Bankir and his men have been trying to fight off Russian attacks along the Ukrainian front lines for more than two years. But it’s only now that they are finally able to strike where it hurts: Inside Russia’s own territory.

After many months on the back foot because of ammunition and manpower shortages, Kyiv is finally able to take full advantage of Western military aid that started to flow into the country last month, after months of delays.

Soldiers on the front lines say the deliveries are beginning to make a difference – especially since they can now use the arsenal to strike across the border.

“We are deploying the most effective weapons systems in the areas where the Russians are trying to break through the defensive lines and there has been a significant slowdown in the Russian advance,” he added.

While Kyiv hasn’t managed to reclaim large swathes of territory, it has successfully averted what could have been a disaster: The occupation of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city.

‘Tragic moment’

Part of the northern Kharkiv region, including the cities of Izium, Kupiansk, and Balakliia, fell into Russian hands soon after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The occupation was brutal. When the area was liberated in the fall of 2022, Ukrainian troops found evidence of what they say were war crimes committed by Russian forces, including multiple mass graves and torture chambers.

In May this year, Russia launched another cross-border attack on the region, trying to exploit Ukraine’s ammunition shortages before the expected arrival of the first Western weapons.

The consequences were deadly. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said that at least 174 civilians were killed and 690 were injured in Ukraine in May, the highest number of civilian casualties in a year.

More than half of the civilian casualties were in Kharkiv – even though the region encompasses a relatively small area compared to the whole country.

But it also marked a major turning point.

“It triggered a change in the position of our Western partners, it encouraged them to, at least partially, remove the restrictions on the use of the Western weapons,” he said.

Fearing an escalation, the US and other Western allies had long prohibited Kyiv from using their weapons to strike inside Russia, restricting their use to Ukrainian areas under Russian occupation.

That has allowed Russia to use the border areas as safe staging grounds for offensives and missile attacks.

“(Russia) knew that Ukraine did not have the capacity to strike these targets on the Russian territory,” Melnyk said.

“If the decision (to provide aid) wasn’t made, if we lost American support and military assistance, that would have been a game changer.”

But the possibility of Russian re-occupation of parts of Kharkiv region convinced some of Ukraine’s key allies, including the US, to lift the restrictions. This allowed Kyiv to hit and destroy or severely damage key targets inside Russia.

According to Ukrainian defense authorities, these included a regiment command post in Belgorod region, an ammunition depot in Voronezh, a drone facility and an airfield in Krasnodar, communication centers in Bryansk and several naval sites in occupied Crimea.

The arrival of long-range ATACMS missile systems was a particular game-changer, Melnyk said. While Ukraine was previously able to strike targets inside Russia using Ukraine-made drones, ATACMS make these strikes far more efficient.

“Speed matters,” Melnyk explained. “With drone strikes, Russians have hours to react, because they can detect Ukrainian drones early. Russian pilots can have a coffee and a cigarette before jumping into the cockpit and taking off to take it down. With the ATACMS, it’s a matter of minutes,” he said.

Konrad Muzyka, an independent defense analyst and the director of Rochan Consulting who has recently returned from eastern Ukraine, said Russia is also no longer able to target Kharkiv region with S-300 and S-400 missile systems.

“Ukraine started conducting HIMARS strikes on targets in the Belgorod region and forced the Russians to push their S-300 system with which they were striking Kharkiv much further away, so now Kharkiv is beyond their range of Russian S-300 systems,” he said.

While Russia switched to aerial glide bombs – guided munitions with pop-up wings dropped by fighter jets from a distance of some 60-70 kilometers – out of range of Ukraine’s air defenses, the elimination of the S-300 threat has provided at least some relief to Kharkiv.

Weapons without men, men without strategy?

But while the new weapons are making some difference, Ukraine is long way off being able to push Russian forces off its territory.

“It isn’t enough to turn the tide at the front. Enough to hold the enemy back, yes, but not enough to change the situation dramatically,” he said.

“The enemy is now exhausted but not destroyed,” he said, pointing to the fact that Russia still has complete air superiority over Ukraine.

Kyiv is now pinning its hopes on the deliveries of F-16 fighter jets which should start soon – the first Ukrainian pilots were set to complete their training in the US this summer.

But Muzyka said it is far from certain the jets will bring a massive change to Ukraine’s fortunes.

“The F-16s are combat aircraft from 1980s and 1990s and their capabilities are worse than the most modern Russian combat aircraft,” he said, adding that the newest Russian jets would likely prevail in an air battle with the F-16.

However, Ukraine can still use the F-16 to deny Russia control over the skies – and push away Russian aircraft delivering bombs.

Yet the new weapons are just part of the puzzle.

“If it had not been for the supplemental package, Ukrainians would be in a much worse situation right now, but at the same time, the current situation is not only the result of a lack of actions by the US Congress, it’s also the result of the decisions that were made and were not made in Kyiv, especially when it comes to mobilization,” Muzyka said.

“The decision to introduce a wider mobilization was probably as important, if not more important, and it came too late,” he said. The new mobilization law, which requires all men between 18 and 60 to register with Ukraine’s military, came into effect in May.

He said that while Ukraine has managed to recruit a significant number of men over the past month and half, it will take time for these new soldiers to be trained up and ready for the front lines.

“Ukrainians are going to be in a very difficult position until August, September, when the first mobilized guys start to enter the front line. If they can get to that point, then there is a big likelihood that they will manage to stabilize the situation from August onwards, but until this happens, more Russian gains are highly likely.”

Muzyka said that with the new weapons arriving and battalions and brigades getting a boost soon from the new recruits, Ukraine will need to decide on its next steps.

“It is unclear what the plans are. What is the strategy for counteroffensives? The problem is that Ukraine is waiting to see what equipment the West can supply them with, and the West is waiting to see what plans Ukraine have for the future,” he said.

Time is of the essence here. Experts estimate that the $60 billion US aid package approved earlier this year will last for – at best – a year or 18 months.

Ukraine’s allies made fresh pledges on arms this week while at a NATO summit in Washington, DC, President Volodymyr Zelensky called for all restrictions on their usage to be lifted.

Given the possibility of former US President Donald Trump winning a second term in November – he has little time to spare.

Maria Kostenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina contributed reporting.

Poland is considering a Ukrainian proposal to intercept Russian rockets that are on course to hit cities in Ukraine or enter Polish territory, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said following a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on the sidelines of the NATO summit on Friday.

“We are a frontline state and Russian missiles breach our airspace – we assume by mistake,” Sikorski said.

Sikorski explained that some missiles fired from around St. Petersburg fly along the Polish border through Belarusian airspace, before briefly entering Polish airspace for about 40 seconds before hitting targets inside Ukraine.

“Our dilemma is the following: if we shoot them down only when they enter our airspace, the debris is a threat to our citizens and to our property,” he said.

“And the Ukrainians are saying, ‘Please, we will not mind, do it over our airspace when they’re in imminent danger of crossing into Polish territory,’” he said, “To my mind, that’s self-defense but we are exploring the idea.”

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Warsaw to sign a security cooperation agreement between the two countries.

Sikorski said the idea of Poland downing Russian missiles was discussed in that agreement.

“At this stage, this is an idea. What our agreement said is we will explore this idea,” he said.

On Wednesday, Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz told Polish national radio service Polskie Radio 24 that such a decision would only be made with NATO allies.

“If NATO does not make such a decision, Poland will not make it individually,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

When two US avocado inspectors were assaulted and detained at a police roadblock in the Mexican state of Michoacán last month, it sparked a costly international crisis.

The US paused all avocado imports from the state for more than a week, leaving Mexican growers out of tens of millions of dollars and temporarily sending the price of a carton of the fruit in the US soaring by 40 percent, according to analysis firm RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness.

Weeks later, after diplomats and agricultural officials from both countries negotiated new security guidelines around inspections, the massive cross-border trade has stabilized, with the US Department of Agriculture saying that export levels returned to normal at the beginning of July.

But the episode underscored the precarious nature of the industry and the immense volatility in a region that provides most of the world’s avocados, one of Mexico’s most dangerous states and a nexus of cartel power.

US and Mexican officials are now considering new changes to the strict processes that direct how the fruit can make its way to American kitchens to meet ever-increasing demand, with industry groups and advocates urging for more oversight.

‘Green gold’

Avocados, the creamy fruit with the industry nickname “green gold,” are big business. Of the amount exported from the nearly 2.7 million metric tons of the fruit grown last year in Mexico, 81 percent went to the US, at a value of $2.7 billion.

Nearly three-quarters of Mexican avocados come from Michoacán, a state along the country’s Pacific coast with a volcanic belt running through it that makes its soil ideal for farming. The state’s deepwater port has also been critical for the flourishing of drug cartels, which moved into Michoacán in the 1980s, fueling a homicide rate that is today more than twice the national average.

The expansion of the avocado market in the state around the same time has been “deeply intertwined” with the violent groups and corrupt public authorities, researchers at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime said in a report this year.

Citing interviews with growers in the state, the researchers described how criminal groups illegally burn and log protected forests and bribe local officials to change permissions around the use of the land to allow for commercial activity. According to an academic article published by the Mexican government cited in the report, 80 percent of the avocado orchards in Michoacán were established illegally, “initially through unauthorized land use that was then turned into legal parcels thanks to corruption of public authorities.”

Cartels today also regularly extort producers in protection schemes, the report found. Local police forces in turn commonly rent themselves out as security for producers, and heavily armed militias known as “autodefensa” groups have formed to patrol farms.

“This is the core of the mafia-style relationships that exist in Michoacán around avocado production,” Romain Le Cour, one of the report authors and a senior expert at the initiative, said in an interview. “You need criminal actors in a way to stir up the business, you need business entrepreneurs to run the business, and you need corrupt authorities to make sure that what you’re doing becomes legalized or laundered.”

Mexican officials in the aftermath of the detention of the inspectors in June were quick to downplay the incident, claiming it was nonviolent and unrelated to organized crime and the inspectors’ work in the avocado industry.

The inspectors, who were Mexican citizens working for the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, were stopped and taken from their car after attempting to cross a barricade on a highway set up by police officers who were protesting a pay issue, according to Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, the Michoacán governor.

A dangerous job

Since the US first allowed imports of avocados from Michoacán in 1997, APHIS employees in the country have inspected avocado orchards to ensure they are free of pests that could harm US avocado crops. About 100 inspectors from the agency operate within the state, according to Ramírez, visiting avocado groves and packing facilities to check the fruit before issuing a certification.

That close contact and pivotal responsibility leaves them “extremely exposed to corruption and violence,” said Le Cour, the GI-TOC expert.

In 2022, exports of Mexican avocados were similarly halted for several days after one of the US inspectors working in Michoacán received a threatening phone call.

In the wake of both incidents, Mexican leaders have pushed to change the bilateral agreement regulating the trade to allow for the Mexican government to take over the inspections, with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador criticizing the US decision to halt the export as “arrogance.”

In a news conference last month, Mexican Agriculture Minister Victor Villalobos said the Mexican government was “perfectly prepared” to do the work, which he said would be valuable to “avoid having to stop the export.”

Officials at the US State Department and USDA have considered the possible change, according to Ken Melban, the vice president for industry affairs and operations at the California Avocado Commission, which represents growers in the state.

In a statement, Melban called it “unimaginable the US government would consider abdicating inspection responsibilities to Mexico.”

“US farmers will not be protected under such a program, one intended and designed specifically to protect US farmers’ economic interests,” he said.

An APHIS spokesperson declined to comment on the thinking around the policy.

US and Mexican officials have also recently resurfaced discussions around a policy to block the export of avocados from Mexico grown in orchards on illegally cleared lands, according to Brad Adams, the executive director of Climate Rights International, an advocacy group that used satellite imagery last year to document the widespread deforestation behind the market.

Instead, the agency pointed towards training and technical assistance that the US Forest Service has provided to Mexico “to support real-time deforestation monitoring of priority regions.”

“We’ve exposed something that is illegal and therefore indefensible,” Adams said. “They have an obligation that they recognize at a governmental level in Mexico, and the US can’t keep importing illegally harvested produce.”