INTREP360 INTELLIGENCE REPORT

01.28.2026

January ^28th, 2026

Greetings! One of our jobs is to analyze war in Ukraine objectively. That requires parking our emotions & focusing on the big picture.

We can’t—nor should we—invent victories or disguise defeats. Instead, our responsibility is to report fairly & accurately.

Yet we are humans too. War isn’t just charts, maps & frontlines. It is also bloody & far too often deadly.

Sometimes—and tonight is one of those nights—you just can’t get certain images out of your head. Especially when they are innocent civilians.

The horror of an elderly Holocaust survivor Yevgenia Besfamilny being found frozen to death in Kyiv after Russian attacks left her apartment building without power is haunting us. Gory images of a Ukrainian couple being murdered by a Russian drone as they attempted to flee the frontlines near Sumy on a sledge.

Photo credit: Open source. Sumy Oblast, Ukraine; January 2026.

Likewise, pictures of a flaming civilian train hit by three Russian drones earlier today as it was traveling in northeastern Ukraine. 18 people were in the passenger car that was hit. Five died. Two were injured. Miraculously, a woman traveling with a baby survived.

Photo credit: State Emergency Service of Ukraine. Ukrainian firefighters battle a fire on a civilian train struck by Russian drones earlier today.

In Kyiv, a four-year-old girl was tragically orphaned after her mother was crushed to death when their apartment building was hit by a Russian drone. A neighbor managed to rescue the child from a spreading fire.

NEXTA@nexta_tv

💔Svitlana Blatova was killed together with her husband when a Russian suicide drone struck their apartment near Kyiv last night A neighbour ran into the apartment and managed to rescue Svitlana’s 4-year-old daughter. She was lying there, screaming "Mom." The little girl was

8:41 PM · Jan 28, 2026 · 62.8K Views

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66 Replies · 391 Reposts · 1.38K Likes

All four of these bloody incidents—all Russian war crimes—happened over the course of only 24 hours.

Tragically, they are merely representative. Other similar Russian war crimes were committed across the entirety of Ukraine yesterday—as they are, nearly every day in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against the Ukrainian people.

There are times you just want to scream ‘Stop!’ But Putin isn’t going to stop. His military is stuck. It can’t achieve success on the battlefields of Ukraine, so Putin—as he has done since the Fall of 2022—focuses on terrorizing civilians.

Putin—despite his propaganda machine saying otherwise—isn’t winning this war. Indeed, as noted by CSIS, since 2024, Moscow has only “advanced at an average rate of 15 to 70 meters per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century.”

Russia’s idea of winning—in this vein—is murdering & injuring Ukrainian civilians. Sadly, there is nothing new about this. It is right out of Putin’s decades-old playbook. First in Chechnya. Then in Georgia. Later in Syria. Now, in Ukraine.

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Bucha was the site of Putin’s initial war crimes in Ukraine. 458 bodies of Ukrainians were found after Russian forces evacuated the city in April 2022. Moscow, of course, denied it. But photographs proved otherwise.

Photo credit: Heidi Levine / Washington Post. Civilian victims being exhumed from a mass grave next to the Church of St. Andrew in Bucha, Ukraine; April 13^th, 2022.

In the end, 366 were men, 86 women (including nine kids under the age of 18). Six bodies were so badly decomposed that it was impossible to determine age or sex.

One resident described the Russian massacre as “worse than hell.” Sadly, that hell became Russia’s new normal in towns across occupied Ukraine.

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Enter Gen. Sergei Surovikin. If—and it’s a big if—Bucha was ever the exception & not the norm, Surovikin made Russian war crimes the norm in Ukraine. After Ukraine pulled off a masterful counteroffensive in the Fall of 2022, Putin appointed Surovikin the unified Russian commander in Ukraine on October 8^th that same year.

Photo credit: Vadim Savitsky / TASS. Gen. Sergei Surovikin; date unknown.

Known as ‘General Armageddon’—a moniker his fellow Russian officers gave him in Syria after he sanctioned the use of chemical weapons—Surovikin made it clear that he wasn’t going to distinguish between Ukrainian soldiers & civilians.

He didn’t.

Nor has Putin ever since.

If Bucha was prologue, Surovikin made Russia’s war crimes & crimes against humanity the main narrative of Putin’s so-called ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Soon after he took command, and continuing under his successors, Russia began its intentional aerial assaults on civilian infrastructure.

Kids were kidnapped & shipped to Russia. Winter was weaponized including Russian attacks on “power stations, transformers [and] transmission lines.” Surovikin ordered summary executions of Ukrainian soldiers including Oleksandr Matsiyevskiy—now posthumously a Ukrainian hero—who said “Glory to Ukraine” just before he was executed.

Photo credit: Radio Free Europe. Oleksandr Matsiyevskiy seconds before he was executed by Russian soldiers.

Trains, hospitals, kids’ cancer centers, maternity wards, theaters & schools all became Russian targets. Ditto the use of double-tap strikes to kill first responders. Significantly, by 2025, Putin’s bloody war was being waged as much against Ukrainian civilians as against the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The scale of Putin’s war crimes is nearly unimaginable. By early 2025, prosecutors in Ukraine had opened over 153,000 cases of alleged Russian war crimes.

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Surovikin was soon ousted. That was largely due to his connections to Yevgeny Prigozhin—Putin’s one-time chef & head of the Wagner Group who died in a plane crash in the skies of Moscow after attempting a coup.

However, his war plan survived & continues to this day. Surovikin set the tone, & Ukrainian civilians continue to pay the price.

War criminals—apparently—get second chances in Putin’s demonic world. Last June, Surovikin resurfaced in Algeria in a new advisory role with the Russian embassy in Algiers. Algeria should declare him persona non grata if he is still there.

Or ideally, turn Surovikin over to Ukraine.

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Team Trump can learn a lesson here too. Putin’s war against Ukraine is––in many ways–– two wars in one.

President Donald Trump––seemingly––just sees it as the Russian army fighting the Ukrainian army. In reality, however, the Russian army is also waging a war against Ukrainian civilians & has done so since day one.

Surovikin expanded. Russian generals, ever since, have continued it. Washington—all too often—keeps ignoring that.

E.g., Steve Witkoff—Trump’s special envoy to Russia—telling Tucker Carlson last year that he doesn’t “regard Putin as a bad guy.”

Witkoff should try telling that to the family of the newly orphaned 4-year-old girl and see what they think of Putin. Or say that at the funeral services for Yevgenia Besfamilny. Or try saying that to any of Putin’s victims in Ukraine.

They know better.

So do we. Putin is a bad guy. He is also a war criminal.

In case Witkoff doesn’t know it, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, more Ukrainian civilians were killed in 2025—on Team Trump’s watch—than in any other year of the war.

2,514 were killed. That is 31% higher than in 2024. 12,142 were wounded.

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Everyone can do more. You. Us as writers. Europe. Team Trump. Our intent with this special edition of the INTREP360 Intelligence Report isn’t to point fingers—except rightly at Putin & his fellow war criminals. Rather, it is a call to action to pause & see Putin’s war against Ukraine as a war against people very much like you or us.

Empathy often gets lost in covering wars. For tonight, at least, our spotlight is on the Ukrainian victims of Putin’s war crimes.

Sadly—indeed tragically—there will be more.

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Thank you for reading! We will see you tomorrow when we return to our regular format. Please subscribe, comment and share. We truly appreciate it!

Jon & Mark

Follow Jon on X at @JESweet2022 or on Bluesky at @JonSweet.bsky.social.

Follow Mark on X at @MCTothSTL or on Bluesky at @MarkToth.bsky.social.