KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia fired more than 700 attack and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, topping previous nightly barrages for the third time in two weeks, part of Moscow’s intensifying aerial and ground assault in the three-year war, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday.

The Kremlin's grip on the Russian elite appears to be closing ever tighter as two major figures of Russian business and security structures were detained in the past few days. Konstantin Strukov, a billionaire running a gold mining empire,

ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR is Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2015 to 2018, she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.

The apparent suicide of Russia’s transportation minister brought expressions of shock and sorrow from the Kremlin but no new clues as to why Roman Starovoit might have taken his own life amid media speculation he potentially was facing corruption charges.

Long seen as loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, billionaire Konstantin Strukov is on the verge of being stripped of his gold mining empire. The state's seizure of his group illustrates the Kremlin’s hardening stance toward Russian oligarchs,

The senior official said Russia has been forced to rely increasingly on such amateurs since hundreds of Moscow’s spies were expelled from Western countries following an operation to poison former Russian intelligence officer Sergey Skripal in the U.K. in 2018. That led to the death of a British woman — and a major response from the West.

A Russia-appointed official in Ukraine’s occupied Luhansk region says that Moscow’s forces have overrun all of it.