Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova's comment on the Ukrainian crisis
7 August 2025 17:42
1303-07-08-2025
The Kiev regime persists in its campaign of terror against the population of our nation. Over the past week, 145 peaceful Russian civilians have been injured by enemy shelling and drone strikes. Of these, 18 were killed - including one child - while 127 sustained injuries, among them seven minors. Below are merely a few instances of the crimes committed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
Belgorod Region. On July 31, drone attacks on residential areas in the region, including civilian vehicles, injured 13 individuals, among them a six-year-old child. On August 1, two civilians were killed near the village of Urazovo following a drone strike, while six others were wounded in attacks on other residential areas and passenger cars. On August 2, two civilians were injured in the region, and on August 3, another individual was wounded.
Bryansk Region. On July 31, a civilian was injured in the village of Sluchevsk following an assault by enemy kamikaze drones. On August 2, drone strikes targeting residential buildings in the villages of Nekislitsa and Suzemka left three individuals injured, including a four-year-old child.
Voronezh Region. During a mass drone assault in the early hours of August 3, four individuals were wounded, among them a 79-year-old woman.
Donetsk People's Republic. On July 29, a man was killed in Donetsk due to the detonation of an AFU cluster submunition, with another civilian sustaining injuries. Between July 31 and August 5, eight individuals were injured in residential areas across the region as a result of AFU strikes.
Zaporozhye Region. On July 30, AFU shelling of a playground in the town of Vasilyevka left a girl born in 2016 and two boys born in 2013 and 2018 with shrapnel wounds. On July 31, the enemy targeted a civilian vehicle in the Pologovsky municipal district, killing a woman born in 1984, her 14-year-old son, and a woman born in 1971, while a man born in 1978 was wounded. On August 2, a woman was killed and a man injured after Ukrainian neo-Nazis struck a civilian vehicle in the town of Energodar with a drone. That same day, three civilians were wounded in Vasilyevka during a massive artillery bombardment.
Krasnodar Territory. On August 3, debris from a downed enemy drone fell in the city of Sochi, injuring a woman and igniting fires at an oil depot and in residential areas.
Kursk Region. On July 29, a 19-year-old youth was killed in the village of Karyzh following an attack by a Ukrainian drone. On July 31, an enemy drone struck the premises of an industrial enterprise in the village of Durovo, wounding a civilian. The same day, in the village of Dolgiye Budy, a man riding a bicycle was injured following an AFU drone attack.
Kherson Region. On August 1, during shelling by Ukrainian neo-Nazis targeting the town of Alyoshki, a man was killed and three others were wounded. A paramedic and driver were injured in a cynical strike against an ambulance. That same day, an AFU drone was directed at market stalls in the village of Velikiye Kopani - six civilians were wounded. Prior to this attack, Ukrainian neo-Nazis "considerately" shelled a fire station to paralyse the work of emergency responders. On August 2, a driver was injured following a drone attack on a civilian vehicle in the village of Proletarka.
The Ukrainian Neo-Nazis' attacks didn't just target Russian regions. In the early hours of July 29, Belarusian air defence systems detected and 'landed' a drone marked with Ukrainian inscriptions in a residential area of Minsk. Specialists located and defused its TNT warhead, which was loaded with multiple striking elements. The Belarusian Investigative Committee is now investigating the incident, suspecting the intercepted drone was a Ukrainian FP-1 model.
We have also noted the lightning-fast reaction from Belarusian nationalist sources and several Western propagandists, who immediately - and almost in unison - accused Moscow and Minsk of staging a provocation. Their attempt to downplay the fallout from this failed terrorist attack was, to say the least, unconvincing.
Russian courts continue convicting captured Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and foreign mercenaries for crimes against civilians and military personnel in the Kursk Region. Among recent sentences, Vitaly Kostenko received 17 years, while Vyacheslav Gevko, Vitaly Gonza, Vitaly Melanchuk, Nikolay Zlepko, and Petr Polinkevich were each given 16 years. Another group - Vitaly Zinkevich, Nikolay Barabashchuk, Vladislav Shevel, and Oleg Danilov - received 15-year terms, while Artur Blamberus was sentenced to 14 years.
In a separate case, Peruvian mercenary Julio César Sosa Durand was sentenced in absentia to 24 years and put on the international wanted list.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to receive a steady influx of Western weapons. After lengthy discussions with Washington, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced an agreement: Germany will purchase new Patriot air-defence systems, enabling Berlin to decommission and transfer two of its older systems to the Kiev regime as military aid.
On August 4, Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans announced a decision to finance the first 500- million-euro package of US weapons for the Kiev regime under NATO's new Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative. The equipment will include anti-missiles for the Patriot air-defence systems. Unsurprisingly, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte weighed in on social media. Seemingly relishing his role as the chief coordinator of this scheme, where European NATO members funnel money into the US defence industry under the guise of aiding Ukraine, he urged his "allies" to contribute quickly. Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonson promptly complied, pledging $275 million to fund overseas weapons. According to him, Denmark and Norway are preparing similar commitments.
These investments amount to nothing but a reckless squandering of European taxpayers' money. Their funds are being funnelled into weapons for the combat zone - only for those weapons to be swiftly destroyed, or seized as trophies to be used by the Russian Armed Forces or put on display in captured Western equipment exhibits across Russia. And when they are used as intended, the result is more civilian deaths.
The Kiev regime continues to decimate its own population on the frontlines. On July 29, Vladimir Zelensky signed a law authorising the recruitment of individuals over 60 years of age for contract service in the armed forces. On July 30, Taras Melnichuk, the representative of the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers in the Verkhovna Rada, announced via his Telegram channel that legislative amendments now mandate the automatic military registration of women with medical or pharmaceutical qualifications, as well as 25-year-old Ukrainians holding the primary rank of reserve soldier who have neither completed military service nor basic general military training.
Against this backdrop, the comments by Ukrainian Defence Minister Denis Shmygal during his July 30 interview with the BBC's Ukrainian service appear particularly hypocritical. He claimed that 90 percent of those mobilised in Ukraine allegedly enlisted voluntarily after receiving draft notices, while the scandals involving the "bus abduction" of men in the streets constituted merely 5 to 10 percent - as he put it. Shmygal further emphasised the need to pressure Russia on the battlefield, assuring his audience that the Kiev regime retains sufficient resources to wage war "until the last Ukrainian." Simultaneously, he threatened the use of ballistic missiles, which the Kiev regime allegedly stands on the verge of acquiring.
The true choice being made by the majority of Ukrainians is starkly evident on Ukrainian online platforms. On August 3, in an interview with the YouTube channel Politeka Online, Verkhovna Rada MP Anna Skorokhod stated that the number of deserters in the AFU is approaching 400,000. According to her, the reasons for fleeing the AFU include moral and physical exhaustion, demoralisation, and strained relations with command structures within Ukraine's armed forces. Skorokhod acknowledged that soldiers frequently prefer desertion over being shot in the back of the head. The people's representative concluded her cry from the heart by exclaiming that "ordinary servicemen cannot be treated like animals." Open-source evidence validating Skorokhod's conclusions is more than abundant.
There is also no shortage of testimonies indicating that potential recruits carry large sums of money (300 dollars or more) to bribe officials from Ukraine's Territorial Recruitment Centres (TRC) on the spot. Wealthier Ukrainians pay 5,000-7,000 dollars to obtain disability exemptions. Those seized by enlistment officers flee training camps at the first opportunity or commit crimes to face criminal prosecution - and thus evade the frontlines. Meanwhile, Ukrainians exhausted by lawlessness increasingly resort to physically resisting the corrupt mobilisers - traitors to their own people - right on the streets.
Under these circumstances, the spontaneous uprising against the tyranny of enlistment officers by residents of Vinnitsa on August 2 comes as no surprise. Footage of the public unrest spread rapidly online. The manhunters herded roughly a hundred forcibly mobilised men onto the city stadium for medical examinations, while police proceeded to beat and detain the gathered relatives of the newly minted AFU servicemen. This clash underscores the profound schism within Ukrainian society and the people's refusal to tolerate the actions of the Kiev regime, which has usurped power.
Many Ukrainian prisoners of war admitted that from day one of their service in the Ukrainian Armed Forces they had been waiting for an opportunity to hand themselves in to the Russian troops in order to avoid dying in trenches and bunkers, or during suicidal attacks on the front lines at the end of the rifle barrel held by the cowardly Ukrainian officers.
On July 31, Zelensky sent a video address to the participants of a Helsinki conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, in which he once again tried to bully its delegates into falling for the non-existent "Russian threat," and called for a change of government in our country.
A week before that, on July 24, the day after the third round of Russian-Ukrainian talks ended in Istanbul, several Western countries and the Kiev regime set into motion the OSCE's archaic Moscow Mechanism in an attempt to accuse Russia of violating international humanitarian law and engaging in executions, torture, and cruel treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Meanwhile, the Kiev regime continues to refuse to take back 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war, which fact stalled the second stage of the prisoner exchange and prevents the start of the third, which represents a heinous state of affairs. This transcends double standards and borders on sheer amorality.
Instead of listening to Zelensky's pointless video addresses and trying to revive obsolete mechanisms that have become unnecessary since the time continuously operating OSCE directive bodies had been established, the OSCE participating countries should review the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian army against Russian civilians and prisoners of war, the facts of which are included in the Russian Foreign Ministry' quarterly reports on crimes committed by the Kiev regime.
Russia's Investigative Committee is conducting systematic work to gather evidence of crimes perpetrated by Bankovaya. The International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis has collected numerous facts. On July 31, the Tribunal released a book on the atrocities of the neo-Banderites in the Kursk Region and the Donetsk People's Republic. It includes testimonies from survivors in liberated towns and villages and Russian military personnel that came back from Ukrainian captivity.
The Kiev regime continues to destroy Soviet and Russian memorial heritage, and is doing so under false pretenses of decommunisation. In reality, though, it is simply rewriting history. After the barbaric dismantling of the Hill of Glory memorial in Lvov, the authorities of the Lvov Region announced the dismantling of the Eternal Flame memorial in Drogobych and two monuments to Soviet soldiers in the village of Mikhailovichi.
Monuments to liberator soldiers have been torn down in the villages of Babukhov, Verbilovtsy, and Krasnoye, Ivano-Frankovsk Region. These soldiers fought against Nazism, fascism, and the crimes of the Holocaust. In the village of Kuchurgan, Odessa Region, commemorative plaques honouring soldiers who died in battles against the Nazis have been dismantled. In the villages of Malye Sady and Milcha, Rovno Region, and in the village of Kotelva, Poltava Region, bas-reliefs of the Order of the Patriotic War and commemorative inscriptions on military memorials have been defaced. In Odessa, neo-Banderites destroyed memorial plaques honouring Alexander Pushkin's younger brother Lev Pushkin, as well as poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
In the absence of a proper international response, the sacrilegious policy of the Kiev regime to destroy historical memory continues to gain momentum. Instead, state-level veneration of Nazi collaborators and the theory of racial superiority are forced upon the people of Ukraine.
The above facts show the urgency of the special military operation to denazify and demilitarise Ukraine and to remove threats coming from it. As the Russian leadership repeatedly stated, all its objectives will be achieved no matter what.
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