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Ternopil, Midas and a week of strain
Summary
A look back at 20 November 2025, when Ukraine absorbed a deadly strike and a political shake-up while neighbours dealt with their own security pressures.
What did Ukraine's week look like by 20 November 2025? It was defined by grief in the west of the country, a reckoning over corruption in the energy sector, and pressure on Europe's eastern and northern edges.
Ternopil
On 19 November 2025, a series of Russian missile and drone strikes hit locations across Ukraine. The worst was a ballistic missile strike on a nine-storey residential building in Ternopil, which killed 31 people and injured more than 100. Search and rescue operations were still under way, with many people missing. Later accounts put the toll from the attack at no fewer than 38 dead, including seven children, with more than 120 injured; the strike hit two apartment buildings in the early morning hours.
A day earlier, on 18 November 2025, overnight Russian missile strikes on Berestyn in Kharkiv Oblast had killed a 17-year-old girl and injured nine other people.
The Midas fallout
The political story ran alongside the military one. On 19 November 2025, the Verkhovna Rada dismissed energy minister Svitlana Hrynchuk and justice minister German Galushchenko. The move followed an anti-corruption investigation into alleged misconduct at the state nuclear agency that implicated them among other officials.
The case is known as Operation Midas. It is an investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, launched in 2024, concerning large-scale bribery in the energy sector during the war. Over 15 months of data collection, investigators carried out more than 70 searches, seized 4 million US dollars and gathered about 1,000 hours of audio recordings of suspects' conversations, according to later descriptions of the case.
On 18 November 2025, former deputy prime minister Oleksii Chernyshov had been arrested on charges linked to the scandal at Energoatom. Taken together, the arrest and the two dismissals within about a day showed the investigation reaching into the top levels of government while Russian strikes continued to hit civilians.
Beyond Ukraine's borders
Other developments on 19 and 20 November 2025 reflected wider regional tension. Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation approved the extradition to Germany of a Ukrainian national who faces charges over alleged involvement in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions.
Also on 19 November 2025, the Russian Navy spy ship Yantar used lasers to disrupt Royal Air Force aircraft that were monitoring it in the North Sea, the first time this had happened. A Royal Navy frigate was following the vessel, and Poseidon P-8 planes had been deployed to track it.
On 20 November 2025, Lithuania reopened its Medininkai and Šalčininkai border checkpoints with Belarus. They had been closed over security concerns involving weather balloons used for smuggling. The crossings sit within the long-running border crisis between Belarus and the European Union, which began in August 2021 when Belarus started sponsoring an influx of migrants to the borders of Lithuania, Poland and Latvia.
A day in context
The stories differed in scale, but they shared a theme: security and accountability under pressure. In Ukraine, the same days brought both the human cost of long-range strikes and a public test of the government's willingness to see senior figures removed amid an anti-corruption inquiry. Elsewhere, a sabotage case moved through European courts, a naval encounter showed new risks at sea, and a border reopened after a closure.
