Uttering one word, one man could end Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. 

With a single word, he could halt the fighting that, in 40 bloody months, has killed or maimed some 1,000,000 Russians and nearly half a million Ukrainians. He could ease the nuclear fears the conflict has stoked. He could relieve the strain on the Russian and Ukrainian economies—and allow the devastated landscape in eastern and southern Ukraine to finally begin healing.

That word is “stop.” And the only man who can say it is the Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, on whose orders 200,000 Russian troops further invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. 

What will it take for Putin to say the word? That question, more than any other, informs Ukraine’s theory of victory as the wider war grinds into its fourth year and both sides show signs of exhaustion. Ukraine could defeat Russia militarily, effectively giving Putin no choice but to say stop—lest the Ukrainian army destroy whatever forces Russia might still have left following decisive losses in Ukraine. 

Or Russia could defeat Ukraine militarily, satisfying Putin’s original conditions for victory. Putin could say stop because he’s gotten everything he ever wanted in Ukraine.

But there’s a third and arguably likelier outcome. Putin could order his armies to stand down not because they’ve actually won, but because Putin says they’ve won.

Dictators, including elected ones such as Putin, tend to be political survivalists—and Putin’s sense of self-preservation could lead him to declare victory in Ukraine if and when he begins to sense he’s losing … and losing domestic political support as his armies falter.

Declaring victory without winning

This sort of thing happens all the time. Palestinian military group Hamas routinely declares victory in its various clashes with Israel, even when the outcomes of the conflicts are often devastating to the group. Hamas has repeatedly declared victory in the bloody war instigated by the group’s brutal cross-border raids into southern Israel in October 2023—despite Israeli retaliation that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians and rendered Gaza all but uninhabitable. 

“The Hamas claim of victory … has further goals,” Palestinian writer Aws Abu Ata noted. “The movement seeks to form a safety belt for itself to avoid being held accountable for the very crises it has provoked.”

As long as a critical mass of Hamas supporters believe, despite their suffering, that they and the militant group are the victors, the Palestinian liberation movement may endure in some form.

Putin could pursue a similar survival strategy. He could simply declare victory in Ukraine, and then attempt to convince his base—Russian elites and tens of millions of everyday Russians—that the victory is legitimate and not the desperate projection of an imperiled dictator.

And yes, Putin is imperiled. Just two years ago, the Wagner Group—the notorious Russian mercenary company led by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—staged an uprising against Putin’s regime. Thousands of Wagner troops marched on Moscow. The uprising ended when Prigozhin unwisely agreed to meet Putin in Moscow, only to perish when his plane fell to the ground in flames, likely shot down. 

Meanwhile in Ukraine, increasingly vehicle-starved Russian field armies are losing more than a thousand troops a day in grinding assaults on Ukrainian defenses—and gaining just a few hundred square kilometers a month in exchange for the massive bloodletting, in a country with a total area of 603,000 square kilometers.

The costly Russian attacks are sustainable because the Kremlin recruits slightly more troops than it loses every month. But that robust recruitment is possible for just two reasons. “Driven by high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over, more than 1,000 men join the Russian military every day,” noted Janis Kluge, deputy head of the Eastern Europe & Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. 

The bonuses and other wartime spending are eating the Russian economy.

“All told, Russia’s defense budget will account for 40% of all government expenditures, which is at its highest level since the Cold War,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of US Army forces in Europe, told US lawmakers on 3 April.

By comparison, the US federal government spends 13% of its budget on the military.

This is unsustainable. As the cost of servicing a ballooning debt crowds out other spending priorities, Putin has reportedly been casting around for conflict off-ramps. However and whenever Putin chooses to end the war, declaring victory for Russia is surely part of the exit strategy.

The US may give Putin the cover he needs

Talk is easy, of course. Real persuasion could be hard.

“Putin has laid out his maximal goals for this conflict,” explained Thomas Graham, a former US National Security Council staffer who is currently a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. “At the moment, he needs to make a credible claim of success on each of these goals to declare victory—and that means no NATO membership for Ukraine, international recognition of the land he has seized as Russian, the demilitarization and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, and the lifting of Western sanctions.”   

“He will not achieve these goals in a negotiated settlement,” Graham asserted.

That’s almost certainly true if the settlement is with Ukraine. But US President Donald Trump, who frequently apes Russian propaganda and has described Putin as strong and smart, has sent his envoys to speak directly with their Russian counterparts in an effort to negotiate an end to the war on terms that favor Russia. 

Trump could lend Putin the domestic political cover Putin needs to sell a unilateral declaration of victory in Ukraine—by giving Russia things Ukraine and Ukraine’s European allies won’t give it. 

What a US-brokered deal could mean for Ukraine

Trump could officially endorse Russian control over occupied territories. Indeed, the White House has already offered to recognize Crimea as part of  Russia. And since the admission of a new member state to NATO requires the consent of all current members, the United States alone could block any Ukrainian bid to join the alliance. 

The Trump administration could also lift US sanctions on Russia—and clearly wants to. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships” between the United States and Russia. 

“The Russian president is in the extraordinary position where he sees the opportunity to entrust his American colleague with imposing a Russian-designed peace settlement on Ukraine,” observed John Lough, a fellow with Chatham House, a London think tank.

The stated Russian war objectives Washington can’t just deliver to Moscow are the most esoteric—and the easiest for Putin to simply claim: the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of the Ukrainian armed forces. 

Russia has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops since February 2022: does that qualify as “demilitarization”? There are very few actual Nazis in the Ukrainian military, but there are surely thousands of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists among Ukraine’s war dead: is that “denazification”?

When both sides claim victory, the war may end

It’s evident Putin is already laying the rhetorical groundwork for claiming Russia has demilitarized and denazified Ukraine. Putin believes key war goals have been achieved, a source close to the Kremlin told Reuters in January.

As Russian casualties reached one million, Russia’s stocks of armored vehicles run low and borrowing costs continue to climb in the sanctions-squeezed, war-strained Russian economy, the temptation for Putin to declare victory and halt major offensive action—at least for a while—should only increase. Especially given how little ground Russian forces have gained in Ukraine since their retreat from Kyiv Oblast in the spring of 2022.

Incredibly, Ukraine could also claim it has won.

“In the end, both sides may claim some form of victory,” explained Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

“Russia by pointing to territorial gains; and Ukraine by claiming its success in preventing Russia from achieving its stated strategic objectives.”

The battle for air superiority is no longer just about seeing — it’s also about hearing. In 2025, Germany plans to launch combat drones equipped with acoustic sensors that can detect the origin of enemy artillery fire, Army Inform reports. 

Vector, Twister, and Reliant drones have already been delivered to Ukraine. They boost Ukraine’s reconnaissance capabilities at a time when the war is increasingly seen as a war of drones. 

According to Hartpunkt, German company Quantum-Systems, in collaboration with Polish firm Weles Acoustics, is integrating advanced acoustic detectors into reconnaissance UAVs. These sensors capture sound waves from artillery and mortar fire, allowing for rapid identification of enemy firing positions.

Weighing under 50 grams, the sensors operate in the 20 Hz to 10 kHz range and can detect shots from up to 15 km away. Directional accuracy reaches 5° at a 5 km distance. Integration with neural networks enables the system to automatically identify weapon types, distinguishing, for example, a howitzer from a mortar.

In the initial phase, the operator receives a signal and visually confirms the target. In the future, machine vision algorithms will handle targeting automatically.

The technology is designed to:

• Reduce the time needed to locate enemy batteries
• Improve counter-battery effectiveness
• Minimize losses among Ukraine’s defense forces

Defense Express notes that a major challenge is filtering out noise from drone rotors and wind. Still, field test results have been convincing, and serial production is planned for late 2025.

Earlier, experts reported that Russia likely used a new jet-powered attack drone, the Geran-3, in a recent missile and drone strike on Kyiv. This model marks a significant upgrade over the slower Shahed-136 (Geran-2), boasting reported speeds of 550–600 km/h and a range of up to 2,500 km, compared to the Shahed-136’s 185 km/h.

Residents of Kyiv reported hearing a distinct whistling sound during the strike, consistent with a jet-powered drone and unlike the quieter propeller-driven models previously used. 

Russian motorcycle assault tactics have spread to the southern front of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine. The result in the south is the same as in the east. A lot of Russia’s southern bike troops are getting killed by Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

But as in the east, the few southern bikers who survive can make dangerous dents in Ukrainian lines. The bike attacks are almost always fatal for the troops who attempt them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Ukrainian commanders should think twice before copying the method, however. The Russians can afford to lose troops. The Ukrainians can’t.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ southern task force claimed the Russians attacked “in the Malynivka area” on Friday. But analysts geolocated the site of the attack in Nesteryanka, 40 miles to the east in the same oblast.

In any event, the attack failed as around a dozen bike troops ran over mines, got plinked by drones or blasted by artillery. “Their plan was doomed to failure,” the Ukrainian southern task force stated. “Our soldiers met the motorcycle assaults with dense fire, and as a result, all the enemy equipment burned down! Not a single occupier passed!”

The Ukrainian defenders, possibly from the 65th Mechanized Brigade, were lucky. The thinking behind the Russian bike attacks is perverse, but not insane. “It involves heavy losses, but it still has certain results,” the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit explained.

“For example, 20 motorcycles are going, some of them are destroyed by artillery, some by drones, someone is eliminated by mining and our infantry will get someone in a gun battle. But several motorcycles still have a chance to jump into the landing.”

It only takes a few infiltrating Russian troops to create a lodgement inside Ukrainian lines—one that can grow into a larger breach. In deploying large numbers of bike troops, Russian commanders are playing the odds—and betting that a few will eventually ride unscathed past Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

“Behind them is the same group, then more and more,” Peaky Blinders warned. The Friday bike attack in Zaporizhzhia may have failed, but the next one might not.

https://t.co/1jRVZLJTBu pic.twitter.com/kSZ1QpgUCI

— imi (m) (@moklasen) June 13, 2025

Abundant manpower

This costly assault method only works for the Kremlin because it has manpower in abundance. Motivated by generous enlistment bonuses and apparently believing Russia is winning the wider war, 30,000 fresh troops sign up for Russia’s war effort every month. That’s slightly more troops than Russia loses every month in Ukraine. Even the “suicidal bike attacks” haven’t tipped Russia’s manpower balance into a monthly deficit.

But Ukraine doesn’t have a durable manpower surplus. So it’s worth questioning the decision by one elite Ukrainian unit to form its own motorcycle assault group. The 425th Separate Assault Regiment organized its bike company, the first in the Ukrainian armed forces, last month. 

“During the training, the fighters spent hundreds of hours behind the wheel and practiced shooting in motion, firing thousands of rounds,” the regiment announced. “As a result, we have a modern cavalry whose main task is to rapidly break into enemy positions, carry out assault actions and quickly change the direction of strike.”

But can the regiment afford to lose almost all the bike troops it sends into battle? And will the Ukrainian people accept the loss of life? 

The Russians are determined to advance north in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. “Russian troops conduct six to seven attacks daily in the direction of Malynivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. One of these attacks may eventually succeed—and open a gap in Ukrainian lines that Russian reinforcements can exploit. 

Even if the effort succeeds, it will come at the cost of most of the bike troops carrying out the initial assaults. “The majority of these bikers are suicidal,” Peaky Blinders observed. “But apparently they are completely satisfied with it.”

Ukrainians might not be so satisfied dying like that.

Ukraine has received 108 Krab self-propelled howitzers from Poland. In three years of hard fighting since the first of the 53-ton, five-person guns arrived in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have lost no fewer than 35 of the howitzers, which fire Ukraine’s best 155-millimeter shells as far as 31 km.

On or just before 7 June, a Russian drone crew showed what happens when artillery gunners don’t take every precaution. The Russian crew flew two fiber-optic first-person-view drones through gaps in the front and back of one Krab’s covered, concealed dugout in a tree line somewhere along the 1,100-km front line—and lit the gun on fire, destroying it.

It’s probably the 36th Krab loss. And it was totally preventable. 

Tiny FPV drones weighing a few pounds and clutching small warheads have, for two years now, hounded troops and vehicles on both sides of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine. For most of those two years, however, the drones’ prey were fairly safe inside or under loose concealment. 

After all, almost all FPVs were, until recently, controlled via wireless radio—and radio signals can’t always penetrate wood, brick and metal. At the very least, structures limit how far a drone can fly. “Obstacles between your transmitter and receiver can significantly reduce range,” FPV expert Oscar Liang explained.

The proliferation of fiber-optic drones has changed everything. Controlled via signals that travel up and down miles-long, millimeters-thick optical fiber, these FPVs are largely unbothered by buildings and dugouts—as long as their operators can avoid snagging the fibers and find some way into the covered position: an open door or window, a gap between layers of camouflage netting.

Which explains the new genre of drone video from the front line of the wider war: indoor drone strikes. FPVs are slipping through open doors and past dangling tarps and nets to strike soldiers and vehicles hiding inside what were once safe havens from FPV raids.

A Polish-made AHS Krab was destroyed by 2x Fiber-Optic FPVs, which were able to penetrate its protection, by flying into the infantries entrance from behind. pic.twitter.com/M4knInt8HZ

— WarVehicleTracker ☧ (@WarVehicle) June 7, 2025

Knock knock

A dramatic video of one indoor strike, carried out by the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ Birds of Magyar unit in April, is typical of the new genre. Easing inside a warehouse, maneuvering past one parked Russian vehicle to take aim at a BMP fighting vehicle with its back hatch ajar, the drone struck inside the BMP.

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The explosion ignited a blaze that may have spread throughout the warehouse, if footage from an overhead surveillance drone is any indication. It’s possible one drone costing less than $1,000 destroyed several vehicles.

“Magyar birds are looking for worm equipment in the corners where the enemy definitely doesn’t expect the FPV drone,” someone—presumably Robert Brovdi, then Magyar’s leader and now the head of the USF—narrated over footage of the strike.

The Ukrainian Krab crew clearly also didn’t expect Russian FPVs to come snooping, which may explain why they accidentally left entrances for the maneuverable drones.

The Krab’s bulk—typical of all self-propelled guns, or SPGs—makes it hard to cover and conceal with 100% certainty. According to analyst Andrew Perpetua, it may actually be easier to dig an effective hideout for a towed gun. 

And it’s not like SPGs are actually rolling around the battlefield the way they may have done in previous wars. Tiny drones have made it virtual suicide for an artillery crews to “shoot and scoot.” So they don’t need tracks. They don’t need to be self-propelled.

“Instead of investing gajillions of dollars developing crappy SPGs that barely carry any ammo and often weigh obscene amounts of tons but can ‘shoot and scoot,’ countries should be investing in ultra lightweight, long-range towed guns that specialize in push and bush,” Perpetua wrote.

That is, push into position, hide in the bushes—and stay there. The gunners just need to work much harder to completely cover their guns when they’re not actually shooting at the enemy.

The 2S7 tracked howitzer is one of the biggest artillery pieces in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. Both sides use them. And both sides prize them. Firing a 100-kg shell as far as 32 km, the 14-person 2S7s can avoid most retaliatory fire.

But that’s changing as Ukraine’s drones range deeper and deeper behind Russian lines. On or just before Thursday, a surveillance drone belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade—perhaps one of the unit’s Shark drones—spotted a Russian 2S7 and its ammunition truck somewhere along the 700-mile front line.

“The adjacent units turned the self-propelled artillery system with a powerful 203-mm cannon into scrap metal with a well-aimed shot,” the brigade boasted.

It’s unclear which adjacent unit struck the 2S7, and with what, but it’s worth pointing out that the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade is equipped with BM-30 Smerch rocket launchers that lob 800-kg rockets as far as 120 km.

Sure, there are plenty of munitions that can range farther than the 2S7’s shells. It’s not for no reason that Ukraine has lost around half a dozen of its 100 pre-war 2S7s—and the Russians have written off around three dozen of their own stock of several hundred 2S7s. 

But the 2S7s and their North Korean-made equivalents, the M1989s, tend to operate far enough from enemy positions to avoid the densest concentrations of surveillance and attack drones that represent the biggest threats to forces on both sides. “They are long-range—quite hard to destroy them,” Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian drone operator, wrote about the North Korean artillery systems the Russians use in increasing numbers.

The Russian armed forces “received a huge amount of artillery from Korea,” Kriegsforscher observed. They may number in the hundreds. Finding and destroying them and other long-range Russian guns and launchers—including the 2S7s—is a top priority as Ukraine struggles to stabilize the front line.

Our UAV reconnaissance unit found and adjusted fire on a «2S7 Pion» (self-propelled artillery system)

The adjacent units turned the self-propelled artillery system with a powerful 203 mm cannon into scrap metal with a well-aimed shot.

The cost of the system is over $1 million pic.twitter.com/jUjk2xAiVe

— Бригада «Чорний ліс» (@15obrar) June 12, 2025

Building the drone wall

More and better drones are the key. Lately, the Ukrainian armed forces have been acquiring at least 200,000 small drones every month—and deploying them to create what David Kirichenko, a fellow with the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, described as a “wall” of drones extending 15 km into Russian-occupied territory.

15 km isn’t deep enough, of course—not for 2S7s and M1989s that shoot more than twice as far. But efforts are underway to extend the drone wall to 40 km. “The goal: deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front,” according to Kirichenko.

Drones that capture and repeat radio signals, thus increasing the range of the most distant first-person-view attack drones, are critical to this extension. As the control system falls into place, analyst Andrew Perpetua anticipated the Ukrainian drone wall will stretch even farther—eventually as far as 100 km.

“You have layers of drone superiority,” Perpetua projected. 

Russia could counter with its own drones, of course. But Russian industry—cumbersome and often corrupt—struggles to scale and innovate at the same pace as Ukrainian industry. At the same time, Ukraine’s electronic warfare—that is, radio-jamming—is much more effective than Russia’s and often grounds Russia’s wireless drones while Ukraine’s own drones fly freely. To counter this, the Russians are scrambling to deploy more fiber-optic drones, which send and receive signals via thin wires instead of wirelessly over the radio spectrum.

If Ukrainian troops can preserve their drone edge, they could eventually rob Russian forces of any freedom of action.

“You push a critical number of drone pilots into each layer [of the drone wall], overwhelming Russian pilots and completely cutting off all logistics access,” Perpetua explained. “I mean, all artillery is cut off, all infantry cut off, out to 100 kilometers.”

That the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade could find and hit a Russian 2S7 potentially 32 km away is one small signal that the Ukrainian drone wall is slowly getting wider.

Ukrainian drones, missiles and artillery devastated a Russian assault group outside of the town of Siversk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast on or just before Wednesday, blocking the Russians’ latest attempt to punch through Ukrainian defenses in order to drive at the so-called “fortress belt”—a chain of Ukrainian cities stretching through Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

It was a rare armored assault in a war where armored vehicles are increasingly vulnerable to drones, mines, missiles and artillery. At least four Russian vehicles—a tank and three fighting vehicles—rolled toward Siversk in broad daylight. The tank fired shells. At least one vehicle popped smoke grenades, its crew clearly hoping to hide the assault group from Ukrainian drones.

It didn’t work. Drones from the Ukrainian 4th National Guard Brigade spotted the Russians mid-assault. Massive firepower rained down, including explosive first-person-view drones, drone-dropped grenades, an apparent Javelin anti-tank missile and cluster artillery. “In the first minutes of repelling the attack, one tank and three units of enemy armored vehicles were hit,” the Ukrainian brigade reported.

A dozen or more Russian infantry managed to dismount from the harried vehicles. First-person-view drones, bomber drones and artillery made quick work of them.

If the Russian assault was as poorly led as it appeared to be, it may have been doomed from the beginning. It’s typical, as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 40th month, for Russian regiments to send under-trained, unprotected troops on “reconnaissance-by-force” missions in the early hours of a planned attack—often in civilian cars and trucks or on motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles or even electric scooters.

Russian assault column destroyed by the 4th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. https://t.co/NKC2EdJeHh pic.twitter.com/vCAQqkTp8a

— Special Kherson Cat (@bayraktar_1love) June 11, 2025

Costly strategy

Believe it or not, there’s a deliberate strategy at play. Yes, it’s costly. No, it doesn’t always fail.

Unencumbered by heavy armor, lightly-equipped Russian recon troops can move fast—and that gives them a chance, if not a great one, to get across the drone-patrolled, mine-seeded, artillery-pocked no-man’s-land before Ukrainian brigades can deploy their heaviest firepower. 

These troops “are ordered to advance towards where they assess Ukrainian positions to be, conducting reconnaissance by drawing fire,” Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“If the group encounters resistance, Russian commanders assess where they believe the best lines of approach are, and in particular, where the boundaries between defensive units lie,” Reynolds and Watling added in their February study. 

“If Ukrainian positions are positively identified, sections are persistently sent forward to attack positions, which are further mapped and then targeted with artillery, FPVs and UMPK glide bombs,” Reynolds and Watling wrote. “When rotation or disruption of the defence is achieved, Russian units aim to conduct more deliberate assault actions.”

What’s most important is that the “deliberate assault actions,” involving heavy vehicles, only takes place after the lighter recon forces have identified a safe route across the no-man’s-land—and Russian artillery, drones and bombs have suppressed the nearby Ukrainian forces.

Russian commanders don’t appear to have followed the usual plan outside Siversk on Wednesday. And potentially scores of Russians paid with their lives.

But don’t expect the Russians to give up. The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies anticipated further Russian action in the area. “The 3rd Combined Arms Army will try to break through to the northern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River between Yampil and Hryhorivka, and from the southeast—toward Siversk,” CDS predicted.

If the Wednesday assault didn’t end with the millionth Russian casualty, the next assault just might.

Russia’s new AI kamikaze drone can navigate and attack without any connection to a human operator. The V2U may be one of the most sophisticated small attack UAVs on either side of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine—and it risks tilting the life-or-death drone race in the Kremlin’s favor.

The electrically-powered, propeller-driven, explosives-laden V2U, roughly 1.2 meters from wingtip to wingtip, first appeared along the 1,100-km front line this spring. 

Recovering crashed examples, Ukrainian and allied analysts have been able to identify the components—many of them Chinese, Japanese or American in origin—that help the V2U fly for up to an hour at 60 km/hr and strike with a vehicle-wrecking 2.9-kg shaped-charge warhead, all without human intervention.

That autonomy makes the V2U essentially impossible to jam. Like smaller fiber-optic first-person-view attack drones, the V2U is impervious to electromagnetic attacks on its control link. The only way to defeat it is to shoot it down—or hide from it. 

“Autonomy is the inevitable pathway drone warfare will follow,” explained “Roy,” a Canadian drone expert. With the V2U, “Russia is pulling ahead of Ukraine in the crucial field of drone autonomy.” 

Russia is pulling ahead of Ukraine in the crucial field of drone autonomy as witnessed in the “V2U” kamikaze UAV.
Autonomy is the inevitable pathway drone warfare will follow, and Ukraine must not let the Russians lead this race.
1/ https://t.co/ulZQo5T96U pic.twitter.com/EOtO8ggoNW

— Roy (@GrandpaRoy2) June 10, 2025

Total autonomy

Like many drones, the camera-equipped V2U boasts satellite positioning by way of the American GPS and Russian GLONASS constellations. It’s the “ubiquitous approach to navigation,” wrote Justin Bronk and Jack Watling, analysts for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

But satellite navigation is fragile. “The power of these navigational emissions is very low,” Bronk and Watling pointed out. “They are, therefore, easy to receive, but also easy to jam through saturation of the frequencies used. Alternatively, adversaries can deliver false signals such that the receiver is spoofed into locating itself in an erroneous position.”

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So the V2U’s designers added a backup navigation system. “A 100-GB solid state drive on a video support board, combined with a laser range finder, gives the UAV terrain-following capability in the presence of GPS/GLONASS jamming,” Roy noted. 

Terrain-following is entirely internal, and requires no connection to an outside operator or satellite. “If a platform has an electro-optical sensor and a pre-loaded map of the terrain over which it is flying, computer vision can be used to match the UAV’s camera view against identifiable terrain features and physical markers such as rivers, roads and forests,” Bronk and Watling wrote. 

Terrain-matching can be inaccurate at the lower altitudes where a smaller drone such as the V2U is most comfortable, so there’s a backup for its backup. “If a platform has a laser rangefinder and flies at a low and level altitude”—and yes, the V2U does fly like that—“it can compare changes in contour of the ground over time to track its progress over its pre-loaded map,” the RUSI analysts explained.

Probing as deeply as 60 km behind the front line, a V2U—or, more ominously, a swarm of several V2Us—will use its built-in AI to scan for targets matching pre-loaded images of the most valuable Ukrainian vehicles and systems. Tanks. Rocket launchers. Artillery. Air-defenses.

The V2U “would be effective against a range of valuable targets,” Roy warned.

The Ukrainian armed forces have highly autonomous, AI-assisted attack drones, too, of course—but the V2U may be the best of the bunch. The type’s proliferation is a waving red flag—a warning that the sanctions-squeezed Russian drone industry is still capable of adaptation and innovation. It’s capable of making technological leaps in arguably the critical capability of the wider war: autonomy. 

“Ukraine must not let the Russians lead this race,” Roy stated.

On or before Saturday, Russian troops somewhere along the 700-mile (about 1,100-km) front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine detected incoming Ukrainian drones. Specifically: fiber-optic first-person-view drones that send and receive signals via millimeters-thick, but miles-long, spools of optical fiber.

Fiber-optic FPVs are extremely difficult to defeat. The main defense against wireless FPVs, which send and receive signals by radio, is electronic jamming that can ground the drones before they strike. But fiber-optic FPVs can’t be jammed. That’s why both the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces are building more of the fiber-optic models—even though they’re several times more expensive than the $500 wireless models.

But sever a drone’s optical fiber, and it’ll fall from the air. Optical fiber is tough, but it can be broken by bending it 180 degrees. Surgical scissors can also cut right through it—as the Russians were well aware. “Got the scissors?” one hidden Russian asked after a Ukrainian FPV buzzed past, trailing its optical fiber, in a video from the Saturday incident. “Got ‘em,” another hidden Russian responded.

The soldiers hurried from their hiding spot, found the drone’s thin optical fiber—and cut it.

The drone lost its command signal. “It’s falling,” one Russian breathed right before the drone exploded a short distance away.

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The circumstances of the Saturday fiber-cutting will be difficult for the Russians—and Ukrainians, for that matter—to duplicate. The soldiers had to have ample warning of the incoming drone raid, opportunity to hide from the passing drone and plenty of luck. If a second drone had followed the first, it might’ve struck the Russians as they tried to scissor the first drone’s fiber.

Cut the cord

Yes, scissors are an effective defense against fiber-optic drones—but only in the most extraordinary circumstances. That’s why both sides are literally digging in, going underground to avoid the millions of FPVs swarming the front as the war grinds into its fourth year.

More and more, armored vehicles and infantry hide indoors or underground when they’re not actively attacking or defending. It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. 

The only scalable active defenses against fiber-optic drones are to shoot them down right before they strike, usually with shotguns. That’s risky, however. Miss with your first shot, and you might not get a second one before the drone strikes.

Acknowledging the difficulty of stopping fiber-optic FPVs right before they explode, the Russians and Ukrainians are trying to stop them “left of the boom,” to borrow a US Army term. That might mean detecting the optical fibers left over from earlier attacks, tracing the fibers back to the drone operators—and bombarding the operators with drones or artillery. 

That only works if the operators unwisely linger in the same location long enough for the enemy to hunt them down. 

Ukrainian forces are trying to get even farther left of the boom—attacking the factories that produce Russia’s FPVs. 

On 13 March, long-range drones belonging to the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency struck a hidden drone manufacturing facility in Obukhovo, just outside Moscow, 300 miles (about 480 km) from the border with Ukraine. A few weeks later, in April, Ukraine sortied one of its then-new Aeroprakt A-22 sport plane drones to strike a drone plant in Yelabuga, 550 miles (about 880 km) east of Moscow.

And on 4 April, a dozen Ukrainian attack drones motored 460 miles (about 740 km) into Russia and struck a factory in the city of Saransk. The target was the Optic Fiber Systems factory, which produces—you guessed it—fiber-optic cables. The critical component in Russia’s best unjammable FPVs.

“We fucked up.” It’s not often you hear a democracy activist open with those words, but Nino Robakidze, a veteran democracy activist with over 15 years fighting for Georgian freedom, isn’t interested in pretty narratives.

Speaking at the “FuckUp Night” panel at the Lviv Media Forum 2025, Robakidze laid bare how Georgian civil society enabled the fastest documented democratic collapse in modern European history.

The timeline is breathtaking: December 2023, Georgia receives EU candidate status. Eighteen months later, dozens of political prisoners, including four high-profile politicians, fill Georgian jails, independent media faces criminal prosecution, and the government has abandoned European integration entirely. Over 200 public servants were fired simply for posting pro-European statements on Facebook.

“Georgian civil society is in a perfect storm,” she says. “We saw the red flags. We really saw the red flags. But it was so uncomfortable to really talk about that.”

From EU dreams to Russian nightmare in record time

Twenty-one years after the Rose Revolution promised Georgia a European future, the country has achieved something unprecedented: the fastest documented slide from EU candidate to authoritarian crackdown in European history.

The timeline is breathtaking.

• December 2023: EU grants Georgia candidate status.
• May 2024: Government passes Russian-style “foreign agent” law.
• October 2024: Elections marked by widespread fraud.
• November 2024: Government suspends EU talks.
• January 2025: First female journalist political prisoner.

The halt to EU accession talks were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Polls show 80% of Georgians want EU membership—one of the highest rates in any candidate country.

What followed was six months of non-stop protests across Georgia—unprecedented in the country’s history. Police have violently dispersed demonstrators using water cannons and tear gas against crowds singing the EU anthem.

Hundreds have been arrested, including Mzia Amaglobeli, co-founder of independent outlets Batumelebi and Netgazeti, who faces up to seven years in prison for symbolically slapping a police chief after he allegedly spat in her face and verbally abused her. She became Georgia’s first female journalist to be designated a political prisoner.

But Robakidze, former Country Director for IREX Georgia, isn’t just analyzing the crisis—she’s dissecting how democracy defenders like herself enabled it through a fatal dependency that made Georgian freedom hostage to foreign funding.

For two decades, the US government poured millions into Georgian civil society—building the independent media, NGOs, and democracy programs that became the envy of the former Soviet space. That investment created something genuinely remarkable: a vibrant civil society that helped Georgia become a beacon of democratic progress in the region.

The fatal dependency: how Western money created the weapon to destroy democracy

For two decades, Georgian civil society lived on life support: US government funding. Independent media, NGOs, democracy programs—all relied heavily on American largesse because local businesses feared government retaliation for supporting critical outlets.

“This was mainly the US government funding because there was not enough advertising money in independent media,” Robakidze explains. Vulnerable to state pressure, “big business did not want to work with media outlets like this because they were investigating government corruption.”

But the irony runs deeper—and darker. Western funding didn’t just create the vulnerability; it actively trained the oppressors.

Georgian Dream created Western-funded strategic communication units across government ministries. “And then this communication in the crisis, when the crisis was approaching, was used against those who were actually protecting Western values—civil society, media, free media, etc.”

The absurdity was complete: civil society trained its own oppressors. “We were inviting representatives of this group to different trainings, on strategic communication, on public opinion research, and they learned the lesson really well. Maybe they were the best in their class, actually.”

The students became the masters, using Western-funded skills to dismantle Western values.

Playing fair while opponents cheated

Civil society’s commitment to democratic norms became another vulnerability. While democracy defenders insisted on fact-checking, verification, and due process, their opponents weaponized speed and fabrication.

During Georgia’s October 2024 elections, civil society deployed 3,000 trained observers who knew by 11 AM they were witnessing “the worst election in Georgian democratic history.” But while they spent the day meticulously fact-checking evidence of fraud, Georgian Dream simply declared victory at 8 PM.

“We struggled to communicate this on time because we were checking each and every case, double-checking it,” Robakidze recalls. “But we lost the battle of the very important, crucial minute.”

Civil society eventually proved the elections were fraudulent—no international observer recognized the results as legitimate. But Georgian Dream had already won by ignoring the verification process that constrained their opponents.

“We collected all this evidence… But we lost the battle of the very important, crucial minute,” Robakidze reflects. It revealed a global pattern: authoritarian forces exploit democracy’s commitment to due process, turning democratic values into democratic vulnerabilities.

Media massacre: systematic destruction of independent voices

The government’s media strategy went beyond funding manipulation—it became systematic annihilation. In April 2025, the Georgian Public Broadcaster fired two prominent journalists—Nino Zautashvili and Vasil Ivanov-Chikovani—after they openly criticized the channel’s editorial policy. Ivanov-Chikovani had stated live on air that the broadcaster’s editorial policy “fails to meet the public’s demands.”

The broadcaster’s supervisory board, headed by Vasil Maghlaperidze—a former deputy chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party—called for prosecutors to investigate journalists who criticized the channel’s coverage. The message was clear: dissent will be criminalized.

Since May 2024, more than 30 journalists covering the “foreign agent” bill have been targeted with anonymous threatening phone calls. Unknown individuals plastered posters on journalists’ homes and offices, denouncing them as “foreign agents” with messages like “There is no place in Georgia for agents.”

The new Foreign Agents Registration Act grants the state authority to criminally prosecute media outlets, NGOs, and individuals for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” with penalties of up to five years in prison. As one media executive warned: “We will work as volunteers as long as we can… But I cannot take any money from any donor past May 30, because I don’t want to go to jail.”

More than 70 journalists have been injured while covering protests, with some hospitalized. The systematic nature is unmistakable: this isn’t random violence but coordinated destruction of independent media.

The confession: “I was not fierce enough”

For Robakidze, the crisis forced brutal self-examination. Could civil society have prevented this catastrophe?

“I always ask myself: did I do everything I could to convince my colleagues and those with whom I worked closely that what is happening is dangerous, and this might lead in a very wrong direction?”

Her answer haunts her: “I think that no, I did not.”

She was part of the problem—attending conferences, sitting at tables with government representatives, participating in dialogues even as the warning signs mounted. “Maybe I was not fierce enough, and maybe the urgent situation that we have now would not have been needed if we started being really fierce and dramatic on the very first cases.”

The first red flag came just months after the peaceful 2012 transition, when Georgian Dream defeated Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement in parliamentary elections. The victory was celebrated as a triumph of Georgian democracy—the first peaceful transfer of power in the post-Soviet space.

But the honeymoon was brief. On 17 May 2013—International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia—a small solidarity gathering of maybe 50 people, mostly journalists and human rights defenders, planned to remember LGBTQI+ victims in Tbilisi’s city center.

Instead, they were attacked by a massive, organized mob, with things getting so out of hand that the 50 protesters needed to be bussed out.

For Robakidze, this wasn’t random violence—it was a test. “At that moment Georgia government had a really brilliant police structure. There was no way, no chance, if the state wanted to protect these people, that things could get so ugly and so violent.”

The attack was “visible that it was organized… And those people were having the blessing or green light from the government and Ministry of Interior.”

The red flag was a warning of things to come: 12 years later, the Georgian police disperses hundred-thousand-strong protests; the state’s repressive apparatus has been fully unleashed on the people.

More red flags followed. In 2016, Azerbaijani investigative journalist Afgan Mukhtarli was kidnapped from Tbilisi’s Freedom Square and appeared in an Azerbaijani prison. No footage existed. “We knew that there was no possibility without state interference for such things to happen.”

But civil society and international partners found it easier to focus on Georgia’s successes than confront uncomfortable realities—so they were ignored.

The lesson crystallized too late: “There is no small compromise with non-freedom. If you compromise that small thing, you definitely need to compromise the bigger thing tomorrow.”

Why Georgia will still win: the freedom advantage

Despite the catastrophic failures, Robakidze remains optimistic about Georgia’s ultimate victory. Her reasoning cuts to the heart of what separates Georgia from Russia and Belarus—and why this matters for democracies worldwide.

“Georgia was a democracy for 30 years. And we enjoyed the freedom of speech, freedom of arts, freedom of movement, everything,” she says. “We tasted freedom.”

Even under Soviet rule, Georgia maintained psychological independence. “Even during the Soviet Union, Georgia was still having that sense of freedom alive because of the language we were using, which was never Russian.”

This creates a fundamental difference from Georgia’s neighbors: “We are genuinely not part of the Russian thinking world.” The government’s target audience—those susceptible to pro-Russian messaging—consists mainly of “mostly older men in regions who had only good things happening in their early years” and “have the sentiments of the Soviet Union.”

But the crucial difference is ideological. Georgian Dream lacks what Putin possesses: an ideology, which makes long-term authoritarian consolidation questionable.

The government is “on their lowest level. Lowest approval ratings in their 12-year history.”

From dependency to independence: The silver lining

The loss of US funding, while painful, may have been necessary medicine. For the first time, Georgian civil society is learning to survive independently.

“Now, first time I see that really viable… society will support independent media and society will support civil society actions,” Robakidze observes. “Whatever happens right now is completely 100% financed by ordinary citizens who are just crowdfunding.”

This grassroots renaissance extends beyond civil society. “We also see for the first time big business also understanding the responsibility that if things go wrong in this part, we can die with them as well.”

The protests themselves represent this new independence. You cannot find “the industry or the sphere where the most prominent people are not part of the protest in Georgia.” All major theaters, singers, and composers have joined the streets. “These are theaters that young people are going to, and you cannot find a ticket for months if you want to attend a theater.”

Even government employees are risking everything. More than 200 public servants were fired simply for posting pro-European statements on Facebook—a purge that backfired by revealing the government’s desperation and creating martyrs.

Global warning: your democracy is next

Georgia’s crisis reflects a global phenomenon that Robakidze calls the “spirit of non-freedom spreading.” The mechanics are eerily familiar across continents.

“A lot of people in the world were living many years thinking that freedom is granted and guaranteed, taking freedom for granted,” she explains. “In Europe, in the US, in the West in general, they had this problem maybe even deeper than the Georgian society has.”

Western societies “allowed in their societies this darkness to spread without reacting to it when it’s needed.”

The warning signs are identical:

• Small compromises that seem manageable
• External funding creating dependency vulnerabilities
• Strategic communication training weaponized against democracy
• Media capture through economic pressure
• Civil society taking freedom for granted.

“Right now weather is the worst for beginner democracies,” she warns. But the crisis is a “wake-up call for not just for us, for societies who want to be democratic and consolidated democracies one day, but for everyone.”

The clock is ticking

As Georgia’s protests continue into their seventh month, the timeline offers a stark warning: democratic collapse can happen faster than anyone imagines. Eighteen months from EU candidate to authoritarian crackdown.

“There is never a bad time to think about your mistakes, and we can never be uncomfortable discussing the elephant in the room, because this elephant will never go anywhere,” Robakidze reflects. “And the only problem that this discussion creates is this uncomfortable feeling, which I think is very important—better experienced earlier than later.”

The uncomfortable truth: external funding made Georgian democracy vulnerable by creating dependency rather than genuine grassroots strength. But losing that crutch may have forced the authentic resistance needed to survive.

Georgia faces its ultimate test—not just of its democratic institutions, but of whether a society that truly tasted freedom can recognize and defeat authoritarianism when it matters most. The answer will determine not just Georgia’s fate, but offer crucial lessons for every democracy grappling with its own “spirit of non-freedom.”

For Robakidze, the fight continues: “We will not let Georgia slide back under Russia’s influence.” The question is whether the world’s other democracies will learn from Georgia’s mistakes before their own 18-month countdown begins.

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Ukrainian analyst Dmytro Zolotukhin recently posed a haunting question: Ukraine has been striving to be a democracy ever since it regained independence, but aren’t Ukrainians, by chance, playing in the team of losers now?

“Absolutely not,” rebutted Timothy Garton Ash at the 2025 Lviv Media Forum, the British historian and Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, whose latest book, “Homelands: A Personal History of Europe,” chronicles the continent’s transformation over half a century and won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize.

“You’re on the winning team. It just may take a bit of time for the victory to come.”

Ash, Europe’s self-described “historian of the present” who has spent decades “breathing Europe,” believes democracy is experiencing growing pains, not death throes.

In fact, he argues that Putin’s war against Ukraine proves democracy’s enduring power.

Ash believes that one of the reasons for Russia’s ongoing invasion was the 2004 Orange Revolution, in which Ukrainians rebelled against the electoral fraud that gave a pro-Russian president victory instead of a Western-leaning candidate: “Putin thought that democracy was coming towards him, in addition to his motives of restoring the Russian Empire.”

The strength of democracy, Ash contends, is evidenced by its unprecedented expansion: “According to Freedom House, in early 1974, there were only 35 free countries in the world. By early 2004, 89.”

What we’re witnessing now, he suggests, is not democracy’s failure but a natural “anti-liberal, anti-democratic counter-revolution” in response to this historic spread, despite all of liberal democracy’s faults. The autocracies and hybrid regimes are simply not delivering—hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Hungary, Serbia, and Hungary are proof of that, Ash believes.

But the data tells a different story

Reality, however, presents a more sobering picture: democracy is hemorrhaging support worldwide at an unprecedented pace.

Only 6.6% of the world’s population live in states defined as full democracies, while 72% live in autocracies—a historic reversal that has seen the global Democracy Index score fall from 5.52 in 2006 to an unprecedented low of 5.17 in 2024.

Even the Western democracies Ukraine aspires to join are backsliding. France’s score fell below the threshold to qualify as a “full democracy” and was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2024.

The United States continues to be classified as a “flawed democracy,” ranked 28th globally. Hungary has recorded the biggest decline ever measured, plummeting to become a “transitional” or “hybrid regime.” When weighted by population, the level of democracy in Europe has fallen back forty years, to where it was in 1978.

Between 2020 and 2024, in one in five elections worldwide, losing candidates publicly rejected the outcome.

Democracy’s three critical ailments

Despite this grim landscape, Timothy Garton Ash maintains his diagnosis offers hope. The historian identifies three fundamental weaknesses that have made democracies vulnerable to authoritarian assault:

1. Democracy degrading into oligarchy

“The great achievement of modern liberal democracy was to separate wealth and power,” Ash explained. “Most of human history, wealth and power have gone together. In oligarchy, they come back together.”

Ukraine knows this threat intimately from its own struggle with oligarchs. But even in established democracies, the lines are blurring dangerously. “Now, even in the United States, we see, with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and all the tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and others, lining up to support him, democracy degrading into oligarchy.”

2. Liberalism creating its own resistance

The second ailment emerges from democracy’s own successes. “What was associated with liberalism over the last 40 years, in particular neoliberalism, globalized, financialized capitalism, but to some extent also identity politics, left a huge part of our societies, in countries like Britain or America, feeling both economically and culturally neglected.”

Into this vacuum step the populists, who revolt against the “liberal cosmopolitan elites” and the big cities.

“They say, we hear you. We’re on your side. And they counterpose democracy to liberalism.” They claim to speak for “the people”—but as Ash notes, “it’s not the whole people. It’s only one part of the people.”

Trump himself once distinguished between “the people, and then there are the other people. And the other people are the bloody foreigners, quote, unquote. The immigrants, the outsiders, the others.”

3. Fragmentation of the public sphere

Democracy depends on shared reality, Ash argues, invoking ancient Athens: “All the citizens meet on the Pnyx. They hear all the facts. They can debate freely all the different policy options. And then together they decide to fight the invading Persians on sea rather than on land, which is how they win the Battle of Salamis.”

Today’s digital revolution has shattered this foundation.

“What’s happened over the years over the last 40 years is because of the digital revolution in media, we have the phenomenon of both monopoly, Facebook, Google, and fragmentation, so that we are losing the kind of public sphere, the kind of information environment you need for democracy to flourish.”

Ash’s seven-point prescription to save democracy

Ash’s remedy is both pragmatic and urgent:

1. “Tough on populism, tough on the causes of populism.” Address the genuine economic and cultural neglect that feeds populist resentment rather than dismissing it.

2. Strengthen all pluralist, anti-majoritarian institutions.”The independence of the courts, the civil service, auditors, obviously the different houses of parliament, and so on and so forth. These are the things that are coming under attack now, for example, in Trump’s America, and have been eroded in countries like Hungary.”

3. Learn from success. “Poland, two years ago, was very close to going down the Hungarian path, to state capture, to the demolition step-by-step of liberal democracy, and they came back. How? By winning an election that was not wholly free and fair. More people turned out to vote than ever before. More young people than old. More women than men voted in that election.”

4. Rebuild the media environment. “If you have public service media worthy of the name, hang on to them for dear life, strengthen their editorial independence, and quadruple the budget.” Ash credits the BBC with helping Britain avoid America’s fate: “You in Ukraine have Suspilne. Hang on to it for dear life. Strengthen its editorial independence. Quadruple the budget.”

5. Keep looking for what people have in common. “You’re going to have this problem in Ukraine in the next few years when the hot phase of the war is over… there’s a big danger of all the tensions and divisions in Ukrainian society coming to the surface. So keep looking for the things that keep people together.”

6. Don’t try to out-populist the populists. “It never works. We know that. If you adopt the rhetoric of the populists, if you do the dog whistle to the populists, voters will say, why should I vote for the dog whistle when I can have the real dog? It only strengthens the Marine Le Pens and the AFDs and the Nigel Farages.”

7. Don’t collaborate, even in very small ways. Drawing on Václav Havel’s wisdom: “Every dictatorship, every authoritarian regime isn’t just built on force. It’s built on these thousands and millions of tiny individual acts of collaboration. So don’t collaborate, even in the smallest way.”

The Ukrainian test case: when optimism meets reality

Ash’s confidence in democracy’s resilience faces its ultimate test in Ukraine. While he speaks of democracy’s long-term victory, Ukrainian survival depends on short-term Western commitment—commitment that’s eroding as anti-democratic populists gain power across the democratic world.

The very democratic backsliding Ash diagnoses is producing leaders hostile to Ukrainian aid. In Poland, despite historical solidarity, anti-Ukrainian sentiment is rising among voters frustrated with economic pressures, culminating in the victory of Karol Nawrocki, who has questioned Ukraine’s EU and NATO aspirations.

Slovakia’s Robert Fico has explicitly cut aid and adopted a Russia-friendly stance.

Romania’s Călin Georgescu, a pro-Putin candidate who praised Russian values and opposed NATO support for Ukraine, won the first round of presidential elections before the vote was annulled due to Russian interference. His political ally George Simion then ran in the 2025 rerun and lost by just 7% in May 2025—meaning pro-Putin forces came within single digits of controlling a NATO country bordering Ukraine.

In the United States, Donald Trump promises “peace deals” that would reward Russian aggression by forcing Ukraine to cede territory.

Ukrainian soldiers die defending democratic ideals while voters in those same democracies choose leaders who would abandon Ukraine to Putin’s sphere of influence—exactly what happened to Georgia after its 2008 war with Russia.

The brutal mathematics are stark. Ukraine’s European integration depends on sustained Western support, but the rise of anti-democratic populists—fueled by the very ailments Ash identifies—is putting that support in jeopardy. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has already blocked EU aid packages. The Trump administration is raising suspicions of directly serving Putin’s interests. The recent Polish election of Nawrocki is sure to send shockwaves regarding supporting Ukraine through Europe.

If Ash is wrong about democracy’s resilience, if the current crisis represents not growing pains but terminal decline, Ukraine faces a choice starker than any since independence: submit to Russian domination or stand alone against an empire. No less than centuries of Ukraine’s national liberation struggle hang in the balance.

The historian’s gamble

Ash’s seven-point plan may be academically sound, and his historical perspective offers valuable long-term hope. But for Ukraine, the timeline of democratic recovery matters as much as its ultimate success. His prescription assumes democracies have the luxury of time to heal themselves—time Ukraine may not have as Western support wavers and Russian pressure intensifies.

The historian’s optimism about democracy’s eventual triumph rings hollow when Ukraine’s immediate survival depends on democracies that are currently failing his own diagnostic tests. While Ash speaks confidently about democracy being “on the winning team,” Ukrainian leaders must plan for the possibility that the team might forfeit the game before victory arrives.

For Ukraine, Timothy Garton Ash’s confidence isn’t just an academic question—it’s an existential gamble. If he’s right, Ukraine’s democratic aspirations will eventually be vindicated. If he’s wrong, they may not survive to see it.

The water began rising quietly, like a whisper. On the morning of 6 June 2023, residents of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast watched small streams seep through their streets. This happened after Russian troops pulled the trigger and blew up the Kakhovka Plant’s dam to prevent a Ukrainian military advance across the Dnipro. What they unleashed that day terrified scientists. 

By evening, a 4-meter wall of water had swept away everything in its path. But as the floodwaters receded weeks later, they left behind something far more sinister than destroyed homes and drowned livestock reaching the Black Sea. 

“We know that garbage and heavy metals from the bottom of the Kakhovka reservoir didn’t go anywhere—they settled on the sea floor, and during storms they rise again to the upper layers of seawater,” warns Yulia Markhel, leader of the ecological movement Let’s do it Ukraine.

What the water carried from the reservoir’s depths would prove to be one of the most severe environmental disasters of the 21st century, a toxic legacy that had been accumulating in silence for over 60 years, the Ukrainian National Ecology Center reports. 

The sleeping giant awakens

When Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka Dam exactly two years ago, they unleashed 18 cubic kilometers of water in just four days. But the water was merely the messenger. What it carried would transform the Black Sea ecosystem for generations.

Local resident Liudmyla Boretska watched the catastrophe unfold from her rooftop refuge.

“Everything was flooded—cemeteries, garbage dumps, cattle burial grounds. Everywhere there were mosquitoes, the smell of death, horrible screams of people and animals, she told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

But beneath the visible horror, something hidden and far more dangerous was stirring.

The destruction exposed lake bed sediment containing more than 90,000 tons of dangerous heavy metals, a toxic cocktail that had been quietly accumulating on the reservoir floor since 1956.

For decades, industrial waste from mines and factories across the Dnipro basin had settled into the sediment like layers in an archaeological dig.

Each year brought new deposits: manganese, arsenic, lead, cadmium—the metallic signatures of Soviet-era industry.

The contamination spreads

Within days, the contaminated flood surge reached the Black Sea, impacting more than 50% of the northwestern Black Sea area. Satellite imagery revealed a massive brown plume spreading across azure waters, carrying decades of accumulated poison.

Viktor Komorin, who studied fish, mussels, and dead dolphins for toxic substances after the disaster, discovered the true scale of contamination.

“In mussels we found toxic substances exceeding the norm by thousands of times,” he reported.

The filter-feeding mollusks had become living repositories of decades of industrial waste.

What lurks beneath

A couple of days later, all this pollution began reaching the shores of Romania and Bulgaria. Freshwater from the Kakhovka Reservoir entered the Black Sea about 3–4 days after the dam burst and reached the coast of Odesa, reducing the normal salinity of the seawater from the usual 17–18‰ to just 4‰.

The contaminated sediments stretched across 620 square kilometers of exposed lake bed—an area larger than many European cities. In this toxic wasteland, previously absorbed heavy metals were absorbed by vegetation and animals and moved through the local food web.

Historical echoes from depths

As the waters receded, they revealed more than industrial poison. Kherson historian Oleksii Patalakh describes what emerged.

He says the area where the reservoir once stood was a true natural treasure—the green lungs of southern Ukraine. It was a system of rivers, lakes, and islands with incredibly diverse flora and fauna and vast fish stocks, including sturgeon, Suspilne reports. He explains that sturgeon disappeared from the Dnipro after the Kakhovka Reservoir was created.

“In addition, this territory is an archaeological landmark. It includes about five of the eight Zaporizhzhian Sich strongholds. There are fortresses from the time of the Late Scythians, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Ulus of Jochi, more commonly known as the Golden Horde,” he continues. 

There were many ports and fortresses on the islands, such as on Tavani Island, between Beryslav and Kakhovka. There were two satellite fortresses: Mustrit-Kermen, which was connected to Gazi-Kermen, and Mubarek-Kermen, which was connected to Islam-Kermen, present-day Kakhovka. 

He adds that shortly after the water receded in 2023, specialists in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast discovered the remains of a submerged Sich-era church, reconstructed in the early 19th century — the site of Nova Sich.

Patalakh emphasizes that the territory from Khortytsia and downriver lies Zaporizhzhia, the historic land of the Cossacks, Ukrainian national warriors-heroes. According to him, these are ancient Cossack territories, home to many winter settlements and numerous submerged Cossack cemeteries. On the one hand, the water could destroy all this. On the other hand, researchers now have the opportunity to study these objects of historical heritage.

The reckoning ahead

The scale of environmental destruction has prompted calls for new international legal frameworks. This disaster may become the first test case for prosecuting environmental war crimes under international law.

Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice researchers concluded that the case “may become the first application of the ICC’s Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute, which concerns causing ‘excessive’ environmental damage compared to expected military advantage”.

Moreover, there is evidence that Russian troops prevented people from evacuation from the flooded areas, despite the deadly threat they unleashed to reach their ghost objective. 

Much of the damage caused by the breach of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam is irreversible, with likely changes to the environment that could have impacts on ecosystems and human health. The total damage is estimated at nearly $14 billion.

Every day, 180 Russian glide bombs fall on Ukraine. Now they’re falling from twice as far away.

Russia has quietly deployed a new version of its satellite-guided glide bombs that can strike targets from more than 95 kilometers away—double the range of previous models.

The extended reach means Russian pilots can drop their deadly cargo while staying safely beyond most Ukrainian air defenses, fundamentally shifting the tactical balance along the 1100-kilometer front line.

The more aerodynamic UMPK-PD bomb first appeared under the wing of a Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber this spring.

“The Russian aerospace forces test new glide bombs with unified planning and correction modules with extended range (up to 95 km) in Kharkiv Oblast,” CDS reported. 

According to CDS, the Russians have lobbed UMPK-PDs at Kharkiv Oblast from positions over the village of Tomarovka in Belgorod Oblast, 30 km from Russia’s border with Ukraine, on May 31. “Similar glide bombs were used against defense forces in Sumy Oblast in May 2025,” CDS noted.

It’s unclear what percentage of the daily UMPK strikes involve the longer-range version. According to Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia has dropped 27,700 aerial bombs on Ukraine just this year. “That’s in less than half a year,” Zelensky said.

Facts are stubborn things. Since the beginning of this year, the Russian army has carried out attacks against Ukraine using nearly 27,700 aerial bombs, almost 11,200 Shahed drones, around 9,000 other types of attack UAVs, and more than 700 missiles, including ballistic ones. And…

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 4, 2025

Jam-resistant glide bombs

The farther away from the target a warplane can drop its bomb, the fewer enemy air defenses it’s exposed to. Farther is safer. 

And it might help mitigate Ukrainian jamming, too. Ukrainian forces have deployed powerful electronic warfare systems that can broadcast radio noise in the direction of satellite-guided munitions such as the UMPKs.

One new jammer, the Lima, is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing in Kharkiv Oblast, the team’s founder claimed.

Lima isn’t just a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” the founder explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”

Ukrainian forces first deployed Lima to protect Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, apparently last year.

“After the deployment of the E.W. system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether,” said an official with Night Watch, the team that developed Lima. 

The jamming caused some Russians to panic. “The golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force, noted in a recent missive. “All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” the channel added.

But jamming requires a lot of electrical power—and it requires more electrical power the farther the target, a UMPK or another system, is from the jammer. “Like a long-distance runner, radio signals lose strength the further they travel,” explained Thomas Withington, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute in London.

A farther-flying UMPK is exposed to less jamming, especially in the early moments of its flight. For at least a portion of its one-way journey toward its target, it might be able to navigate accurately. Even if Ukrainian jamming grows more powerful closer to the target, it might be too late: the bomb might already be on course for an accurate hit.

The good news for Ukrainian developers is there’s a straightforward solution to longer-range UMPKs. That is: jam harder, with more powerful emitters.

Russian troops are piling onto motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles and attacking in small groups in Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine. But the shift to smaller, lighter assault groups doesn’t mean the Russians are losing momentum in Sumy.

In fact, they may be preparing to march farther south—toward the city of Sumy itself.

50,000 troops, 20 kilometers to target

In late May, a powerful Russian force—50,000 troops plus hundreds of vehicles—rolled toward the border and into Sumy Oblast, reversing modest Ukrainian gains along the border region. Two weeks later, the Russians had captured several border villages in a 150-square-kilometer pocket.

Sumy lies just 20 kilometers to the south.

As the offensive grinds on, the Russians’ assault tactics have begun to shift.

“On the Sumy direction, Russian forces have changed tactics and conduct assaults in groups of eight to 10 personnel, use motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles (quad bikes) for rapid movement, secure positions and mass forces for further attacks,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported Thursday.

Trading armored vehicles for unarmored ones, and fighting in smaller groups, can make individual Russian troops more vulnerable to Ukrainian drones. But that’s all part of the plan, as analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds at the Royal United Services Institute in London noted in a pair of reports from this year and last.

Costly reconnaissance by fire

According to Watling and Reynolds, small probes are just the first phase for major Russian assaults. “First, they send sections/squads of poorly trained troops, perhaps eight personnel at a time (although some larger attacks consist of up to 30 personnel supported by one or two infantry fighting vehicles),” Watling and Reynolds explained.

“These are ordered to advance towards where they assess Ukrainian positions to be, conducting reconnaissance by drawing fire,” the analysts added. “If the group encounters resistance, Russian commanders assess where they believe the best lines of approach are, and in particular, where the boundaries between defensive units lie.”

Next, Russian artillery and precision glide bombs rain down.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Russians are now dropping nearly 180 of the glide bombs every day all along the front line. That’s up from 100 as recently as last year.

“When rotation or disruption of the defense is achieved, Russian units aim to conduct more deliberate assault actions,” Watling and Reynolds wrote.

The small, vulnerable assaults are just the preludes to larger, more powerful attacks. This probe-then-attack approach to ground warfare, with light infantry doing the probing, can be costly in lives. It’s not for no reason that Russian casualties have exceeded 1,000 a day for the better part of a year.

Ukraine’s difficult math

But as long as recruitment remains robust, the Kremlin doesn’t seem to mind, Watling and Reynolds explained. “The Russian group of forces continues to take significant casualties, but is nevertheless growing in size.”

The pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team initially described the Russian offensive in Sumy as “gradual.” But another analyst is worried it might accelerate as Ukraine shifts more forces to the south to block Russian advances around the eastern city of Pokrovsk.

“Ukraine shifted tens of thousands of troops” from Sumy, noted Tatarigami, the founder of Frontelligence Insight. That had the effect of “leaving that front undermanned and accelerating Russia’s gains there.”

The destruction of a few smaller Russian assault groups, most likely conducting reconnaissance missions, belies the overall superiority of the Russian force in the north—and the growing likelihood of further Russian advances.

“Unless the loss ratio begins to shift decisively in Ukraine’s favor, Russian forces are likely to continue advancing,” Tatarigami warned.

The Ukrainian air force has responded by sortieing more of its precious, ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters for bombing raids targeting the attacking Russians. But it might take more than a surge in air power to halt the Russian march on Sumy.

One of the latest do-it-yourself armored vehicles in the arsenal of the Russian army in Ukraine may also be one of the fakest. The up-armored MT-LB armored tractor appears to sport extensive protection against Ukrainian drones. But some of the protection might be strictly for show.

For the unfortunate Russian crew of the improvised vehicle, the possible fakery is a tragedy in the making if and when the vehicle’s potentially fake defenses meet real Ukrainian drones. For the Ukrainian drone operators, the vehicular stagecraft is an opportunity—to knock out yet another Russian vehicle.

On Sunday, Andrey Rudenko, a Russian propagandist reporting from occupied Donetsk Oblast, highlighted the work of mechanics working for the Russian army’s 1st Guards Tank Army.

“Servicemen of the repair company of the motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the west grouping of forces restore, repair and modernize military equipment,” Rudenko wrote. “Specialists are engaged in the repair of tracked and wheeled vehicles, including the replacement of engines and the installation of dynamic and anti-drone protection kits.”

The Russians really put in the effort. In addition to a folding visor on top of the vehicle, Russian troops also mounted something separately on the front and decorated it with what appears to be EW (maybe?).

In some cases, such experiments might actually provide decent… pic.twitter.com/z76t9Bm4Cm

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) June 2, 2025

The video accompanying purports to depict an impressive example of a drone-hardened armored vehicle—a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor that, in its baseline form, weighs just 13 tons and has armor that’s just 14 millimeters thick at its thickest point. That’s barely adequate to protect a vehicle from machine gun fire—to say nothing of protecting it from the thousands of explosive first-person-view drones that prowl the front line every day.

FPV drones, which Ukrainian industry builds at a rate of millions of copies a year, now account for the majority of Russian vehicle losses—and have lately driven the total tally of Russian losses to more than 17,000 tanks, fighting vehicles, armored trucks and other vehicles.

Kitchen pots disguised as electronic warfare systems

The MT-LB in the 1st Guards Tank Army’s workshop boasts a shell of welded-on metal plates, dangling chains to guard the fronts of the tracks and, most impressively, a hinged anti-drone grill—a “cope cage”—that opens up to reveal a mast for electronic systems. Potentially medium-range radio jammers for grounding incoming drones.

And on the vehicles’ front, there are three round radomes that appear to be shorter-range jammers. On its face, it’s a comprehensive anti-drone suite. The problem is: the radomes for the short-range jammers don’t seem to match any known design. They might even be kitchen pots painted to resemble military hardware. In that case, it should go without saying, they’d be totally useless against drones.

1/ Russian troops have been forbidden to ride in vehicles that don't have electronic warfare equipped, but there's a shortage of EW devices. To get around this, Russian soldiers are reportedly painting plastic dishwashing bowls and sticking them on the roofs of their vehicles. pic.twitter.com/5DTV1p8luc

— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) May 7, 2025

It became apparent recently that some Russian regiments were bolting pots onto their armored vehicles owing to jammer shortages and delays. “In a certain kingdom, the enemy began to hit equipment with drones,” Russian Telegram channel Two Majors wrote euphemistically. “Then the soldiers were forbidden to ride in the equipment if there was no miracle electronic warfare system on the roof.”

That was the origin of the fake jammers, Two Majors explained. “The military police were strictly told to watch for external signs of electronic warfare on the vehicles, so that the soldiers would take care of themselves. But they have to ride. The army is moving forward, they can’t carry ammunition and food on donkeys—and other types of supplies.”

Deadly theater of fake military protection

“What to do?” Two Majors asked rhetorically. “They ordered electronic warfare, but while it was coming … they took plastic basins and covered them with ‘secret paint that deflects enemy drones.’ At the same time, it looks like it’s an electronic warfare system, and now the military police posts frown from afar, but let them through: there is a yellow dome on the roof, which means there is order.”

That supposed “order” masks a serious problem for Russian forces, of course. Fake jammers might help get front-line troops through the military police checkpoints, but they won’t defeat Ukraine’s drones.

What happens when your enemy copies your best weapon? Russia’s latest drone innovation mirrors Ukraine’s own breakthrough—and the implications stretch far beyond the battlefield.

Russia’s Molniya drone mothership carries FPV attack drones tens of kilometers behind Ukrainian lines, marking the first confirmed use of this Ukrainian-pioneered technology by Russian forces.

The innovation, which Ukrainian forces developed and Russia has now embraced, extends the range of smaller explosives-laden drones from mere miles to dozens of kilometers. It’s essentially a smaller-scale, aerial version of the drone deployment method the Ukrainian state security agency, or SBU, used to devastate five Russian air bases on Sunday.

The SBU operation, involving more than 100 small quadcopter drones smuggled across Russia in specially modified truck trailers, ended with the destruction of more than a dozen Russian warplanes including irreplaceable Tupolev Tu-22M and Tu-95 bombers and Beriev A-50 radar planes.

Russia copies Ukrainian drone tactics

The Russian drone-carrying drone was caught on camera for the first time on or just before Wednesday. Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, identified the carrier as a Molniya, an inexpensive one-way attack drone with a battery-powered propeller engine and a payload of up to five kg. The Molniya’s payload was a standard first-person-view quadcopter.

“These could be a serious problem,” Lee warned.

The rationale behind the drone-piggybacking-on-a-drone innovation is obvious. On its own, an FPV drone ranges just a few miles. It’s constrained by its battery life and the reach of its radio transmitter. By contrast, a Molniya ranges as far as 40 km. It could launch its FPV at the end of its sortie, and even relay the FPV’s radio signal back to the drones’ operators—effectively adding tens of kilometers to the FPV’s range.

Once the FPV has struck its target, the Molniya no longer needs to act as a carrier and relay—and can strike a target, too.

Ukraine pioneered drone motherships in 2023

Drone-carrying “mothership” drones are proliferating on both sides of Russia’s 39-month war on Ukraine. Russian troops first encountered Ukrainian motherships in November 2023. Today, when Ukrainian FPVs strike as far as 40 km behind the line of contact, it’s often because they were carried into the Russian rear area by motherships.

From sea to sky: Ukraine’s expanding drone fleet

The Ukrainians even launch FPVs from their satellite-controlled unmanned surface vehicles. In other words, drone-carrying drone boats.

The first strike by a USV drone-carrier, in December, targeted a Russian-occupied oil platform in the Black Sea. Four months later, the robotic aircraft carriers motored along the coast of occupied Crimea, launching FPVs that blew up a pair of Russian air-defense vehicles: an Osa and a Strela.

The newest Ukrainian aerial mothership, the StratForce Gogol-M, deployed last month. The propeller-driven, catapult-launched Gogol-M can carry two FPVs as far as 300 km. “A $10,000 mission replaces what previously required $3 to $5 million missile systems,” a StratForce official told Forbes.

The communication challenge driving AI adoption

The main problem for all operators of mothership drones is communication. Line-of-sight radio struggles to reach over the horizon, potentially just a few miles away. Satellite radio signals can be jammed. Ranging hundreds of kilometers from their operators, a mothership and its smaller drones risk getting cut off.

Autonomy is one answer. It’s not for no reason that StratForce has equipped the Gogol-M with A.I. that can steer the drones toward recognizable targets. “It’s like a self-driving car,” the company official told Forbes.

It’s unclear whether the Russians have installed AI in the Molniya or other mothership drones.

Reusable vs. expendable: the next evolution

It’s also unclear whether the Russians expect any of the drone-carrying Molniyas to return to base after launching their FPVs. The Gogol-M is designed to launch its FPVs and then return to base, effectively making it the small, robotic analogue of a manned bomber armed with even smaller cruise missiles.

Reusable motherships are even more dangerous than single-use motherships. If their FPVs miss you the first time, they might just return to base, load up more FPVs—and come after you again.

One of the latest do-it-yourself armored vehicles in the arsenal of the Russian army in Ukraine may also be one of the fakest. The up-armored MT-LB armored tractor appears to sport extensive protection against Ukrainian drones. But some of the protection might be strictly for show.

For the unfortunate Russian crew of the improvised vehicle, the possible fakery is a tragedy in the making if and when the vehicle’s potentially fake defenses meet real Ukrainian drones. For the Ukrainian drone operators, the vehicular stagecraft is an opportunity—to knock out yet another Russian vehicle.

On Sunday, Andrey Rudenko, a Russian propagandist reporting from occupied Donetsk Oblast, highlighted the work of mechanics working for the Russian army’s 1st Guards Tank Army. 

“Servicemen of the repair company of the motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the west grouping of forces restore, repair and modernize military equipment,” Rudenko wrote. “Specialists are engaged in the repair of tracked and wheeled vehicles, including the replacement of engines and the installation of dynamic and anti-drone protection kits.” 

The Russians really put in the effort. In addition to a folding visor on top of the vehicle, Russian troops also mounted something separately on the front and decorated it with what appears to be EW (maybe?).

In some cases, such experiments might actually provide decent… pic.twitter.com/z76t9Bm4Cm

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) June 2, 2025

The video accompanying purports to depict an impressive example of a drone-hardened armored vehicle—a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor that, in its baseline form, weighs just 13 tons and has armor that’s just 14 millimeters thick at its thickest point. That’s barely adequate to protect a vehicle from machine gun fire—to say nothing of protecting it from the thousands of explosive first-person-view drones that prowl the front line every day.

FPV drones, which Ukrainian industry builds at a rate of millions of copies a year, now account for the majority of Russian vehicle losses—and have lately driven the total tally of Russian losses to more than 17,000 tanks, fighting vehicles, armored trucks and other vehicles.

The MT-LB in the 1st Guards Tank Army’s workshop boasts a shell of welded-on metal plates, dangling chains to guard the fronts of the tracks and, most impressively, a hinged anti-drone grill—a “cope cage”—that opens up to reveal a mast for electronic systems. Potentially medium-range radio jammers for grounding incoming drones.

And on the vehicles’ front, there are three round radomes that appear to be shorter-range jammers. On its face, it’s a comprehensive anti-drone suite. The problem is: the radomes for the short-range jammers don’t seem to match any known design. They might even be kitchen pots painted to resemble military hardware. In that case, it should go without saying, they’d be totally useless against drones.

1/ Russian troops have been forbidden to ride in vehicles that don't have electronic warfare equipped, but there's a shortage of EW devices. To get around this, Russian soldiers are reportedly painting plastic dishwashing bowls and sticking them on the roofs of their vehicles. pic.twitter.com/5DTV1p8luc

— ChrisO_wiki (@ChrisO_wiki) May 7, 2025

Jammer theater

It became apparent recently that some Russian regiments were bolting pots onto their armored vehicles owing to jammer shortages and delays. “In a certain kingdom, the enemy began to hit equipment with drones,” Russian Telegram channel Two Majors wrote euphemistically. “Then the soldiers were forbidden to ride in the equipment if there was no miracle electronic warfare system on the roof.”

That was the origin of the fake jammers, Two Majors explained. “The military police were strictly told to watch for external signs of electronic warfare on the vehicles, so that the soldiers would take care of themselves. But they have to ride. The army is moving forward, they can’t carry ammunition and food on donkeys—and other types of supplies.”

“What to do?” Two Majors asked rhetorically. “They ordered electronic warfare, but while it was coming  … they took plastic basins and covered them with ‘secret paint that deflects enemy drones.’ At the same time, it looks like it’s an electronic warfare system, and now the military police posts frown from afar, but let them through: there is a yellow dome on the roof, which means there is order.”

That supposed “order” masks a serious problem for Russian forces, of course. Fake jammers might help get front-line troops through the military police checkpoints, but they won’t defeat Ukraine’s drones. 

Something has changed in Ukraine’s skies. Russian air defenses that once dominated the battlefield are being picked apart with surgical precision—not by lone wolf pilots, but by something entirely new.

The Ukrainian F-16 pilots fighting to hold back 50,000 Russian troops in Sumy Oblast aren’t fighting alone anymore. More and more, the air force’s jets fight as teams.

A dramatic video that circulated online on Monday depicts a Sukhoi Su-27 from the Ukrainian air force’s 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade blowing up a Russian air-defense vehicle somewhere along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine.

Ukrainian Su-27 of the 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade successfully engaged and destroyed a Russian surface-to-air missile system (SAM) using an HARM missile. The strike occurred while the aircraft was performing an escort role for a strike group. https://t.co/VEREqXzdhM

P.S:… pic.twitter.com/I3cvLUUnDH

— Special Kherson Cat (@bayraktar_1love) June 2, 2025

When Soviet jets learned Western teamwork

The pilot of the Soviet-vintage supersonic fighter wasn’t just hunting random Russian air defenses. No, he was targeting Russian defenses “like a scalpel,” to borrow one Ukrainian pilot’s simile, to clear a path for other Ukrainian warplanes to perform their own missions.

As the Ukrainian air force takes delivery of up to 85 Lockheed Martin F-16s from a Danish-Dutch-Norwegian consortium, as well as a dozen or more Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters from France, the flying branch’s fleet is getting much more diverse.

The upgraded Western types complement a pre-war fleet that had around 125 Sukhoi Su-24 bombers, Su-25 attack jets, Su-27s, and Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters.

In all, the Ukrainian air force is probably bigger than it was in February 2022—and it’s certainly much more modern as more Western jets arrive and the Soviet leftovers get their own upgrades, including Western bombs and missiles.

This specialization, and teamwork, first became possible as US contractors helped Ukrainian airmen modify their Su-27s and MiG-29s to fire American-made AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, which home in on enemy radar signals from as far away as 148 km. 

Ukraine’s ex-Soviet jets lack internal radar-jamming equipment, so they need help fighting their way through dense Russian defenses. Sukhois and MiGs armed with HARMs can escort bomb-laden Sukhois and MiGs to their targets. 

It was a HARM that the Su-27 pilot fired at the Russian air-defense vehicle on or before Monday.

“The Cossack in the Su-27, performing the task of covering the strike group, did a good job,” noted Sunflower, the Telegram channel that first posted the video of the attack.   

From solo missions to strike packages

The arrival of the first F-16s back in August, and the first Mirage 2000s in February, allowed even more complex strike packages. Unlike the Sukhois and MiGs, the F-16s and Mirage 2000s do have internal radar-jammers.

“Sometimes when we arrive, there are already F-16s waiting there, or sometimes Mirages,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said in an official video from March. 

The F-16s and Mirages “either cover the whole package that is sent there to [strike] our enemies, or also strike [themselves],” the pilot said.

So while some F-16s are flying attack sorties over Sumy with American-made precision glide bombs, others may be flying jamming missions to protect the attackers—while other Ukrainian fighters, perhaps Su-27s, target the Russian air-defenses that the F-16s and Mirages can’t jam.

These complex fighter packages still don’t risk striking very deep inside Russia, where the air defenses might be prohibitively dense. “Currently, we can only strike at tactical depth,” the pilot in the March interview conceded. That means tens of kilometers rather than hundreds of kilometers.

But the fight for Sumy is a fight at tactical depth—inside Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force’s fighter packages should be up to the task.

In the cold December of 2023, Russia launched the most intense massive missile and drone strikes on Ukraine since the start of the war.

The most devastating came on 29 December, when Russia fired around 158 aerial targets, including various types of missiles. Approximately 55 people were killed, and over 170 were injured.

That same month, Ukraine began planning its largest-ever operation against Russian aircraft — and activated it in June 2025, launching hundreds of drones from trucks prepared by covert agents.

“The planning, organization, and every detail were perfectly executed. It’s safe to say this was a truly unique operation,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explained.

A senior US defense official told CNN that Ukraine’s attack showed a level of sophistication that they had not seen before.

The official added that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received regular updates on the operation during his visit to Joint Base Andrews on 1 June but had not yet spoken to his Ukrainian counterparts.

This chain of events unfolded as Russia and Ukraine returned to tense peace talks in Istanbul, shadowed by uncertainty. Ahead of the talks, US President Donald Trump had voiced frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s resistance to advancing the negotiations.

Putin had proposed “direct talks” in Turkiye earlier in the month but failed to appear, even after Zelenskyy agreed to the meeting. In the end, both countries sent only low-level delegations.

Ukraine is running out of choices. Russia has 50,000 troops threatening to besiege Sumy, a city with a pre-war population of 250,000 just 30 kilometers from the border. Ukraine’s response: gamble its rarest aircraft on missions they might not survive.

The Ukrainian air force is sortieing its small fleet of ex-European F-16s to drop American-made glide bombs on Russian regiments rolling into Sumy Oblast. 

Two months after an elite Russian drone group cut the supply lines feeding the Ukrainian force clinging to a 600-square-km salient around the town of Sudzha in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast—ultimately driving the Ukrainians from Kursk after a bitter, six-month battle—the Russians are pressing their advantage on the northern front of their 39-month wider war on Ukraine. 

In all, there are no fewer than 50,000 Russian troops in Kursk. The Ukrainian brigades holding the line in Sumy, just across the border from Kursk, have many fewer troops—especially now that at least one formation, the elite 82nd Air Assault Brigade, has rushed south to Donetsk Oblast to block a Russian attack on the town of Kostiantynivka, a critical strongpoint in Ukrainian defenses in the east.

The arrival of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade and other reinforcements in the east has helped to slow the Russian advance along the stretch of front line between Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar—can could save Kramatorsk and other key cities comprising the so-called “fortress belt” threading through Donetsk toward the border in the north.

“On the Sumy direction, the enemy offensive is intensifying,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned. “The Kursk group of forces is concentrating reserves in the border zone, attempting to break through between Yunakivka and Vodolahy.” 

The Ukrainian air force has received just a few dozen of the 85 American-built F-16 fighters that a Danish-Dutch-Norwegian consortium has pledged from European surplus stocks. Three of the single-engine, supersonic fighters have been lost since they first flew into action in August.

NATO’s “military Wi-Fi” arrives

The F-16s are precious assets, but the dire situation in Sumy warrants risking them. The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted F-16s lobbing US-supplied Small Diameter Bombs—114-kg precision glide bombs—at Russian forces in and around Kursk.

“The application of F-16s in this role came as somewhat of a surprise,” CIT observed, “as they were initially utilized as ‘flying air defense’ deep within Ukrainian territory and only began appearing near the front line in the Sumy region in late winter 2025, accompanying Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter aircraft that launched guided aerial bombs.”

“It is possible that the [Ukrainian air force] has begun using their F-16s closer to the front line due to the recent arrival of new aircraft or due to an acute need to increase firepower,” CIT proposed.

The F-16s are being upgraded for more dangerous missions. Kateryna Chernohorenko, the Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine for Digital Development, Digital Transformation and Digitalization, announced that the F-16s—as well as Ukraine’s French-supplied Mirage 2000 jets—will get software allowing them to plug into the Link-16 radio network.

Link-16, which Chernohorenko described as “NATO’s military Wi-Fi,” connects command posts, radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, and warplanes in a single network. It can share data so that each HQ, missile battery, and plane sees what the others see. 

The Link-16 upgrade may not save all the Ukrainian F-16s as they fly into the danger zone to bomb the Russian troops threatening Sumy. But the Ukrainian command is running out of options as it struggles to hold back Russia’s dual offensives. 

The latest missile to join the Russian terror campaign is one of the weirdest: a target drone that the Russians have modified for a one-way attack. 

The Dan-M is a 350-kg jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle that Russia’s Sokol design bureau designed for air-defense training back in the early 1990s. Launched from the ground or air, a Dan-M is capable of flying at very low altitude and high subsonic speed for as long as 40 minutes.

On or before Thursday, Russian forces in Crimea launched three Dan-Ms at Ukraine. The Russians had modified the Dan-Ms into a kind of “attack UAV,” according to drone expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov. The modifications included repainting the drones from their normal bright red to a more subtle color, Beskrestnov wrote—and presumably also included the addition of a warhead.

It’s unclear whether the Dan-Ms struck their targets. “For information security reasons, I cannot report the fate of this group of attack UAVs,” Beskrestnov wrote.

If a Dan-M survives its training sortie, it pops a parachute and floats back to the ground for repairs and reuse. A single Dan-M is usually good for up to 10 training flights before it wears out.

It should be pretty easy to convert the target drones into cruise missiles: simply add a warhead and maybe omit the parachute.

Indeed, the Ukrainians have performed similar modifications on their 1970s-vintage Tupolev Tu-141/143 reconnaissance drones. Swapping out their cameras for warheads, Ukrainian forces fired several old Tu-141/143s at targets in Russia’s border oblasts early in Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine. 

But the Ukrainians were, at the time, desperate for deep-strike munitions. They hadn’t yet ramped up development and production of purpose-made long-range strike drones. The explosive Tu-141/143s were an expedient—one Ukraine no longer needs.

What’s the point?

Why does Russia need to arm its Dan-Ms? Even Beskrestnov doesn’t know for sure. “We did this because we did not have cruise missiles and long-range attack UAVs,” he wrote. “And why Russia made this modification is unclear.”

One possibility is that the Russians “have a large number of these UAVs,” Beskrestnov proposed.

Russian air-defense troops get plenty of practice shooting at actual Ukrainian missiles and drones. The wider war may have rendered potentially substantial stocks of Dan-Ms redundant—so why not add warheads and shoot them at Ukraine?

The most obvious explanation—that Russia is running low on purpose-designed deep-strike munitions—seems unlikely. If anything, the Russian strike arsenal is expanding as the Kremlin finds more ways around foreign sanctions and, with growing stocks of high-tech components, ramps up production of munitions, including Kh-101, Kh-555, Banderol cruise missiles, KAB glide bombs, and Shahed attack drones.  

The two biggest Russian air raids of the wider war took place on the nights of May 24 and 25, each involving more than 350 missiles and drones. The munitions rained down on cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.

“Russian strikes against Ukraine continue to disproportionately impact civilians and civilian infrastructure,” noted the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

The intensifying raids are “part of a cognitive warfare effort to weaken Ukrainian resolve and to undermine Western support for Ukraine,” ISW explained.

Adding Dan-M drones to the Russian arsenal only slightly expands the terror campaign. But for the Russians, every weapon they can fire at Ukrainian cities is a weapon well-spent. 

Russia aimed what may have been an Iskander missile at apparent high-value targets—and missed. The drone-hunting plane or planes the Russians hoped to blow up weren’t there. 

On or just before 23 May, Russia’s strike complex—aerial or satellite intel cueing Russian missile strikes across Ukraine—identified what the Russian planners clearly believed were active Ukrainian warplanes at an airfield in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, 50 km from the front line in southern Ukraine.

A ballistic missile, potentially a $3 million Iskander missile—one of Russia’s best missiles—streaked down. The Russian missile strike turned the airfield into flames. 

Russian missile strike on some kind of Ukrainian airstrip, claiming to have destroyed 3x Yak-52s(thats what im assuming they mean if they say 3x propeller UAV destroyers) pic.twitter.com/AvzbECCmn1

— WarVehicleTracker ☧ (@WarVehicle) May 23, 2025

The targets, according to Russian bloggers, were three propeller-driven “drone-destroyers.” A clear reference to the old Yakovlev Yak-52 piston-engine training planes Ukrainian forces fly on anti-drone patrols using Russian missile defense tactics.

Yak-52s would’ve been worthwhile targets for Russian missiles. Ukrainian airmen have been taking charge of the 1970s-vintage planes, apparently buying or borrowing them from civilian flying clubs, and flying them over front-line cities in southern Ukraine with a pilot in the front seat and a shotgun-armed gunner in the back seat.

The shotgun-armed Yak-52s—inexpensive, slow-flying, and maneuverable—are perfect drone hunters that have frustrated Russian missile targeting. In a heady three months starting last May, one Ukrainian Yak-52 shot down a large number of Russian drones over Kherson Oblast, prompting increased Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian positions.

Fans of the World War I-style barnstormer posted videos and photos of the Yak-52 in action and on the ground. A growing number of kill markings on the side of the old trainer spoke to its effectiveness against Russian missiles and drones. It worked so well that the Ukrainian intelligence directorate also began training gunners to hunt Russian unmanned aerial vehicles from locally-made Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes.

That first Yakovlev drone killer was so irritating to Russian planners that, in July, they targeted the plane at its apparent base near Odesa using an Iskander missile strike. On 15 July, a Russian drone surveyed the airfield, pinpointing several parked Ukrainian UAVs, as well as hangars where the Yak-52 may have sheltered.

Successful and unsuccessful Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s drone hunters

An Iskander missile streaked in, exploding between the drones and the hangars. One analyst scrutinized video and satellite imagery and concluded that the Russian missile strike damaged three drones and several hangars on 15 July.

It’s unclear whether the Yak-52 was in one of the damaged hangars when the Russian missile hit. But it’s telling that, after the Iskander missile strike, there were no new sightings of the famous piston plane.

There are scores of Yak-52s in Ukraine. And there was nothing stopping the Ukrainian defense ministry from acquiring a replacement plane after the Russian missile attack. Eight months later, a second Yak-52 drone killer took to the air. 

A screengrab from the video feed of a Russian surveillance drone that circulated online on 24 March depicted a dramatically painted Yak-52 maneuvering into position so its back-seat gunner can take a shot at the drone with a rifle, despite the threat of Russian missile strikes.

It was that plane, or its equivalents, that the Russians were apparently targeting with their Iskander missile on 23 May—obviously hoping to duplicate their July success with another precise Russian missile strike.

Footage of Russian missile strike on a small airfield located near Kyslychuvatka in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The only planes stationed at that airport are Soviet-era Antonov An-2 biplanes. As Google Earth satellite imagery show, those An-2s have been there for years (pic… pic.twitter.com/wxRkIFFZpE

— Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (BlueSky too) (@Archer83Able) May 23, 2025

A four-ton, 500-km-range Iskander missile is a powerful weapon in Russia’s arsenal. And the Russian deep strike complex using these missiles is a constant threat to Ukrainian forces everywhere in the war-torn country.

But a Russian missile strike is only as effective as its supporting intel. In this case, the intel was bad. So the expensive Russian missile likely blew up old, grounded An-2s instead of active Ukrainian aircraft.

Ukraine’s Yak-52—or Yak-52s—survived to fight another day, continuing to evade Russian missiles and hunt drones.

The bad news for Russian missile strike planners is good news for Ukrainian airmen and the troops and civilians they protect from Russian missiles and drones.

Russia and Belarus have significantly reduced the scale of the planned Zapad-2025 joint military exercise and relocated its main activities away from NATO-adjacent areas, a decision likely driven by Russian military overstretch due to Moscow’s war in Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) on 28 May.

Belarusian Defense Minister Lieutenant General Viktor Khrenin announced on social media that the upcoming Zapad-2025 exercise would be relocated from the western border of Belarus to central parts of the country. He claimed this move aimed to demonstrate “readiness for de-escalation, dialogue, and peace.”

However, ISW notes that such a decision would not have been made without Moscow’s approval, suggesting broader strategic motives.

“Belarussian authorities would not have been able to make this decision independently without Russia. Russia and Belarus are attempting to posture themselves as unthreatening, reasonable, and cooperative to the West,” ISW wrote.

Forces unavailable due to Ukraine deployment

ISW points out that previous Zapad exercises involved large formations, including elements of Russia’s 1st Guards Tank Army, 20th Combined Arms Army, 6th Combined Arms Army, and approximately 4,000 Airborne (VDV) personnel from the 7th, 76th, 98th, and 106th divisions. Many of these units are now engaged in combat operations in Ukraine.

“Belarusian officials previously claimed that at least 13,000 personnel would participate in the Zapad-2025 exercise, and Russia and Belarus likely had to downsize the joint exercise as most of its forces are fighting in Ukraine,” ISW says.

Russia’s shrinking military bandwidth

The Zapad-2023 exercise was canceled unexpectedly, which ISW says is “very likely due to Russia’s equipment and manpower requirements for” the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The decision to downsize Zapad-2025 likely reflects similar constraints.

An awful clash is imminent along the villages and fields south of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. An industrial town with a pre-war population of 67,000, Kostiantynivka is the last major settlement between the front line and Kramatorsk, a city of 147,000 buttressing the last line of Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk.

Capturing Donetsk is one of Russia’s top objectives in its 39-month wider war on Ukraine. Holding Donetsk is one of Ukraine’s top objectives. Both sides are surging forces into the area around Kostiantynivka. The fighting is escalating. Casualties are piling up. And the worst is yet to come.

“The occupiers are trying to advance toward Kostiantynivka,” the Ukrainian army’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade reported last week. In fact, they’ve been trying for weeks now. An assault by around 150 Russian motorcycle troops on the village of Yelyzavetivka in mid-April may have signaled the beginning of the Russian offensive. 

The 93rd Mechanized Brigade is one of no fewer than a dozen Ukrainian brigades—each with thousands of troops, thousands of drones, and hundreds of armored vehicles and howitzers—that have deployed battalions around the town. 

Some of the Ukrainian ground forces’ best units are in the area. Not just the battle-hardened 93rd Mechanized Brigade, but also the aggressive 5th Assault Brigade and the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, a reorganized tank brigade with up-armored Leopard 1A5 tanks.

They’re arrayed along a 30-kilometer arc—one end anchored to the southwest in the direction of Pokrovsk, the middle running through the outskirts of Toretsk and the opposite end anchored outside Chasiv Yar, to the northeast. “In the north, Russian forces are attempting to break through from the direction of Chasiv Yar,” the 93rd Mechanized Brigade noted, “while in the south they are attacking from the Pokrovsk highway.”

Ukrainian forces and earthworks are thinnest to the southwest. Probing for gaps in the line last week, the Russians advanced swiftly in this area, carving out a 15-kilometer-deep salient beginning around Yelyzavetivka and pointing toward Kostiantynivka, another 15 kilometers to the northeast.

Kostiantynivka is now within shooting distance of Russia’s short-range attack drones and smaller artillery pieces.

Russians frustrated after failure to capture Chasiv Yar

Frustrated by their failure to fully capture Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk despite a year of costly effort, the Russians sense an opportunity in Kostiantynivka—and aren’t about to waste it for a want of resources.

A huge Russian force is gathering south of the town. No fewer than three Russian field armies—the 8th, 41st, and 51st Combined Arms Armies—are nearby. The 8th CAA is apparently taking the lead.

There are more than 600,000 Russian troops in Ukraine; it’s possible one out of 10 is marching on Kostiantynivka. They’re paying in blood for every yard they gain. That initial Russian motorcycle assault on Yelyzavetivka was typical. Almost all the Russians involved in that assault were killed or wounded, but more Russians followed behind them. 

Kostiantynivka is not lost. Yes, the Russians are extending a salient toward Kostiantynivka from the southwest. But the salient “is only one of the three necessary areas where Russian forces must make further advances in order to seriously threaten Kostiantynivka,” observed the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

The other two areas are Chasiv Yar and Toretsk. And “Russian forces have struggled to break out” of those settlements, ISW noted. That “has likely complicated Russia’s plans for an offensive against Kostiantynivka and the wider Ukrainian fortress belt” running through Kramatorsk, according to the think tank. 

Moreover, Ukrainian forces aren’t exactly standing still in the sector. On Sunday or Monday, Ukrainian troops counterattacked the Russian salient and, according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, “pushed the enemy back slightly from the village of Zoria.”

Asbestos is bad for your health, so it’s not a good idea for Russian paratroopers to reinforce their armored vehicles with the carcinogenic material. But cancer-causing asbestos is the least of the Russians’ problem as they assault positions held by the Ukrainian 24th Mechanized Brigade in around Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

But Ukrainian troops have problems, too. Despite inflicting horrific casualties on the attacking Russians, the Ukrainians are still outnumbered and outgunned—and falling back on some key axes. 

The Russian 98th Airborne Division is trying to capture the ruins of Chasiv Yar in order to clear a path toward Kostiantynivka, an industrial town with a pre-war population of around 70,000 that anchors a line of urban settlements stretching to the north in Donetsk. Kostiantynivka lies just a few kilometers southwest of Chasiv Yar.

But the 24th Mechanized Brigade’s drones are everywhere all the time over Chasiv Yar—and they’re making life extremely dangerous for the 98th Airborne Division’s paratroopers. The division’s eight-ton BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicles are made from aluminum—to make them lighter and easier to transport by air, so they’re extremely vulnerable to enemy gunfire and artillery.

They’re even more vulnerable to drones that can attack from above and behind, where the BMD-2s’ thin armor is even thinner. So, according to open-source analyst Moklasen, the 98th Airborne Division has bolted asbestos roof sheets onto the sides of its BMD-2s and around the vehicles’ rear passenger compartment. 

Asbestos fibers can cause long-term health problems, but the Russians’ problems are more immediate. In a year of hard fighting, they’ve captured half of Chasiv Yar—but it’s cost them thousands of troops and potentially hundreds of vehicles.

An assault just south of Chasiv Yar on Sunday by paratroopers riding in one BMD-2 and an armored truck and on six motorcycles ended in defeat when the 24th Mechanized Brigade’s drones spotted the attackers—and explosive drones and artillery rained down.

Asbestos isn’t flammable, but aluminum is, so the up-armored BMD-2 burned.

The bloody march on Kostiantynivka

The Russians are making very little progress in and around Chasiv Yar, and what little ground they do gain every month comes at an incredible cost. But that doesn’t mean Kostiantynivka isn’t in peril. Russian regiments are also marching on the city from the southeast and southwest.

And in the southwest in particular, they’re advancing at a relatively fast pace. 

In just the last few weeks, they’ve marched tens of kilometers toward Kostiantynivka, pushing back unprepared Ukrainian troops and capturing around 250 square kilometers along the city’s southern flank. The Russian vanguard is now just nine kilometers from Kostiantynivka’s outskirts. 

The Russian advance from the southwest “risks outflanking Ukrainian defensive lines and denies time for construction of new fortifications,” explained analyst Konrad Muzyka.

The Russians’ next objective is probably the village of Rusyn Yar. “Should Russian forces secure a breakthrough near Rusyn Yar, it would constitute a critical tactical gain, severely degrading Ukrainian defensive depth,” Muzyka warned.

The fall of Rusyn Yar wouldn’t necessarily doom Kostiantynivka. Ukrainian defenses tend to get denser the closer they lie to the bigger cities. Recall that the Russian offensive toward Pokrovsk, farther south in Donetsk, moved swiftly through last year—and then ground to a halt just a few kilometers outside the city early this year. 

But the closer the Russians get to Kostiantynivka, the more artillery and drones they can fling at the city center.

They could do to Kostyantynivka what they’ve done to many front-line cities: steadily demolish it, killing or forcing out any civilians who haven’t already fled—and rendering the ruins less valuable to Ukrainian forces, who may choose to withdraw … allowing the Russians to nudge the front line farther to the north and west.

Two years ago, Russian troops began wrapping their armored vehicles in shell-like layers of add-on armor—all in a desperate effort to protect the vehicles from Ukrainian drones. The Ukrainians gave these up-armored vehicles a name—“turtle tank”—and got to work destroying them with better-aimed and more powerful drones.

So now the Russians are trying a new kind of protection. Instead of welding shells around their vehicles, they equipped at least one BMP infantry fighting vehicle with long metal bristles they clearly hoped would detonate incoming first-person-view drones before they struck the vehicle’s hull. 

It wasn’t a turtle tank. It was a porcupine.

But the porcupine vehicle failed its very first test. The Birds of Magyar, an elite Ukrainian drone unit, hunted down the modified BMP during a Russian assault toward Troitske, a town just north of Bahatyr in Donetsk Oblast, on or just before Saturday. 

The immobilized vehicle burned … and then exploded. “Badaboom!” a Birds of Magyar member crowed as he narrated a video—captured by a Ukrainian surveillance drone—depicting the BMP’s fiery demise. (Go to the 4:25 mark in the video to see for yourself.)

Tiny FPV drones are everywhere all the time all along the 1100-kilometer front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine. The Russian and Ukrainian militaries each deploy millions of drones every year. Both sides try to defeat the other’s drone with radio-jamming or add-on armor—or by finding and striking the operators … or even the factories that build the lethal robots.

Counter-drone innovations can seem awkward in their first iterations. The anti-drone cages the Russians began bolting onto many vehicles as early as the first year of the wider war, which the Ukrainians derisively called “cope cages,” are now standard equipment on vehicles on both sides.

Turtle tanks are funny-looking, but that doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes work. Examples abound of the reinforced vehicles shrugging off multiple drones.

Silly armor

The porcupine armor may seem silly on its face, and it didn’t save that BMP from an explosive fate. But the vehicle’s destruction may not be the fault of the metal spines. 

Instead, it seems the Birds of Magyar drone operator flew an FPV into the Russian vehicle’s hatch after a crew member left it open, perhaps while abandoning the vehicle after it was immobilized, potentially by a strike from below. Every vehicle is liable to burn when struck on its fragile insides—regardless of how effective its external armor is.

So it’s possible the porcupine armor will show up on more Russian vehicles. And it’s possible it might actually work as long as crews can avoid a mobility kill—mine damage to their treads, for example—and keep their hatches shut. It’s even possible other armies will eventually copy the porcupine armor the way they copied the cope cages.

And it’s worth pointing out that the porcupine BMP’s destruction didn’t prevent the Russians from advancing. Russian regiments and brigades advanced northeast of Troitske on or just before Saturday, according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies. 

It’s not that the Ukrainian brigades in the area are collapsing. Indeed, they counterattacked in Bahatyr at the same time the Russians were attacking around Troitske.

But despite losing around 800,000 troops and 17,000 armored vehicles in more than three years of hard fighting, and despite scrambling for better anti-drone defenses, Russian forces still outnumber and outgun Ukrainian forces.

The Russians can afford to lose more troops and vehicles than the Ukrainians can afford to lose. For now, they can afford to exchange a lot of hardware, and a lot of bodies, for incremental territorial gains.

Le Festival international du journalisme de Carleton-sur-Mer, était de retour pour sa troisième édition.
Webdiffusion du vendredi 16 mai 2025 - Programme: https://fijc.ca/le-programme
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Le Festival international du journalisme de Carleton-sur-Mer, était de retour pour sa troisième édition.
Webdiffusion du samedi 17 mai 2025 - Programme: https://fijc.ca/le-programme

9:45 - Informer à l’heure de la post-vérité
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUUhLz6p-0&t=660s
Brian Myles, Le Devoir
Luce Julien, Radio-Canada
Marc Gendron, Le Soleil
Marie-Eve Carignan, Université de Sherbrooke
Modération : Steven Jambot, RFI

1:40:23 - Ukraine : Le grand marchandage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUUhLz6p-0&t=6168s
Marie-Ève Bédard, Radio-Canada
Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, photographe
Gilles Van Kote, Le Monde
Modération : Laura-Julie Perreault, La Presse

4:40:24 - LE JOURNALISME DE PÈRE EN FILS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUUhLz6p-0&t=16824s
Grand entretien avec Patrice et Émile Roy
Entretien mené par Pénélope Garon, CIEU-FM

6:08:46 - CARTE BLANCHE À JEAN-FRANÇOIS LÉPINE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUUhLz6p-0&t=22126s
Grand entretien avec Guy A. Lepage
— Permalien

Le Festival international du journalisme de Carleton-sur-Mer, était de retour pour sa troisième édition.
Webdiffusion du dimanche 18 mai 2025 - Programme: https://fijc.ca/le-programme

1:25 - Jusqu’où ira Donald Trump?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZeFFbXmF8A&t=85s
Yves Boisvert, La Presse
Manon Globensky, Radio-Canada
Richard Latendresse, TVA, Le Journal de Montréal
Marina Catucci, Il Manifesto
Animé par Patrice Roy, Radio-Canada

1:29:34 - La presse a-t-elle encore du pouvoir?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZeFFbXmF8A&t=5374s
Marie-Claude Lortie, Le Droit
Antoine Robitaille, Le Journal de Montréal
Pierre Sormany, journaliste-auteur
Valérie Gaudreau, Le Soleil
Modération: Lela Savic, La Converse

4:30:25 - ITINÉRAIRE D’UNE PASSIONNÉE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZeFFbXmF8A&t=16225s
Grand entretien avec Louise Beaudoin
Rencontre menée par Jean-François Lépine

6:00:44 - Grands reportages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZeFFbXmF8A&t=21644s
Les finalistes Annie-Claude Bisson, Alexia Boyer et Clément Hamelin du Fonds québécois en journalisme international présentent leurs projets de reportages devant public qui fera le choix final.

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Noémi Bureau-Civil ne croit plus au progrès techno-scientifique qui écrase, ni aux promesses de croissance repeintes en vert. Elle croit aux gestes simples, aux communautés qui s’organisent, aux terres qu’on cultive autrement. Depuis le Bas-Saint-Laurent, elle fait campagne avec deux autres candidats décroissants, sans parti ni illusion...
— Permalien