Ukraine Invasion: Part 61

[MagicFox]

Welcome to thread 61 with many thanks to all So many thanks to all contributors and a special salute to those providing daily updates. For the 61st time, Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦

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The restaurant bombing?

https://www.reuters.com/world/three-killed-15-injured-moscow-explosion-tass-says-2026-08-01/

Three dead (two of whom were security personnel) isn't trivial, but it's not like bringing down a block of flats. And there have been quite a few targeted assassinations in Moscow in the last two years.

That's not to say that the Kremlin wouldn't try to use it for propaganda purposes, but it's pretty thin beer to justify conscripting hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The Kremlin needs huge numbers of new soldiers because its poor tactics and command failures have resulted in extremely high attrition rates, but it can't come right out and say that.

Yep, the discussion was about that attack,.motives ...and of course who could have been behind it......

The news has just been showing that they had a random beach bombing in Russia.

@notimagain they called it.

It was a drone, and in the video's soundtrack, you'll hear two different-caliber machine guns firing at it before it came down. So it was shot down by the Russians, and then it hit the beach.

https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-3-2026/

Key Takeaways

1. Russian forces are replicating aspects of their Summer-Fall 2025 battlefield air interdiction (BAI) campaign that set conditions for late 2025 advances near Pokrovsk and Hulyaipole to prepare for offensive operations against the Fortress Belt in Donetsk Oblast.
2. The main objective of the ongoing Russian BAI campaign against the Fortress Belt — as with previous BAI campaigns — is to isolate Ukrainian forces defending the Fortress Belt from sustained logistics.
3. The ongoing Russian BAI campaign aims to shape the battlefield ahead of planned Russian offensive operations against Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in the future, although Russian forces remain unlikely to advance quickly to or through these cities in the near term.
4. Russian forces appear to be more heavily relying on glide bomb strikes in their 2026 BAI campaign compared to their 2025 campaigns.
5. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced more personnel changes within the Ukrainian government and security services on August 3.
6. Neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces made confirmed advances on August 3.
7. Russia launched 181 drones against Ukraine overnight. Ukrainian forces continued striking Russian military assets on August 3.