Ukraine and NATO have unveiled two artificial intelligence (AI) tools in Vilnius, Lithuania, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported on 13 October. One forecasts Russian drone attacks near the front and is ready to join the Armed Forces’ situational awareness systems. The other helps plan artillery fire and is still in testing.

A forecast of where, when, and which drones will fly targets the main source of losses near the front. In March, Ukraine’s military put the share of front-line casualties caused by FPV drones at up to 80%. In May, Ukraine’s drone forces commander Robert Brovdi said Russia was copying Ukraine’s model to grow its drone forces. A month earlier, Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov wrote that adding more drones no longer fundamentally changes the battlefield. The next stage, he said, is full integration of AI.

Forecasting Russian drone attacks

The NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC) presented both at a three-day seminar in the Lithuanian capital. NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and Ukraine’s Armed Forces built the tools with JATEC’s support.

“The solution has already been validated using real-world datasets. It has been refined and is ready for integration into the Armed Forces of Ukraine's situational awareness systems,” the ministry said.

Model No. 13 works from past data, weather, and the current battlefield situation. The ministry said it can identify the intensity of attacks, the areas, the time windows, and the types of drones with a high probability.

Ranking artillery options

Model No. 32 is a decision-support module. It tests whether artillery plans can be generated automatically. It weighs the mission’s requirements and current operational data, including available weapons, ammunition, firing positions, and constraints.

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First, it applies logistics, ballistics, and impact-zone parameters to throw out unworkable options. Then it scores and ranks the rest. That means less hand-based comparison, faster decisions, and a more efficient fire loop, the ministry said. The prototype is now with the Ukrainian military for trials. If the trials succeed and it is validated, it could be expanded to other units that strike Russian forces.

The claim that strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots finds no support in the networks tracked by Ukrainian disinformation-monitoring company LetsData, co-founder Ksenia Iliuk told Euromaidan Press on 13 October. She cautioned that the strikes may still have affected networks outside the company’s view.

At the Warsaw Security Forum, Lithuania’s prime minister suggested allies should ask Ukraine to strike more Russian data centers because that might help protect European elections from foreign interference. Bot networks are one tool of that interference, so whether the strikes mute them carries weight well beyond Ukraine.

No drop in the networks LetsData tracks

Drones hit Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Vladimir between 8 and 11 October. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 drones struck Yandex’s Kaluga site in between. On 12 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that once Ukraine’s response reached Yandex, social media had fewer bots.

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LetsData checked X and Facebook, where bot networks usually stand out clearly, Iliuk said. Its analysts looked at networks attributed to Russia’s influence ecosystem. Among them are groups of X accounts spreading domains from what she called a new wave of Doppelgänger, a Russian campaign that clones real news sites.

Those networks look unaffected, Iliuk said. None of them has stopped posting or broken its usual rhythm, she added. Some are slightly less active, but LetsData’s analysts say that is typical for them. The networks run on a weekly cycle, and the check fell in the part of the week when they post less.

A network that jumped from Germany to Ukraine

LetsData worked with two samples. One covers accounts that systematically target Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia. The other covers bot networks the company has followed for some time that keep changing their target audience, so they have no fixed country.

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About two weeks ago, one network from that second sample wrote about elections in Germany and spread fake Die Welt sites, she said. It now posts about mobilization in Ukraine and shares a fake site of Ukrinform, Ukraine’s state news agency.

What the check can’t see

The company can compare only within networks whose usual behavior it knows, Iliuk said. Checking the whole internet is impossible because the scale is colossal, she said. A Cloudflare chart that circulated as evidence counted automated web requests from Yandex’s network, including its search crawlers, not social media posts, Cybernews reported.

So the networks LetsData follows show no impact, Iliuk said. That does not mean the strikes had no effect at all, she noted. They may have shown up in networks the company isn’t tracking now. LetsData will keep watching and report other signals if they appear.