THE RUSSO-UKRAINE WAR BRIEF
Day 1176 of the full scale invasion
Slava Ukraini! In early 2022 I began a Telegram channel aggregating news from a number of sources daily on the war in Ukraine. In June 2023 I began providing a daily draft for the Ukraine War Brief Podcast collecting news from over 70 sources daily, which formed the basis of the script. While the Podcast no longer exists I have continued to make this Brief available for my followers here on Substack for those who wish to keep up with the news from the war.
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GSAFU Morning Report
For: May 13, 2025
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in its Operational Information update at 08:00 on May 13 stated that day 1176 of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation against Ukraine had begun.
The situation on the line of combat remains tense in some sectors. Ukrainian defenders continue to actively counteract the Russian aggressor, causing them significant losses in personnel, equipment and technology. Exhausting the enemy along the entire front line and continuing to disrupt the plans of Russian occupiers to advance deeper into the territory of Ukraine.
During the past day, 163 combat engagements took place.
Over the past 24 hours, the enemy carried out 1 missile strike, 78 air strikes, used 2,983 attack drones and fired approximately 5,000 artillery shells across the positions of Ukrainian forces and civilians.
Air Force Daily Report
80 ENEMY UAVS SHOT DOWN, 42 SIMULATOR UAVS FAILED TO REACH THEIR TARGETS (LOCATIONALLY LOST)
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On the night of May 14 (from 7:30 p.m. on May 13), the enemy attacked with an Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missile from Crimea, 145 Shahed attack UAVs, and simulator drones of various types from the directions: Bryansk, Kursk, Orel, Shatalovo, Millerovo, Primorsko-Akhtarsk - Russia.
The air attack was repelled by aviation, anti-aircraft missile troops, electronic warfare units, and mobile fire groups of the Defense Forces of Ukraine.
As of 09:00, it has been confirmed that 80 Shahed attack UAVs (and other types of drones) have been shot down in the east, north, west, and center of the country.
42 enemy drones-simulators - lost in location (without negative consequences).
As a result of the enemy attack, the Sumy, Kharkiv, Odesa, Donetsk, and Kirovohrad regions suffered.
Combat Operations in the Russian Federation
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US based think tank, in its May 13 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment reported that:
Sumy - Kursk Border: Fighting continued in Kursk Oblast on May 13.
Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting continues near Tetkino and Novyi Put (both southwest of Glushkovo).
The Khortytsia operational-strategic group
(Responsible for the northeastern part of Ukraine. )
Sumy Sector: Russian forces recently advanced in Sumy Oblast.
Geolocated footage published on May 12 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced northeast of Vodolahy and in southeastern Bilovody (both northeast of Sumy City).
Lyman Sector: Russian forces recently advanced in the Lyman direction.
Geolocated footage published on May 12 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced in eastern Ridkodub (north of Lyman).
Toretsk Sector: Ukrainian and Russian forces recently advanced in the Toretsk direction.
Geolocated footage published on May 12 indicates that Ukrainian forces recently advanced in western Toretsk.
Geolocated footage published on May 13 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced northwest and southwest of Toretsk.
The Tavria operational-strategic group
(Responsible for the central-eastern and southeastern part of Ukraine.)
Pokrovsk Sector : Russian forces recently advanced in the Pokrovsk direction.
Geolocated footage published on May 13 indicates that Russian forces seized Yelyzavetivka (east of Pokrovsk) within the past week and recently advanced to central Myrne (east of Pokrovsk).
Velyka Novosilka Sector: Russian forces recently advanced in the Velyka Novosilka direction.
Geolocated footage published on May 13 indicates that Russian forces likely recently seized and advanced north and south of Novosilka (southwest of Velyka Novosilka).
The Odesa operational-strategic group
(Responsible for Kherson, Qırım, (also known as Crimea) and the Black Sea.)
There have been no major changes to the combat environment since our last report.
TEMPORARILY OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
Russian political, corporate interests seize thousands of Ukrainian businesses, assets in occupied Mariupol.
More than 1,000 Russian government entities and 1,200 private companies are involved in the economy of occupied Mariupol, a major southeastern city captured by Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, according to a research paper published on May 14.
A Serious Organized Crime & Anti-Corruption Evidence (SOC ACE) research paper titled "Looting Mariupol: Russia's use of illicit finance and economic crime in Ukraine" has identified individuals and companies leading and benefiting from the Russian occupation. The SOC ACE Research Program is funded by the U.K. Foreign Office.
The researchers have compiled a Russian Illicit Finance in Occupation Database ("RIFO Database") to explore the mechanisms of illicit funding and business seizures in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city on the Azov Sea captured by Russia in the spring of 2022.
The database includes a dataset of more than 1,000 Russian officials and institutions involved in the occupied Mariupol's economy, indicating potential abuse of authority and/or participation in asset theft, along with providing the administrative capacity underpinning the Russian policy of de-Ukrainianisation of the occupied territories.
Another dataset of more than 1,200 private companies involved in the occupied Mariupol's economy may also contain indicators of potential benefits from corruption and fraud, as well as services provided to Russia's security forces that may have carried out war crimes or crimes under the law of occupation.
The third dataset contains more than 180 Russia-based companies potentially involved in business takeovers without the consent of legal owners, which may give rise to claims of fraud, theft, or pillage.
The paper focuses on emerging Russian economic and political networks in Mariupol's reconstruction after Russia's assault left large parts of the city devastated.
The study also investigates new developments around the city's major industrial plants, including Azovmash and MMK Ilych, and examines Mariupol's role as a major logistics center for the Russian military and for the illegal export of Ukrainian grain and other goods.
"These economic practices in many cases constitute criminal activities and may be potential war crimes," the researchers conclude.
The study suggests that targeted sanctions could raise the cost of Russia's occupation and make its long-term hold on the territory less certain. That would require a more coordinated and targeted effort among G7 members.
THE HOME FRONT
Russian attacks across Ukraine kill 4, injure 26 over past day
Russian attacks against Ukraine killed at least four civilians and injured at least 26 others over the past day,the Kyiv Independent reported citing regional authorities on May 14.
In Nechvolodivka in Kharkiv Oblast, Russian attacks killed an 80-year-old man and a 70-year-old woman. Three women aged 88, 83, and 67, as well as a 69-year-old man, were injured, Governor Oleh Syniehubov reported.
In the town of Kupiansk, a 56-year-old woman and a 34-year-old man were injured. In the village of Staryi Saltiv, two men aged 63 and 35 also suffered injuries.
In the village of Ruski Tyshky, a 51-year-old man was injured in a Russian strike, while in the village of Oleksandrivka, three people were injured in Russian attacks: a 90-year-old woman and two men aged 54 and 49.
In Donetsk Oblast, Russian attacks killed two people in the village of Berestok, injured three in the town of Pokrovsk, and four others in the villages of Novoekonomichne, Illinivka, Vasiutynske, and Zolotyi Kolodiaz, Governor Vadym Filashkin reported.
In Kherson Oblast, Russia targeted 30 settlements, including the regional center of Kherson, over the past day. As a result of the attacks, two people were injured, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported.
At around 7:00 a.m. on May 14, Russian forces also dropped explosives from a drone on a car, injuring a 49-year-old man. He suffered a mine-blast trauma and concussion, as well as multiple shrapnel wounds to his face, arms, torso, and thigh, the local military administration reported.
In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Russian forces' artillery and FPV (first-person-view) drones struck the Nikopol district over the past day, injuring two men, according to the local military administration.
In Rivne Oblast, Russian forces targeted civilian infrastructure, injuring two people, Governor Oleksandr Koval reported.
Zelenskyy's trust rating rises to 74%, highest since 2023
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's trust rating increased from 69% in March to 74% in the first half of May, while 22% of respondents said they do not trust the Ukrainian leader, according to a poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) on May 14.
This marks Zelenskyy's highest trust rating recorded by KIIS since December 2023, when he enjoyed the confidence of 77% of respondents.
The institute carried out the survey as the Ukrainian leader is preparing for a possible meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 15 in Turkey for peace talks.
Compared to the March poll, the level of trust in the president has increased by 5%, while the level of distrust has decreased from 28% to 22%. A trust-distrust balance is +52%. Researchers also noted that Zelenskyy enjoyed confidence in all regions across Ukraine.
The poll was conducted from May 2 to May 12 among 1,010 citizens over 18 years of age living in the territories controlled by Ukraine.
Russia invited Ukraine to direct talks in Istanbul after rejecting calls for a 30-day unconditional ceasefire backed by Europe, Ukraine, and the United States. Zelenskyy accepted the invitation and said he was ready to personally meet Putin in Turkey on May 15.
The Kremlin has not confirmed Putin's participation but said Russia would dispatch a delegation.
The meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin, if it occurs, could signal a breakthrough in stalled diplomatic efforts to end Russia's full-scale invasion.
The last and only face-to-face meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin occurred in December 2019 in Paris under the Normandy Format. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, there have been no direct meetings between the two.
Ukraine gas reserves are at their lowest level in 11 years, analyst ExPro says.
Gas volumes in Ukrainian storage facilities are at the lowest level in at least 11 years, standing at 6 billion cubic metres (bcm) as of May 11,Reuters reported citing analytical company ExPro on Wednesday.
Ukraine has been forced to ramp up gas withdrawals from storage and increase imports this winter and spring after Russian missile attacks damaged production facilities in the east of the country.
ExPro noted that storage facilities, whose capacity exceed 30 bcm, were less than 20% full, compared to 31.7% at the same date in 2024, when they held 8.8 bcm of gas.
It said that since the beginning of the current injection season in mid-April, 610 million cubic meters of gas had been pumped into storage facilities, including 258 million in April.
"Injection volumes in May 2025 are higher than in May last year. Overall, more than 350 million cubic metres of natural gas have been injected into storage facilities since the beginning of the month, 33% more than in the same period last year," ExPro said.
The company forecast that Ukraine could have about 6.6 bcm of gas in reserve by the end of May.
The former head of the Ukrainian gas transit operator, Serhiy Makogon, said last month that the country needed to import up to 6.3 billion cubic metres of gas for the 2025/26 winter season as reserves have fallen to a record low due to war-related damage to some facilities.
He said Ukraine would need up to $3 billion for gas purchases.
Ukraine's state oil and gas firm Naftogaz has said it was in talks with the government and international financial institutions to raise 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to purchase over 2 bcm of gas for the 2025/26 heating season.
Naftogaz has said it also contracted 300 mcm of American LNG with deliveries from Poland's Orlen.
RUSSIAN WORLD
Russian economy in worse shape than Moscow says, report for EU shows.
The Russian economy is in an increasingly precarious state as a result of a shift to a war mode and of Western sanctions over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, a report by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.
The report, prepared for talks of European Union finance ministers, said that while still relatively stable, the Russian economy was only superficially resilient and that underlying imbalances and structural weaknesses were growing.
"The fiscal stimulus of the war economy has kept the economy afloat in the short term, but the reliance on opaque financing, distortionary resource allocation, and shrinking fiscal buffers makes it unsustainable in the long term. Contrary to Kremlin narratives, time is not on Russia's side," it said.
The EU has imposed 16 packages of sanctions on Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, targeting Moscow's main sources of revenue - oil, gas and coal exports. Other Western powers, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan also imposed sanctions.
Keen to show Western sanctions are pointless, Russia says its gross domestic product grew 4.3% in 2024 after 3.6% expansion in 2023.
But Torbjorn Becker, who presented the SITE report to EU finance ministers, said Russian GDP numbers could not be trusted because Moscow was most likely strongly understating inflation which affected real GDP calculations.
"Russia claims inflation is 9-10%. Why would they then have a policy rate of 21% at the central bank? Which regular central bank would have a policy rate that's basically 11.50 percentage points higher than the inflation rate? If any of our central banks were doing something like that, they would be out of their job the next day," Becker told reporters.
"That's a very clear indication that inflation may not actually be the right number. If you understate inflation, you will then overstate real GDP numbers," he said.
He also pointed to Russia's budget constraints caused by falling revenues from oil, gas and coal and rising military spending. Since the start of its invasion of Ukraine and despite its massive war effort, Russia has been reporting a budget deficit of 2% of GDP every year.
"Fiscal numbers in Russia don't really correspond to what we think that they are putting into the war effort," Becker said.
He said much of the financing of the war machine was going through the banking system. "So if you add that to the fiscal numbers, their fiscal deficits would be ballpark twice as high as what they have shown in the official statistics," he said.
This, in turn, was building up financial risks in the banking system, Becker said, because banks were reporting high credit growth.
"These are all indicators that we usually look at when we want to predict the banking crisis," Becker said.
European Economic Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said the European Commission agreed with the SITE report.
"Their analysis highlights the unreliability of Russian statistics, and how the Russian economy is not performing as well as its official statistics suggest," Dombrovskis told reporters after the EU ministers' meeting.
"The Commission broadly agrees with this analysis and the overall increasing fragility of the Russian economy. This underlines the importance of the international community's ongoing efforts to limit the Kremlin's capacity to continue its war of aggression against Ukraine," he said.
RELATED INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Ukraine wants clarity from Russia before deciding next steps on talks in Turkey.
Ukraine's leadership will decide on its next steps for peace talks in Turkey once there is clarity on Russian President Vladimir Putin's participation, a Ukrainian diplomatic source told Reuters on Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has challenged Putin to attend the planned talks in Istanbul on Thursday in person. If Putin agrees to join, it would be the first meeting between the leaders of the two warring countries since December 2019.
"Everything will depend on whether Putin is scared of coming to Istanbul or not. Based on his response, the Ukrainian leadership will decide on the next steps," the diplomatic source said.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that a Russian delegation would be in Istanbul on Thursday for possible talks with Ukraine, but did not disclose who would be there from Moscow's side and did not clarify whether Putin would come.
Direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators last took place in Istanbul in March 2022 in the early weeks of Russia's invasion.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said he might visit Turkey for the talks as part of his trip to the Middle East this week but said he did not know if Putin would show up.
Zelenskyy has said his priority is to secure a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
German Investigators Capture Suspected Kremlin Saboteurs.
German authorities have accused three Ukrainian nationals of an alleged Russia-orchestrated plot to send out parcels with explosives in Europe, Der Spiegel news outlet reported on May 14.
Two of the suspects were reportedly detained over the weekend, and the third on May 13, during police raids in Germany and Switzerland.
The West has accused Russian intelligence services of a number of sabotage attacks across Europe as Moscow hopes to destabilize countries supporting Ukraine.
Vladyslav T., Daniil B., and Yevhen B. are suspected of plotting aggravated arson and bombing attacks on behalf of Russian authorities.
The investigators said that the suspects had already begun preparations by sending test parcels with GPS trackers to Ukrainian addresses.
Yevhen is believed to have purchased the trackers in Switzerland and sent them to the two other men in Cologne and Konstanz, from which they were shipped to Ukraine. This was meant to help the suspects identify the transport routes.
Earlier this week, Poland charged two Ukrainians in connection with suspected Russian-backed arson attacks at an IKEA store in Vilnius and a Warsaw shopping mall in 2024.
Russia is also believed to be responsible for a fire that broke out in July 2024 in an airport hub run by the DHL courier in Leipzig, Germany. A flammable package was reportedly sent from Lithuania by plane and marked for delivery to a fake address in Birmingham, U.K.
MILITARY & TECH
Ukraine and Rheinmetall Expand Partnership to Boost Artillery Ammunition Production.
On May 13, during a meeting in Madrid, Ukraine's state defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom signed a memorandum of understanding with German defense giant Rheinmetall, signaling a potential expansion of their strategic partnership. The agreement outlines plans to establish a new joint venture focused on producing artillery ammunition on Ukrainian soil, Defense Express reports.
The move reflects Ukraine's urgent need to scale up domestic production of critical military supplies amid Russia's full-scale invasion.
"The war has clearly demonstrated that the demand for artillery shells is enormous, and current production capacities are insufficient to meet that need. Every new ammunition plant, every production line is vital for supplying our military. We must seize every opportunity to build them," Oleh Hulyak, CEO of Ukroboronprom, said.
This latest agreement builds on the cooperation established in June 2024, when the first repair and production facility for armored vehicles was launched under a separate joint venture between Ukroboronprom and Rheinmetall. With artillery munitions playing a central role in Ukraine's defense strategy, the new project aims to further strengthen the country's resilience and independence in arms manufacturing.
As previously reported, Rheinmetall is expanding its product range and is taking the space sector seriously, planning to produce satellites in cooperation with ICEYE.
The two companies have signed a memorandum to establish a joint venture that will assemble remote sensing satellites equipped with SAR technology.
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