Ukrainian engineers near the front rewrite their drones' software every couple of days. A NATO army needs about six months to push the same update. That gap in speed is the central challenge for the Western trainers working with Ukrainian troops in Poland, who say Ukraine's wartime tempo is exposing how slowly the West moves in peacetime, the Business Insider reports.

Russia's war forces the Ukrainian Army to buy, train, and adapt at a pace peacetime armies are not built for, and its experience is pushing NATO to confront how much its own bureaucracy slows it down.

The alliance has studied that experience without yet fully absorbing it: in an Estonian war game last winter, a ten-person Ukrainian drone team wiped out two NATO battalions in a day.

Now NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte is calling for a large-scale transformation of the West's defense industry so its armies can react faster.

Two speeds meet in Poland

The place where those speeds collided was Camp Jomsborg, a base Norway built in an eastern Polish forest in a matter of months. There, under an operation called Legio, trainers from across northern Europe drill Ukrainian soldiers while the Ukrainians hand their front-line lessons back to NATO.

The camp sits, as its operations officer, a major identified only as John, put it,  at "the mental and geographical middle point between war in the east and peacetime mechanism in the West."

A drone update tells the story

Brigadier General Atle Molde, who commands the task force, put the gap in numbers. If a Western drone needs new software, he said, "you have to send it to a Western country or a company, and an update takes six months." 

In Ukraine, "they have the engineers sitting close to the front updating every two days, every two weeks, developing software, adapting it to genuine situations."

Molde said he wants to see greater initiative in innovation within Western armies, but to achieve that, "it has to be some major changes that have to be done on all levels when it comes to legislation."

The US is preparing to sell Ukraine something unusual: American-made missiles for its Soviet S-300 air-defense systems. The missiles, labeled "S-300 Clone" in the paperwork, are part of a $2.68 billion package that the State Department approved on 18 September, financed by European partners and unused US military aid, Defense Express reports.

Ukraine has plenty of Soviet-era S-300 launchers but not the missiles to feed them. Russia will not sell more, and an earlier Ukrainian attempt to build its own went nowhere, according to Defense Mirror.

Not a Soviet 5V55 replica

At the same time, the missile itself is not actually a "clone" or replica of the Soviet 5V55. According to Defense Express's own information, this is a new development with enhanced characteristics and a different, more modern targeting guidance principle.

At the same time, the American side did not disclose the index, characteristics, or manufacturer of the missiles mentioned in the State Department's statement.

In September 2024, then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced at the Ramstein contact group that Washington, in partnership with several European companies, was working with Ukraine to "design and build a substitute" for the Soviet S-300 and the R-27 air-to-air missile used by fighter jets, Newsweek reports. He never spelled out what that substitute would be.

Anti-radar missile project from the 1950s

The package will also include GAM-67. As for the GAM-67, despite the existence of an unrealized American anti-radar missile project from the 1950s, this is also a new development. It is intended for medium-range systems, both existing ones, including Soviet ones, and future ones.

The package also provides for modernization and maintenance: spare parts, consumables, and accessories, support during repair and return, software, transportation support, engineering, technical, and logistical services from the US government and contractors, and other related elements of logistical and program support.

Drones get most of the attention in this war, and deservedly so—but the snipers are still out there, two Ukrainian marksmen told Army Inform, and the same drones have made their work far harder to survive. It now turns on watching, not shooting: long stretches at a hidden position, a thermal scope always running, and a constant fight to stay unseen.

Across the drone-saturated front, cheap cameras overhead have rewritten nearly every job—infantry, logistics crews, and now marksmen—so that surviving depends less on firepower than on never being seen.

The job is mostly watching

The men—a squad leader in a special-purpose sniper company, callsign Efiop, and his partner Maister—serve in the National Guard of Ukraine's 3rd Operational Purpose Brigade Spartan. Maister worked a factory milling machine before joining in 2022. He saw what Russian troops were doing, he said, and Ukrainian children started dying: he went to fight for the children, and he has a daughter of his own. A team takes a sector and holds it around the clock through a thermal scope.

"We can sit 40 days and never fire a shot. Or we go in, and in a single day we take down a lot of them," Efiop said.

His longest stint at one spot ran 48 days, and the greatest distance he has worked was 2,540 meters—more than a mile and a half.

Up to 154 pounds on your back, over 12 miles to cross

Reaching a position is often the hardest part. A sniper carries a vest, helmet, an assault rifle and the sniper rifle, and what supplies will fit—60 to 70 kilograms, or 132 to 154 pounds. They stay more than a month, and a month's worth will not go on one back. That load sometimes crosses more than 20 kilometers, over 12 miles, of open ground with no tree line to hide behind.

"You don't walk, you run," Maister said.

Lately it has eased a little: food can be dropped in by a heavy Vampire bomber drone.

Drones rewrote the rulebook

The biggest shift came from the sky. Russian drones with thermal cameras can see a bullet in flight because it is warm, Efiop said, and then burn out the position.

"They caught us like that once. We took out three, they saw where we fired from and burned the spot. We moved right away, and everyone lived," Efiop noted.

Now the snipers watch remotely from a safer place instead of lying behind the scope for hours. Once, that safer setup saved a life outright: a mortar round came in and pierced only the rifle scope.

ZVS Holding evacuated its ammunition factory in Snina, a town in eastern Slovakia, on 16 September after a fire broke out on the roof of a production building. Work stopped temporarily in the affected section, but nobody was injured, Militarnyi reported.

The Snina plant has an annual capacity of roughly 100,000 shells and plans to triple it, Noviny reported. The blaze briefly disrupted part of a facility under expansion for Europe’s ammunition buildup, although co-owner CSG expects no impact on customer deliveries. Authorities across Europe are investigating suspected Russian sabotage against defense companies, but no evidence links the Snina fire to that campaign.

ZVS Holding is owned equally by the Slovak state and the Czech defense conglomerate Czechoslovak Group (CSG). It makes 155 mm artillery shells, 120 mm tank rounds, and 30/35 mm cannon ammunition.

In December 2025, ZVS signed a seven-year framework agreement with Slovakia’s Defense Ministry to supply EU states. Purchases under the agreement may be financed through the bloc’s SAFE defense-loan program. Its Euro 58 billion ceiling represents the maximum possible value of future orders, not guaranteed purchases.

Firefighters brought the blaze under control during the afternoon. As thick black smoke rose over Snina, town officials advised nearby residents to limit time outdoors, close windows and doors, and switch off ventilation systems drawing in outside air.

Slovak Defense Minister Robert Kaliňák said the fire had not reached the plant’s production equipment and that the affected part of the building was not being used for manufacturing at the time. That section makes metal projectiles, he said.

Kaliňák said welding during the renovation may have sparked the fire, but stressed that investigators had not established the cause.

CSG said the fire started during roof repairs conducted by an external contractor. The company said the damage and cause still had to be assessed, but it did not expect the incident to affect customer deliveries, STVR reported.

Why sabotage fears shadow Europe’s arms plants

The Snina blaze was at least the fourth fire or explosion at a European ammunition facility since 10 August, after two fires struck a Bulgarian company and an explosion hit an Italian factory. No common cause has been established.

Preliminary findings pointed away from outside interference in the first Bulgarian fire. No evidence of sabotage, however, was reported after the Italian blast, and only the second Bulgarian fire remains under investigation for possible sabotage.

Czech authorities are examining a possible Russian trail behind an arson attack on a factory making drones and thermal optics for Ukraine.

Estonia has also probed suspected arson at a military-robot maker after courts documented earlier attacks directed by Russian military intelligence.

Ukraine's arms industry wants the government to scrap a steep fee on weapons exports, warning it undercuts their prices just as Europe's defense market opens, RBC-Ukraine reported. The same fee has opened a second fight in Kyiv, where parliament this week declined to turn its revenue into money for the army.

Russia's war on Ukraine has pushed Europe into rearming, and Ukraine's battle-tested arms makers are among the few that can deliver at scale right now—an opening that domestic red tape could blunt, handing the advantage to competitors just as the market grows.

A €60 billion European window—and a fee in the way

The push comes as Europe opens a major market for Ukrainian weapons. The EU's €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan for 2026-2027 reserves €60 billion for defense purchases, and partners increasingly want weapons built on their own soil. International partners report more than 200 cooperation approaches to Ukrainian firms still without a decision, according to the industry's press release. Producers link the fee fix to Build with Ukraine, a co-production push they consider strategically significant.

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Parliament won't route the money to the army

On 15 September, the Verkhovna Rada—Ukraine's parliament—rejected a bill in first reading that would have sent fee revenue collected from 1 August 2026 into a special budget fund for the Defense Ministry, half for buying, modernizing, and repairing weapons, half for soldiers' pay. The vote left the fee itself untouched, since it rests on the Cabinet resolution, and settled only that its revenue will not be earmarked for the army.

The fee producers want gone

The Ukrainian Council of Arms Manufacturers, joined by other defense and employer groups, prepared proposals to rework the July government resolution, No. 875. They want the fee—20% on finished goods and technologies, 30% on parts—cut to zero, or capped at 5%. Firms must also pay upfront, before any foreign payment lands, with no refund guaranteed if a deal collapses. A UAH 15 million (about $337,000) threshold shuts out the small test shipments new clients often begin with.

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The fee has drawn complaints since the resolution took effect in early July. Ihor Fedirko, the council's executive director, earlier said the 30-day review window was welcome but warned it could clog into a bureaucratic queue as staff leave the agencies running it. One of the associations behind the submission calls the 30% rate on parts prohibitive, since Europe is where Ukrainian firms would undercut Chinese suppliers on price.

Ukraine has swung from banning weapons sales abroad to courting foreign buyers, and its defense sector now ranks among the country's fastest-growing industries. Wartime certification to NATO standards is turning that output into something European militaries can actually buy.

For the first time, a foreign government is paying to build a Ukrainian drone-training program. Under its Military Training and Cooperation Program, Canada has funded a 24-month course for FPV and fixed-wing drone operators at the training center of the Serhii Prytula Foundation, one of Ukraine's largest charities, the foundation said.

The money buys a system. Canada is paying to build a training cycle that can be scaled and copied, the instructors, methods, standards, and infrastructure behind the courses, so it can keep pace with a technology that changes by the month.

The arrangement runs both ways: Canada, which was slow to adopt the FPV drones now dominating the battlefield, gains access to the combat experience of the country that leads the world in drone warfare.

Canada buys a training system

The deal recognizes what Ukraine's front-line schools have built.

"This is recognition not only of our experience but of the quality and standards of our training," said Andrii Shuvalov, CEO of the Serhii Prytula Foundation.

Both sides gain from the deal

Canada's military attaché framed it as an exchange, not simply aid.

"This is a mutually beneficial partnership. Ukrainian service members will train with leading instructors, and Canada will benefit from Ukraine's deep combat and training experience," said Colonel Eric Andresen.

The problem the program targets is one every modern army now faces: technology evolves so fast that training has to keep pace, or fall behind.

The foundation brings the scale

The problem the program targets is one every modern army now faces: technology evolves so fast that training has to keep pace, or fall behind.

The Prytula Foundation, founded by the volunteer and public figure Serhii Prytula, is a credible partner given its track record. It has bought roughly $39 million in strike drones and $10 million in reconnaissance drones for Ukraine's forces, along with about $8.6 million in vehicles and some $1.9 million each in optics and communications gear, spending that has put it among the country's biggest private suppliers of the war.

NATO fighter jets shot down a drone over Lithuania shortly after midnight on 15 September, the first time alliance aircraft have destroyed one over that country, LRT reported. The aircraft crossed in from Belarus and came down near a village in the center of the country, where military police sealed the site. Its type and operator have not been established.

What happened over Lithuania

Lithuania's National Crisis Management Center issued a yellow air alert after midnight, first for the capital and the districts around it, then for the Kaunas region further west. Italian Air Force Eurofighter Typhoons flying NATO's Baltic air policing mission from Šiauliai Air Base destroyed the drone with missile armament, Lithuania's Defense Ministry confirmed, and the army published the first images from the crash site.

The drone was over Lithuanian territory for about half an hour, crisis center head Vilmantas Vitkauskas told LRT radio. He said there is a high probability it carried an explosive charge, though the wreckage does not yet show whether it was a combat drone. Lithuania chose a yellow alert rather than red because red is used when a strike or a fall is unavoidable, he explained, and the drone was destroyed within seconds of the air defense crews reacting, over farmland with no homes nearby.

Military and civilian police are working at the site under the Shield security plan, and the area has been fenced off and guarded. President Gitanas Nausėda thanked the allied personnel for their swift response, saying that with Russia intensifying its aggression against Ukraine such readiness is vital for the region.

Whose drone it was

Nothing has been established beyond the direction it came from. The army has not commented on the drone's possible origin while the wreckage is still being collected, and the launch point also remains unreleased. Vilnius airport suspended operations during the alert, and flights from Türkiye and Iceland were delayed.

The same night as this incursion, Poland scrambled fighter jets and raised air defense readiness over Russian drone strikes on western Ukraine, and Romania did the same, with neither country recording a violation of its airspace. The day before, the Polish military recovered a drone from the Baltic Sea that its defense minister said preliminary inspection indicated was Russian and military.

Belarus' Defense Ministry said a command-staff exercise will run from 14 to 16 September in the Cherven and Berezino districts of Minsk Oblast. It closes a reservist training camp that began there on 25 August, part of a wider round that also took in the Vawkavysk district of Hrodna Oblast from 26 August, the ministry announced.

Under Alyaksandr Lukashenka's rule, Belarus remains Russia's closest ally in the war against Ukraine, supplying weapons, intelligence, and industrial capacity while Moscow fights. That alliance is what makes drills inside Belarus a question for its neighbors: Russia may again use Belarus to launch an attack on Ukraine or a NATO member state.

The Belarusian army is "preparing for war so that there will be no war," Belarusian ruler Lukashenka said during a visit to a military training ground in Brest Oblast on 11 September. He said the whole armed forces would be checked, up to mobilization, with some units deployed to wartime norms, while denying any intention to attack, since Belarus could not win a war against its neighbors.

Belarus prepares reservists for military missions

The exercise is meant to sharpen officers' command of subordinate territorial defense forces and drill personnel in coordinated action, and the deputy chairman of the Minsk oblast executive committee will lead it.

"Particular attention will be paid to the interaction of territorial troops with internal affairs bodies, internal troops, as well as people's militia units in the protection of important facilities, ensuring martial law and fighting enemy sabotage groups," the ministry said.

The people's militia is a volunteer reserve, and the internal troops are the Interior Ministry's own armed formations rather than part of the army.

Minsk steps up territorial defense training as Lithuania launches military drills

Since late March 2026, Belarus' Defense Ministry has announced at least 11 events involving territorial troops, Poland-based Belarusian broadcaster Belsat reported. Most of them were training camps, but command-and-staff exercises and drills were also held, the media outlet said.

Uladzimir Zhyhar, a representative of BELPOL, an association of former Belarusian security officers opposing Lukashenka's regime, highlighted in comments to Belsat the exercises conducted for Belarus' Interior Ministry. The Interior Ministry is preparing to suppress internal protests, while the Defense Ministry wants to conduct exercises that would, among other things, practice responding to saboteurs entering Belarus and breaches of the state border, he said.

"Why can this happen? BELPOL representatives have repeatedly said that there is currently no threat from either NATO countries or Ukraine to Belarus. Therefore, something must change around the country as a whole," Zhyhar said, adding: "And that change would bring both possible destabilization inside Belarus, meaning a threat to the regime, and the likelihood of a breach of the state border."

One scenario he sees is Belarus being drawn into a war against Ukraine or NATO countries, which would prompt a response. The skills currently being practiced by the Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry could then be needed, the expert said.

On 14 September, military exercises began in 12 municipalities in Lithuania and run until 18 September, LRT reported. The NATO member shares a 679-kilometer border with Belarus, and its troops are training to act together against military threats of various kinds, using drones, boats, and weapons.

Belarus has been militarizing steadily since 2022, holding exercises almost without pause, including joint drills with Russian forces.

A Russian state-linked espionage group ran much of its campaign against Ukraine on Claude, the AI assistant sold by US company Anthropic, which set out the case in a threat report published on 10 September, covering activity it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026. Ukrainian government, military, and diplomatic staff recurred most often among the targets, with the drone supply chain second. Other Russian users of the same chatbot produced on-air tickers and voiceover scripts for state broadcasters, while Russian-speaking criminals went after the AI industry itself.

Ukrainian ministries and diplomats led the target list

Anthropic tracks the group as GTG-20006 and says its attribution matches public reporting that links it to Midnight Blizzard, a hacking group the US and UK governments attribute to Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service. A Russian-speaking operator using the handle JackPoterz ran campaigns against military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments, plus diplomatic and defense bodies and individuals connected to US foreign policy.

More than 20 organizations appeared in the actor's planning and live operations, from ministries and embassies to think tanks and defense companies. Ukrainian government, military, and diplomatic staff came up most often, and the operators scanned email and remote-access systems across more than two dozen Ukrainian state organizations. Russia has worked these networks all war, treating Ukrainian media as a priority cyber target.

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Drone technology was the other target

The operators bulk-exported the mailboxes of at least two drone component manufacturers and went after a military drone maker. They also stole a complete proprietary software development kit for a drone vision system, the code and documentation engineers need to build on that hardware, then spent days pulling it apart. They recovered the product architecture, the parts list, the supplier dependencies, and details of a product the company had not announced. Military drone control and AI vision firmware drew their particular interest.

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To reach people indirectly, the group also compromised at least three vendors running hotel guest WiFi and redirected guests to its own servers, pushing malware at their devices and hunting for Ukrainian officials and drone manufacturers. To reach people indirectly, the group also compromised at least three vendors running hotel guest WiFi and redirected guests to its own servers, pushing malware at their devices and hunting for Ukrainian officials and drone manufacturers. Microsoft documented the same method on 31 July, calling it CaptiveCrunch and tracing it to a Midnight Blizzard sub-cluster. Russian services have tracked the weapons pipeline before, tapping private cameras in Europe to watch arms shipments bound for Ukraine.

What the chatbot did for the operation

Claude fingerprinted mail systems, built the phishing infrastructure, ran commands inside victim networks, harvested credentials, and organized hundreds of gigabytes of stolen data, Anthropic found. Automated agents also checked whether the group's implants were being detected, rewrote flagged malware until it passed, and staged it for the next intrusion. The operators also seized WhatsApp accounts and targeted at least two former high-level Ukrainian officials that way, and stole cloud email from at least eight bodies, including a national prosecutor office and a military education institute.

Russian state media used the same chatbot

Four individual operators fed state outlets, among them a former Sputnik Moldova editor-in-chief. Anthropic says content generated with Claude reached Sputnik Moldova, RIA Novosti, Sputnik en Español, Sputnik Africa, and RT's English newsroom, including fabricated claims about Moldova's President Maia Sandu before the parliamentary election of 28 September 2025. 

A Russian-speaking operator in Bangui also supplied daily material to Radio Lengo Songo, a station investigators say the Wagner Group founded and funded in 2017, coordinating with RT, Sputnik Afrique, and TASS.

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Two crews went after the AI company itself

A Russian-speaking actor moved from hotel-booking and fintech intrusions to attacking AI firms, planting instructions in one vendor's testing system and hitting roughly 30 companies in four days while chasing an unreleased Claude model. The hunt for the model failed, though the actor did take production API keys from that testing system, and Anthropic says its own systems were never breached. A Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking group meanwhile sold fake discounted access to the assistant, routing customers to a different model and stealing their logins.

A Ukrainian company has unveiled a homegrown strike drone built to fly deep behind Russian lines, Militarnyi reported on 13 September. Octava Defence showed the new long-range aircraft—a bigger version of a drone already used in combat—at the MSPO 2026 defense expo in Kielce, Poland. The company says the smaller drone is built to keep working in electronic warfare conditions without a reliable satellite signal.

Russian jamming is one of the biggest obstacles to Ukrainian strikes deep in the rear, which is why Ukrainian makers keep building guidance that does not depend on satellite signals.

The workhorse is already in the fight

The base FLYCAT, presented in January 2026 by another Ukrainian firm, Venator Technologies, is a strike drone Ukrainian forces have used in combat since March. An improved model went into action in July and August and is now undergoing codification—entry into Ukraine's official weapons register.

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The company says the updated drone can fly more than 80 km, stay in the air for an hour, and carry a warhead weighing up to 3.7 kg. It is built to hunt armored vehicles, artillery, radars, and air-defense systems, as well as lighter shelters and communications gear. It can pair with a scout drone that finds the target and passes the coordinates. Several FLYCATs can also strike a single target together or hit multiple targets at once.

Nearly everything on it is built in Ukraine—the communications, navigation, guidance, and warhead. Only the engines come from abroad. Its two cameras—day-only or day-and-night—feed a terminal-guidance module that picks out the target from 2,000 m as it closes in.

The one that reaches deeper

The FLYCAT SL is a bigger, longer-range version, and it is still in testing. The company says it is built to fly more than 200 km, stay airborne for over two and a half hours, and carry a heavier load of up to 7 kg.

That range is meant to let it go after command posts, armored vehicles, artillery, and air defenses far behind the front line.

The EU's ambassadors failed again on 11 September to extend the bloc's sanctions on individual Russians, days before the listings lapse, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Europe editor Rikard Jozwiak. Slovakia wants two Russian oligarchs delisted, and France now backs the same for one of them, Alisher Usmanov. The EU listed him in 2022 as a pro-Kremlin oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

France picks up a demand Bratislava has carried for years

Paris has called for the delisting of Usmanov, an Uzbek-born multi-billionaire under EU sanctions since the full-scale invasion in 2022, four EU diplomats told Euronews. His money came out of metals and mining and later out of telecoms and tech holdings. Usmanov denies being close to the Kremlin. Forbes ranks him 10th among Russia's wealthiest people this year, at $14.5 billion.

One diplomat, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the discussions, said the request raised questions about the motive and that it "seems mostly economic reasons at play here." All four diplomats described huge frustration among other member states, against the background of Russia's widening hybrid attacks in Europe, among them the explosive-laden drone found beside a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport. A French official said Paris supports renewing the sanctions but would not discuss the negotiations.

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Slovakia holds out for two names

Bratislava has pushed for years to remove both Usmanov and a second Russian oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, and it repeated the demand when the sanctions were last extended in March. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico's government has threatened to block EU decisions on Ukraine before, and it halted all military aid to Kyiv in January. It has opposed the rollover across several ambassadors' meetings and wants the six-month review cycle kept.

Paris pitched the move as a political trade-off, wagering that Bratislava would stand by both of its delisting demands this time instead of dropping them as it did at the last renewal, Euronews reported.

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What runs out on 15 September

The deadline falls on 15 September. The listings at stake cover around 2,600 people and companies by the Council's own count, while Euronews puts the whole regime at more than 3,000, from arms-industry firms to individuals the bloc blames for sustaining the war against Ukraine. Individual listings have run in six-month blocks, and a 12-month cycle is now under discussion. The bloc's economic measures switched to annual renewals over the summer, and a July package added 218 names. Renewal requires unanimity, so one capital can let everything lapse. Ambassadors return to it on Monday.

How the last delisting in Usmanov's family was arranged

Recordings of a 2024 call, published this spring, showed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asking Hungary's then-foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, to help remove Usmanov's sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, from the list. The Hungarian minister replied that his country and Slovakia were submitting a delisting proposal together. Ismailova came off the list in March 2025.