the Ukrainian capital into a city in permanent alert and has once again recommended that foreign diplomats flee. Furthermore, it has given the starting signal for the season of bombings against Ukrainian energy facilities with the drop in temperatures.

A Russian drone attacked a passenger train traveling between Kyiv and Warsaw this Sunday, just two kilometers from the border with Poland, without causing any injuries in what Ukraine has described as "Putin's terror striking directly at the doors of the EU and NATO." Tonight, Russia attacked Ukraine with four missiles and 405 drones. The attack has left at least six dead and more than forty injured and has especially affected the western part of the country, which was relatively more preserved. Since Ukrainian airspace is closed due to the Russian aggression, the train is one of the main routes for the entry and exit of people and goods to the country.

About fifteen people gather around a table in the evening at the Rodina restaurant for dinner. Activists, journalists, and evacuation volunteers bid farewell, amidst pizzas and a bit of wine, to one of the most famous establishments in the city of Kramatorsk, which will close its doors forever the next day. "I decided to quit a month ago, I have a young son and the situation has become unsustainable. We don't know what we will do, but now everyone is closing," says Rose, who opened a gastronomic venue in an old cinema three years ago. Now it is surrounded by the fiber optic cables of Russian drones that remain hanging in trees and buildings shaken by daily explosions. When Rose took over the Rodina, which in Russian means "homeland," she kept the name because in Ukrainian the same word means "family".

At a time of special tension between Europe and Russia and amidst a constant escalation of attacks between Kyiv and Moscow, any suspicious movement in the airspace quickly triggers alarms. This is what has happened in the last few hours with a drone and the plane of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who would have been involved in a scare on his trip on Tuesday to Oslo to attend the funeral of King Harald V this Wednesday.

"Europeans are facing a harsh truth: that this is the new normal." This sentence from the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, brings to mind that "new normal" of restrictions on individual freedom in favor of public health to which we had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The statement, however, is not from six years ago, but from this week. Now, the new normal to which we must get used to is that of systematic attacks by Russia. "We are in a new era of European security," insisted the leader of the EU executive. The message arrived after German authorities directly blamed Moscow for an attack with an explosives-laden drone at Leipzig airport at the beginning of August, one of the most serious sabotage attempts recorded so far on European territory, at a key NATO logistics center.

When last Saturday 38 people died near Kyiv in one of the deadliest Russian attacks of the entire war, many inevitably thought of the unstoppable destructive power of ballistic missiles. But what crashed into the ammunition depot in the suburb of Mila was not a fearsome Iskander, but a new-generation drone. The Geran-4 and Geran-5, the latest Russian evolutions of the Iranian Shahed, have also become the latest headache for Ukrainian air defenses, which see with impotence how, in addition to missiles, they now also have difficulties stopping this new Kremlin weapon.

"We are not at war, but we are a daily target of hybrid warfare." This is how German Foreign Minister Alexander Dobrindt summarized on Tuesday the moment that one of the main European powers is going through, and which is extensible to a good part of the region. After Dobrindt's words, Germany has recorded three violent acts in the last two days, which coincide with the German government's accusation against the Kremlin of being responsible for the attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport on August 4th. Amidst the uncertainty and waiting for police investigations to progress, Germany and Europe are debating between avoiding an excessive escalation that worsens the situation or taking a stand given the gravity of the incident in Leipzig.

If you want to better understand the world we have started living in for the past few months, there are a couple of news items of the day that are very helpful.The day before yesterday, Pedro Sánchez stated that Morocco did not instigate the massive entry of people into Ceuta, that it had been the work of Russia and Israel, who had spread through the networks in Morocco that Spain was waiting for workers with open arms, so to speak. Putin himself has denied that Russia had anything to do with it, and the Israeli government has also denied it. But this morning, the digital newspaper El Español published that the Spanish police have informed the judge that the massive entry into Ceuta was guided by Moroccan gendarmes under the orders of plainclothes agents with the aim of collapsing the border control system and eliminating Spain's response capacity.

Volodymyr Zelensky is looking for new ways to pressure Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine. In the last few hours, the rhetorical escalation has reached a new level after the Ukrainian president issued a warning to international airlines that still maintain flights to Russia. “Russian airspace will become completely unsafe,” he stated on Tuesday night. While clarifying that Kyiv “does not threaten civil air transport nor does it threaten a single aircraft,” Zelensky holds the Russian authorities responsible for how they manage their airspace from now on, taking into account that “there will be drones in the Russian sky to a dimension that must be considered”.

The President of the Generalitat begins an official trip this Wednesday that will take him to spend 48 hours in Ukraine, accompanied by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jaume Duch, and he will also meet with the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni. Illa will arrive in Kyiv at a particularly complicated moment, as missiles have been falling on the city for six consecutive days, where at least 12 people died this Tuesday in a Russian attack on railway infrastructure.

The escalation in the Ukraine conflict is not pleasing to Russia's partners. The latest to make this known to Vladimir Putin has been the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Both met in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, within the framework of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which also hosted a meeting between the Russian and Chinese presidents, Xi Jinping. The Indian leader warned Putin that “every day the war continues, humanity takes a step back” and demanded that he “move from an interminable war to the end of hostilities as soon as possible”. He also assured that New Delhi supports all peace efforts and will continue to do so in the future.