Ukraine resumes missile-interception counts after Zelensky says some Patriots arrived from ‘Coalition of the Willing’ allies

Exports of Russian and Kazakh oil through Novorossiysk plummeted in August compared with July, the Russian business daily Kommersant said, citing a review by the independent pricing agency Argus.

Shipments of Russian oil to India fell 4.4-fold to 516,000 metric tons, and shipments to China dropped threefold to 94,000 metric tons. No oil was shipped from Novorossiysk to Turkey or Egypt in August, after both had received shipments in July.

The review said many shipowners are refraining from sending tankers into the Black Sea because the cost of chartering vessels keeps rising “due to escalating military risks.”

The Argus review, which covers August 1 to 21, includes data from Baltic ports and Novorossiysk. Oil exports from all ports combined fell 26% from July, to 6.1 million tons.

Separately, MSC — the world’s largest container shipping company — has suspended new bookings for shipments to and from the port of Novorossiysk with immediate effect, the Bloomberg news agency said on August 26. The decision followed a recent drone strike on one of the company’s vessels, the MSC Ulsan III, while it was en route to Novorossiysk, MSC said in a notice to customers seen by Bloomberg. The company did not say when the attack took place. Bloomberg said MSC, like other international container lines, has limited its operations in Russia since 2022 and that the shipments still going into Russia on international lines usually include goods such as food, clothing, and medicine.

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Russia launched a combined attack on Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles early on August 27.

In the Kharkiv region, a drone struck a fourth-floor balcony of an apartment building in the Industrialnyi district. In the Zaporizhzhia region, a 78-year-old woman was killed, and several other people were injured, according to Ivan Fedorov, head of the regional military administration. There were also injuries in Kryvyi Rih, and infrastructure was damaged in the Sumy and Odesa regions.

In Kyiv, the city administration said that drone debris had fallen and that a school building in the Shevchenkivskyi district sustained “significant damage.” An air-raid alert sounded again in the capital several hours after the overnight strikes. A later drone attack in the Holosiivskyi district injured a truck driver, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

After the overnight attack, Ukraine’s General Staff published interception statistics for the first time in a long while, saying air defenses had shot down one Onyx anti-ship missile and seven ballistic missiles. The statement did not say how many missiles Russia fired in all during the attack.

Ukraine’s Air Defense Forces had stopped reporting downed Russian missiles in mid-August, amid an acute shortage of interceptor missiles. A Ukrainian source told Bloomberg that the change in reporting format was a security measure in response to Russian strikes. Bloomberg said the Air Defense Forces stopped reporting interceptions of ballistic missiles after an attack in which Ukraine failed to stop any of 28 projectiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on August 25 that Ukraine had received “a few” Patriot missiles after recent summits of the Nordic-Baltic Eight and the “coalition of the willing,” but that “more are needed.” Zelensky repeated that message in his August 27 address. “This week, our European allies made important decisions to strengthen Ukrainian air defense,” he said.

The war in photographs