Ukraine’s military leadership, regional U.S.-Iran strikes, and election-security allegations

Off Leash update 17 July 2026

UKRAINE •Ukraine's former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, isn't taking his sacking quietly. Nor were the thousands of his supporters who turned out to protest his firing. •Fedorov spoke out against Ukraine's top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, accusing the commander in chief of "blocking all of our initiatives" and complaining that "instead of figuring out how to defeat Russia asymmetrically...hefigured out how to split the country." •Fedorov and Syrskyi clashed over Federov's efforts to modernize the military, despite the success of innovations like drone technology that he introduced. Protesters are now calling for Syrskyi to be removed instead.

IRAN •U.S. airstrikes targeted infrastructure in Iran - including an airport, a train station, and several bridges - and Iran hit back at U.S. military targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and (for the first known time) Syria. •Iran said the Syrian strike on a U.S. special operations command center in al Tanf was in retaliation for U.S. strikes that killed Iranian soldiers in Iranshahr. There were no U.S. casualties; the U.S. withdrew troops from al Tanf in February (probably at Pres. al Sharaa's request: al Sharaa doesn't want to get involved in the U.S.-Iran war).

CHINA •In a televised address, Pres. Trump accused China of stealing voter files on about 220 million Americans and using them to influence the 2020 election in Joe Biden's favor. China vehemently denied Trump's claim, saying it "has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S." •Shortly after Trump's address, China's leader, Xi Jinping, struck a much more friendly tone at the AI conference he's hosting in Shanghai: "With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is for positive, for good, and for humanity."

VENEZUELA •A CIA analysis of almost 20 years of intelligence on Venezuelan elections concluded that Venezuelan officials had "some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems" to alter up to 1.5 million votes in the country's elections since 2012. •The report cautioned that there was no definitive evidence that the Maduro regime pulled off "large-scale electronic fraud" this way (Nicolas Maduro had other ways of rigging elections in his favor, like bullying the opposition out of challenging him in polls). It also clarified that there was no evidence that Maduro's regime had any ability to influence elections in other countries using Smartmatic machines.