What we don't know

THE WILDBERRIES CAMPAIGN, WHICH THIS BOX HAS LISTED AS UNRESOLVED SINCE 13 AUGUST AND WHICH IS NOW HALF-ANSWERED. On the justification, Ukraine's case is on the record from a named officer: Maj Gen Vadym Skibitski, deputy chief of Ukraine's intelligence service, told the BBC that the warehouses are 'one of the elements of the logistics system of the Russian Federation to wage the war, including through Wildberries - some military equipment, components and other elements', that long-range strikes will continue, that Ukraine does not deliberately target civilians, and that some deaths in Russia are the accidental result of Russian air defences shooting down incoming missiles and drones. On the effect, Ukraine's defence ministry says seven of the retailer's ten largest logistics centres have been 'disabled'. WHAT IS STILL NOT KNOWN IS EVERYTHING A READER WOULD NEED TO WEIGH EITHER. That is a belligerent's justification and a belligerent's damage claim, neither independently assessed; no legal authority has ruled on whether a distribution warehouse selling drone components is a military objective; nobody has produced evidence that any specific struck warehouse held military goods; and there is still no reconciled toll for the campaign, which this page has carried at at least 20 sites since 18 July, nor any count of the dead or injured across it. Skibitski's attribution of Russian civilian deaths to Russian air defences is a claim about causation that no independent party has tested, and we print it as his. HOW MANY INTERCEPTORS UKRAINE HAS, unchanged and still not an inventory. President Zelenskyy told CNN that he holds '1 percent' of the United States' stockpile, is asking Washington to SELL him 5 percent to get through the winter and 10 percent to 'destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles'. Four limits stand. It is a ratio, not a count: one percent of a stockpile the Pentagon will not quantify — and which an Associated Press analysis estimates has fallen by at least 65 percent since before the war, against the Pentagon's claim of a deep arsenal — is one percent of an unknown. It is a request to buy rather than receive, with no price, no timeline and no agreement. Asked whether the US had answered, he said only: 'From 1 percent to 5 percent, I have some months and millions [of] phone calls and anything else… I do some things which I can't even share.' And the figure the whole comparison turns on has ONE publisher: the verifier seat searched the BBC's page for '1 percent' and found nothing, so 'I have 1 percent' rests on Al Jazeera alone while the five and ten percent are two chains relaying the same CNN interview. Production is bounded rather than known: Lockheed Martin delivered more than 600 of the newest interceptors in 2025 and targets 2,000 a year by the end of 2030, against an estimate that Gulf states alone fired more than 1,100 in the first three months of the Iran war, and NATO says Europe's first Patriot production facility is expected to open in September in Germany — a date we have not seen confirmed by the manufacturer or the German government. On the domestic-production licence: Trump said at a NATO summit the US would grant one, said about three weeks later that he had not decided, and per Reuters the US is pressing ahead with talks including Ukrainian manufacture of components for final assembly elsewhere in Europe. Whether any of the three replenishment routes is agreed, funded or scheduled is unknown, as is whether NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's statement that the alliance is working 'urgently' produces a delivery, a date or a quantity. Zelenskyy's suggestion that stalling supplies may be 'aimed at making Ukraine, so to speak, more willing to compromise' is a party's allegation of motive and we carry it as that. HOW MUCH ANYONE WILL BE ABLE TO CHECK FROM NOW ON. On 12 August Ukraine's air force said it would stop publishing detailed figures on Russian ballistic missile strikes — 'the number of targets launched, shot down, suppressed or those that failed to reach their targets', per air force communications chief Yurii Ihnat — while continuing real-time warnings and generalised launch figures. This story has been built substantially on Ukrainian interception counts, and the institution that publishes them will publish fewer. We do not know how long the restriction lasts, what counts as 'generalised', or whether any independent monitor fills the gap. The interception rate is the single measure of whether the shortage this story reports is costing lives, and it is becoming harder to observe rather than easier — five days on, no interception figure for any attack in that period has reached us. NOVOROSSIYSK, where almost every consequence is open. Two major grain export terminals were hit on 12 August; one chain says 'damaged' and the other 'out of action', which are different facts about a supply chain and which nothing we walked settles. We do not know how long either is out, what tonnage is affected, or whether the redirection to Baltic and Caspian ports and land routes that Russia's agriculture ministry announced can absorb it. The projection that Russia's August exports could fall by more than half against the five-year average comes from a Moscow-based analytics company UNNAMED in the only chain that carries it, and it is load-bearing for every claim about global food prices. Whether four Russian warships were hit, or two frigates plus a landing ship plus a corvette plus others, is a divergence between Ukraine's general staff and its president as relayed by two outlets; Russia has said nothing, and no independent imagery has walked to us. We do not know what the strike did to the naval base's operations or where the fleet moves next. And we do not know whether anyone targeted the grain at all: Ukraine claimed a naval operation and did not mention the terminals, whose damage was reported by the grain companies themselves. Alongside it, Al Jazeera relays a Financial Times report, citing Ukrainian officials, that Kyiv committed at the end of July to halting drone strikes on oil tankers using Novorossiysk after a request from US Vice-President JD Vance. That reaches us at two removes and concerns tankers rather than warships or grain berths; whether the commitment exists, whether it covers the port or only the tankers in it, whether the 12 August operation breached it, and what Washington has said since are all unknown. Zelenskyy said on 11 August that Kyiv had handed proposals to US negotiators to end the war; we have one sentence, no terms, no US response and no timetable, and Al Jazeera now describes US-backed talks as frozen and front-line fighting as at a near standstill. THE DEEP-STRIKE PICTURE, where one question is narrowed and another has opened. At least 13 people were killed at Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan on 10 August, 1,200km inside Russia, per the local mayor; nine died in a hostel, per the region's head Rustam Minnikhanov; seven of the dead were Uzbek citizens, per the Uzbek consulate. Whether that toll is final, who the other victims were, what struck the hostel and how far it sat from the Taneco refinery Ukraine says it targeted, what damage the refinery sustained, and whether the Russian terrorism case produces anything but a filing are all unestablished, and no Ukrainian account of the hostel deaths has walked to us. ON BASHKORTOSTAN THE BOX NARROWS: a single chain, walked at source by the verifier seat, names the 13 August target as the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery complex, about 1,300km from Ukraine, per Ukraine's General Staff. A different name from the Bashneft-Novoil refinery struck on 6 August is not proof of a different plant, and until somebody corroborates it we still cannot say whether this page has reported one facility twice or two facilities once. AND ON SAMARA A NEW QUESTION OPENS ON THE SAME PAGE: Zelenskyy claims Ukraine hit the Progress Center with Flamingo missiles and one monitoring channel says the same, while A SECOND MONITORING CHANNEL ON THAT PAGE CLAIMS A RUSSIAN ORESHNIK BALLISTIC MISSILE STRUCK A MAJOR AEROSPACE FACILITY IN THE CITY — two countries' weapons claimed for one target, with the Samara governor confirming only that missiles hit an industrial facility he declines to name and saying casualties are still being checked. We do not know who struck what, what was destroyed, or whether anyone died; nor whether a Flamingo was used at all, a weapon this page has now carried four ways — ten downed by Russia on 10 August, a Russian target at a FirePoint production site on 16 August, Ukraine's own claimed munition at Samara, and a rival claim that the missile which landed there was Russian. The 14 August Ust-Luga strike, said to have damaged two processing plants and triggered a fire, and the 15 August Savasleyka claim rest on the same single chain. Beside all of it sit the deep-strike claims we cannot check: Russia's assertion that it intercepted 456 Ukrainian drones in a day, the Tyumen industrial fire, the Ilsky and Syzran refineries, and unconfirmed Telegram-sourced reports that Iskander and Zircon launchers were destroyed in Kursk and Bryansk. THE TOLLS, which have one independent floor and nothing else. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission has verified 437 civilians killed and 2,610 injured in Ukraine in July — the worst month since May 2022 — and 16,874 civilian deaths since the 2022 invasion, a cumulative figure the mission itself says is likely a significant underestimate because it cannot confirm casualties in Russian-occupied areas including Mariupol. That is the only non-belligerent count this story carries and we treat it as a floor; we have read it as one outlet relays it and not the statement at source, which is a standing debt. It verifies no individual strike, so every day-by-day figure here remains each side's own account: at least six killed on 6 August at Balakliya and in Sumy; a crew member aboard the Mera Queen off Odesa; three killed at Pukhivka on 8 August — a grandfather, grandmother and their three-year-old grandson, by a double-tap drone strike — plus one more in the capital, a count revised from three to four between two walks of the same page; five killed on 9 August at Buhaivka outside Kharkiv; at least 11 civilians killed between 11 and 12 August, the majority in Zaporizhzhia; two train crew killed in the Odesa region on 13 August; at least seven killed in Russia and at least seven in Ukraine with more than 39 injured on the night of 15–16 August, both sums closing exactly against their own stated totals; and on 17 August at least six killed and four wounded including a 14-year-old at Koloskovo in Belgorod region, a woman killed by a drone in Astrakhan, and at least four killed and nineteen injured across Ukraine. THREE COUNTING PROBLEMS SIT INSIDE THAT LIST AND WE DO NOT SMOOTH THEM: one publisher's standfirst gave two Ukrainian dead on 17 August against its own body's at least four, with the components summing to four; the same publisher describes the night of 15–16 August as having 'killed 19 people in both countries' where two chains and our own arithmetic give fourteen, and nobody has decomposed the nineteen; and the Belgorod governor's identical statement is placed on the state-backed MAX platform by one chain and on Telegram by the other. Whether cluster munitions were used on 5 August rests on a single correspondent's account of what authorities said. Whose account of the targets is right — Zelenskyy's civilian businesses against Russia's military logistics — we carry both and resolve neither. THE SANCTIONS BILL. The US Senate passed a measure targeting Russian energy exports, including 100 percent tariffs on countries still buying Russian oil and gas, by 86 votes to 11 on 7 August. It is not law. Whether the House passes it, whether the president signs it, when it would take effect, which countries the tariffs would reach and what exemptions it carries are all unestablished, as is whether it interacts with Zelenskyy's separate call for G7 and EU sanctions on the 17 firms he alleges produce Russia's ballistic missiles — a call that so far has produced only President Macron's statement that the EU would increase pressure. The Reuters report, sourced to Andrii Cherniak of Ukraine's Main Directorate of Intelligence, that Russia has received a North Korean missile unit possibly equipped with as many as 120 missiles and six launchers deployed to western Russia is a Ukrainian-intelligence claim we have not corroborated, as is the presidential adviser's estimate that Russia can now launch about 100 ballistic missiles a month — a figure that sits against the walked count of more than 450 Russian missiles fired last month, nearly 200 of them ballistic, without either being reconciled. AND THE THREADS STILL OPEN FROM EARLIER TRACKING. What Russia is doing to Ukraine's energy and ports, on which Naftogaz now says its facilities were attacked thirteen times in a week and Russia's targeting of Izmail is given as a Danube port strike on one chain and an Odesa city strike on the other. The two people the Russian-installed governor of occupied Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, says were killed by a Ukrainian drone striking an apartment building on 7 August, uncorroborated and unaddressed by any Ukrainian statement we walked. Whether Russian-appointed authorities' report that the Zaporizhzhia region was largely without electricity reflects the scale they describe. The cause of the car explosion that killed a driver and seriously wounded the director of a Russian drone factory. The ground picture, where this page now has a control figure — the BBC says Russia holds approximately a fifth of Ukrainian territory — against which we still hold only Russia's uncorroborated claims to have taken Petrivka in Donetsk and Vodiane in Kharkiv, and Kyiv's unwalked claim to have liberated 26 settlements in the south. AND ONE ITEM THIS BOX CARRIED WRONGLY UNTIL NOW, corrected rather than quietly dropped: it listed 'the fate of the Romanian airspace incursions' as unknown, when this story's own 16 August append published a Spanish F-18 on a NATO air policing mission shooting down a drone that Romania says entered from MOLDOVA and that NATO's spokesman says 'appears to be Russian', the fourth over Romania this year. What is genuinely open there is narrower: whose drone it was, why it came via Moldova, and whether the investigation NATO describes as continuing ever concludes. The Crimea infrastructure campaign and the Ukrainian military-leadership changes remain tracked in our watching room.