Residents who have recently escaped Russian-occupied Oleshky describe being subjected to threats, intimidation, and exploitation by Russian soldiers, according to the head of the Oleshky City Military Administration.

Oleshky is facing severe shortages of food, water, and medicine, with around 1,500 civilians, including up to 50 children, still trapped in the Russian-occupied city with no safe way out.

Tetiana Hasanenko told Ukrinform on September 29 that people escaping the city on foot were severely weakened and had lost up to 15 kilograms. She said those who managed to leave described not only hunger, but also abuse by Russian troops.

“They were really fleeing from hunger and from abuse,” Hasanenko told Ukrinform.

Russian troops threaten residents for food and alcohol

According to Hasanenko, Russian soldiers are entering residents’ homes, taking them over, and forcing the civilians living there to feed them despite having little food themselves.

“They move in and demand that people feed them and give them alcohol,” she said, adding that some of the soldiers appeared to be drug or alcohol users.

She described one family’s account in which a Russian soldier allegedly locked them in a shower while in an apparently intoxicated state and threatened to throw a grenade at them.

Another woman reportedly told Ukrainian officials that a Russian soldier threatened to kill her because the homemade wine she gave him was sour.

“They move in and demand to eat and drink,” Hasanenko said.

Residents face hunger and mines

The accounts come as Oleshky in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast faces a severe humanitarian crisis. Ukrainian authorities say around 1,500 people remain in the occupied city, including up to 50 children, with residents lacking reliable access to food and water.

Those trying to escape face minefields around the city. Hasanenko said some residents have attempted to leave on foot and that there are people who have failed to return after entering mined areas.

She said one family tried to return because children had been left behind at home but never made it back.

Recent escapees have reportedly lost 10–15 kilograms, with some leaving only after becoming severely weakened by hunger.

Russian troops accused of using civilians as cover

Hasanenko also said Russian soldiers are deliberately living in civilian homes to protect themselves.

By occupying homes and remaining among local residents, she said, Russian troops are effectively using civilians as a “human shield” because they fear for their own safety.

Ukraine has been seeking an organized evacuation of civilians from Oleshky and has said the International Committee of the Red Cross is prepared to participate if Russia agrees to the necessary arrangements. Russia has not confirmed its readiness to allow such an evacuation.

A former Wagner fighter captured by Ukraine has described alleged training sessions in Mali where Russian mercenaries used African prisoners as live subjects, deliberately inflicting severe injuries so recruits could practice battlefield medicine and killing.

Training built around real victims

The fighter told Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Karpenko that Wagner instructors brought captured Africans to training sessions and turned them into human practice targets.

“We gathered for medical training, and they brought in a captured terrorist. They tied a block of TNT to his leg. They set it off, everyone moved away, and of course his leg was blown off,” he said.

The recruits then practiced stopping the resulting bleeding. According to the fighter, the prisoner was later shot in the artery near his armpit so they could practice the same procedure on his arm.

The prisoner died after the training.

In another session, he said, instructors had a prisoner's leg chopped off with an ax so recruits could practice applying a tourniquet under realistic conditions.

“They cut off his leg. Then they put on the tourniquet – everything as if it were an extreme situation, so everything would be realistic,” he said.

‘Here, strike the heart’

The alleged exercises also included training in how to kill.

The fighter said another prisoner was drugged before recruits were taught how to kill someone with a knife.

“They showed us how to kill with a knife to the heart. They chose two people who were willing and said: ‘Here, strike the heart,’” he said.

The fighter said all three prisoners died during the exercises.

From Mali to Ukraine

The testimony comes from a Russian mercenary who joined Wagner in 2023 and was sent to Mali that September via Syria. He said around 120–130 recruits traveled with him and that Wagner paid them $3,000 a month.

Wagner was a Russian paramilitary formation that operated as a deniable arm of the Kremlin in Ukraine, Syria, and Africa. After Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in 2023, the group's independent role was largely dismantled, with many of its fighters and operations brought under Russian state control. Its African operations were increasingly taken over by Russia's state-run Africa Corps.

The mercenary remained in Mali until April 2024. After returning to Russia, he signed a contract with the Russian Defense Ministry in August 2025 and was assigned to the 14th Separate Special Forces Brigade, which is subordinate to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU.

He was subsequently captured by Ukrainian forces.

A record of alleged abuses

The account has not been independently verified, but it adds to years of allegations of serious abuses by Wagner and other Russian personnel in Africa.

Wagner fighters have long faced allegations of abuses in Africa, including killings and violence against civilians. In Mali, the group became a key part of Russia’s military presence after the country’s military junta turned to Moscow for support, with Wagner fighters operating alongside Malian forces. Ukrainian intelligence has also documented and targeted Wagner’s activities in Africa.

The pattern of alleged abuses has continued under Russia’s Africa Corps, the Kremlin-controlled force that replaced Wagner in Mali. Human Rights Watch reported in August 2026 that Africa Corps fighters summarily killed nine civilians, including four children, beat dozens of others, and burned and looted homes in central Mali. In June, the group also carried out airstrikes that killed eight civilians, including three children.

Ukrainian company Vyriy Industries is bringing a new tactical reconnaissance drone, Slavic, to the market, Oboronka reports, citing information from the manufacturer. The control system of the new drone will be familiar to DJI Mavic operators, the company also said.

Mavic has long been one of the main reconnaissance tools used by Ukrainian forces, with Ukraine relying heavily on supplies of these drones from abroad. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said China had stopped selling drones to Ukraine, the country began seeking alternatives. Slavic is one of these domestic alternatives, designed not only to replace Mavic but also to adapt its capabilities to current battlefield conditions, allowing reconnaissance crews to operate farther from the line of contact and reducing risks to personnel.

Slavic has a tactical range of up to 30 kilometers without GPS

Slavic can remain airborne for up to 1.5 hours because it is equipped with a 40,000 mAh solid-state battery, the media outlet notes. The drone has a tactical range of up to 30 kilometers, the report says.

The aircraft can operate without GPS, as Slavic uses optical positioning for navigation. The pilot can also select a less congested channel and operate more effectively in difficult terrain because the communications system operates across a wide range of channels.

The manufacturer notes that for surveillance, Slavic is equipped with a daytime 2K digital camera mounted on a three-axis stabilized gimbal, with 10x optical and 30x hybrid zoom.

The system is supplied as a ready-to-use package “out of the box,” with all the equipment needed for operation without additional field modifications.

The drone is designed to keep crews farther from the front line

The company said its new drone has successfully completed initial combat trials with seven units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces and is preparing for scale-up, the media outlet notes.

“The war has changed, and so have the working conditions for crews. The kill zone has expanded, while available commercial drones have a limited tactical range. The main task now is to provide the military with a specialized platform that can fly longer and farther, so crews can operate farther from the line of contact. This is exactly why we began developing Slavic,” said Oleksii Babenko, founder and CEO of Vyriy Industries.

At the same time, the team is working on new Slavic configurations, including testing thermal imaging modules for nighttime reconnaissance. The manufacturer is also preparing the platform for scaled-up production and deliveries to the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the company told the media.

“Frankensteins” and Ukrainian-made drones are among the options for replacing scarce Mavics

The Ukrainian military had widely used Chinese DJI Mavic 3 drones, including to adjust artillery fire, monitor infantry positions and conduct surveillance, prompting Ukraine to seek ways to replace the shortage. More than five alternatives to the Chinese drone had already been developed in Ukraine, the Ministry of Strategic Industries of Ukraine confirmed to RBC-Ukraine in July 2025.

There are also other options for replacing them. The main work in military units is being done with “Frankensteins,” drones assembled from two or three damaged aircraft, Mavic UAV pilot instructor “Dobryi” said in an interview with Militarnyi in July this year. At the same time, such drones are less reliable than new ones, he added.

Small groups of Russian infantry could slip into regional capital Zaporizhzhia this winter, a frontline commander warned in a mid-September interview with Dnipro TV, in a debate later compiled by Radio Svoboda. His forecast drew quick pushback from a military analyst, who called it far more categorical than the situation warrants. At the center of the dispute lies the drained Kakhovka Reservoir, whose dry bed Russia now uses for cover.

Dense drone surveillance has made large mechanized assaults costly, pushing Russian commanders toward small groups that probe for gaps. That shift turns unwatched terrain — here, the drained reservoir bed—into the seams they test.

Solitary groups, not massed forces

Dmytro Filatov, callsign Perun, commands the 1st Separate Assault Regiment named after Dmytro Kotsiubailo. The danger will come not as a massed assault but as infiltration, he said. He expects solitary infantry groups to reach and enter Zaporizhzhia over the winter. He pointed to the Stepnohirsk axis and the dense buildings along the Dnipro shore. Fog and rain raise pressure across the whole front, and Russian troops have long fought well in winter, he said.

A city on the front's edge

Zaporizhzhia is a regional capital and industrial center in southeastern Ukraine, with more than 700,000 residents before the full-scale invasion. The city sits about 25 km from the nearest active front, around Stepnohirsk to the south—unusually close for a regional capital of its size. Russian missiles, drones, and glide bombs hit the city daily. It has held since 2022, and Russia has not taken a Ukrainian regional capital since the war's first months.

The dead reservoir as cover

Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 and drained the reservoir behind it. Reeds now stand several meters high across the dry basin, giving foot soldiers cover to move unseen. Ukraine's Southern Defense Forces reported in November 2025 that Russian groups use it to press into the Ukrainian flank.

Russian troops increasingly use the bed to infiltrate and haul supplies, said Kostiantyn Mashovets of the Information Resistance group. One of their assault groups pushed as far as Malokaterynivka before Ukrainian forces blocked it, he wrote. Ukrainian troops hold northern Plavni, including the railway station and part of the E-105 highway, Mashovets added. The Institute for the Study of War pointed to the same route in its 26 September assessment, citing Ukrainian military observers.

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An analyst is not convinced

Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military-political expert and Information Resistance coordinator, rates the threat far lower. He wrote that the warning "sounded far more categorical than it should have." Stepnohirsk, about 25 km south of Zaporizhzhia, is the closest active fighting to the city. Russia has tried for years to take the town but now controls only its 3rd microdistrict and southern Plavni.

Infiltration becomes possible only if Russia takes the whole foothold and reaches the north bank of the Konka river. That will not happen by the end of 2026, and no ground push on the city looks possible, he said. The main danger stays daily Russian strikes on the city, not a ground advance, he added.

Estonia says Russia ordered the August arson attack on Milrem Robotics’ Tallinn premises, an Estonian defense company supplying Ukraine with military ground robots.

Russian sabotage operations have been expanding across Europe in recent months, targeting companies, infrastructure and supply chains connected to Ukraine’s defense effort. European authorities have linked or investigated suspected Russian involvement in arson and other sabotage attempts in several countries, as Moscow seeks to disrupt support for Ukraine and intimidate its European backers.

Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said on 29 September that information gathered by Estonia’s Internal Security Service showed the fire at Milrem’s Tallinn premises on the night of 14–15 August was a Russian intelligence-directed sabotage operation. Estonia summoned Russia’s chargé d’affaires over the attack.

Three suspects detained

Estonian authorities had already detained three suspects in connection with the arson, with the suspects apprehended in Latvia. Tsahkna said the perpetrators had been taken into custody and no longer posed a threat to Estonia.

When the investigation was first announced in August, Estonian authorities had not publicly established a Russian connection or disclosed evidence linking Moscow to the fire.

Milrem supplies robots to Ukraine

Milrem Robotics makes THeMIS unmanned ground vehicles, which have been used by Ukrainian forces since 2022 for tasks including transporting ammunition, food and other supplies, evacuating wounded troops, and mine clearance.

The company said in August that the fire had not disrupted its production or deliveries to Ukraine. More than 200 of its robotic systems are expected to be operating in Ukraine by the end of 2026, including more than 150 vehicles funded by the Netherlands.

The attack is part of a growing series of suspected sabotage operations targeting companies and facilities connected to Ukraine’s defense effort. In August, Slovak authorities foiled an attempted arson attack on a Ukrainian drone factory, while European investigations have also examined suspected Russian involvement in attacks on defense-related facilities in Czechia, Lithuania and Bulgaria.

Estonia says sabotage will not weaken Ukraine support

Tsahkna said Russia’s campaign is intended to intimidate European countries, divide allies and weaken their support for Ukraine.

“Russia’s sabotage campaign will not achieve its objectives,” the Estonian Foreign Ministry said, adding that Estonia and its allies would continue increasing pressure on Russia and supporting Ukraine.

Tsahkna said Estonia would respond to the attack by increasing both its support for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.

Ukrainian defense-tech firm BlueBird Tech has begun renting out its Hrets electronic-warfare jammers by the day, in what it calls Ukraine's first such service, the company said on 29 September 2026. Electronic-warfare gear—the devices that scramble the radio links attack drones rely on—is normally bought outright, renting lets a user take a system for a single mission or test it before committing.

The pull is a war where cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones have made portable jamming a routine need, one many users face only for a stint.

How renting works

After paperwork and a deposit equal to the device's full price, the system is handed over, and that handover counts as day one. Each day's rent is then drawn from the deposit, return the system working and undamaged and the renter gets back what is left. Keep it long enough that the fees add up to the full price, and the jammer passes to the renter automatically. Renting is open to individuals, companies, charities, and volunteer groups.

Three models, and what each one jams

The Hrets XL is a modular FPV jammer built from two to 10 working modules, priced case by case. The vehicle-mounted Hrets 4MC is an anti-drop system that jams DJI Mavic-type quadcopters—the drones Russian forces use to drop munitions—for about $56 a day. The lightweight Hrets 4M jams FPV drones at a stated 70 to 400 meters for about $67 a day. One Ukrainian firm has even packed detection, decoding, and jamming of an FPV signal into a single device.

Ukraine is set to receive three more F-16 fighter jets from Belgium by the end of 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, as Russia intensifies its missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.

The aircraft are particularly valuable as Russia increases its use of Shahed/Geran drones, including faster jet-powered variants that are harder for Ukraine’s cheaper interceptor drones to stop. Russia’s growing aerial campaign is already placing additional pressure on Ukraine’s limited air-defense resources.

Zelenskyy said the aircraft will be delivered through an accelerated process. Ukraine has already received urgent F-16 ammunition from Belgium and other partners, including Spain.

“As Russia escalates its attacks every day, we need to increase our capabilities to shoot down aerial targets and protect people,” Zelenskyy said.

F-16s help counter Russia’s air campaign

Ukraine received its first F-16s in 2024 after an 18-month international effort to secure the aircraft and train Ukrainian pilots. The jets have since become an important part of Ukraine’s air defense.

Ukrainian F-16s are used primarily to intercept Russian cruise missiles and attack drones, while also carrying out electronic warfare and other missions. In one January 2025 mission, a Ukrainian F-16 pilot shot down six Russian cruise missiles.

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F-16s can also carry precision-guided bombs and air-to-air missiles, allowing them to support strikes against Russian forces and other targets near the frontline. Ukrainian pilots have developed tactics for using the aircraft despite Russia’s dense air-defense network.

For Ukraine, the additional jets therefore provide both another layer against Russia’s expanding aerial attacks and additional capacity for combat operations on the frontline.

A Russian drone struck near the Yahodyn border crossing on the Ukrainian-Polish border, the Ukrainian Border Service and the Polish Armed Forces Operational Command reported on 28 September. Geolocated footage of the attack shows the jet-powered Geran-5 striking near the facility. Following the incident, Poland is reviewing its air security measures.

Russia systematically strikes Ukraine’s border crossings to complicate logistics. Russian strikes near the Ukrainian-Polish border have increased over the past month. Yahodyn is one of the largest border crossings with Poland, on a route leading, among other destinations, to Warsaw, and has repeatedly been used by senior foreign officials visiting Ukraine.

The blast wave damaged the checkpoint building at the terminal entrance, Ivan Romaniuk, head of the Volyn Regional Military Administration, reported on 28 September. It was a jet-powered drone, but there was “preliminarily no direct hit” on the border crossing, BBC Ukraine reported, citing its own sources in the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine.

Russian drone strikes near Yahodyn

On the afternoon of 28 September, Poland reported the involvement of Polish military aviation because of Russian drone attacks against Ukraine. That day, it was also reported that the airports in Rzeszów and Lublin suspended operations.

Jacek Horyszewski, a spokesperson for the Polish Armed Forces Operational Command, said on TVN24 that a Russian drone had struck near the Yahodyn border crossing in Volyn Oblast on the border with Poland.

Romaniuk confirmed the attack in the village of Starovoitove, Kovel district, Volyn Oblast, where the Yahodyn international border crossing is located.

“There have been no reports of injuries or fatalities,” he said.

Videos that appeared online show the drone falling in a forest near people and border infrastructure.

The Russians carry out such attacks on Ukraine’s western regions using repeaters on Belarusian territory that amplify signals for Shahed- and Gerbera-type drones, BBC Ukraine reported, citing State Border Guard Service data.

Poland is already considering changes to its air security rules after the incident

The same day, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Cezary Tomczyk said Poland will change its engagement rules "in the coming days." Currently, helicopter and fighter jet pilots can use weapons only after visually identifying a target: the aircraft must approach the object and determine what it is. After the rules are changed, however, a pilot or operational commander will be able to make a decision to engage based solely on radar data.

“It is notable that Polish authorities have taken this step as NATO states attempt to find an adequate response to Russian drones nearing or entering their airspace from Ukraine, often leaving NATO air defense insufficient time to identify and target such threats before they have entered allied airspace,” the Institute for the Study of War noted in its 28 September report.

Recent strikes near the Polish border

On 10 September, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that Poland had prevented a threat to one of its border crossings with Ukraine overnight and expected its border crossings to be attacked as Moscow targets trade routes in an attempt to economically weaken Kyiv. He made the statement after drones struck a border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova on the previous day, killing two people.

On 13 September, Russian forces struck the locomotive of a passenger train two kilometers from the Polish border and hit a gas station near the Yahodyn international border crossing on the Ukrainian-Polish border.

The drone attack forced passengers on a train from Ukraine to leave the carriages for safety. Those evacuated included Boris Johnson, security advisers to European governments, German Bundestag lawmakers, diplomats, and academics.

After the Russian attacks, Poland deployed military units on the border with Ukraine and strengthened infrastructure near the border crossings, Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said on 15 September.

On 17 September, Russian forces struck near the Yahodyn border crossing with a jet-powered drone.

Russia plans to sharply increase military spending in 2027 while expanding the authorized size of its armed forces, according to budget documents seen by Reuters and a report by Novaya Gazeta Europe.

The developments point to Moscow preparing to expand its war effort into next year, even as its battlefield gains remain limited and its campaign increasingly relies on missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. It is also doing so as the Russian government faces a widening budget deficit and falling projected oil and gas revenues.

Russia plans 27% increase in 2027 defense spending despite widening budget deficit

Russia plans to spend 17.1 trillion rubles ($202.6 billion) on defense in 2027, according to government documents reviewed by Reuters. That is about 27% more than the 13.5 trillion rubles originally budgeted for defense in 2027 and would be the highest level of military spending since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The documents project total defense spending of 50 trillion rubles over the next three years. The actual amount Russia will spend on defense in 2026 is classified, Reuters reported, while some military-related spending can be recorded under other parts of the state budget.

The planned increase comes alongside worsening fiscal pressures. Russia has raised its forecast for the 2026 budget deficit to 3.2% of GDP, from an earlier estimate of 1.6%, according to Reuters. Overall government spending is expected to rise 13.2% this year to 48.6 trillion rubles, or 20.9% of GDP.

The government also expects to increase net borrowing by 26% in 2026 to 5 trillion rubles and withdraw 459 billion rubles from its National Wealth Fund, Reuters reported. Its forecast for 2026 oil and gas revenues has been cut to 7.6 trillion rubles from 8.9 trillion.

Russia is reportedly planning new tax increases for 2027 to help cover the growing deficit. A new windfall tax on metals and mining companies is expected to bring in about 200 billion rubles a year, according to the documents. State debt is projected to rise to 21.7% of GDP in 2027, above the 20% level Russian authorities have previously considered safe.

The draft budget is expected to be submitted to Russia's parliament by October 1.

Army staffing also reaches new high

At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has again increased the authorized size of the country's armed forces.

Putin signed a decree raising the official staffing level of the Russian Armed Forces to 2.44 million people, including 1.55 million military personnel, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported on September 28. The increase is 15,500 personnel compared with the previous decree issued in August.

It is the fourth increase in the authorized size of the Russian military in 2026 and the seventh since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe. Before the invasion, the authorized force stood at 1.90 million people, including 1.01 million military personnel.

Russia shifts more of the war into the air

The increases in military staffing and spending come as Russia continues to pursue its maximalist war aims despite limited battlefield progress. The Institute for the Study of War assessed on September 27 that Russia's frontline has remained largely static in recent months and that the Kremlin is increasingly relying on long-range missile and drone strikes as part of its effort to force Ukraine to capitulate during the winter of 2026–27.

ISW assessed that Putin may be trying to make Ukraine's infrastructure and air defense capacity buckle under sustained Russian strikes rather than relying solely on further territorial gains. The institute also said the Kremlin may delay a large-scale mobilization while it assesses whether its expanded long-range strike campaign can achieve its objectives.

The planned increase in military spending and the repeated expansion of the armed forces show that Moscow is preparing to sustain and expand its war effort into 2027, even as its forces make limited territorial gains in Ukraine.

Ukraine's air defenders now have purpose-built interceptors for Russia's jet-powered attack drones—weapons whose speed and altitude make them difficult for conventional defenses to catch, Militarnyi reported. A crew from the 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Regiment downed a Geran-5 over Chernihiv Oblast with a newly delivered interceptor, according to the Serhiy Prytula Foundation.

Russia's long-range drone and missile attacks have become central to its effort to wear down Ukraine's air defenses and grid before winter, and the war in the sky now turns on which side scales its answer faster.

The Chernihiv intercept

The crew, callsign Yastrub (Hawk), made its first successful engagement with the new interceptor, hitting the jet drone at 425 km/h and above 3 km, the foundation said, releasing footage of the strike. The Prytula Foundation supplied the interceptors and said it has contracted several manufacturers to counter the jet threat.

"Our task is to scale this up and strengthen units," it said.

Why it kept slipping through

Russia first used the Geran-5 in January 2026. HUR's own specifications put its warhead at 90 kg, cruise speed at 450–600 km/h, and range at 950 km, with a ceiling of 6 km. That mix of jet speed and high altitude kept it clear of machine guns, shoulder-fired missiles, and the cheap interceptors built to swat slower piston-engine Shaheds.

Ukraine's military intelligence estimates Russian plants now turn out around 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones a month, according to HUR. A monitoring Telegram channel, Polkovnyk HSh, reports a newer variant that steers by ground imagery instead of satellites, which would blunt jamming—though HUR has not confirmed it and lists no such system among the drone's components. Separately, Russia moved the jet engine inside the fuselage, a change aimed at more speed and range.

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Where the fight stands

Ukraine intercepts about 55% of Russia's jet drones, against more than 90% of the older models, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 26 September. Since the start of September, Russia had launched more than 2,730 jet drones, and Ukraine had downed or suppressed more than 1,500, he added. Zelenskyy also said Russia plans to spend $12 billion in 2027 on jet drones and loitering munitions alone. Ukraine already has several interceptor prototypes in combat use, and the 1020th crew's kill is one of several jet Geran intercepts Ukrainian units and drone makers have logged this month.

Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla.

The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they’ve posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car’s steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.

The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn’t finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting.

DrivingBench is Aditya Ramabadran, Tobias Gessler, and Simon Mahns — three Bay Area tech workers who met at their day job at Axiom Math, an AI math startup. During a call with all three members of DrivingBench, Ramabadran told 404 Media that the idea for hooking up chatbots to a car happened when the three of them were hanging out at an ice cream shop one weekend. 

“This is after we saw a bunch of demos of Astra and models like Fable being able to do a lot of robotic things that LLMs can not do out of the box before, such as do a painting or move objects or even some 3D and Blender demos that showed a level of spatial reasoning we hadn’t seen from LLMs before,” he said. “We just thought: ‘Is there a way we can get LLMs to drive a car now?”

Why driving a car? To prove that it’s possible and, they said, to create a new benchmark for LLMs performing tasks in the real world. “The point wasn't to show that it's practical for you to plug ChatGPT into your car and have it drive you places. It's probably very unlikely that the labs have trained specifically for this or have IRL environments that involve both the models driving a real car,” Ramabadran said. “It would be pretty shocking, I think, for people to see that these models are good enough now that they can actually drive a vehicle in real life, even if it's just on some cone course at low speeds in a parking lot.”

After brainstorming at the ice cream shop, they decided to get a car and sent Gessler to rent a Toyota Corolla. They didn’t tell the rental car company they planned to hook chatbots up to the vehicle and drive it through an obstacle course. The team used Comma — an off-the-shelf system that allows users to install a self-driving system on unsupported cars — to get the car to communicate with a laptop running the LLMs. Comma had two cameras pointed at the road feeding data back to the Chatbot.

“It’s pretty easy to install. The Toyota Corolla is one of the most popular for this Comma kit, that’s why we chose it,” Gessler said. “The good thing about their system is that it’s open source [...] so it’s easy for us to go in and modify it because we need to hook up the car somehow to our LLMs.”

Comma looks like a dashcam.. Users attach it to their windshield and it continually watches the road, recording video, integrating with the car’s electrical systems and sensors, and providing a rudimentary kind of self-driving. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration announced an investigation into Comma last week after two car crashes involving the system killed three people.

For DrivingBench, Comma was an easy way to get their car talking to a chabot. “We had one person on the driver's seat with the laptop or a passenger seat prompting the LLM,” Gessler said. “And then the person who drives it has to press a button on the steering wheel to give the car the command to start, and then from there it's basically just monitoring the car and checking that the model doesn't crash into a wall or something.”

“And we have the foot over the brake, just in case,” Mahns cut in.

DrivingBench’s prompt is on its website and runs fewer than 600 words. “Your objective is to drive through the course (in a backwards-U-shaped parking lot) and stay between the cones,” the prompt said. “Your finish line is a wide "parking spot" marked by numerous BLUE mini-cones at the very end; finish by parking in this area. You will be evaluated primarily by how far you get in the course (without leaving the boundaries/collisions), but a secondary objective is to complete the course in less time.” The rest of the prompt is made up of specific instructions about the physical limitations of the Corolla and the parking lot.

The problems with the project started before the car had moved an inch. When the LLMs recognized the team had prompted them to drive a car, most refused. “Specifically with Astra, it would refuse to drive the car in a lot of situations and we would have to change our prompt and rename things through hours of iteration to get it to consistently drive the car,” Ramabadran said.

“We tried calling it a simulation, which worked like some percentage of the time, but then other times they would see the images and see, oh, ‘I'm in a real parking lot, these people are just lying to me,’” he said. “We ended up having to call everything a sandbox. And with that prompt, it's able to consistently drive the car and like never refuse to do that.”

Other problems were more pedestrian and led to delays which forced Gessler to extend the rental on the Corolla. Finding a parking lot held them up several times. “We went to high schools, churches, and community centers. We got kicked out a couple of times,” Mahns said. 

The first place to ask them to leave was a church. “Rightfully so. We just commandeered the entire parking lot and they had an event starting. So they were like: ‘Hey, you get permission to do this? And then we're like: ‘We can pack up right now,’” Mahns said.

They also got kicked out of the parking lot of an office building. “We took a corner and then a security guard was like: ‘Hey, you’re taking like one quarter of the parking lot. Do you have permission?’ And then we’re like: ‘Not really.’ So then we’d pack up. We didn’t try to cause any issues,” Mahns said.

“The people that kicked us out were super chill about it,” Ramabadran added.

Coding the software also slowed things down. The first time DrivingBench set out to do this, they vibe coded the bridging software between the LLMs and Comma. “A true and funny story is that we tried to get Astra to one shot some code and then it was pure slop. So we had to restart from a new design,” Mahns said, adding that this pointed to the limits of these frontier models. “It can’t just autonomously do this because it made thousands and thousands of lines of slop.” They said that Astra’s first attempt at writing the software created a 200,000 line repository.

Parking lots were scarce, the software was vibe coded, the chatbots fought the experiment, and only one of them completed the course. But Mahns is still excited about the results. “It's an interesting demonstration of potential emergent capabilities,” he said. “It can fail a turn, and then the next turn, next try, it will be able to do that turn and other turns that it hasn't seen before. Not necessarily saying LLMs are gonna put Waymo out of business or something, just an interesting demonstration of where things are, and things are just moving fast.”

Mahns added that these kinds of experiments are good because LLMs will increasingly affect things in the real world and not just on our screens. “Most people that are familiar with ChatGPT have used it in this white collar, kind of like in the computer, and it's definitely imminent to the point that this capability will start having more impact in the physical world,” he said. “So I think seeing the sparks of this happening, the shift of this utility coming into the physical world, is also somewhat exciting.”

Focusing on latency and testing high consequence tasks were key for Ramabadran. “These models [...] it can take like 20 seconds to think and give a response. And if you imagine, even if you're driving at like 2mph, which is like one meter per second, if you take 10 seconds to think, you've moved like 10 meters. And if you're driving 10 meters blind, that's pretty bad,” he said. “And I think it's cool that we have a benchmark where latency is part of the benchmark.”

Lithuania is getting its US troops back although the overall American presence in Europe will shrink, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said. He tied the wider drawdown to Washington's demand that Europe take more responsibility for its own defense. Lithuania's case, he suggested, is the exception.

While waging all-out war on Ukraine, Russia keeps probing Europe with drones and sabotage that stop just short of open attack. Its small Baltic neighbors are already preparing their people for a possible invasion, and American soldiers on their soil have long been the clearest sign that attacking them means fighting the US. With Washington weighing a pullback and telling Europe to fend for itself, each US unit that stays on Russia's doorstep carries more weight than its size.

"There will be fewer US troops in Europe"

Nausėda spoke in an interview with LNK television on 28 September.

"There will be fewer US troops in Europe. This is partly related to what US President Donald Trump says, to the signals the US administration is sending us that Europe must take on more responsibility itself," he said.

Europe must do more for itself, and it is already doing so, Nausėda added. The US presence in Lithuania matters not only for its military power but also for deterrence, he argued.

"The presence of these troops is precisely what reduces the likelihood of military conflict or military aggression," he told LNK, ELTA reported.

"The heavy battalion will be here"

Nausėda called the decision a kind of encouragement for Lithuania. "As the overall number of US troops in Europe decreases, in Lithuania that number will at least remain, will not decrease, and perhaps will even be slightly larger," he said. "In any case, the heavy battalion will be here."

The battalion will keep its Abrams tanks, but an engineer battalion will replace the artillery battalion, Nausėda said on LRT's Savaitė program. The rotation will again last nine months. The Americans will number roughly as before, over 1,000, Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said.

Estonia has also secured the return of US troops, at least temporarily, LRT noted.

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More than 1,000 US troops began leaving Lithuania when their rotation ended in early June, and no replacement arrived, LRT said. It was the country's first gap in the US presence since 2020. American heavy battalions have rotated through Lithuania since 2019.

The Pentagon is weighing a withdrawal of about 25,000 US troops from Europe, and possibly as many as 40,000, NBC News reported, adding that no final decision had been made. About 80,000 US troops are now stationed on the continent. Germany, Italy, and Spain would likely be among the countries most affected.

Ukraine likely neutralized Russia's drone defenses north of Lyman before sending armor into the third phase of its Vivaldi counteroffensive, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed. An intermediate-range strike campaign against Russian logistics and electronic warfare paved the way, the think tank said.

Drones have made this front so deadly that armor now mostly fights from kilometers back. That is what makes Ukraine's armored push onto fortified positions near Lyman stand out. Russia has already shifted its effort south toward Sloviansk after losing the Lyman pincer.

Armor reached Russian bunkers without drawing drone strikes

To break the strongest Russian fortifications, Ukraine used old Soviet BTR-60 armored personnel carriers rebuilt as remote-controlled explosive vehicles, the 3rd Army Corps says.

Ukrainian forces drove them up to heavy Russian fortifications without coming under Russian drone strikes, ISW noted. The think tank said this indicates Ukraine neutralized or otherwise negated Russia's drone defenses in the area.

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Strikes on fuel starved Russia's jammers

Ukraine achieved tactical drone overmatch through extensive shaping operations and an intermediate-range strike campaign, ISW said. Those strikes targeted the Russian drones and electronic warfare (EW) systems that would otherwise have hunted the advancing vehicles.

The 3rd Army Corps reported on 17 September that strikes on Russian logistics in occupied Luhansk Oblast had degraded Russian fuel supplies to the front, ISW wrote that day. The corps said that strained Russia's ability to use drones and EW against Ukrainian drones. EW systems consume a lot of power, and Russian troops run them on diesel generators, ISW explained.

Deputy corps commander Maksym Zhorin credited strict information silence and a "Protective Drone" system of EW assets, according to the same assessment. He said it helped neutralize around 20,000 Russian drones. The corps had earlier described mapping Russian command posts and striking them to sow panic.

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Five settlements and 2,000 Russian losses

The corps liberated Nove, Ridkodub, and Katerynivka and restored control over Karpivka and Novomykhailivka, it said on 28 September. The phase added 51 km², bringing the total since the offensive began to 176 km².

Russian losses reached 2,000 personnel, and more than 250 Russians were taken prisoner, according to the corps. Corps commander Andrii Biletskyi said a feint from Shandryholove toward Zelena Dolyna drew Russian reserves away from the real target, Nove.

The first two phases had reportedly cleared more than 125 km² north of Lyman.

Russian intelligence services have sharply stepped up building websites and social media pages that impersonate Ukrainian state bodies and media, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) warned. Moscow uses the fakes to spread disinformation and to steal personal data it can turn into spy recruitment. The SBU says it has already blocked dozens of clones of its own brand.

Counterfeit pages built for propaganda and data theft

The fake sources serve Russian psychological operations and disinformation campaigns, the SBU said on 28 September. Their aim is to destabilize the situation inside Ukraine and damage its position abroad. Russian intelligence also uses them to extract Ukrainians' personal data, the agency said.

Alongside its full-scale invasion, Russia wages war on Ukraine in the cyber domain and through espionage and sabotage. Every agent Russia recruits inside Ukraine can help steer missiles and drones onto targets, and the SBU keeps catching such recruits.

Hacked accounts become recruitment leads

Russians often hack the accounts of users who subscribe to the fake pages and messenger channels, the SBU found. They then use the stolen information for recruitment operations and to collect confidential data.

Moscow is most interested in the combat and operational work of Ukraine's defense and security forces, the agency said. The SBU's cybersecurity department found and blocked more than 50 resources that copied the agency's own branding and positioning.

The fake pages are not Russia's only digital tool. Earlier in September, Anthropic said it had caught Russian spies running a campaign against Kyiv on its Claude AI chatbot.

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How Ukrainians can protect themselves

The SBU urged citizens not to follow suspicious links and to rely only on official sources. Anyone who sees a dubious web address, or gets a message from someone posing as an SBU officer, should call the 1516 hotline, the agency said.

What Russia's recruits are sent to do

The SBU's own reports from the past week show what Russia's recruits are tasked with. A mobilized soldier allegedly recruited by the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, tried to direct a Russian missile strike on his own unit in Kharkiv Oblast, the SBU said. His repair battalion restores Ukrainian drones.

A Lviv Oblast resident who worked at a drone production site in western Ukraine was allegedly recruited to guide a missile strike on it, the agency reported. The strike was meant to disrupt the steady supply of strike and reconnaissance drones to Ukrainian troops, the SBU said.

A court also sentenced a 17-year-old agent of Russia's military intelligence (GRU), exposed in November 2024, to 10 years in prison, the SBU announced. She tracked Ukrainian air defenses in Chernihiv Oblast under the cover of taxi rides. She talked to her GRU handler through an anonymous messenger chat.

Russia has quietly started a new round of mobilization and plans to bring in more North Korean troops, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. He cited a new report from Ukraine's military intelligence. The same day, the Kremlin published a decree enlarging Russia's army for the fourth time this year.

Russia widens recruitment at home and abroad

Zelenskyy spoke in his evening address on 28 September, after a briefing from Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR).

"In effect, the Russians have already begun additional mobilization—they are increasing the number of people they recruit through various means," he said.

Moscow also plans to recruit more foreigners, Zelenskyy said. He urged the governments of countries whose citizens Russia recruits to counter it, and said Kyiv would inform each of them.

Ukraine says Russia has been losing soldiers faster than contract recruitment replaces them. If so, an unannounced call-up lets the Kremlin refill its ranks without a formal draft. ISW says Putin may hold off on such a draft until he sees whether his strikes work. Ukrainian intelligence had expected Russia to announce a mass mobilization after this month's State Duma elections.

More than 8,000 North Koreans in Russia, 10,000 more in preparation

More than 8,000 North Korean troops are currently on Russian territory, Zelenskyy said. Pyongyang is selecting another 10,000 for training and deployment to Russia, he added.

Russia is paying, among other things, with technology, according to Zelenskyy. North Korea has launched production of Shahed-type attack drones with Russian technical support, he said.

That is a step beyond what Kyiv reported in June 2025. Moscow and Pyongyang had then only agreed to start preparing such production. In August, Zelenskyy warned that Russia could receive up to 50,000 North Korean troops.

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Kremlin raises the army's size again

Putin's decree sets the authorized strength of Russia's armed forces at 2,441,630, including 1,550,500 military personnel, Vedomosti reported. The decree gives no reason.

The order adds 15,500 troops and is the fourth such increase this year, Euronews said. Since March, the combined increase has reached 47,860 soldiers. Putin's 2022 "partial mobilization" decree also remains in force, the outlet noted.

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Moscow keeps denying a call-up

In early September, Putin claimed that reports of a coming mobilization were "complete nonsense" and "an information attack on Russia." Russian officials gave similar assurances days before the 2022 call-up.

Ukraine's military and foreign intelligence had earlier said that Russia's General Staff prepared a scenario to mobilize 600,000 people over 2026 and 2027, 300,000 each year.

The hackers behind the massive FBI breach told 404 Media on Monday they do not intend to publish the data.

The breach, in which the hackers stole personal information on “all FBI employees and applicants” including physical addresses, job roles, names of spouses, and medical records, represents a significant national security and counterintelligence threat. Criminals in the same ecosystem as the hacking group, called ShinyHunters, have previously used hacked phone data to track and harass the FBI agents investigating them. When 404 Media first broke news of the breach, the group sent the personal data of an agent and their spouse who they said was investigating the group.

Russia is likely attempting to force Ukraine to capitulate by spring 2027 through a large-scale campaign of long-range strikes, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its 27 September report. Russian President Vladimir Putin's new theory of victory relies heavily on the mass use of jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles against Ukraine, the institute assesses.

Russia keeps shifting to faster jet-powered drones that Ukraine's defenses struggle to stop, forcing it to spend scarce missiles on them. Russia's use of jet-powered drones rose eightfold from June to August, with Moscow launching around 7,700 such drones since their initial deployment, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said on 23 September. But Putin likely does not expect the campaign to last indefinitely, and he may hold off on a new mobilization until he sees whether the strikes work, ISW assesses.

Putin's modified theory of victory

Putin's modified theory of victory largely depends on Russia's ability to mass-launch cheap jet-powered Gerans that get through Ukrainian defenses often enough, the institute notes.

Even a Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger claimed on 27 September that the Russian strategy, which relies heavily on long-range strikes, is costly and cannot continue indefinitely, not least because Ukraine is hitting Russia harder too, according to the analysis.

At the same time, Putin stated on 25 September that Ukraine "must feel" Russia's "retaliatory" strikes. ISW assesses that this suggests he intends to intensify Russia's strike campaign in winter, as he has in previous winters.

If Putin is counting on Ukraine to break and capitulate this winter, he may be ignoring what the campaign will cost Russia over time, the institute notes. This strategy also counts on Ukraine's shortage of Patriot interceptors against ballistic missiles, and on the country's power grid and other vital systems giving way under months of strikes.

Until that approach runs out, Putin is unlikely to back down on his demands or agree to real ceasefire talks, ISW assesses.

Ukrainian interceptors could disrupt Russia's plan

A Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger claimed on 27 September that Russian forces launched predominantly jet-powered Geran-5 drones at Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kyiv during the night of 26–27 September. According to the blogger, Russia's diverse arsenal of strike weapons and Ukraine's shortage of air defense assets allow Russian forces to maintain the current pace of strikes and expand the range of targets, ISW writes in its analysis.

At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 26 September that Ukraine's interception rate for jet-powered Shahed drones currently stands at 55%. Of more than 2,730 such drones Russia had launched in September by then, Ukrainian forces had downed or suppressed more than 1,500, he added.

Ukraine is testing interceptor drone prototypes in combat conditions, Ukrainian Presidential Office head Kyrylo Budanov told Novyny.LIVE on 27 September. The mass deployment of interceptors capable of shooting down jet-powered Gerans could begin within several months, he added. Ukrainian companies have already successfully tested several interceptor drones capable of intercepting Russian jet-powered drones in field conditions, the institute notes.

At the same time, it remains unclear whether Ukraine will be able to scale up its interceptor program quickly enough and achieve sufficient success to disrupt the intensification of Russia's campaign during the winter, ISW notes.

Why Putin may hold off on a new mobilization

Expanding Russia's arsenal of strike weapons is cheaper than carrying out a second mobilization economically, militarily, and socially, a Kremlin-linked Russian milblogger cited by the institute claimed.

Putin may put off large-scale forced mobilization until he sees whether the strikes deliver, ISW assesses, though his officials have been laying the groundwork for it despite Kremlin denials. Still, the need to replace Russia's enormous battlefield losses could push him to order such a mobilization as early as this fall, ISW notes, as Ukrainian and other sources have repeatedly reported he is preparing to do.

Ukraine's government plans to pay for its army, pensions, and public-sector wages first, and freeze the parks, fountains, and repaving. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi says his Cabinet reordered its spending priorities because part of the international aid it counted on has not arrived.

The war is costing the country at least $155 billion this year, Koretskyi stated earlier.

Defense and people come first

"We continue to take tough anti-crisis measures to ensure the most important thing, the needs of defense and our people," Koretskyi says.

The state will continue to pay for the army, pensions, social benefits, and the salaries of teachers, doctors, and other public-sector workers. Everything deemed non-critical is on hold: new construction, reconstruction, capital repairs, and tidying-up projects, among them parks, squares, fountains, and repaving.

"It is worth finally ceasing to spend money on non-priority things," he continues, promising the state will return to them later.

The aid runs late

On 27 September, Ukraine's prime minister stated that the shortfall in the defense budget's needs stands at $27 billion.

"The president, the government, and all branches of authority are working with partners to find mechanisms and sources to cover the remaining $20 billion," he stressed.

These funds are critically needed to supply the Defense Forces with drones, missiles, equipment, and other resources ahead of winter.

"The government, for its part, guarantees that by 15 October, all government decisions required to receive the international financial assistance promised by partners will be implemented," he stated.

Local budgets get the same call

Koretskyi extended the order downward, urging local councils to review their own budgets and cut spending that is not a priority now. The message across government is the same: pool what is available for the army and citizens, and leave the fountains and the rest for after the war.

Russian troops retreating near Kupiansk abducted civilians, including children and elderly residents, and drove them into a gas pipeline to cover their withdrawal, the 2nd National Guard Corps Khartia said. The men of military age walking with them in civilian clothes were most likely Russian soldiers who had removed their uniforms, the corps added. Its reconnaissance drones filmed the group on 27 September. Ukrainian forces watched the column but did not open fire because of the civilians, ArmyInform reported.

Ukraine's military has accused Russia of using civilians as human shields in Kupiansk before. During its offensive, Russian troops also tried to enter the city through an inactive gas pipeline. Now, Khartia says, a pipe once used by Russian saboteurs is carrying abducted civilians toward occupied territory.

Nine people forced into the pipeline

Khartia filmed the group as the corps pressed its counteroffensive in the Kupiansk community in Kharkiv Oblast. The footage shows nine people: children, elderly residents, and a person on crutches. Men of military age in civilian clothing walk alongside them.

The group was led from Kupiansk through Holubivka village to the Shebelynka-Ostrohozhsk gas pipeline.

The footage shows them being led into the pipe, where they face a walk of about 10 km in darkness. The pipe exits in a forest, and the civilians will likely be taken to occupied territory.

"We documented this case. The materials will be handed over for a war crimes investigation," the corps said.

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Ukrainian forces held fire—Russia counted on it

Ukrainian troops saw the group and did not open fire because children and elderly people were among them. Russia counted on exactly that, Khartia said.

The corps warned that Russian propaganda could present the footage as an "evacuation" or "rescue" of civilians, Militarnyi reported. Khartia calls it an abduction.

Khartia's counteroffensive near Kupiansk comes alongside other Ukrainian advances farther south. In northern Donetsk Oblast, the Third Army Corps' Operation Vivaldi has regained control of 125 km², including 50 km² previously under Russian occupation, and inflicted more than 3,000 Russian personnel losses, the corps said. The operation has effectively erased Russia's planned Lyman pincer. Near Kupiansk, Ukraine's defense forces continue pushing Russian forces toward the Oskil River, and the liberation of forests near Dvorichna and Zapadne has reduced the threat to the city.

Russia says it is punishing Ukraine, and it is not hiding it. Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, says Ukraine must "pay a price" for its actions in recent months and calls Russia's intensified strikes "part of this price," according to UNIAN, citing Russian media.

Russia rarely admits its strikes are meant to punish a country rather than hit military targets, but Peskov did just that, casting the wave of attacks on Ukraine, which have struck apartment blocks, trains, and this week Kyiv's Academy of Sciences, as a "price" Ukraine has to pay. In the Kremlin's telling, Ukraine is being punished for its own deep strikes inside Russia.

Moscow calls the strikes a 'price'

Asked how Ukraine's strikes had affected Russia's position on peace talks, Peskov says Ukraine "will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months," adding, "This is what is happening now."

Russia, he says, must ensure "no one gets the idea to announce plans to inflict devastating strikes on it."

Kyiv's deep strikes draw the reprisal

The "actions" are Ukraine's strikes deep in the Russian rear, targeting its assets, helping it to fund the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin complained last week of a large Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow during Russia's parliamentary election and a June strike on St. Petersburg during an economic forum, Reuters reported.

Ukraine has also battered Russian refineries with long-range drones and missiles, cutting fuel output enough to spark shortages and force Moscow to curb exports and buy fuel abroad.

The price falls on civilians

What the Kremlin calls a price has fallen largely on Ukrainian civilians. Through September, Russian strikes have hit trains, data centers, gas stations, and educational institutions, and on 28 September, a drone set fire to the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv as people inside fled through the windows.

Ukraine's 40th Separate Marine Brigade cleared 5 square kilometers in the Pokrovsk direction, captured two Russian soldiers, and stopped Russian infiltration there, the brigade said on 27 September.

Even small gains count on one of the most heavily contested fronts of Russia's war, where Russia has spent years and repeated offensives trying to push farther west. Ukrainian forces continue to carry out local operations there despite sustained Russian attacks.

Operation Audit

The brigade called the operation Audit and said its sniper company, reconnaissance company, and 1st Marine Battalion carried it out. The marines said they eliminated the remaining Russian troops identified in the cleared area. The brigade released video footage that it said documented the operation.

Pokrovsk front under sustained pressure

The Pokrovsk front has been among the most heavily attacked sectors for years. From 22 to 27 September, Ukraine's General Staff reported 20 to 29 Russian attacks there a day, peaking on 24 September, with Kostiantynivka the other main focus.

Russian troops infiltrate this front in small groups, sometimes one soldier at a time. The marines said the ones they found had been sent to hide in shelters and wait for the right moment to advance further. The operation halted that infiltration push in the sector, the brigade said.

Russia's long campaign for Pokrovsk

Russia launched its offensive toward Pokrovsk in February 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Over a grinding campaign, Russian forces seized Pokrovsk and most of Myrnohrad, ISW assessed.

ISW assessed in February 2026 that Russia had failed to capitalize on the seizure of Pokrovsk and had been unable to make significant advances west of the city since December 2025. Russian forces had not even taken Hryshyne, a settlement just 2 kilometers northwest, ISW noted at the time.

A Ukrainian Hornet drone struck a Russian radar system about 120 kilometers behind the front, Taras Myshak, senior communications officer of the 59th Separate Assault Brigade of Unmanned Systems, said on Suspilne on 28 September, ArmyInform reported. The brigade's Signum unmanned systems battalion carried out the strike about a week earlier, he added.

Russia's air defenses depend on radars to see Ukrainian drones and missiles coming. Every radar it loses weakens that watch and gives the next Ukrainian strike a better chance of getting through.

According to Myshak, the target was a "quite expensive" Russian radar system.

A radar system is effectively the "eyes" of the Russian air defense system: it detects aerial targets, determines their coordinates, and transmits information to other elements of the system.

Russians continue probing Ukrainian defenses

Russian forces in the brigade's zone, roughly along the Donetsk Oblast border, continue to operate in small infantry groups and use infiltration tactics, Myshak says. At the same time, the Russians are trying to cut Ukrainian logistics, he adds, saying that the brigade is effectively holding the Russian army back from infiltrating into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The Russians' main means in this sector remain drones and infantry, the serviceman says. The number of infantry has decreased somewhat compared with previous periods, but the pressure from the enemy has not stopped, he adds.

"Of course, they will try, they will constantly probe, so to speak, our defense with their infiltrations. And likewise with drones, of various ranges, working on logistics, making it impossible for us to enter positions, to deliver everything necessary to the positions, in order to make our defense impossible," Myshak emphasized.

At the same time, Ukrainian troops are trying not only to defend against these actions but also to deprive the Russians of radars, electronic warfare systems, and other equipment, the serviceman says. "We likewise don't let them relax," he said.

Ukraine systematically knocks out the "eyes" of Russian air defense

In October 2024, Ukraine's military said it had hit a Russian Nebo-M radar station with ATACMS ballistic missiles to blunt Moscow's ability to spot and shoot down aircraft and missiles, Reuters reported. The military estimated each such system at more than $100 million.

Ukraine is systematically increasing its use of medium-range strike drones, which can hit targets up to 200 kilometers deep inside enemy territory, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported in May this year. Russian air defenses and radars are among the main priorities of such operations, as their destruction weakens the system for detecting and intercepting aerial targets, the ministry said. Medium-class drones, including the FP-2, Hornet, and Bulava, play a critical role in such strikes, the ministry noted.

According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces struck at least 25 major Russian air defense and radar systems during April, about 12 of which were radar systems, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry also wrote in May this year.

Russia has fielded a Geran-5 variant that can steer by images of the ground below without satellite navigation, the Ukrainian monitoring channel Polkovnyk GSh reported. A second Russian jet drone also filmed a strike on Kyiv live and relayed control signals to the drone that hit it, presidential adviser on defense technology Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, said.

Russia's air war on Ukrainian cities has turned into a race of adaptations. As Ukraine got better at catching slow drones, Moscow made them fly faster, and now its jet drones also see for themselves and talk to each other.

A Geran-5 that reads the ground

The channel labels it the Geran-5 K5. Its DSMAC-type module corrects the drone's route by matching images of the ground below against stored references, like the one on Russia's Kh-101 cruise missile. The K5 also has a new fuselage, the channel said.

Because it flies faster than the Geran-4 and the standard Geran-5, it is often mistaken for Dan-T cruise missiles, the channel said. Official Ukrainian sources have not confirmed the K5 designation or the DSMAC-class system, Militarnyi noted.

The base Geran-5 carries a warhead of about 90 kg and cruises at 450–600 km/h, Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) found in January. It relies on a jam-resistant Kometa-M12 satellite navigation system and a mesh modem. HUR's component list includes no terrain-matching optics.

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One drone struck, another filmed and relayed

Russia published footage of its 25 September strike on the Inkom business center in Kyiv, which killed four people, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The video was filmed from high above the target and fueled speculation about how it was shot. Beskrestnov dismissed the theories.

"Let me say right away: no secret satellites, no FPV from a Shahed, no Russian agents, no mysterious drones," Beskrestnov wrote.

Russia hit the building with a Geran-5, a jet-powered drone that functions as a small cruise missile. At the same time, a jet Shahed flew into Kyiv and circled the target at almost 3 km altitude, he said. It served as a mesh relay, passing radio signals to the Geran-5. It also filmed the attack and transmitted the video immediately. The Shahed then left Kyiv and destroyed a McDonald's warehouse.

Mesh networking lets Russian drones relay control signals through one another. Russia already flies its jet Shaheds under mesh control.

Status-6, an X account that monitors the war, reposted the Russian video and suggested a Gerbera-type drone had filmed it. Beskrestnov identifies the camera as the second jet Geran.

"This is certainly a complex Russian drone operation that requires precise calculations and coordination between pilots. I'm even sure they were sitting next to each other," he wrote.

New sensors across the Geran family

Russia's jet Shaheds sometimes switch off their engines before an attack and glide toward the target, Beskrestnov wrote. It is still unclear whether that is a malfunction or a deliberate move to approach slowly and precisely. In the same post, he showed a Geran-4 Seeker, a jet drone that hunts for targets with a front camera. It carries two mesh antennas on its tail, one pointing down and one up.

With colder weather, warm objects will become prey for Geran Seekers equipped with thermal cameras, Beskrestnov warned. He posted a thermal image of a locomotive that a Shahed operator filmed from 5–6 km away.

Ukraine catching up again

Ukraine's interceptors are catching just over half of Russia's jet drones. Beskrestnov confirmed on 19 September that a Ukrainian jet-powered interceptor works and has enough speed margin for different targets, calling it "functional, real, and ready for refinement." Separately, drone maker Wild Hornets says its STING interceptor is heading toward mass production after its first kills against jet Gerans.

Speed alone will not catch them, Beskrestnov argued earlier. Interceptors need machine vision to lock on and guide themselves in.

The threat is in the skies daily. On 28 September, a Russian jet drone hit the National Academy of Sciences in central Kyiv in the middle of the working day, killing a woman.

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Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo editing requests and images that users have uploaded, including upskirt photos or putting women into sexual positions. These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt — such as, did the image generator make the woman’s AI-enlarged breasts big enough.

A Russian strike on an apartment building in Kharkiv injured dozens of people, many of them children, early on 28 September, regional prosecutors reported. Through the rest of the day, Russian drones hit Kyiv, Dnipro, and other cities, killing civilians in several of them.

Russia has moved much of its aerial campaign to jet-powered drones that fly too fast for the cheap interceptors Ukraine built against older models. Every switch to a faster weapon reopens gaps in city defenses that Ukraine had only just begun to close.

Two floors partly destroyed in a Kharkiv apartment block

Russia hit a nine-story building in Kharkiv's Saltivskyi district around 04:00. By early afternoon, the count had risen to 43 injured, including 11 children, prosecutors said.

A man of 43 and a girl of 14 remain in hospital with blast wounds, and the others have moderate or light injuries, Kharkiv Oblast head Oleh Syniehubov said. Three children lived in the apartment that took the hit. Their father carried them out himself, and none of them was seriously hurt.

The strike hit the second floor and destroyed the ceiling between the third and fourth floors. Rescuers brought 32 people out of the building. Across the district, the attack damaged 18 apartment buildings and blew out more than 1,500 windows. More than 100 volunteers are helping city services seal them, Syniehubov added.

A resident who fled Kramatorsk a year and a half ago said her family never heard the blast itself.

"We didn't hear any explosion. Glass came pouring down, and a column of smoke stood there," Yuliia Baldzhy told Suspilne Kharkiv. "The children were sleeping in another room, and my husband and I barely squeezed through, grabbed them, and got out."

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said the city had not taken a hit "of this level" in some time. Officials are still establishing the weapon. Syniehubov named guided aerial bombs (KABs) and counted six of them over the oblast in the past day. Prosecutors named a UMPB-5, a Russian munition, as the preliminary version. Terekhov said the city was checking whether it was a KAB or a Banderol, a small cruise missile.

Russia has hit Kharkiv high-rises with guided bombs before. In November 2024, one such strike injured 25 people, including an infant.

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Combat shows speed alone can’t catch Russia’s jet-powered drones, despite eight Ukrainian makers’ assurances. So why can’t they stop them?

Kyiv hit through the night and into the day

In the middle of the working day, a Russian jet drone struck the main building of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv's historic center. The attack killed a woman and injured five people, the Kyiv City Military Administration said. Three of them were hospitalized, Klitschko said. People climbed out of windows to escape the fire.

"Russia will definitely get a response to this," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Overnight and into the morning, Russian drones hit a gas station in Obolon, a café by a gas station, office buildings, and a 16-story residential building in Podil. The attacks injured three teenagers in Podil, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A 17-year-old boy was hospitalized.

Nationwide, Russia launched 165 drones overnight, 79 of them jet-powered, the Air Force reported. Air defenses downed or suppressed 112, and hits were recorded at 14 locations.

The capital is now under attack daily. On 27 September, Russian strikes injured nine people in Kyiv, and Russia hit a Kyiv data center twice. That evening, a Russian drone struck the Stolychnyi market in Sofiivska Borshchahivka, just outside the city, and killed two people. Zelenskyy wrote that one of the two killed in Kyiv Oblast was a citizen of Azerbaijan.

Deaths in Dnipro and Synelnykove

Around 11:15, a Russian drone hit a business center in central Dnipro, killing three people. The number of injured rose to 15, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast head Oleksandr Hanzha said. Rescuers led 47 people out of the burning building, regional council head Mykola Lukashuk said.

"Nearby are residential buildings, a park, a library, offices, shops. The center of Dnipro. In the middle of the working day, hundreds of people are here," Hanzha wrote.

In Synelnykove, a Russian strike on a logistics company's branch killed one person. It injured three others, including a 15-year-old boy now in hospital in serious condition.

Overnight, Russian drones also hit infrastructure in the Vasylkivka community and a market in Nikopol.

Strikes across other regions

In Kharkiv Oblast on 27 September, a Russian FPV drone killed a 67-year-old driver in Shestakove, prosecutors said. A drone on fiber-optic control also killed a 41-year-old woman in a car in Velykyi Burluk and injured a 46-year-old man.

Explosions sounded in Poltava overnight. In Rivne Oblast, a Russian attack damaged a detached house without injuring anyone. In Odesa Oblast, Russia struck a warehouse, and an evening attack injured a man of 62 and a woman of 63. Zelenskyy also listed a Palau-flagged ship hit in Odesa Oblast and an ice cream plant damaged in Zhytomyr Oblast, in the same post.

Russia has struck the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NAS) in Kyiv on the afternoon of Monday, 28 September. People inside the building are climbing out onto the windows to avoid being burned alive.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia has damaged more than 4,650 educational institutions in Ukraine. Another 423 educational institutions have been completely destroyed, Ukrainian Ombudsperson Dmytro Lubinets reports.

The Academy was founded in Kyiv on 27 November 1918. Its first president was the eminent, world-renowned scientist Volodymyr Vernadsky.

As of 1 January 2026, the total number of people working at the NAS of Ukraine was 23,982, including 13,003 researchers. Among them are 2,332 doctors of science and 6,435 candidates of science.

Volunteers say the world looks away

According to Telegram channel "Lachen Writes": "There are injured and dead as a result of Russia's strike on the National Academy of Sciences."

Meanwhile, military volunteer Serhii Sternenko, whose fund has purchased 291,502 FPV drones and helped the Ukrainian military shoot down 12,954+ aerial targets, commented on it this way: "Just hell."

"The world just watches this. Europe is lifting sanctions on Russian oligarchs. Trump asks Ukraine not to hit Russia's oil refineries. Unpunished evil will come for them too," he wrote.

The toll remains unclear

Another journalist, Andrii Tsaplienko, who posted a video showing people trying to save themselves, added his own comparison for the drone strike.

"Footage reminiscent of 11 September at the World Trade Center," he wrote.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says a rescue operation is underway: the fire is being extinguished, and people who may have been inside the building are being searched for. He adds that "there will definitely be a response to this from Russia."

"And every one of Ukraine's partners must see, from this terror and these strikes, that support for Ukraine is truly support for people's lives, support for the principle that terror must never and nowhere be normalized," he stresses.

Russia must answer for all of this and feel real consequences. Thank you to everyone who is helping Ukraine!

Ukraine is carrying out strikes on Russia's railways, the acting governor of Bryansk Oblast says. Yegor Kovalchuk claims that Ukrainian drones collapsed part of a bridge and derailed dozens of rail cars across the region, in a post on Telegram.

Bryansk is the main launchpad for Russia's drone and ballistic strikes on Kyiv and on the Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts, and its lines likely carry supplies that feed those attacks. For nearly a month, Russian jet-powered drones have been striking Kyiv from the region.

Kovalchuk reports damage in three districts but adds that no one was hurt in those drone attacks.

The launchpad's railways take hits

On the Dyatkovo–Lyudinovo line, a drone attack brought down part of a bridge and derailed 10 cars, Kovalchuk says. In the Unecha district, 18 empty gondola cars derailed. In the Navlia district, a strike damaged the track without stopping trains.

Repairs will begin, he notes, once the National Guard has inspected the sites.

Russia's campaign dwarfs it

Ukraine's strikes on Bryansk are modest beside what Russia is doing to Ukraine's railways. In the first eight months of 2026, Ukraine's state operator logged more than 1,600 attacks on its rolling stock and infrastructure, Oleh Holovashchenko of Ukrzaliznytsia tells DW.

Russia has damaged more than 500 locomotives since the invasion, over half of them this year, and has increasingly hunted moving trains to sever the corridors that carry Ukraine's exports and supplies.

A drone finds a train near Poland

The campaign even reaches Ukraine's western edge. On 13 September, a Russian jet Geran struck the locomotive of a passenger train at the Yahodyn crossing in Volyn, two kilometers from the Polish border.

A dispatcher spotted the drone in time to evacuate the passengers, among them former CIA director David Petraeus, and a diplomatic train carrying former British prime minister Boris Johnson had left early.

Seoul called on Kyiv to explain and apologize for making public the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war, saying Ukraine had broken an agreement to keep the move private and later denied that such an agreement existed, Reuters reported on 27 September. Seoul also said it was reviewing additional measures if necessary.

The dispute puts new pressure on ties between Ukraine and South Korea as Seoul supports Kyiv while also dealing with growing military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow.

Seong Ghi-hong, senior presidential secretary for public relations, said Seoul "expresses strong regret over Ukraine's unilateral disclosure and its subsequent false announcement that there had not been a nondisclosure agreement," according to the Korea Herald.

Seoul said Ukraine had requested that the transfer remain confidential, citing fears of a backlash at home for passing up a chance to trade the two soldiers for Ukrainian prisoners held by Russia, though a presidential official called the handover humanitarian, not a prisoner exchange, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported. Seoul went along with the request to protect the soldiers and their families and for diplomatic and security reasons, Seong said, according to the Korea Herald.

Ukraine had denied that the two countries had agreed to keep the transfer private. Dmytro Lytvyn, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, replied to a critic on Facebook that "there was no agreement to remain silent" and that hiding the prisoners' destination "would also be wrong," the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.

How the dispute unfolded

Zelenskyy announced the transfer on 23 September during a speech at the UN General Assembly. He said Ukraine had recently sent two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea. He also described one soldier's attempt to kill himself after realizing he would be captured and accused North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of using his soldiers "like currency," pointing to Pyongyang's improved ballistic missiles and drone capabilities as what it gets in return.

The next day, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said the transfer should not have been disclosed and that the two sides had agreed to keep it private. A South Korean presidential official said Ukraine had told Seoul in advance that Zelenskyy might mention the transfer and Seoul had asked that the soldiers' destination not be disclosed, though it was unclear how he would phrase it, the Korea JoongAng Daily reported.

Who the two soldiers are

The two soldiers—Ri, 26, a reconnaissance sniper, and Baek, 21, a rifleman—were captured by Ukrainian forces in Russia's Kursk Oblast in January 2025, according to their interview with South Korea's Chosun Ilbo. Both had served in North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau and later asked to go to South Korea in media interviews and handwritten letters to defector groups.

The two countries' foreign ministers discussed the prisoners' status in March and June, reaching a shared understanding that the case should be resolved under international law and humanitarian principles, according to South Korea's Foreign Ministry. On 8 July, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Lee and Zelenskyy agreed to handle the case on humanitarian grounds while respecting the soldiers' wishes.

The two soldiers arrived in South Korea the weekend before Zelenskyy announced their transfer at the UN General Assembly, opposition lawmaker Yu Yong-weon said.

North Korea's role in Russia's war

North Korea began sending troops to support Russia's war in late 2024, with initial estimates putting the deployment at more than 10,000 soldiers. Many were sent to Russia's Kursk Oblast. The two countries signed a strategic partnership pact with a mutual defense clause in Pyongyang in June 2024.

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• Kim Jong Un inspects memorial sculptures for North Korean soldiers killed fighting for Russia

Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps has defeated Russia at the key settlement of Nove in Donetsk Oblast by pointing it the wrong way. Russia has poured its reserves into counterattacks on a feint axis and "slept through" the real strike, which took the important hub in the village and closed the decisive third season of the Vivaldi offensive, commander Andrii Biletskyi said.

Vivaldi is Ukraine's counteroffensive aimed at disrupting Russian forces' plans to encircle the fortress-belt cities in Donetsk Oblast from the north and south. Among them are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka. These cities have helped hold back Russian forces since 2014.

Over its first two "seasons," the 3rd Army Corps and attached units have retaken more than 125 square kilometers, half of it de-occupied outright, and inflicted more than 3,000 casualties on Russian forces.

The operation in Nove was its "third season," Biletskyi said, the turning point of the whole operation. The corps liberated Nove, Ridkodub, and Katerynivka and restored control of Karpivka and Novomykhailivka, adding 51 square kilometers, bringing the total liberated since the offensive began to 176. Ukrainian forces have taken 250 Russians captive.

The feint drew Russia's reserves

The victory, by Biletskyi's account, was won by deception.

"The enemy was convinced the main direction of the strike was Shandryholove–Zelena Dolyna," he revealed, and it burned its reserves counterattacking there.

He added that the Russians slept through the real strike, which was concentrated on taking Nove. The village was the prize, a key Russian hub on the bridgehead, ringed by heights that command the surrounding ground.

"Who controls the heights holds the initiative," Biletskyi said.

By spending its reserves on the wrong axis, he suggested, Russia had little left to hold Nove when the real assault arrived.

Old APCs crack the defense

To break the strongest fortifications, the corps said, it used a homemade weapon: Soviet BTR-60 armored carriers converted into remote-controlled kamikaze robots, driven into Russia's toughest positions and detonated.

In 2024, the Ukrainian forces received another local upgrade of the post-Soviet BTR-60 wheeled armored personnel carrier. This time it was fitted with the BM-7 "Parus" turret, known from the BTR-4 "Bucephalus" The main armament consisted of a 30 mm ZTM-1 automatic cannon paired with a 7.62 mm KT-7.62 universal machine gun.

Additional armament might include a set of four anti-tank guided missile launchers mounted on the sides, or two launchers and a 30 mm KBA-117 automatic grenade launcher. As a result, this upgraded BTR-60 saw a significant improvement in firepower, although the vehicle still has very weak armor and less-than-optimal access to the troop compartment.

It was the latest of the corps' robotic improvisations in Vivaldi, which have included air-dropped ground drones and Bullspike grenade-launcher-armed UGVs. They are Bulgarian hand-held, rocket-propelled anti-tank grenade launchers based on the Soviet RPG-22, which the Bulgarian defense industry previously produced under license.

The corps has leaned on such machines throughout the operation to keep its infantry out of the deadliest fights.

Whole units surrender

As the defense broke down, Russians gave up in groups, including officers, pilots, and artillery soldiers, the corps said. The 3rd Assault Brigade carried much of the fighting, while the 3rd Border Guard Detachment, named for the fallen Colonel Yevhen Pikus, retook Ridkodub and dug in on the new line, with the 10th Mobile Border Guard Detachment "DOZOR" taking an active part in the assault.

Ukrainian drones struck two fuel depots in Krasnodar Krai overnight on 28 September, setting both on fire, Militarnyi reported. The targets were the NFB-Pavlovskaya depot in Pavlovskaya and the Edelveys-95 depot near Novotitarovskaya, about 25 km from Krasnodar.

Residents heard six explosions near the railway

A drone alert was declared in the region at 23:43. Residents of Novotitarovskaya then reported drones overhead and at least six explosions near the railway, Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported. Fires broke out at both depots. NASA FIRMS satellite data confirmed both blazes by 04:24, Militarnyi reported, citing imagery published by Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+.

What the depots store

NFB-Pavlovskaya handles cargo operations with petroleum products, including wholesale trade in motor fuel and petroleum storage, Militarnyi reported.

Edelveys-95 is a similar facility. It specializes in wholesale distribution of diesel fuel (Euro-5 standard) and gasoline (AI-92, AI-95, and AI-100), Astra reported. Its capacity is 4,500 cubic meters, and it has its own rail siding for receiving and shipping fuel. The company has been selling petroleum products for 30 years, buying directly from Russia's largest refineries, according to its website.

Ilsky refinery struck days earlier in the same region

The overnight strikes came two days after SBU drones struck the Ilsky oil refinery in the same region on 26 September, triggering fires near the ELOU-AVT unit and the tank farm. Ilsky is one of the largest refineries in Russia's Southern Federal District, with a design capacity of roughly 6.6 million tonnes of crude per year, and has been struck more than 18 times since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion.

Ukraine's sustained campaign against Russian fuel infrastructure has earlier pushed Russia's fuel shortages into Central Asia and forced Moscow to seek emergency refining deals abroad.

Ukrainian forces carried out one of the largest drone food delivery operations across the Dnipro to occupied Oleshky, dropping about 4,000 kg of supplies provided by partners at 100 locations across the city where people are trapped without food, electricity, or water, Kherson Oblast head Oleksandr Prokudin said on 27 September. Russian forces punish residents who receive aid—shooting down supply drones, confiscating packages, and beating people caught accepting food, he noted.

Oleshky—a city across the Dnipro from liberated Kherson—has been occupied since 2022. Russia sealed off the city in late 2025, and conditions worsened sharply in early 2026 as occupation forces cut off food supplies, prevented evacuation, and left the dead unburied. The drone flights are now the only humanitarian operation reaching the trapped population, making each sortie both a lifeline and a target for Russian forces that treat civilian starvation as a tool of control.

Multiple military units flew food across the Dnipro

Since March, Ukrainian forces have been systematically delivering food to Oleshky by drone in coordination with the 11th National Guard Brigade's Bolharychi unit and the 34th Separate Marine Brigade Borysfen, Prokudin said.

The latest operation expanded the effort: the 30th Marine Corps, the Hrim tactical group, the 34th National Guard Regiment, and the 79th Border Detachment joined alongside the Borysfen brigade and the Bolharychi unit.

"Instead of loud statements, we chose the path of concrete action," Prokudin wrote.

The deliveries fly across the Dnipro and drop food packages at pre-selected locations across the occupied city.

Prokudin said about 2,000 people remain trapped in Oleshky, including nearly 50 children. Ukraine's ombudsman and international monitors have put the figure at up to 6,000, with about 200 children.

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Russia shoots down supply drones and beats residents for receiving food

Russian forces try to disrupt the deliveries. Soldiers shoot down drones carrying food, confiscate or resell packages meant for children and elderly residents, and detain people caught receiving humanitarian aid, Prokudin said. Residents are thrown into basements and beaten.

"Deliberate blocking of aid and creation of famine among the civilian population are war crimes with no statute of limitations. Everyone involved in these actions will face inevitable accountability," Prokudin wrote.

Ukraine prepared an evacuation list, secured the ICRC's readiness, and coordinated a ceasefire on its side, but Russia has not confirmed its readiness to open a route, Ukraine's ombudsman said.

Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O'Flaherty warned on 25 September that the humanitarian crisis in Oleshky is deteriorating rapidly. Civilians, including children, are trapped without food, medicines, medical care, running water, or electricity, and reports indicate a high risk of death, he said. Under international humanitarian law, Russia as the occupying power is obliged to provide the population with food and medical supplies, O'Flaherty noted, and called for an immediate local ceasefire, unimpeded humanitarian access, and safe evacuation of civilians.

Ukraine has employed a new tactic during its major Operation Vivaldi in Donetsk Oblast. During the 3rd Army Corps' offensive, fighters from the world's first experimental unit of unmanned ground-strike vehicles, "NC13", have upgraded their kamikaze ground drones with grenade launchers.

Vivaldi is the counteroffensive the corps is running near Lyman in northern Donetsk Oblast. Over its first two "seasons," the 3rd Army Corps and attached units have retaken more than 125 square kilometers, half of it de-occupied outright, and inflicted more than 3,000 casualties on Russian forces.

Through this offensive operation, the 3rd Army Corps, commanded by Brigadier General Andrii Biletsky, disrupted Russian forces' plans to encircle the fortress-belt cities in Donetsk Oblast from the north and south. Among them are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka. These cities have helped hold back Russian forces since 2014.

From intensive training to the world-first operations

The NC13 unit has been through Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and other of the toughest sections of the front.

Among its achievements: the world's first robotic assault carried out without infantry involvement, resulting in the capture of two Russian soldiers, a sabotage operation in the enemy's rear — blowing up a crossing and disrupting an offensive — using UGVs alone, and Ukraine's first fully robotic defense of a position for 45 days without involving infantry.

"No one in the history of warfare has used this kind of tactic before," the soldiers commented on the offensive.

The defenders say that a lack of combat experience is no barrier to joining the unit. Every recruit goes through an intensive training course led by experienced instructors.

Grenade launchers were developed based on the Soviet RPG-22

During the operation, UGVs equipped with two Bullspike grenade launchers attacked Russian positions, then detonated directly inside their shelters. The occupiers believed they were being attacked by an entire assault group. In reality, they were being torn apart by robots from the 3rd Assault Corps.

"Yes, the UGVs carry out three tasks at once: they strike, they exert psychological pressure, and they clear the position. And most importantly, this happens without risk to our infantry," the force says.

The Bullspike grenade launchers were developed based on the Soviet RPG-22 anti-tank grenade launcher, which was previously manufactured under license by a Bulgarian defense company.

According to data from the manufacturer's website, the Bullspike RPG has a maximum aimed firing range of 350 meters, a direct-fire range of 150 meters, and armor penetration of 400 mm, Militarnyi reports.

The total weight of the launch unit, together with the 72.5 mm PG-22 grenade, is 3.4 kg. The length of the launcher is 780 mm.

The manufacturer states that the Bullspike-AT round is designed to destroy tanks, self-propelled artillery, and other armored vehicles, as well as to target enemy personnel located in bunkers, field fortifications, and urban-type brick fortifications.

The robots were controlled by operators from a safe shelter dozens of kilometers from the line of contact.

Earlier, for the first time in the world's history, the 3rd Army Corps dropped ground robots behind Russian lines from the air. The soldiers behind the mission say their heavy drones delivered kamikaze unmanned ground vehicles more than 10 kilometers into the Russian rear during the "second season" of Operation Vivaldi, letting Ukrainian troops flank them and clear another 40 square kilometers.

Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected a neutrality initiative that would have banned Switzerland from adopting sanctions against warring states and blocked cooperation with NATO, Swiss public broadcaster SRF reported. The measure failed by 70.2% to 29.8%, with zero cantons voting in favor.

Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine has expanded beyond the battlefield into a campaign of sabotage, political influence, and pressure on European institutions. Every European country that has adopted sanctions or cooperated militarily with Ukraine faces some variant of the same push—to weaken the sanctions regime and fracture the coalition. Russia expressed sympathy for the initiative—which backfired. Opponents warned the measure would benefit Moscow.

What the initiative would have done

The initiative, formally titled "Safeguard Swiss Neutrality," sought to enshrine neutrality as "permanent, armed, and comprehensive," bar cooperation with military alliances unless Switzerland was under direct attack, and ban economic sanctions against warring states—with only UN-mandated measures exempted.

Switzerland currently adopts sanctions autonomously and has largely followed EU sanctions against Russia since the full-scale invasion in 2022. The Swiss government's own explanatory materials stated the initiative would affect sanctions against Russia, SRF reported.

Blocher's Russian connection

Former Federal Council member Christoph Blocher, 85, launched the initiative in autumn 2022—six months into the full-scale war and the same year his daughter Magdalena Martullo-Blocher, who controls Ems-Chemie, decided the two Russian plants would stay. He led the campaign through the organization Pro Schweiz.

Ems-Chemie produces plastics, adhesives, sealants, and technical fibers. Two subsidiaries, operating under the Eftec brand, continued working in Russia after the full-scale invasion, Swiss magazine Republik reported earlier this month. Company and government documents contain strong indications that Eftec products may have been purchased by KamAZ, UAZ, GAZ, and AvtoVAZ—sanctioned companies tied to military vehicle production and financial support for Russian soldiers deploying to Ukraine. Ems-Chemie denies supplying them.

The Federal Council and Parliament both recommended rejection. In the National Council, 124 members voted against and 65 in favor. In the Council of States, the vote was 29 to 10 against.

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Drones over Swiss military bases

Unidentified drones were spotted over Swiss military installations this year. In about 20% of sightings over military sites, authorities cannot identify who is responsible, army chief Benedikt Roos said earlier this month. Asked whether Switzerland is a target for Moscow, he said yes—the country holds critical infrastructure vital to Europe that anyone seeking to destabilize the continent could target.

Across Europe, pro-Russian forces continue to push back against sanctions. Germany's far-right AfD won 43.8% in the Saxony-Anhalt state election on 6 September—its strongest result ever, though every other party refuses coalition. In France, Marine Le Pen leads first-round polling for the 2027 presidential election at 36%. Slovakia's Robert Fico earlier demanded the EU lift Russian energy sanctions.

Russia has combined kinetic and political pressure across Europe—drone incursions into NATO airspace, arson at defense-linked sites, and sabotage of critical infrastructure—alongside support for political forces that oppose sanctions and military cooperation with Ukraine. Switzerland's own intelligence service assessed earlier this year that Russia is waging a long war against the West and escalating it.

Ukraine's defense forces intercepted 55% of Russia's jet-propelled drones in September—more than 1,500 out of over 2,730 launched—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his 26 September evening address.

Russia's full-scale aerial campaign has shifted from propeller-driven Shaheds Ukraine learned to shoot down at over 90% to jet-propelled models that fly faster, resist jamming, and often slip past existing defenses.

55% and climbing

Zelenskyy said military intelligence had briefed him on Russian weapons production—not just jet Shaheds but other technological systems. The documents detail what Moscow is preparing for next year: the volumes and the financing. "We are preparing our countermeasures, and for every line item there must be a Ukrainian answer," he said.

Several effective interceptor prototypes are already in combat.

"Interceptors have been identified that can become the main tool of our defense. Production, components—all of this we are scaling up. There will be an answer," Zelenskyy said.

The goal is to match the interception rate for regular propeller-driven Shaheds, which exceeds 90%. At 55%, the jet-drone rate is climbing but still leaves nearly half reaching their targets.

$12 billion for one category

Russia plans to spend $12 billion in 2027 on jet drones and loitering munitions alone, Zelenskyy said. "This concerns not only Ukraine and not only us," he added, warning that multiple intelligence agencies have information Russia wants to expand its war to other countries and regions.

He said this is why Ukraine is pushing for stronger sanctions and the Drone Deal format. Ukraine has signed 11 such agreements, the latest with Finland at the UN General Assembly this week, and is preparing a 12th with what Zelenskyy called "a strong country."

The warning came as Russia struck a Kyiv data center twice on the morning of 27 September, injuring three people including two children, Zelenskyy wrote. Overnight strikes killed three people in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and one man in Kyiv.

In total this week, Russia launched more than 2,200 strike drones, roughly 1,650 aerial bombs, and 38 missiles—a significant share of them ballistic—at Ukraine, he said.

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Jet drones are now Russia's main aerial weapon

Russia's jet-propelled Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones have become the dominant threat in Russia's aerial campaign against Ukrainian cities. By August, production of jet Geran-4/5 models exceeded that of propeller-driven Geran-2s, according to Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR). Russian factories produce roughly 3,000 jet models per month alongside about 2,800 of the older type. The Geran-5 is technically a drone but functions as a small cruise missile—faster, harder to jam, and increasingly guided by AI and mesh networking that complicate interception.

Ukraine's answer has been interceptor drones—cheap, fast enough to chase a Geran, and guided by machine vision. A Ukrainian interceptor recently scored its first kills against jet Gerans and is heading into mass production, though a presidential adviser warned that speed alone cannot catch them—machine vision and automatic guidance decide the chase.

Ukraine has destroyed a record 76 Russian air-defense systems this month, and September is not over. The tally beats a record that had stood since July 2023 and reflects a systematic Ukrainian campaign to hunt down Russia's air defenses, opening the skies over occupied territory and inside Russia, the analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko said on Telegram.

Ukraine is methodically peeling apart Russia's layered air defense, and September has been its worst month yet: 76 systems destroyed, past the 73 lost in July 2023, by Kovalenko's count, with days still to go.

It is part of a campaign in which Ukrainian drones and special forces have hunted Russian radars and missile launchers across occupied territory and Crimea, and each one destroyed opens a corridor for the next strike.

The record falls with days to spare

Kovalenko credited Ukraine's Defense Forces' sustained hunt for Russian anti-air, which he said pays off twice: it clears the defenses that would otherwise stop Ukraine's strikes, making later attacks on occupied territory and on Russia itself more effective.

Each kill opens a corridor

Ukrainian drone and special-operations units have picked off Pantsir, Tor, Buk, and pieces of S-300 and S-400 systems across occupied territory and Crimea, sometimes several in a single night throughout 2026.

As Russia pulls its scarce long-range systems back to guard Moscow, fewer are left to cover occupied Ukraine, widening the openings for the next wave of Ukrainian strikes.

Russia cannot replace the losses

Over the full-scale war, Kovalenko said, Russia has lost more than 1,673 air-defense systems of every kind, from radars to surface-to-air missiles and self-propelled anti-aircraft guns.

That, he argued, is a level Moscow can no longer make good with a defense industry already stretched thin by the war.

"Such a quantity of equipment Russia will never be able to restore and compensate," he thinks.

He added that this means it would no longer be able to return to the pre-war level of closing the sky, neither technically nor technologically."

Ukraine, the country under daily Russian attack, is offering to help defend others from it. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine will share its drone-defense experience with partners facing Russia's hybrid and drone attacks, NATO members and non-members alike, through its "Drone Deal" agreements, according to UNIAN.

Russia's hybrid and drone attacks are spreading past Ukraine, to Moldova, Germany, and Romania, and Kyiv is casting itself as the country that knows how to counter them.

Asked whether he would send Ukrainian troops to defend NATO members, Zelenskyy instead pointed to the drone agreements, bilateral pacts open to partners in or out of NATO, that pair weapons sales and joint production with the transfer of Ukraine's combat experience.

Ukraine had signed such deals with nine countries by early August and is negotiating more than a dozen others, becoming, as its officials put it, "a security provider for Europe."

The attacks spread past NATO

"Russia will continue hybrid attacks against various countries, and not only NATO members," Zelenskyy said, pointing to drone incursions over Moldova, which belongs to neither NATO nor the EU.

Those crossings have become routine: Moldova logged 39 Russian drone incursions in the first eight months of the year, and on 24 September, drones entered both Moldova and Romania as Poland scrambled fighters. Ukraine has offered help, Zelenskyy said, "above all to those countries that help us during the war."

The Drone Deal shares experience

The Drone Deal agreements cover the sale of drones and missiles and joint production, he added, "but also an exchange of experience."

He offered a precedent: "How we sent our specialists to the Middle East, how we helped protect critical infrastructure." Sharing how to defend against drones, he said, is "precisely part of this exchange."

Ukraine turns security provider

Zelenskyy did not answer the question on whether Ukraine would put troops into NATO countries under attack, steering instead to what Ukraine can already give, its hard-won experience of fighting the very weapons now reaching its neighbors' skies.

Last winter, eight Ukrainian companies told the defense minister that their interceptors were ready to knock Russia's jet-powered drones out of the sky. They were not. A fast-flying drone is the easy part of the design, while combat testing exposed what the interceptors lacked in key features to chase an evading jet-powered Geran, presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, said in an interview with NV.

Ukraine's answer to Russia's fast, hard-to-stop jet drones was supposed to be cheap interceptors, and last winter, their makers said they had them. But a jet Geran flies 450 to 500 kilometers an hour, up from the Geran-3's 320, varies its speed to slip past defenses, and will dodge harder once interceptors appear.

Catching one takes maneuverability, machine-vision target-lock, and fuel to loiter and search, not just speed, Flash said. Ukraine's cheap interceptors have already downed about half of Russia's slower drones, but the jet-powered systems have stayed a step ahead.

Eight makers said "ready"

At a meeting last winter called by Mykhailo Fedorov, then-defense minister, all eight interceptor makers reported the same thing: "everything's ready, the solution exists, it flies, we tested it, speed is sufficient," Flash recalled.

The mistake, he said, was that no one checked on them week to week. There were also too few jet Gerans in the skies then to test against.

"On the range, they showed: it flies. That was the problem," explained Flash.

Speed is the easy part

The engines are not the obstacle, Flash continues, since they can be bought abroad, and neither is a plane that flies fast in a straight line. The hard part is a machine agile enough to chase a jet-powered Geran, which is far more maneuverable than the propeller kind and will start changing altitude and throwing evasive maneuvers once interceptors appear.

Because an operator's aim frays at such speeds, he said, the decisive pieces are automatic target capture by machine vision and automatic terminal guidance.

"Building a construction that just flies fast is the easiest part," he added.

Mass orders must wait

That is why Ukraine cannot simply order thousands to blanket the country, Flash said: it first needs a proven design that works for any crew, from Security Service specialists to territorial defense soldiers, and is simple to launch, operate, and maintain.

Once such a sample exists, he said, scaling up is only a question of money. Meanwhile, the work is moving: a Ukrainian interceptor recently notched its first kills against jet Gerans and is heading toward mass production.

A Ukrainian jamming-systems maker went to a US Army base to do to candidate drones what Russia does to Ukraine's: flood them with electronic warfare (EW) and see which survives. Unwave company has tested four of its EW systems at Fort Carson in Colorado as part of the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program and has been asked to continue supporting it.

The Pentagon is using Drone Dominance to choose the drones it will buy at scale, more than 200,000 by 2027, and it needs to know they work under jamming, the condition that decides most drone fights in Ukraine.

So it brought in a Ukrainian electronic-warfare maker to supply that jamming, turning Ukraine's hard-won counter-drone experience into the test bench for American hardware. It follows a pattern in which US defense efforts adopt Ukrainian battlefield models.

Ukraine brings the jamming

From 24 August to 2 September, Unwave's team worked at the base, running scenarios that pitted its jammers against drones tasked with protecting fixed positions, moving vehicles, and infrastructure.

The crews operated from three separate positionsat short and long range to compare how drones from different manufacturers held up.

"Our mission was to create conditions as close to the real battlefield as possible," the company said, adding that it judged the tasks successfully completed but could not detail the scenarios for security reasons.

In all, 14 drone makers and three electronic-warfare firms took part.

Four systems on show

Unwave brought four:

• VIHA, which it calls Ukraine's first tactical-operational jammer for directed suppression of drones
• BOOMBOX, built to shield troops and positions from FPV and drop-drones
• SHATRO, for vehicles
• CHOVEN-2, a multi-frequency amplifier for cars.

Its participation was organized by Revenant Technologies, a US firm that specializes in bringing combat-proven defense tech to the American market, and helped design the scenarios using its ties to Ukraine and frontline experience.

A foothold in the US market

For Unwave, the value is a door into the alliance's security architecture. The event showed the importance of Ukrainian, American, and European specialists testing together, the company said, and "such interaction will help integrate Ukrainian technologies into the security architecture of our allies."

A drone-warfare course written by Ukrainian officers from real combat has earned NATO status. The English-language Drone Warfare Awareness Course, built on Ukraine's war experience, is now "NATO Selected" and has been taught to officers from more than 10 countries, the General Staff said.

Ukraine's combat experience is flowing into NATO's classrooms, and the alliance is starting to treat Kyiv as a teacher rather than only a recipient. It follows a broader shift of Ukrainian lessons into allied curricula.

Combat lessons become a course

The course came out of Ukraine's International Peacekeeping and Security Center, whose instructors at its "Partnership for Peace" training center wrote the syllabus, formally titled "Fundamentals of the Combat Use of Unmanned Systems", based on the Armed Forces' own experience.

In November 2025, the Ukrainian team presented it at a seminar in Sweden attended by NATO commanders and analysts.

The next year, it passed international trials with officers from more than a dozen countries and earned its NATO Selected mark, a recognition that it meets Alliance standards and can be offered to member-state officers, short of the full accreditation the center is still pursuing.

Sweden and Finland lend a hand

Two Nordic partners helped get it there. Sweden's SWEDINT began working with the center in 2024, teaching international methods for course development and preparing courses for accreditation.

Finland's FINCENT joined in 2025, sharing insights on building a military education system and assessing training needs. In the fall of 2026, delegations from both countries visited the center and signed plans for further joint work.

Ukraine teaches the Alliance

The course is one piece of a wider reversal. Ukrainian officers have trained Polish and German counterparts in drone and electronic warfare, and at the joint NATO-Ukraine center in Poland, they have set their battlefield practice against NATO doctrine, exposing where the Alliance's assumptions no longer fit in a modern war.

The person who built Ukraine's "Army of Drones" is now building an "Army of Robots". Myhailo Fedorov, the former defense minister, has launched a private-sector push to robotize the war, wanting machines to take the deadliest jobs, evacuating the wounded, laying and clearing mines, and fighting, so soldiers come home, he wrote, announcing the effort at the IT Arena conference in Lviv.

The pitch rests on a track record. Fedorov's Army of Drones, launched in 2022, helped make drones the weapon behind more than 95 percent of Ukraine's battlefield hits. Over 700 makers now building them, and he is betting robotization is the next such leap.

Army of Robots is meant to be an ecosystem, not a company: investing in defense-tech firms, standing up R&D, testing with troops, and scaling fast, whatever works. Fedorov is running it from outside government, having left the defense ministry in July and started building a defense-tech company backed by Palantir chief Alex Karp.

Robots take the deadliest jobs

Fedorov's vision is a battlefield where machines go first. A sensor spots a threat, then a robot enters the danger zone, he says. Humanoid robots would carry ammunition and pull out the wounded, lay and clear minefields, scout, hold positions, and strike, taking the roles that today cost soldiers their lives. For now, it is a vision more than a fielded capability: Fedorov is describing where he wants the battlefield to go, not a robot force already in the fight.

The Army of Drones sets the model

The aim, Fedorov says, is to gather the best engineers, combat experience, and capital and point them at one goal: making robots fight instead of people. The obstacle is Russia, which he said has learned to quickly copy and scale military technology, so Ukraine must keep inventing the next cycle before the enemy does.

"Russia will stop only when we can break its backbone," he says, arguing that it will take Western capital, world-class engineers, and private initiative.

Russia's best defenses against ballistic missiles ring Moscow, leaving much of the rest of the country exposed to Ukraine's growing missile arsenal. That concentration is why Ukraine's homegrown ballistic missiles could cause Russia real trouble beyond the capital, even as Russia's air defenses show gaps elsewhere, expert Vadym Kushnikov says, Ukrainian Radio reports.

Russia has the systems to stop ballistic missiles, Kushnikov continues, but it has massed the best of them around Moscow: the S-500 "Prometey", with interceptors adapted from the A-135, the Soviet-era shield built to defend the capital from missiles.

Other regions, by his assessment, are left more open to Ukraine's massed and combined strikes. That matters now that Ukraine's own ballistic missile, such as the Sapsan, is entering combat.

The best defenses ring Moscow

"If you analyze the characteristics, Russia today has concentrated its most modern S-500 complexes, with 77N6-N and 77N6-N1 interceptors, in Moscow Oblast," Kushnikov says.

Elsewhere, he said, Russia is short of air-defense complexes, the S-400 among them, a shortfall he said is visible in satellite imagery.

Ukraine's ballistic program grows

Ukraine's deep-strike arsenal has been shifting from foreign-supplied systems to homegrown ones. Alongside its Neptune and Flamingo cruise missiles, it now fields the Sapsan, an Iskander-class ballistic missile with a range of about 500 kilometers, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed was in combat late last year.

A domestic ballistic missile will let Ukraine strike deep inside Russia without waiting for a Western green light.

Production faces hard hurdles

Building them is the hard part. Ukraine's rocket-engineering tradition runs deep, Kushnikov suggests, but its production sites, mostly in the east, are direct targets of Russian strikes.

The missiles also depend on components that are difficult to make, chiefly solid-fuel rocket engines and the guidance that steers a warhead flying at five times the speed of sound along a ballistic arc.

"The combination of all these factors is exactly what our engineers have worked on for years, building the Ukrainian ballistic shield," he adds.

Ukrainian soldiers have built a drone that carries a combat ground robot into battle and drops it where needed, a trick the US has pursued but never fielded. The Alter Ego battalion of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade has paired a bomber drone with a purpose-built robot, the Desantnyk, and took it from idea to combat in 10 days, the Brave1 defense cluster said.

The system answers a problem that has long hobbled ground robots: getting them to the fight over mined, cratered terrain they cannot cross on their own.

A drone carries the robot dozens of kilometers behind the lines and drops it precisely, in a pairing engineers call a "marsupial", one carrier delivering another. The US worked on such systems for more than 30 years, Brave1 said.

And it is not alone: the 3rd Army Corps has been air-dropping robots behind Russian lines in its Vivaldi offensive.

A drone carries the robot in

The Desantnyk is a compact wheeled platform. Alter Ego built a way to release it accurately from a heavy bomber drone, dropping it well beyond the range a ground robot could reach on its own. It lands deep in the enemy rear and drives on to its target. The point is to spare the robot the most dangerous, exposed leg of the journey.

Confirmed kills follow fast

According to Brave1, just 10 days passed from the idea to its first combat use, and the Desantnyk has already carried out confirmed strikes: the unit used it to destroy Russian shelters and troops. Only a handful of Ukrainian units have mastered the tactic so far.

Brave1 moves it to production

The defense cluster, a state platform for scaling battlefield inventions, said it took notice of the Desantnyk and helped the battalion find a manufacturer to move it from prototypes to serial production and out to other units.

French President Emmanuel Macron said French services received no CIA warning about a possible Russian drone attack from Mediterranean merchant ships, pushing back on an El Mundo report that US intelligence had alerted France, Italy, and Spain, RTL reported.

Macron’s denial comes amid drone attacks and sabotage cases that European governments have linked to Russia. France is preparing stronger defenses against that wider threat, even as Macron says its services received no specific CIA warning. Italy’s defense minister has also cautioned against fueling alarm over an unconfirmed report.

Asked about the report during a televised interview on 24 September, Macron said: “The CIA did not inform French services of such an attack.” He said Russia was multiplying hostile and sometimes criminal acts against European countries. Covert acts such as sabotage and cyberattacks are often described as hybrid warfare. Asked whether France itself could be attacked, Macron answered yes.

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto separately wrote on X that El Mundo’s alert “finds no confirmation.” He said it served no one to add “more fuel to the fire” at an already tense time.

The Spanish newspaper reported that the possible operation would use Gerbera drones, small Russian aircraft capable of carrying several kilograms of explosives. The drones would be hidden in shipping containers aboard merchant ships and launched toward targets along Europe’s southern coast. El Mundo cited a source close to Lithuania’s Defense Ministry, and analysts familiar with a CIA report said to have circulated among European foreign ministries. Euromaidan Press covered the account on 24 September. Bythe time of publication, neither Spain’s government nor the CIA had publicly addressed it.

Macron pointed to the failed attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany in August. A drone carrying explosives was found near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft. German officials attributed the attempt to Russia. Macron said France had not experienced a comparable incident.

The wider hybrid warfare threat

Beyond the disputed Mediterranean alert, authorities have investigated other incidents throughout Europe as possible Russian sabotage.

Germany followed its accusation over Leipzig with diplomatic measures against Moscow. Berlin ordered Russia’s last consulate in Germany closed and ended an agreement permitting a Russian cultural center. German investigators also identified two suspects, including a Russian man they linked to military intelligence. Moscow denied involvement.

Poland’s justice and interior ministers said Russian intelligence ordered the May 2024 arson of Warsaw’s Marywilska 44 shopping center.

Finnish President Alexander Stubb said Russia would continue such attacks to frighten Ukraine’s allies into reducing support. He urged vigilance without overreacting, saying Finnish intelligence saw no imminent military threat.