The Low-Down

"Crucial" Russian Missile Control Systems Plant Struck By Ukraine

2026-03-12T13:46:00.000-04:00

A plant that manufactures crucial electronic components for the guidance systems of Russian missiles was badly damaged by a Ukrainian missile and drone strike.

The facility was in Bryansk, relatively close to the border with Ukraine, and in addition to the deaths and damage there, it further undermines Russian morale about how the war is being conducted. JL

Ivan Nechepurenko reports in the New York Times:

Ukrainian forces struck the Russian city of Bryansk, home to a major factory that produces components for Russian missiles, in an attack that killed six civilians and injured 42 others. The attack highlighted how Ukraine can hit high-value targets inside Russia despite Russia’s air defenses and the jamming of GPS and mobile internet. The plant, which lies 60 miles inside Russia, is a “critically important link” in the production of Russian missiles. The facility made “semiconductor devices and integrated microchips” for missile control systems. The plant is “one of the biggest microelectronics enterprises in Russia,” with more than 1,700 workers. Russian military bloggers, called the attack's success a result of “criminal negligence and unthinkable stupidity” by Russian officials.
Ukrainian forces on Tuesday struck the Russian city of Bryansk, home to a major factory that produces components for Russian missiles, in an attack that killed six civilians and injured 42 others, the region’s governor said.
In their accounts of the strike, the Russian authorities did not mention any damage to the plant, called Kremniy El. They called the attack an “inhuman act” committed by “Ukrainian terrorists,” and said it had been conducted with seven British Storm Shadow missiles.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Ukrainian forces had successfully struck a plant in Bryansk that produced “control systems for all types of Russian missiles.” These missiles, he said in his nightly address on Tuesday, “strike our cities, our villages and civilians.”
The attack highlighted how Ukraine can still hit high-value targets inside Russia despite the Russian military’s deployment of air defenses and the jamming of GPS and mobile internet network. The Ukrainian General Staff called the plant, which lies about 60 miles inside Russia, a “critically important link” in the production of Russian missiles. It said the facility made “discrete semiconductor devices and integrated microchips.”

“The target was hit, and significant damage to production facilities was recorded,” the General Staff said in a statement. “The extent of the damage is being clarified.”
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that “the main production facility” of the plant had been destroyed as a result of the strike.
Video footage distributed by the Ukrainian military and verified by The New York Times showed the moment that the factory was hit, causing explosions and large plumes of smoke. Other footage circulating on social media, filmed down the road, showed clouds of smoke rising into the sky as multiple areas around the factory were targeted.
In a phone call with journalists on Wednesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that such an attack “would not be possible without British specialists,” though he did not elaborate and offered no evidence for British involvement in the strike. Storm Shadow missiles are produced jointly by Britain and France. Britain, which has been at the forefront of weapons aid to Ukraine, has donated Storm Shadows. Storm Shadows have a range of more than 150 miles, so they give Kyiv the ability to hit targets deep into Russia.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said that Ukrainian forces had “deliberately attacked the civilian population.” She called for the United Nations to comment on the incident.
Ukraine says that its forces strike only military targets inside Russia. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died in Russian attacks on Ukraine’s towns and cities.
Aleksandr Bogomaz, the governor of the Bryansk region, said that 29 people were hospitalized after the strike on Tuesday. He posted a video of himself from the scene of the attack, where he heard a report from emergency service workers while standing next to ruined stores and an apartment building with most of its windows broken.
In a separate statement, Mr. Bogomaz declared Wednesday a day of mourning in the region.
The Kremniy El factory is a sprawling complex of industrial and office buildings in the western part of Bryansk, closer to the Ukrainian border. On its website, the plant is described as “one of the biggest microelectronics enterprises in Russia,” with more than 1,700 workers. Russian military bloggers, who have emerged as a vocal force supporting the Russian war effort but often criticize its execution, were dismayed by the attack. One of them, Anastasiya Kashevarova, called it a result of “criminal negligence and unthinkable stupidity.”
“How much time, money and effort will it take to not only rebuild the production but also train new specialists?” she said in a post on Telegram.

Kremlin's "Buffer Zone" Strategy Has Been Derailed By Ukrainian Counterattacks

2026-03-12T11:31:00.003-04:00

The Kremlin's winter strategy was to make gains so significant that Ukraine would be forced to concede to the Russian 'buffer zone' concept which would have required Ukraine to cede territory the Russian military was incapable of taking in fighting.

Ukraine flipped that script by launching its own counteroffensive, opportunistically taking advantage of both weather and Starlink cutoffs that restricted Russian capabilities. The Ukrainians have now regained so much territory that the buffer zone concept is dead because Kyiv's forces now control formerly occupied Russian territory AND the ostensible buffer zones. JL

Martina Sapio reports in Politico:

Ukraine has regained almost complete control of its Dnipropetrovsk region and recaptured several hundred square kilometers of territory in recent counterattacks. Pushing Russian forces back undermines Moscow's attempts to establish buffer zones along parts of the border, and disrupts Russian plans for attacks in the spring and summer. As Russia’s full-scale invasion drags into its fifth year, with Moscow struggling to make significant advances despite committing large numbers of troops to grinding assaults along the front, the Ukrainian counterattacks are generating tactical, operational and strategic effects. Moscow may now need to abandon or substantially revise its planned operations in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk.

Ukraine says it has regained almost complete control of its eastern Dnipropetrovsk region and recaptured several hundred square kilometers of territory in recent counterattacks.
Pushing Russian forces back undermines Moscow's attempts to establish buffer zones along parts of the border, and could disrupt Russian plans for fresh attacks in the spring and summer.
Details of the operation emerged Tuesday when Oleksandr Komarenko, head of the main operational directorate of the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces, told local media that Ukrainian airborne assault troops and mechanized brigades had already liberated more than 400 square kilometers of territory. According to Komarenko, Ukrainian forces have now restored control over almost all of Dnipropetrovsk region, with only a handful of small settlements still to be cleared.
He said Russian troops had attempted to push into the region as part of a broader effort to expand beyond Donbas and create a buffer zone that could support further offensive operations.
The advances follow weeks of Ukrainian counterattacks that began in late January and intensified through February, a trend that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hinted at last week in an interview with Italian media.
Western analysts say the battlefield effects are already being felt beyond the immediate area.
In its March 9 assessment, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Ukrainian counterattacks are generating tactical, operational and strategic effects that could disrupt Russia’s planned spring-summer 2026 offensive.
That matters because Russian commanders had hoped earlier gains in these directions would allow a converging advance toward the city of Zaporizhzhia, potentially opening the way for further offensives in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian counterattacks launched earlier this year appear to have complicated those plans before they could be consolidated. The ISW assessed that Moscow may now need to abandon or substantially revise its planned operations in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, or both.
At the same time, Russia is still pressuring Ukraine elsewhere.
Asked Tuesday about increased Russian activity near the Sumy border region in northeastern Ukraine, Zelenskyy told reporters via a WhatsApp chat that Moscow still aims to establish a buffer zone there and in neighboring Kharkiv region — but that Ukrainian forces are holding the line.
The ISW assessed that Moscow may now need to abandon or substantially revise its planned operations in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, or both. | Alex Nikitenko/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
“It’s no secret that they want to create a buffer zone in the Sumy region and in the Kharkiv region,” Zelenskyy said. “But we have not abandoned our goals either. We’ve blocked them everywhere. Therefore, there are no risks in the Sumy region at this time.”
He said Ukrainian forces are closely monitoring the situation along the border and defending settlements and infrastructure from Russian attacks, which he said continue to target civilian sites.
The gains come as Russia’s full-scale invasion drags into its fifth year, with Moscow struggling to make significant advances despite committing large numbers of troops to grinding assaults along the front.

In Its 2nd Month, Ukraine Advance Wreaks Havoc, Exploits Russian Weaknesses

2026-03-12T10:49:00.003-04:00

The Ukrainian southeastern counterattack continues to roll as Russian vulnerabilities in the region reveal new opportunities. The primary problem for the Kremlin's forces was that they held gray zone and even ostensibly occupied areas with inadequate troops, creating gaps which the Ukrainians have exploited.

The Russians have lost between 100 and 200 miles of territory, significant casualties and damaged equipment, as well as two battalion commanders killed by Ukrainian assault units and are in position to take the forward operating base of an entire Russian Combined Arms Army. JL

The Institute for the Study of War and David Axe in Trench Art report:

Ukraine's counteroffensive is now in its second month. After clearing Russians from 100 square miles of the gray zone east of Pokrovs’ke, advancing miles into Russian-controlled territory, Ukrainian paratroopers are within striking distance of Uspenivka, the forward base of the Russian 36th Combined Arms Army. Ukrainian infantry suppressed Russian recon and drone operators after infiltrating a sector where Russian forces did not have significant manpower. Ukraine has eliminated two Russian battalion commanders due to the dispersed, non-linear frontline. Russia did not have sufficient manpower and equipment to defend and develop advances along the Hulyaipole and Oleksandrivka sectors and need to commit additional resources as Ukrainian infantry and mechanized elements exploited gaps in Russian defenses
Ukraine’s southeast counteroffensive, now grinding into its second month, has achieved one of its main objectives. It has bought space and time for Ukrainian engineers to dig new fortifications around the town of Pokrovs’ke, which buttresses Ukrainian defenses between the a clutch of Russian field armies and, 50 miles to the west, the free city of Zaporizhzhia and its 700,000 pre-war residents.
But there’s another, more ambitious goal—and the Ukrainian 95th Air Assault Brigade is close to achieving that, too.
After clearing Russian infantry from 100 square miles of the disputed gray zone east of Pokrovs’ke and advancing a few miles into firmly Russian-controlled territory, the Ukrainian paratroopers are within striking distance of the village of Uspenivka, the forward base of the Russian 36th Combined Arms Army, one of three field armies aiming to march on Zaporizhzhia.
“They’re close,” observer Thorkill wrote about the Ukrainian paratroopers. “It’s just a matter of capturing two hills and one village.”

Ukrainian forces conducted mutually supporting drives in the Hulyaipole and Oleksandrivka directions in late 2025 and early 2026, respectively, to push Russian forces from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and to undermine Russian preparations for a spring offensive. Ukrainian forces first set conditions for a flank attack north of Hulyaipole in late 2025 and later launched counterattacks in the Oleksandrivka direction starting in late January 2026. Ukrainian 1st Separate Assault Regiment Commander Captain Dmytro Filatov stated that the regiment’s elements redeployed to an area between Dobropillya and Nove Zaporizhzhia (both north of Hulyaipole and on the Dnipropetrovsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border) in late 2025 to conduct a flank attack and push Russian forces from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[13] Filatov stated that Ukrainian offensive operations in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast do not mark the start of a new “counteroffensive,” as these counterattacks aim to stabilize the frontline and improve Ukraine’s positions amidst Russian troop redeployments to the area. Filatov stated that Russian forces considered conducting offensive operations in the Oleksandrivka direction as part of their “pre-spring” offensive campaign, implying that Russian forces may have sought to use attacks in the Oleksandrivka direction to set conditions for offensive operations in the Pokrovsk and Lyman direction in the spring. Ukraine’s Airborne Assault Forces reported on March 2 that its elements launched an “offensive operation” in the Oleksandrivka direction on January 29, and Komarenko stated that Ukrainian counterattacks in the area are part of a planned operation.[14]
Ukrainian forces were likely able to rapidly advance in the Oleksandrivka direction after infiltrating dispersed Russian positions in poor weather conditions and suppressing Russian drone-based defenses. The commander of a Ukrainian airborne assault battalion, which deployed to the Oleksandrivka direction in late January 2026, reported that Ukrainian forces infiltrated into Russian positions under the cover of snow and fog during the winter.[15] Snowy and foggy weather conditions likely hindered Russian drone operations, such as aerial reconnaissance and strikes, due to poor visibility. The commander noted that the battalion’s infantry elements suppressed Russian reconnaissance capabilities and drone operators, encircled 60 Russian servicemen, and captured three prisoners of war (POWs) after successfully infiltrating behind Russian lines. Ukrainian Airborne Assault Forces Commander Major General Oleh Apostol, who reportedly commands the Ukrainian counterattacks in Hulyaipole and Oleksandrivka directions, stated that the Ukrainian General Staff selected a frontline sector where Russian forces did not have significant manpower concentrations, which likely enabled Ukrainian infiltrations.[16] Apostol stated that Ukrainian forces have also eliminated two Russian battalion commanders during the counterattacks. Russian milbloggers similarly acknowledged that Ukrainian forces were able to infiltrate Russian positions in small groups and conduct mechanized assaults into Novohryhorivka due to the dispersed and non-linear character of the frontline.[17] ISW assessed in December 2025 that Russia did not have sufficient manpower and equipment to defend and develop simultaneous advances along the Hulyaipole and Oleksandrivka directions and would need to either reduce the area of responsibility or commit additional resources to these directions.[18] Ukrainian forces — both infantry and mechanized elements — appear to have exploited gaps in Russian defenses, exacerbated by decreased Russian drone activity amid poor weather conditions.

AI's Potential, Real Or Not, Is Providing An Excuse For Corporate Layoffs

2026-03-12T10:21:00.002-04:00

Appending the word "wash" to any phrase implies a coverup. Although investors and big tech companies continue to hype AI while pouring more money into it, the reality is that its benefits remain elusive, at least on the potential scale which could deliver the returns VCs and tech bros were counting on.

But one unforeseen implication of the tech adoption cycle is that corporate executives are using "AI washing" as an excuse to cut employees, a tactic always popular with Wall Street, especially during times like now when stock growth momentum has slowed. The result is a premature or even counterproductive trend which may result in harming the businesses employing this tactic to jack equity prices. This is because history teaches us the most effective technology adaptation may come from workforce experimentation and innovation, so if those people are laid off, productivity growth could be impeded. But never underestimate the power of an executive bonus tied to 'efficiency' metrics, which usually rely on employees being the costs cut. JL

Lila Schroff reports in The Atlantic:

Companies are blaming AI for job cuts, not because AI is ready to replace workers, but because it’s become fashionable. AI-induced job loss risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy (driven by) “AI-washing:” using the technology as an excuse to lay off workers. The cuts offer a way to shed workers while signaling they take AI seriously, not that AI is doing the work but, by cutting people, the company is AI-native. After Block announced layoffs, its stock price increased. Investors, who have unthinkable sums riding on AI, are antsy for signs it is boosting productivity. Once one company conducts AI-driven layoffs—even if premature—others feel pressure to do the same. (But) humans working with AI are more likely to produce good work than bots alone. Sloppy, hasty automation, which replaces workers with inferior (tech), is bad for businesses as premature AI layoffs backfire. Some of the “most promising AI applications will come from employees, not the C-suite."

Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. “I have bad news, America,” he told the crowd. “The Fuckening is here.”
The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI’s disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out. Yang has talked with computer-science majors, he said onstage, who can’t find a job and are instead “driving Ubers to make ends meet.” His doomsaying is extreme but familiar: Fears of job losses are mounting as AI continues to rapidly advance. A new generation of AI agents are more capable than traditional chatbots of assisting with sophisticated computer work. Bots are no longer limited to searching the web and answering questions—they can create financial models, generate slide decks, and much more.

Perhaps the most concerning sign yet of an impending jobs crisis came one day after Yang’s announcement. The payments firm Block, which operates Square and Cash App, announced that it was laying off roughly 4,000 workers—nearly half of the company’s workforce—due to AI. “The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,” Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, wrote. Going forward, he added, the company will be laser-focused on integrating AI across layers of its operations.
Although other companies have also blamed AI for job cuts, Block’s layoffs were unusually drastic. “The dreaded AI jobs wipeout got real,” The Wall Street Journal declared. Other companies could soon follow Block’s lead—not necessarily because the technology is ready to replace workers, but because it’s become fashionable to make such cuts. In that sense, AI-induced job loss risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dorsey’s explanation for the layoffs at Block might not be the whole story. The company could be engaged in “AI-washing,” or using the technology as a convenient excuse to lay off workers when other factors may be to blame. Like many other tech companies, Block became bloated during the pandemic—its workforce more than tripled from 2019 to 2022. Perhaps the cuts offered Dorsey a way to shed workers while also signaling to the world that he is taking AI seriously. “It is hard to imagine a firm-wide sudden 50%+ efficiency gain that justifies massive organizational cuts,” Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who is usually quite sanguine about AI’s capabilities, wrote online. “I think it is worth taking the justification with a grain of salt.”

I asked two former Block employees, both of whom were affected by the layoffs, for their perspective. “For engineers, AI did change the way work was being done,” one told me, pointing to the popularity of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and Block’s own open-source AI agent, Goose. “I do believe that Jack was genuine in that layoffs were in large part due to AI.” But as the other former staffer pointed out, these tools are popular across the industry: “I’m not sure if Block uses AI more than most other tech companies do these days (which is to say, quite a lot).” In other words, yes, AI is being used plenty at Block—but it’s also being used at all kinds of large companies, none of which has engaged in such drastic cuts. (The employees both spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of professional repercussions.) Block declined to comment when I reached out.

In an interview with Wired on Friday, Dorsey suggested that the layoffs were a proactive move. “Something really shifted in December,” he said, pointing to advances in coding bots from Anthropic and OpenAI. “It presented an option to dramatically change how any company is structured, and certainly ours.” The implication is not that the technology is already doing the work of half the company but rather that, by cutting people now, the company will be forced to reimagine itself as an AI-native firm. The technology has made traditional management structures obsolete, Dorsey said, and the cuts will allow the company to put AI into everything it does.
After Block announced the layoffs, its stock price increased—in other words, the market seemed to be rewarding Dorsey for his vision. Investors, who have unthinkable sums riding on the AI boom, are antsy for signs that the technology is boosting productivity. This could set off a dangerous cycle: Once one company conducts AI-driven layoffs—even if premature—others might feel pressure to do the same. If your competitors can do more with less, you should be able to do so too. “The impact is very unfortunate,” Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies AI and work, told me, explaining that such layoffs compound the narrative that AI is an effective substitute for humans.

Although the market might immediately reward companies for making AI cuts, in the long run, experts told me, premature AI layoffs could backfire. Some of the “most promising and revolutionary AI applications” will come from employees, not the C-suite, Sadun said. At one company she works with, she told me, an engineer codified his knowledge about company operations into an AI agent. Junior employees can now go to the bot with trivial questions, saving the engineer time.

If you fire half your staff, the institutional knowledge required to create such tools is lost. Plus, when companies cut their workforce because of AI, they cast the technology as a competitor, dampening employees’ incentives to make good use of it. Block’s ability to reinvent itself will “depend on the morale of the remaining engineers,” one of the ex-employees said, which “probably isn’t too great.” (Indeed, some remaining employees report feeling overwhelmed by their increased workload.)
Dorsey might be a visionary ushering in a new type of company, or he might be, as Sadun put it, sowing the seeds of his own destruction. For now, the quality of AI’s output is often middling—humans working with AI are more likely to produce good work than bots working alone. Sloppy, hasty automation, which replaces workers with inferior machines, is everyone’s loss. It is bad for society and for businesses themselves, and such efforts are unlikely to do much to increase productivity, Simon Johnson, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at MIT who has studied the history of technological transformations, told me. But for decades, corporate America has viewed “labor as a cost to be minimized as opposed to a resource to be developed,” he said.

People working on AI have been prophesying the end of white-collar work since the field’s inception. Now the technology is here, and the fearmongering is louder than ever. Last month, Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI chief, warned that “most, if not all” white-collar work will be fully automated within the next 12 to 18 months; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that half of all entry-level white-collar workers may soon be jobless. But mass job loss, at least for now, is not an inevitability so much as a narrative. Executives are constantly being told that AI cuts are coming, and as pressure grows for them to signal that they are making good use of the technology, layoffs offer one of the easiest ways for them to do so.

Ukraine Is Sweeping Roads With Lasers To Fry Russian Fiber-Optic Drones

2026-03-11T12:06:00.005-04:00

In the constant, on-going battle for drone dominance, Ukraine has yet another devastating new innovation.

With the growing use of ambush or 'waiter' drones, which lurk by the side of roads or on top of buildings, waiting for an unsuspecting target, Ukraine has developed a counter-technology which locates the presence of the lurker through light scanning recognition of the ambush drone's shape. It then destroys that waiting drone. So far, no effective counter to the counter has emerged. JL

David Hambling reports in Forbes:

Both sides use FPV ambush drones, called 'waiters.' The drones waits for a target, then strike. They are often uses to hit vehicles on supply routes to the front. Ambush drones are controlled by fiber optic cable spooled from the FPV, which are hard to cut. This has led to lasers. In drone piloting, "smoking the ESC" is burning out the Electronic Speed Controller which controls the motor. Excessive current causes the components burn out. But this latest development may be more advanced technology. A structured light scanner which analyses the distortion of the projected pattern to map the shape of objects below in 3D. An automated recognition system could pick up the shape of a parked drone. The drone is "fried" and inoperable.

A Russian drone waiting in ambush by the side of the road captures something weird advancing towards it, a ball of light in the sky beaming down a square of light which scans up and down the road. As the light passes the ambush drone, we see a “NO IMAGE” warning as the feed from the ambush drone is suddenly cut off.
The light certainly looks science fictional, leading X user BreacherFPV to dub it a “Strange alien road scanner.” Many commentators identify this as a drone with a laser weapon which cuts the ambush drone’s fiber optic cable. However, a closer look at the video shows something very different.

Both sides make extensive use of FPV ambush drones, also known as Waiters or “Zhdun.” The operator lands beside a road or on a building and waits for a target to appear, then takes off and strike from close range. They are often used to hit vehicles on supply routes to the front.
Ambush drones are typically controlled via a fiber optic cable spooled out from the FPV rather than radio. Unlike a radio connection, fiber is not limited by line-of-sight, so the operator can maintain good connection even when the drone is on the ground. And fiber uses less power than radio, so the drone can wait for several hours without draining the battery.
Expended fibers from FPV drones catching the sun across a section of Lyman in Ukraine
Ukraine MoD
Fiber drones are so common that in some places the landscape is festooned with used fibers glittering in the sun like spider webs.
The best way to tackle ambush drones is to destroy them before they can attack. Ukrainian videos show bomber drones executing clearing missions, locating and bombing Russian ambush drones where they lie. There have also been many schemes to cut the fiber link, none of which seem to be practical so far. This has led to the idea that a laser weapon is slicing through the cable.

Laser Interference
Technically this is not plausible. While Ukraine is on the early stages of deploying a counter-drone laser known as Tryzub this is a large and relatively low-power system.

Cutting glass with a laser is challenging although there are industrial lasers used for exactly this job. However these use invisible infra-red beams because visible light passes right through glass or reflects off it, and cutting needs to be with a different wavelength, not the visible light seen in this video.
A second suggestion is that the beam is getting into the fiber cable and disrupting the electronics. Again, this seems highly unlikely, largely from the physics involved. The fiber optic cable is tiny, and only a minute fraction of the projected light is captured.
Previous Ukrainian efforts to use laser in a similar way to disrupt or make visible fiber optic communications failed, as experiments with laser pointers showed.
“We tried this idea in the first week of searching for solutions against drones using optics,” wrote Ukrainian electronics warfare expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov. “The idea DOES NOT WORK in practice.”
Finally, laser beams focus their power on a small area. They are not several feet across and square like the beam seen here.
So what is going on and what takes out the connection? The answer can be found by looking more closely at the video and in particular the numbers showing the drone’s condition.
“Smoking The ESC”
Looking at the video, you can see that the horizon shifts as the numbers start changing rapidly, as the operator attempts a rapid takeoff. The current indicator on the right of the screen goes from 0.3 A at rest before surging to over 112 A as the feed goes dead.
To experienced drone operators, this can only mean one thing.
“The pilot smoked the ESC trying to run away from the strange alien road scanner,” BreacherFPV writes on X. “Went from a stand still to yanking 80% throttle. That doesn't go well with a heavy drone.”
In drone piloting, "smoking the ESC" is burning out the Electronic Speed Controller which handles the motors. An electrical short or, in this case, excessive current, causes the components burn out with a puff of white smoke. The ESC is "fried" or destroyed, and the drone is inoperable. Other drone flyers concur that this is what the video shows,
The fiber optics were not cut or destroyed, but the drone was lost due to operator error. This still leaves the question of just what that thing was coming down the road that scared them so badly?
Sensing With Structured Light
Ukrainian drones carry out sweeps looking for FPVs along roads. At night ambushers may be visible from their thermal signature, though a drone with its engines off does not present much of a heat source.
The fiber optic cable is harder to hide though. Fiber cables glint in strong light, and a road which is in use should not have any old cables lying across it. Any glint on the road suggests a new arrival and an ambush drone nearby. What we may be seeing is a drone fitted with an LED searchlight like DJI’s Zenmuse S1, shining it up and down to catch the telltale glitter of a fiber cable.
Structured light is used to build 3D models of objects by projecting a grid on to them.
Wikimedia Commons
But this may be more advanced technology. The square of light projected on to the road suggests a structured light scanner which analyses the distortion of the projected pattern to map the shape of objects below in 3D. This technique is sued for detailed drone surveys, and an automated recognition system could certainly pick up anything as distinctive in shape as a parked drone.
What is interesting is that rather than lying low, the Russian drone operator panics and lifts off in a hurry. They have seen, or been warned about the Alien Road Scanner before, and they know that if they leave the FPV there it will be destroyed soon afterwards.
The mystery remains. We can be fairly confident that this is not a high-energy laser weapon, but it does seem to be some sort of drone device for clearing roads. And in this case, there is one Russian FPV which will not be killing any Ukrainians.

Putin's Power Suffers From Ukraine Failure, Perception He's Powerless To Save Iran

2026-03-11T11:20:00.001-04:00

There have been lots of articles in the past week claiming Putin is the primary beneficiary of the US-Israeli attack on Iran. But most of these arguments focus on the current rise in oil prices.

The harsher reality is that this financial impact is temporary. What is permanent is that for the third time in recent months the leader of a major Russian ally - Syria, Venezuela and now, Iran - has fallen (with Cuba probably to follow) and Putin has been powerless to save them. This perception of weakness is corrosive. And while he can still project a threat to Europe, he would be unlikely to win were he foolish enough to think he could win a war. And the proof is that he still can't beat Ukraine, which was weaker than several of Europe's individual nations, let alone the alliance together. JL

Bob Seely reports in The Telegraph:

Oil prices have temporarily skyrocketed, helping replenish Russia's emptying coffers, but Putin's dreams of building an alliance to counter the West are being dismantled, one dictatorship at a time, by Donald Trump. Trump's and Putin's telephone call doesn’t change the fundamentals: the loss of allies damages Putin, but also the perception he’s powerless to save them. Putin has invested so much in co-opting Trump over Ukraine that he cannot treat the US as an enemy on Iran - or Syria, Venezuela, Cuba. The Kremlin wanted US-Ukraine negotiations to gain what Russian soldiers failed to win on the battlefield; it hasn’t. Putin knows his fake superpower status would be swept aside if he uses what little force Russia could muster to support Iran. He loved to boast Russia was one of the “sovereign” powers on earth. In reality, it is metamorphosing into a raw-material colony for China.

For Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, the Iran war must feel, to misquote Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, like the best of times and the worst of times.
On the one hand, oil prices have temporarily rocketed, helping to replenish Russia’s emptying coffers. The benchmark price for crude oil has nearly doubled since January, from about $60 (£45) a barrel to near $110 before falling back. Where it goes now is obviously dependent on whether the conflict continues – Trump says it is near complete, let’s see – and whether the Straits of Hormuz, through which a third of the world’s oil moves, is open.
While there is a current Western-imposed cap of $44 a barrel on the Russian oil price, it applies only when using Western banks, insurance and tankers. To avoid this cap, Putin uses his “shadow fleet”, an armada of about 1,200 ships, the largest such covert operation in maritime history. Even selling at a discount, Russian oil should currently fetch $80 a barrel from deliveries to India and China. Not paying for insurance or even for the upkeep of the often-unsafe vessels may make Russia another $5-$6 per barrel. Every little helps.

But this boon is dwarfed by the downsides of the war in Iran for Putin. His dreams of building an alternative alliance system to counter the West are being dismantled, one dictatorship at a time, by Donald Trump, who has been treating him as if he were an irrelevance on a par with Sir Keir Starmer.
Yes, on Monday, Trump and Putin spoke about the war. This has led to some concern that the Kremlin is once again influencing the US president’s thinking. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One polite telephone call doesn’t change the fundamentals: it’s not just the loss of allies that damages Putin, but the perception that he’s powerless to save them.
Two key partner regimes, Venezuela and now Iran, have been partly decapitated. The fall of socialism in Cuba, an island which, in Putin’s mind, sits at the heart of Moscow’s overseas alliances, is surely only a matter of time.

Yet his hands are tied. Putin has invested so much in trying to co-opt Trump and the US negotiating team over Ukraine that he cannot be seen to treat America as an enemy elsewhere now. The Kremlin wanted the US-Ukraine negotiations to be a new front in the operation – to gain the territory Russian soldiers failed to win on the battlefield. He hoped his influence would result in the US forcing Ukraine to surrender territory and cities; it hasn’t.

But Putin is so heavily invested in the Trump White House that his strategy is backfiring in other regions. His world is being shattered by the same US administration he tried to co-opt. Whether by accident or design, the US is helping to bury Russian power in the Middle East and Putin seems powerless to react.
He has little practical aid to offer, in any case. Putin must know that his superpower status is fake and would be swept aside if he dared to use what little military force Russia could muster to support Iran. Putin’s Russia can send some satellite information and verbal messages of congratulations to the ayatollahs, but short of endless boasting about nuclear weapons, Putin must know that he is a modern-day emperor with no clothes.
Consider the example of Syria, a Moscow client state since the late 1950s. Less than a decade ago, Putin’s forces successfully helped Bashar al-Assad cling to power in the country’s civil war, outmanoeuvring an indecisive West with a combination of a ruthless application of limited military force and swift diplomatic action. It was the high point of Russian global power, helping to convince Putin that Russia was back. When a British delegation visited Moscow shortly before the start of the Ukraine war, they were told by the Russian chief of staff that he commanded the second most powerful army on earth.
From zenith to nadir. By December 2024, as Assad’s regime was being overthrown, Putin stood by. Russia lacked the military capability even to defend one of its core allies.

Putin’s overreach in the Ukraine war has drained Russia’s global military and diplomatic leverage. While he can and will still threaten eastern Europe, his ability to deliver expeditionary forces over long distances is largely shot through, save for some semi-mercenary operations in Africa.

Russia has also lost much of its influence in Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, replaced by the US and Turkey. Recent Iranian strikes on Azerbaijan are likely to have further complicated Putin’s calculations in the region. The Kremlin failed to support its Armenian ally during its conflict with Baku and has paid the price. A lesson for the UK in support of its Gulf allies now.

And in Central Asia, ruled from Moscow within living memory, China is (quietly) replacing Russia. Moscow cannot compete with Beijing’s wealth, especially as Putin can’t confront China while it needs it to replace lost Western markets. Putin has gambled on relationships that are now weakening, not strengthening, Russian power.
By the end of this decade, Putin risks strategic failure on many fronts – in Ukraine, in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and further afield in Venezuela, Syria and Iran. He loved to boast that Russia was one of the truly “sovereign” powers on earth. In reality, it is metamorphosing into a raw-material colony for China. It is an angry, atavistic threat to Ukraine and Europe, and an irrelevance elsewhere.
At the start of this century, Putin had grand plans to rebuild his nation. He reinvented a theory of war in which all the tools of the state, military and non-military, would be integrated as never before to take on the West. It was a strategically creative way of maximising Russia’s shrinking power. There were some notable wins. Yet such were Putin’s aims that, no matter how skilfully blended the tactics were, those ambitions were too great for a country with an economy the size of Spain’s.

It is foolish to write Putin off. He remains a danger and still has much destructive power. He is a ruthless manipulator, but his dreams of attaining a global status on a par with China and the US – a “Poundland superpower”, if you will – are tottering, if not falling, around him.

Continuous Ukraine 'Toll-Gate' Kill-Zone Extorts Huge 'Price' On Russian Troops

2026-03-11T10:34:00.003-04:00

Ukraine has created what it is calling a continuous kill zone along crucial sectors of the front which are intentionally designed to act as a figurative 'toll gate' which extracts an 'extortionate' price from Russia in terms of casualties as well as destroyed weapons and vehicles.

While the aerial and land drone wall is a new Ukrainian innovation, the physical barriers of tank traps, mine fields, barbed wire entanglements etc are, ironically, based on the Russian 'Surovikin Line' which thwarted Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive. Having learned that hard lesson, the Ukrainians are now turning their hard-won knowledge against the Russians to even greater effect as this year's disastrous Russian offensive attempts have demonstrated. JL

Decimus reports in Daily Kos:

Pokrovsk, Dobropiliya, Huliaipole and Kostiantynivka are exacting extortionately expensive tolls on the Russians in personnel and materiél. The Ukrainians have kept the toll gate at Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad up for more than a year and a half now. And still make huge daily collections from the Russians. Ukrainian commanders are focusing on constraining Russian maneuverability rather than clinging to ruined towns. A new continuous kill-zone system aims to stop rapid Russian assaults through layered trenches, wider fire lanes, and anti-vehicle obstacles. This is what modern trench warfare looks like.
Ukraine’s “Toll Gate” business … is really booming. The Russians can try any of the toll gates Ukraine has set up … from the south in Zaporizhia all the way up to the northernmost Sumy oblast … hoping to catch a lucky break. Nope.
Pokrovsk, Dobropiliya[both Donetsk & Zaporizhia oblasts], Huliaipole and now Kostiantynivka. Same result … extortionately expensive toll exacted on the Russians in terms of personnel and materiél. The Ukrainians have managed to keep the toll gate at Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad up for more than a year and a half now. And still making huge daily collections from the Russians in both personnel and materiél. The Ukrainians will likely keep it going for as long as the Russians are willing to pay the incredibly high toll to gain a propaganda “victory” over what is now largely pulverized concrete and a waste land. For all practical intents and purposes the pile of rubble that is the Pokrovsk city core is now occupied by the Russians. Beyond that and further up on the higher elevations in the north of the city and beyond lay fortified defenses … a series of more elaborately constructed “toll gates”.
As one fighter in Pokvrovsk recently said of Ukraine’s plans regarding the inner city:
“Our priority is not to cling to concrete,” Kovalenko explains, “but to construct a defensible perimeter on the outskirts and shape the battlefield in a way that maximally constrains the enemy’s options.”
In practical terms, this approach aims to deny Russia the ability to regenerate offensive momentum along the Dobropillia axis, prevent the opening of a new Druzhkivka-oriented line of advance, and complicate any effort to redeploy forces — particularly elements of Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army — toward renewed operations against Kostiantynivka.
www.ukrinform.net/...
To that end, Ukrainian commanders have reportedly initiated a calculated pullback from dense urban areas to establish more defensible perimeters on the outskirts, focusing on constraining Russian maneuverability rather than clinging to ruined towns. This strategy of establishing lines behind heavily contested, destroyed urban areas is designed to better manage Ukraine’s perennial personnel shortages and counter Russian advances. This approach moves away from holding every ruined town at a high cost, focusing instead on creating deeper, more resilient defensive lines.

The Russians had their “Surovikin Line” in 2023. And boy did it take a toll on the Ukrainians during their abortive Summer 2023 counter-offensive. Well, welcome to The New Donetsk Line, the major defensive network constructed by Ukraine in Donetsk Oblast, often called the "Ukrainian Surovikin Line".  This system spans well over 350 kilometers, stretching from Druzhkivka-Kostiantynivka to Sloviansk, and is designed to halt Russia’s advances following significant battlefield pressure in 2025. And it is now connected by additional works to the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad-Dobropilia line as well.
Attribution: A section of the elaborate defenses the Ukrainians are calling the “New Donetsk Line”. It stretches for hundreds of kilometers from Pokrovsk up to the “Fortress Belt” cities.
There are quite a few online videos of these fortifications.  But in sum, the design features include trenches, anti-tank ditches, dragon’s teeth, barbed wire, and decentralized strongpoints hidden in forests to evade drone detection. It is modeled after the Russian Surovikin Line that stalled Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, representing a strategic shift with Ukraine now on the defensive.
The "Fortress belt". fortified since 2014, remains central to Ukraine’s defense strategy. Holding this line is vital to prevent further Russian advances toward Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and potentially even Dnipro:
Ukraine now has the fortress belt it wishes it had in 2022
THE DEFENSIVE lines stretch as far as the eye can see, an ugly scar across the snowy hills of the Donbas. They are part of a massive fortification system that Ukrainian forces have built to protect towns and cities not yet occupied by the Russians. “If we had had such defensive lines in 2022, the situation on the ground would be the complete opposite of what it is now,” says Viacheslav Shutenko, commander of a drone battalion that is part of the 44th Mechanised Brigade.
www.economist.com/...
Ukraine’s New Kill-Zone Strategy Turns Frontline Territory Into a Trap for Russians
FPV drone warfare and Russia’s meat-grinder tactics forced Ukraine to redesign its fortifications. A new continuous kill-zone system aims to stop rapid Russian assaults through layered trenches, wider fire lanes, and anti-vehicle obstacles. This is what modern trench warfare looks like.
united24media.com/...
Along those lines, attrition “toll gates” are now being set up on the Zaporizhia and the Druzhkivka-Kostiantynivka lines as well. The New Donetsk Line and the ongoing successful Ukrainian counter in Zaporizhia presents Russia with an operational dilemma. Russia is going to soon have to make a decision as to which attritional gate to go into  … continue pushing the Southern Line which had been making gains until Ukraine slammed the door shut and started rolling it back or go whole hog and all-in against the “New Donetsk Line” in a do-or-die attempt to militarily capture the rest of Donetsk oblast?. Ukraine intentionally set it up like that. Indeed even the ongoing southern offensive was planned not as a major counteroffensive but as part of the overall effort to stabilize and harden Ukraine’s frontline defenses ahead of Russia’s 2026 Spring-Summer offensive:
A regiment commander says Ukraine’s recent advances were a tactical operation to stabilize the front — not the sweeping counteroffensive being celebrated online.
... Ukraine's Defense Forces launched an offensive aimed at improving the tactical and operational situation on this front sector, stabilizing it, and blocking Russian advances. Filatov[Dmytro “Perun” Filatov], commander of the 1st Separate Assault Regiment was specific about what it was not:
"This is not some grand counteroffensive that everyone is shouting about. This is operational level. Maybe a little more."
euromaidanpress.com/...

In that regard, any continuing gains from the Huliaipole-Oleksandrivka front in the south, such as General Syrskyi described today is just extra gravy:
Ukraine's army chief reveals key gains in southern offensive
newsukraine.rbc.ua/...
It is worth noting that Russia pounced on the Huliaipole area because it was for a long time one of the least defensively built up sections of the Ukrainian southern flank … basically left to a couple of lightly-armored Territorial Guard brigades, the 102nd and 106th, anchored on the Haichur River as a defensive strong point. Ukraine has now managed to get the opportunity to rectify that omission … to harden what had been relatively weak defenses in this sector.
But according to analysts, Ukraine’s Zaporizhia counter, as designed, has also had the effect of frustrating and upending Russia’s new offensive plans. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assessed that these counterattacks spoiled Russia’s offensive timeline and forced the redeployment of elite Russian units from the eastern front to the south as well as disrupted Moscow’s plans for a spring-summer 2026 offensive toward Zaporizhzhia City and the “Fortress Belt” in Donetsk :
Ukrainian Armed Forces counterattacks thwart new Russian offensive on the front
The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that a counteroffensive by Ukrainian defenders could have thwarted Russia's plans for further advancement in the Zaporizhia region, as well as the expected spring-summer offensive of the Russian Federation on the "Belt of Fortresses" in the Donetsk region.
Thus, Ukraine's counteroffensive in February 2026 could have thwarted Russia's plans to further exploit tactical successes in the Zaporizhia region, and could also have negatively affected the expected spring-summer 2026 offensive on the Ukrainian "belt of fortresses," the ISW team emphasizes.

Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li Each Raised $1 Billion Separately For Non-LLM/Chatbot AI

2026-03-11T09:49:00.007-04:00

In the space of one month, two of the acknowledged leaders in AI thinking and development - Yann LeCun and former Google AI head Fei-Fei Li - each raised $1 billion separately for new startups to explore alternative routes for AI which are contrary to the LLM/chatbot frenzy over which Silicon Valley has been obsessing for the past year or so. And the rosters of investors these two insider apostates have convinced to invest are among the elite in corporate and tech leadership as well as wealth.

This should be telling the rest of us something, primarily, that the current approaches to AI, while not necessarily 'wrong,' are not the only answer and may not even be the optimal solutions in the long run. As we should know from the history of technology invention and adoption, it is still relatively early in the adaptation cycle and, hype aside, there will be changes ahead because tech always eats its elders. This is also further evidence that the AI investment pull-back or pause is based on more than just 'not getting it,' but on real-world concerns about the efficacy of the LLM/chatbot business model. JL

Shannon Carroll reports in Quartz:

Turing Award winner and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun just raised $1.03 billion for a startup to prove machine intelligence doesn’t run through ever-larger chatbots (with ever-bigger spending). He has spent years arguing Silicon Valley’s favorite AI are impressive party tricks. He called the idea that LLMs will scale their way to human intelligence "complete nonsense." He wants to build AI systems that understand the world, reason through it, staying controllable and safe while doing it, not just predict the next word in a sentence. That means a bigger emphasis on reasoning, planning, spatial understanding, and learning from real-world data. AMI’s investors include Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Marcel Dassault, Eric Schmidt and Tim Berners-Lee. AMI is being (seen) as an infrastructure layer for physical-world AI. Chatbots made the market but LeCun is betting machines that can model reality will matter more.

Yann LeCun has spent years arguing that Silicon Valley’s favorite AI products are, intellectually speaking, really just very impressive party tricks. Now, the former Meta $META +1.03% AI chief has raised $1.03 billion for a startup called AMI to prove that the road to something like real machine intelligence doesn’t run through ever-larger chatbots (with ever-bigger spending), but through “world models” that can understand how reality works.

$1 billion is a giant sum for a company founded four months ago, with no product and no interest in pretending one is around the corner. But while much of the AI industry has spent the past few years treating LLMs as the obvious route to bigger and better “intelligence,” LeCun has been one of the field’s loudest dissenters.
In an interview with WIRED, the Turing Award winner called the idea that LLMs will simply scale their way to human-level intelligence “complete nonsense.” AMI, short for Advanced Machine Intelligence, is his chance to stop being the guy yelling from the wings of the stage and become the guy building his own spotlight.
LeCun left Meta in late 2025 after spending 12 years building Meta’s AI research operation; he remains one of the most prominent voices inside Big Tech arguing that the industry is getting a little drunk on autocomplete.
Essentially, the former AI chief seems to think that Meta had to chase the LLM race, and doing so pulled the company away from the work he thinks actually matters. He told WIRED that Meta’s push to “catch up with the industry on LLMs” was “not my interest,” and said he eventually went to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and told him he could do this “faster, cheaper, and better outside of Meta.” Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is now led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
Meta is largely a company obsessed with consumer products and AI assistants, but LeCun had a different target in mind: systems that can reason about the physical world and be sold into enterprise settings where fluent nonsense isn’t an acceptable error mode. So this latest venture is LeCun trying to prove, with over a billion dollars of other people’s money, that the industry may be marching down the wrong road.
Chatbots made the market. LeCun is betting that machines that can model reality will matter more. Whether that turns out to be profound or just extremely expensive remains the fun part.
What are “world models”?
AMI wants to build “world models” — AI systems can understand the world, reason through it, and stay controllable and safe while doing it, not just predict the next word in a sentence. LeCun’s framework for that is JEPA, or Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, which aims to learn abstract structure. That means a bigger emphasis on reasoning, planning, spatial understanding, and learning from video and real-world data, which LeCun has argued is a more plausible route to human-level intelligence than today’s large LLM obsession.
AMI is reportedly initially targeting organizations that manage complex systems with consumer applications (such as home robots) further down the road. And heck, maybe even a partnership with Meta; LeCun has left open the idea of partnering with his former employer later on to commercialize the tech, potentially even in products such as Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
“World models” are having a real funding moment. Last month, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs also raised $1 billion to work on “spatial intelligence,” which is adjacent terrain: AI that understands and generates 3D environments for robotics, AR/VR, and other real-world applications. Nvidia $NVDA +1.16% has similarly described “world models” as systems for understanding real-world dynamics and generating training environments for robots and autonomous vehicles.
Silicon Valley’s newest expensive hobby may be teaching machines that the world exists outside of a prompt.
AMI’s goal is a lofty one, and LeCun seems perfectly aware of it. So does CEO Alexandre LeBrun, who told TechCrunch that this is “not your typical applied AI startup” that ships in a quarter and starts bragging about revenue by the end of the year. “‘World models’ will be the next buzzword,” he predicted, adding that “in six months, every company will call itself a world model to raise funding.”
He may be right. But AMI has at least one thing most buzzwords don’t: a clear reason for existing. LeCun thinks today’s dominant AI products are useful but fundamentally limited, especially in settings where sounding plausible isn’t good enough. That helps explain why the first commercial lanes being discussed are manufacturing, robotics, biomedical work, and healthcare, high-stakes environments where hallucinations can get dangerous, expensive, or both. Nabla, LeBrun’s healthcare startup, is the first disclosed partner, which gives the AI venture a concrete healthcare-adjacent lane from day one.
AMI’s investor roster has plenty of big names. Nvidia is in. So are Samsung, Toyota $TM +0.67% Ventures, Cathay Innovation, Temasek, and Bezos Expeditions. As are Mark Cuban, Marcel Dassault, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, and Tim and Rosemary Berners-Lee. That’s a pretty clear clue about how AMI is being read by the market: as a possible infrastructure layer for physical-world AI. The company is based in Paris, with offices planned in New York, Montreal, and Singapore, and its early bench pulls from Meta and DeepMind.
There is, of course, an obvious chance that this becomes the most elegantly argued expensive science project in Europe. LeCun is asking investors to back a long-horizon technical thesis in a market that rewards speed, spectacle, and software that can dazzle on command. But that’s also what makes AMI interesting; it’s one of the clearest signs yet that some of AI’s biggest names and deepest pockets aren’t content to keep feeding the same machine and calling the result something like destiny.
Silicon Valley has spent the AI boom treating chatbot fluency like proof of intelligence. LeCun just raised a billion dollars to argue that the harder, more valuable trick is understanding the world in the first place.

Slew Of Ukrainian Frontline Successes Due To Weapons, Tactics, Strategy

2026-03-10T10:09:00.005-04:00

For the first time in several years, Ukraine has anticipated and then thwarted Russia's winter offensive plans. Not only have the Ukrainians stopped the Russians and advanced themselves, they have done so while reducing their own casualties even as they increase those inflicted on the Kremlin troops.

What is particularly interesting about the Ukrainian successes is that they are based on a systematic evaluation of lessons learned and what works then translated into organizational and tactical plans. Their deployment of drone technology, both land and aerial, reflects this analytical approach to reducing their vulnerabilities while enhancing their advantages. JL

Kostiantyn Khudov and David Stern report in the Washington Post:

Ukrainian special forces have halted a Russian advance in the Zaporizhzhia region, the latest military success in recent weeks. Kyiv’s troops have recaptured 200 square miles since the beginning of the year, while Moscow is losing up to 35,000 soldiers a month to deaths and injuries. Ukrainian forces are clawing back territory. “With precise drone and artillery strikes, military intelligence operatives systematically limit the capabilities of the Russians — due to a lack of supplies, the occupiers are increasingly abandoning assaults.”
Ukrainian special forces have halted a Russian advance in the southeastern Ukrainian region of Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv officials said Saturday — the latest military success in recent weeks amid Moscow’s ongoing aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities.

The operation “stopped the enemy’s approach” on the regional capital, the city of Zaporizhzhia, according to Ukraine’s main military intelligence directorate, known as the GUR.
The GUR statement, posted on social media, could not be independently verified, but corresponded with a slew of upbeat news for Ukraine from the front line in recent days. It also underscored the cutting-edge effectiveness of Ukraine’s weapons systems, such as anti-drone interceptors, which are now actively sought by the Trump administration for its operations in the Middle East.
Zaporizhzhia is a major urban center and longtime target of Russian forces, as they attempt to conquer the entire region. Moscow’s troops are now about 15 miles from the outskirts of the city, according to the online maps published by Deep State, an open-source military website.
“For three months, soldiers of the ‘Timur Special Unit’ … have been conducting a comprehensive defensive operation” on the Zaporizhzhia section of the front, GUR said in its statement, adding that its forces had killed or seriously injured more than 300 Russians and captured 39 servicemen.
“With precise drone and artillery strikes, military intelligence operatives systematically limit the logistical capabilities of the Russians — due to a lack of supplies, the occupiers are increasingly abandoning assault operations,” GUR said.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials said that Ukrainian forces are clawing back territory on other parts of the front, as the full-scale war with Russia passes its fourth year.

Kyiv’s troops have recaptured close to 200 square miles since the beginning of the year, Zelensky said in an interview published Tuesday in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, while Moscow is losing up to 35,000 soldiers a month to deaths and injuries.
On Thursday, as swarms of Iranian drones struck targets across the Middle East, including U.S. military bases, Zelensky said in a social media post that Ukraine had “received a request from the United States for specific support in protection” against Tehran’s attack drone systems.

Although it was unclear how much anti-drone assistance Kyiv could spare from its own defenses, it was nevertheless a moment of recognition for Ukraine’s military industry, which was almost nonexistent when Russian invaded in February 2022.
Ukraine’s military production has had to adapt at rapid speed to innovations on the battlefield and changes in Russia’s strategy — such as a relentless aerial campaign against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure this winter, using waves of drones and missiles to overwhelm air defenses.
On Friday, Russian forces launched yet another attack, targeting locations throughout the country using some 480 drones and 29 missiles — of which 453 drones and 19 missiles were shot down or intercepted, Ukraine’s air force said in a social media post. That count also could not be independently verified.
In Zaporizhzhia, drones damaged an apartment building and injured a 3-month-old girl, Ivan Fedorov, the head of the Zaporizhzhia’s regional military administration, posted on social media. The child’s injuries were “moderate” and she remained under medical supervision, Fedorov said.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, a ballistic missile destroyed a section of a residential building, killing 11 people and injuring 16, local officials said. Among the dead were a 13-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy.

Kyiv's 2026 Research Priorities Reveal How Tech Is Driving War's Future

2026-03-10T10:02:00.005-04:00

Ukraine's research priorities for this year reflect the next stage of the technological revolution, exemplified by drone dominance.

Faster scaling of new technologies, organizational design changes necessitated by the need to deploy more technology, including drones, faster and deeper, and the implementation of AI to assist with targeting, Russian drone and missile interception all reflect the realities of the battlefield. What is interesting, especially to business executives, is that the need for new technology has been largely supplanted by the demand for better institutional adaptation and scaling in order to optimize the impact of these victory-driving innovations. JL

Mick Ryan reports in Futura Doctrina:

The Ukrainian Armed Forces released its research priorities for the coming year. The main change from 2025 is the transition from chaotic developments to a holistic state system…Last year, the Armed Forces of Ukraine completed the formation of a holistic system that allows them to respond instantly to the challenges of war. The key principle is feedback. The focus is on four strategic areas: improvement of innovation management, scaling, AI implementation, integration of unmanned systems into all branches of the service.
This week, the Ukrainian Armed Forces released its research priorities for the coming year. The briefing provided a look back at 2025, noting that:
The main change in 2025 is the transition from chaotic developments to a holistic state system…Last year, the Armed Forces of Ukraine completed the formation of a holistic system that allows them to respond instantly to the challenges of war. The key principle is feedback.
The key priorities for research funding (and percentage of research funding received) in 2025 were:
UAV – 28%.
Robotic systems (RCS) – 15%.
Communication and information protection – 11%.
Electronic warfare and countermeasure systems – 8%.
This year, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will focus on four strategic areas:
Improvement of the innovation management system.
Scaling of research activities.
Deep implementation of Artificial Intelligence technologies.
Further development and integration of unmanned systems in all branches of troops.

Ukraine Has Liberated Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Advances In Kupiansk, Zaporizhzhia

2026-03-10T09:33:00.003-04:00

Ukrainian forces' advance in the southern theater of war continues unabated. Dnipropetrovsk has been almost completely liberated of Russian occupying units, Kupiansk is being cleared as new Ukrainian assaults take additional ground and in Zaporizhzhia, the Russian winter offensive has not only been stopped with heavy casualties, but Ukrainian troops are advancing there as well.

The effects of the Russians' offensive and defensive failures have cascaded as one affects the other. The Kremlin's plans for this year have been disrupted, if not wholly eliminated, and reflect a broader war-wide operational failing. JL

Benjamin Murdoch and Maria Tril report in Euromaidan Press:

Ukrainian forces have liberated nearly all Russian-occupied areas of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Ukrainian troops had pushed Russian forces back during ongoing operations on the Oleksandrivsk axis near the border of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, where Russian troops had attempted to push earlier. Ukrainian troops have already recaptured more than 400 square kilometers. Additional areas have undergone follow-up sweeps to eliminate small groups of Russian infiltrators. In the Kupiansk area, Ukrainians advanced east of the city, where Russian forces were shelling a newly occupied Ukrainian position - itself an indicator of the advance - as Ukrainian forces counterattacked within Kupiansk itself. The stalled southern drive reflects a broader Russian operational failure, as Ukrainian counterattacks disrupted Russian forces. Their inability to hold newly captured ground has deprived the Russians of the starting offensive positions from which they intended to launch a summer offensive. The effects are cascading across the theater.

Ukrainian forces have liberated nearly all Russian-occupied areas of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, with only three small settlements still requiring clearance, a senior Ukrainian general said in an interview with the outlet RBC-Ukraine.
While most of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast has remained outside direct ground fighting, Russian advances through neighboring Donetsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhia Oblast pushed the front line into a small part of the region’s eastern border area.
Ukraine pushes Russian forces back on the Oleksandrivsk axis
Major General Oleksandr Komarenko, head of the Main Operational Directorate of Ukraine’s General Staff, said Ukrainian troops had pushed Russian forces back during ongoing offensive operations near the border of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
“Almost the entire territory of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast has been liberated,” Komarenko said. “We still need to finish work in three small settlements and clear two more.”
Frontline situation around Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, 10 March 2026. Map: DeepState
How Ukraine recaptured 400 square kilometers
The advances come as Ukrainian forces conduct a planned offensive operation on the Oleksandrivsk axis at the junction of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhia Oblast, an area where Russian troops had attempted to push forward earlier.
According to Komarenko, Ukrainian troops have already recaptured more than 400 square kilometers during the operation. Additional areas have undergone follow-up sweeps to eliminate small groups of Russian troops that had infiltrated behind Ukrainian lines.
The operation has involved airborne assault and assault units supported by mechanized brigades already defending the sector, the general said.
Russia's "buffer zone" plan and February's territorial balance
Komarenko added that the Russian push into Dnipropetrovsk Oblast aimed to create what Moscow describes as a “buffer zone,” part of its broader effort to expand control near the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Ukraine’s recent advances on this axis contributed to a net territorial gain in February, he said, with Ukrainian forces reclaiming more territory than Russia captured during the same period.
Despite the gains, Komarenko described the overall situation on the battlefield as “difficult but controlled.” Russian forces continue to concentrate major efforts on the Pokrovsk direction and the Oleksandrivsk sector, which he said remain among the most contested areas of the front. Ukrainian forces are pressing simultaneous counterattacks across multiple sectors — from Kupiansk in the northeast to western Zaporizhzhia in the south — generating effects that ISW assessed on March 9 are now forcing the Russian command to make operational and strategic-level decisions in response to what began as local tactical setbacks.
In the Kupiansk direction, geolocated footage published March 8 confirms a Ukrainian advance in western Podoly, east of the city, where Russian forces were observed shelling a newly occupied Ukrainian position — itself an indicator of the advance, according to ISW. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger separately claimed Ukrainian forces counterattacked within Kupiansk itself. Russian forces continued attacking southeast of the city toward Kurylivka and near Kupiansk-Vuzlovyi on March 8 and 9, while the Ukrainian General Staff reported striking a Russian manpower concentration near Petropavlivka on March 8. Russian milbloggers have continued to criticize official messaging on the sector, with one writing that Kupiansk remains a "sore subject" but that authorities have decided to portray the situation as "neutral."
In the adjacent Borova direction, Russian forces attacked near Oleksandrivka and Korovii Yar on March 8 and 9 but did not advance.
In southern Ukraine, Ukrainian counterattacks in western Zaporizhzhia Oblast have effectively halted the Russian Dnepr Grouping of Forces, which includes the 58th Combined Arms Army. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported March 9 that the grouping has "virtually halted" near Orikhiv and south of Zaporizhzhia City. According to Mashovets, Ukrainian forces retook Novoyakolivka and northern Lukyanivske and pushed Russian units back from northern and central Prymorske. Russian attempts to advance near Orikhiv — attacking toward Bilohirya, Mala Tokmachka, Robotyne, Danylivka, and Mali Shcherbaky — have produced no results.
The stalled southern drive reflects a broader Russian operational failure, according to ISW. The command had planned for advances in the Hulyaipole direction to complement progress near Orikhiv, setting conditions for a converging assault on Zaporizhzhia City. The commander of a Ukrainian regiment in the Hulyaipole direction stated March 8 that Russian plans to seize the city are "part of a broader plan" to advance westward across Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Ukrainian counterattacks in late January disrupted that momentum before it could be consolidated, and ISW assessed that Russian forces' failure to hold newly captured ground after infiltration-tactic advances left them exposed. "Ukrainian forces' ability to take advantage of these Russian mistakes has likely deprived Russian forces of the starting offensive positions from which they intend to launch a summer offensive," ISW wrote.
The effects are cascading across the theater. Mashovets assessed that the Dnepr GoF may need to draw forces from Kherson Oblast to stabilize western Zaporizhzhia — a move he described as difficult given prior redeployments of VDV and assault elements to Donetsk's Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka directions. ISW assessed March 7 that the Russian command had already laterally redeployed elite VDV and naval infantry from Donetsk Oblast to the south in response to Ukrainian gains in the Oleksandrivka and Hulyaipole directions — a shift that may compromise the anticipated Spring-Summer 2026 offensive against Ukraine's Fortress Belt. A Russian milblogger claimed March 9 that elements of the 137th VDV Regiment were moved from Sumy Oblast to Kherson, then rushed back after creating what the blogger called a "critical situation" near Yunakivka; ISW said it could not independently verify the report.
ISW noted that Russian forces have already drawn on operational reserves simply to sustain ongoing combat, "likely including in the Kupiansk where Ukraine has conducted a series of successful counterattacks." The institute assessed that "the Kremlin will likely need either to abandon or to substantially adjust previous plans for its Spring-Summer 2026 offensive — either in Donetsk Oblast or in Zaporizhzhia Oblast or both," adding that "the Russian military simply does not have the capacity to overrun Ukrainian defenses that Russian President Vladimir Putin constantly claims."
On the order of battle across the northern sectors, ISW identified fiber optic FPV drone operators of the 7th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion, 47th Tank Division (1st Guards Tank Army) striking Ukrainian howitzers south of Kurylivka; FPV operators of the 68th Motorized Rifle Division (6th Combined Arms Army, Leningrad Military District) targeting Ukrainian artillery in the Kupiansk direction; elements of the 27th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st GTA) operating in the Kupiansk area; and FPV operators of the 1432nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (1st GTA) striking Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles near Bohuslavka, north of Borova.

OpenAI's Robotics Hardware Chief Quits Over Pentagon Deal

2026-03-10T08:10:00.000-04:00

The resignation of a senior executive from OpenAI who explicitly gave it agreement with the Pentagon as the reason for her departure will have some operational implications for the company. But the larger impact is likely to be reputational and symbolic.

That someone of her caliber is willing to walk over a matter of principle could be significant in tech, where such behavior tends to be copied and signals that disputes about the future of AI, which have so far been dominated by monopolists focused on market dominance have held sway. Ms. Kalinowski's action likely signals that there is considerable disagreement within the ranks of AI execs about its appropriate uses and these could affect how it is rolled out, as well as how the desperately needed growth in it finances evolves. JL

Anthony Ha reports in Tech Crunch:

Caitlin Kalinowski announced today that in response to OpenAI’s controversial agreement with the Department of Defense, she’s resigned from her role leading the company’s hardware team. Kalinowski, who previously led the team building augmented reality glasses at Meta, joined OpenAI in November 2024. In her announcement, she emphasized that the decision was “about principle, not people. AI has as an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.” The controversy appears to have damaged OpenAI’s reputation among consumers
Caitlin Kalinowski announced today that in response to OpenAI’s controversial agreement with the Department of Defense, she’s resigned from her role leading the company’s hardware team.
“This wasn’t an easy call,” Kalinowski said in a social media post. “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”

Kalinowski, who previously led the team building augmented reality glasses at Meta, joined OpenAI in November 2024. In her announcement today, she emphasized that the decision was “about principle, not people” and said she has “deep respect” for CEO Sam Altman and the OpenAI team.
In a follow-up post on X, Kalinowski added, “To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined. It’s a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.”
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Kalinowski’s departure to TechCrunch.
“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the company said in a statement. “We recognize that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world.”
OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon was announced just over a week ago, after discussions between the Pentagon and Anthropic fell through as the AI company tried to negotiate for safeguards preventing its technology from being used in mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon subsequently designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk. (Anthropic said it will fight the designation in court; in the meantime, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon said they will continue to make Anthropic’s Claude available to non-defense customers.)

Then OpenAI quickly announced an agreement of its own allowing its technology to be used in classified environments. As executives attempted to explain the deal on social media, the company described it as taking “a more expansive, multi-layered approach” that relies not just on contract language, but also technical safeguards, to protect red lines similar to Anthropic’s.
Nonetheless, the controversy appears to have damaged OpenAI’s reputation among some consumers, with ChatGPT uninstalls surging 295% and Claude climbing to the top of the App Store charts. As of Saturday afternoon, Claude and ChatGPT remain the U.S. App Store’s No. 1 and No. 2 free apps, respectively.

Interceptor Drones, Ukrainian Soldiers Sent To Protect US Bases In Jordan

2026-03-09T11:34:00.004-04:00

Within a day of requested help being received, Ukrainian interceptor drones and teams to help use them as well as train US troops had been sent to Jordan to protect US bases there.

The White House has refused to answer questions about the request for Ukrainian assistance, most likely because they consider it embarrassing to have to have made the request, which undermines Pentagon claims of dominance in its Iran attack. Ukraine is hoping this support will result in further support from the US administration, though given past exchanges, it would not be a surprise if the White House claimed it was 'owed' this support in return for past US aid given to Ukraine. But with widespread reports of Russia providing targeting support for Iranian drones and missiles, Ukraine's assistance to the US is a prudent move. JL

Iryna Balachuk reports in Ukraine Pravda:

Ukraine has sent interceptor drones and a team of drone specialists to help protect US military bases in Jordan. No other countries have more experience in countering Iranian drones than Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said the US had requested assistance on 5 March. The Ukrainian team left the following day. "We reacted immediately. I said, yes, of course, we will send our experts." The White House has not responded to questions about whether the US had formally asked Ukraine for help.

Ukraine has sent interceptor drones and a team of drone specialists to help protect US military bases in Jordan as the war involving Iran expands beyond the country's borders.

Details: Zelenskyy said the US had requested assistance on 5 March and the Ukrainian team had left the following day, meaning it was expected to arrive in the Middle East shortly afterwards.
Quote from Zelenskyy: "We reacted immediately. I said, yes, of course, we will send our experts."
Details: The NYT noted that the White House had not responded to questions about whether the US had formally asked Ukraine for help.
The NYT said that the US-Israeli war against Iran risks shifting global attention away from the war in Ukraine, but it has also given Kyiv an opportunity to apply its hard-earned experience and advanced technologies on a new battlefield.
"The country has eagerly offered to help US forces and their Middle Eastern allies defend against the sorts of Iranian-designed attack drones that Russia has been using in Ukraine for years. Kyiv is hoping to score points with the United States in American-brokered peace talks," the NYT reported.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine wants to help countries in the Middle East but must balance such requests with Ukraine's own needs, as the country has now entered a fifth year of fighting Russia's full-scale invasion.
The war in Iran could also disrupt supplies of defensive weapons urgently needed by Ukraine. Kyiv has proposed exchanging its interceptor drones used to protect Middle Eastern countries for more powerful systems required to counter Russian ballistic missiles.
Ukraine also said it is ready to assist Middle Eastern countries in exchange for diplomatic support in efforts to secure a ceasefire with Russia, as some countries in the region have "very strong relations with Russia", Zelenskyy said.
"That's why I said, Look, so maybe they can speak with Russians and Russians will make a pause. In this case, of course, we can help the Middle East to defend them," he said.
The NYT pointed out that no other countries have more experience in countering Iranian drones than Ukraine.
According to Zelenskyy and Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for Defence and Space, countries in the Middle East fired over 800 Patriot missiles to counter more than 2,000 Iranian kamikaze drones and more than 500 ballistic missiles in the first few days of last week's war involving Iran.
Zelenskyy's adviser Dmytro Lytvyn said that Kyiv has received only about 600 modern Patriot missiles over the four years of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.

Ukraine's 2026 Gains Support Tech-Heavy, Human-Light Strategy

2026-03-09T10:59:00.001-04:00

As Ukrainian forces continue to achieve unexpected territorial gains while significantly increasing Russian casualties, they are feeling vindicated by their strategy of investing more in technology, especially drones, in order to preserve the lives of their soldiers.

Given the disparity between Ukraine's population versus Russia's, this was a pragmatic decision which has now yielded long term benefits for the country by obviating the need to recruit more of their young and middle aged who are needed for its economic stability and future growth. They are, meanwhile, inflicting increasingly unsustainable casualties on the Russians at a time when even that large nation is beginning to feel the loss of so many working age men. JL

Phillips O'Brien reports in his substack and Kateryna Denisova reports in the Kyiv Independent:

In historical terms, Russian advances, which have been hailed by some in the press as an inexorable march to victory and in the analytical community as a sign that Ukraine was on the verge of collapse, have been historically tiny and achieved at great cost. Ukraine's military forces have stopped Russia's advance toward the city of Zaporizhzhia as part of a three-month operation in the country's south while Ukraine actually liberated more land than the Russians seized. (And they did so) while starting to feel vindicated in their strategy of reducing their soldiers on the front line while using machines (mostly drones) to inflict what they (believe) will be unsustainable casualties on Russian forces.

The line has barely changed in historical terms. Russian advances, which have been hailed in the press as some inexorable march to victory and in the truly terrible analytical community as a sign that Ukraine was on the verge of collapse, have been historically tiny and achieved at great cost. As I have said numerous time, in historical terms what the Russians have “accomplished” would normally be seen as a sign that they are stuck in a strategic quagmire.
So I do not think we should over-react to the news from the second half of February. The line also moved relatively little, indeed hardly at all. That being said something interesting did happen, which is that when the dust settled, Ukraine actually liberated more land than the Russians seized. The best reporting on this has come from the Institute for the Study of War, which regularly leads the way in not overestimating Russia’s military capabilities as opposed to many in the analytical community. Here was a Ukrainian report on their findings.
According to ISW data, since January 1, 2026, Ukrainian forces have liberated approximately 257 square kilometers of territory. Between February 14 and 20, Ukrainian troops achieved a net gain of nearly 33 square kilometers, while from February 21 to 27 they recorded a net gain of approximately 57 square kilometers.
“The last time Ukrainian forces made net gains was during the Summer 2023 counteroffensive, when Ukrainian forces gained 377 net square kilometers in June 2023, 257 net square kilometers in July 2023, and 1.47 net square kilometers in September 2023,” the report said.
At the same time the Founder and President of the ISW had an op-ed in the Washington Post which outlined the situation in detail. You can read the whole thing for free here.
While the Ukrainians are liberating more territory than they are losing, they are also maintaining to keep Russian casualties at a very high level. Zelensky dwelt on this question in some detail on March 3.
“We're sensing Russian weakness in certain areas. It's a new feeling. This doesn't mean we should let our guard down, let me explain. We can't relax, can't think the enemy's given up, can't think their numbers have dropped. But what's important, very important, is that personnel-wise, they feel a bit weaker. No time for training there. So they have a major personnel problem, in our view. Of course, all our personnel challenges are known, we have no secrets. We have, well, these issues, they exist. But still, we'll do everything to strengthen our guys, our army. But this feeling, it's not a bad one. I think the monthly casualty numbers are starting to have an effect. Again, I don't want to sound like some pseudo-optimist, but I'm just saying that, in my view, the enemy personnel losses are starting to add up. That's what I mean. So we'll see how things go moving forward”
Certainly the Ukrainians are starting to feel vindicated in their strategy of reducing their soldiers on the front line while using machines (mostly drones) to inflict what they hope will be unsustainable casualties on Russian forces. This Ukrainian choice was one which western analysts have been derided for years, as that talked about a manpower crisis for Ukraine on the front lines and warned that if the Ukrainians did not draft more young people and send them to the front that a collapse might ensue.
The Ukrainians disagreed and for now, they believe they were right to do so.
The best argument that the Ukrainians are right? The western analysts are much quieter about the Ukrainian manpower crisis and the major papers are not writing stories about what is happening in the front lines. Their entire narrative of the last two years has major flaws, so they are keeping quiet.

The units of Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) and the Armed Forces have stopped Russia's advance toward the city of Zaporizhzhia as part of a three-month defensive operation in the country's south, HUR claimed on March 7.
The statement was made as Russian advances on most sections of the front line slowed during the winter, mirroring patterns observed on the battlefield the previous year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian units along the southern front in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts have been pushing forward.
HUR did not reveal the exact area where the Russian offensive was halted.
The special forces unit of Ukraine's military intelligence, Tymura, killed or wounded over 300 Russian soldiers and captured 39 more, HUR said.
"The goal of the special forces is to disrupt the Russians' offensive plans and prevent their advance toward the regional capital," the agency said.
"The actions of the special forces helped stabilize the defense at positions favorable to the Ukrainian defenders and secure Zaporizhzhia."
Zaporizhzhia, home to approximately 710,000 residents before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, is frequently targeted by Russian forces.
Zaporizhzhia Oblast is also home to the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, which has been under Russian occupation since 2022 and remains one of the thorny issues in ongoing peace talks between Ukraine, the U.S. and Russia.

"All the Cards?" Why Russia Has Achieved So Little In Ukraine

2026-03-09T10:28:00.003-04:00

As spring begins to sprout in Ukraine after a long, difficult winter, Ukrainian forces are on the march. Yes, you read that right. Ukrainian forces, not Russian, are advancing in the country's southern battle zone as its troops have effectively thwarted Russian advances in Pokrovsk and the Kremlin finds itself short of money and new troops. The usual doom-laden warnings of imminent Ukrainian collapse and 'inevitable' Russian victory are strangely absent from the usual dismissive sources. Even the chronically Ukraine-skeptical New York Times is running op-ed pieces, like the one below, critical of Putin's chances!

And despite Putin's maximalist demands for Kyiv's surrender - seconded by his admirers in the White House - he can have no confidence, four years on, that his operationally incompetent army, air force and navy are capable of delivering even modest gains, let alone his downwardly revised military and political objectives. The reality is that Ukraine's military has gotten smarter and stronger, while the Russians continue to flounder, having achieved little at great cost in men and materiel. And that is unlikely to change, even with temporarily rising oil prices, thanks to Russia's weak economy, technological deficiencies and organizational confusion and corruption. Russian dreams of victory have evaporated thanks to Putin's poor decision-making and inadequate strategic capabilities. JL

Lawrence Freedman comments in the New York Times:

A Russian victory in Ukraine remains elusive. Its territorial gains are modest, it controls no regional capitals, is unable to exploit any breakthroughs. These meager results have cost of 1.2 million Russian casualties. If Russia has 'all the cards,' why has it achieved so little? Its progress been frustrated by its own operational weaknesses as well as a much smaller army’s resilience and innovative tactics. Neither Putin’s military objectives nor his political ones have been met. Ukraine has the strongest, largest, most battle-hardened army in Europe. NATO has expanded to include Sweden and Finland, as Germany is again a military power. While Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine, it has become dependent on China and unable to help its Syrian, Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian clients. However hard Russia tries, it cannot subjugate Ukraine.

Before sunrise on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine from five directions. Moving quickly, it took swaths of territory in the south and east and quickly reached the outskirts of Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, in the northeast. The safest assumption then was that the country would be under Russian control in a matter of days.
Four years later, a Russian victory remains stubbornly elusive. Russia’s territorial gains are modest, and it controls no regional capitals. Its forces have been moving forward, but only just, and seem unable to exploit any breakthroughs. These meager results have been achieved at a cost of over 1.2 million Russian casualties since the start of the war, according to an estimate by the Center for International Strategic Studies, which called the numbers “extraordinary.”
There is nothing inevitable about a Russian victory in Ukraine. The narrative that Russia has, to quote President Trump, “all the cards” and that Ukraine must make big territorial concessions in order to avoid even worse losses, has dominated negotiations. But at this point in the war, it’s fair to ask: If Russia has all the cards, why has it achieved so little? Why has its progress been so often frustrated by a much smaller army’s resilience and innovative tactics, as well as Russia’s own operational weaknesses?
Some of the first steps toward any durable peace agreement are to understand that a Russian victory is not inevitable and to convince Russia of it. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that the next round of talks among Ukraine, Russia and the United States would probably take place this week in Abu Dhabi, but the timing and location of that meeting are now in doubt because of the war in Iran. Many of Russia’s failures in Ukraine have their roots in decisions made during the first days in February 2022, when Russian forces underestimated their opponents and advanced on too many axes at once. When what was supposed to be a quick push to take Kyiv stalled, supply lines became overextended and forward troops became so vulnerable to counterattacks that they had to be withdrawn. Those mistakes turned a short war into a long war.
By early 2024, Moscow seemed to have rallied and was confident that it could win this long war. Ukraine had been shaken by a disappointing counteroffensive the previous year; it was short of troops and struggling with recruitment. Russia had no problems with recruitment, thanks to large sign-up bonuses, and its economy, increasingly on a war footing, was booming — albeit unsustainably.
With Ukraine outnumbered and outgunned and with the aid from the United States stalled in Congress, Russia embarked on an offensive that has yet to conclude. But instead of executing blitzkriegs, Russia has made remarkably slow progress, and its casualty rate is staggeringly high. According to estimates, in the past year Russia suffered roughly 400,000 casualties, including killed, wounded and missing, to acquire around 0.8 percent of Ukrainian territory.
And here we are. Neither President Vladimir Putin’s core military objectives nor his political ones for his special military operation have been met. Ukraine retains its independence. And instead of being demilitarized, it has one of the strongest, largest and most battle-hardened armies in Europe. NATO has expanded to include Sweden and Finland, and Germany is once again becoming a serious military power.
While Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine, it has become increasingly dependent on China and unable to help its Syrian, Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian clients. Oil revenues have diminished, even with a rally this week, and the economy suffers from high interest rates, inflation and minimal growth. Given the vast gap between the initial objectives and what has been achieved, Mr. Putin has understandably tried to emphasize successes. Late last year, he claimed that the cities of Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, and Pokrovsk, in Donetsk, were under Russian control. Kupiansk has since been mostly liberated, and Ukrainian forces were still fighting in Pokrovsk — the fall of which had been described in various outlets as imminent since August 2024 — until January. And if Russia has now finally captured Pokrovsk, reduced to rubble and with its railway lines and roads no longer functional, its value is surely ambiguous. Mr. Putin’s army has squandered men and matériel merely to make his boasts come true. While the battle has been underway Ukraine has built up a formidable defensive line to protect the so-called fortress belt of Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, in Ukraine’s main industrial region. It is not surprising that Moscow demands that these cities be handed over without a fight in negotiations. It can have no confidence — even if the war lasted well into 2027 — that it would be able to take them.
It would be premature to call an offensive that is not yet over a failure — despite the meager gains, high costs and lack of momentum. But the basic feature of the front line, with troops easily spotted and eliminated, is that it is now extremely difficult to mount large-scale, fast-moving massed offensives. This is why Russian advances have largely depended on small-scale infiltrations on foot, bikes or buggies.
Mr. Putin has been ready to pay an extraordinarily heavy price to achieve his geopolitical ambitions. Perhaps that readiness is why whenever the question of whether Russia can keep the war going is posed, the answer invariably comes back that it can. In Moscow, it may not feel like a proper defeat until Russian troops are in full retreat.
Ukraine, of course, has suffered grievously in the past four years. In addition to its heavy military losses, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. Russian attacks on energy infrastructure left Ukrainians dealing with regular blackouts and insufficient heat throughout a harsh winter in which temperatures dropped to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Even so, a majority of Ukrainians continue to oppose territorial concessions and are confident that they can impose ever higher costs on Russia, even if Ukraine lacks the means to liberate all its territory from Russian occupation for now. Ukrainian commanders have claimed that Russia has been unable to replace its frontline losses with new fighters in recent months and have set a grisly target of inflicting 50,000 casualties a month to bring home to Moscow the costly futility of this war.
Russia has failed at much since it began its full-scale invasion in Ukraine, but it has had some success in creating the narrative that its victory in Ukraine is but a matter of time. The first step toward a durable peace is to defeat that narrative: However hard Russia tries and however much pain it inflicts, it cannot subjugate Ukraine.

Anthropic's Defiant Stance Appears To Be Paying Off - And Hurting OpenAI

2026-03-09T09:44:00.007-04:00

In the annals of achieving the opposite result for an intended consequence, there are few that surpass the US Secretary of Defense's decision to label Anthropic's AI 'a supply chain risk.'

Since that announcement by Secretary Hegseth, Anthropic's Claude has climbed to - and maintained - the lead ranking for AI downloads, while primary competitor and new Pentagon supplicant OpenAI has suffered a 295% increase in uninstalls and a 50% drop in five star reviews. And, because of the short time between the Pentagon declaration and the start of the administration's attack on Iran, reports indicate that Anthropic's model has been crucial to a range of US military decisions, including targeting and prioritization of actions - despite its ostensible banning. Since the Pentagon is considered almost certain to lose its case in court for declaring supply chain risk, this will ultimately have been meaningless performative posturing by the administration, though it has certainly benefited Anthropic despite having achieved the White House's diametrically opposed outcome. Inquiring minds want to know if the Silicon Valley hype machine is taking note and will now request Pentagon banning for all new products as a means of stimulating sales... JL

Ken Harbaugh reports in The Atlantic:

Anthropic's principled confrontation with DOD is paying off. The day after Hegseth announced the government was severing ties, Claude took the No. 1 spot as downloaded free app, a position it still holds, topping 1 million a day. It “has broken its sign-up record every day since, across every country where Claude is available.” Users are abandoning OpenAI: uninstalls of ChatGP, spiked 295% February 28, as OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon emerged. One-star reviews surged 800%, five-star reviews fell by half. Hegseth’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk will likely be overturned in court. The U.S. government has never applied the label to a US company or used in retaliation for decline of contract terms. In the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon, a company was forced to hold the line against its government. In doing so, Anthropic earned something more valuable than the contract it lost in an industry where trust is the scarcest resource.

At first glance, last week looked like a catastrophe for Anthropic.
The AI company refused to let the U.S. government use its products to surveil the American public or direct autonomous weapons without human oversight. In response, the Department of Defense canceled its $200 million contract. On Truth Social, President Trump called the company “leftwing nut jobs” and ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using its products. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went a step further, designating Anthropic as a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.” OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival, quickly signed its own deal with the Pentagon.

Anthropic’s principled stand continues to pose enormous risks for the company. But some early indications suggest that it just might pay off.
The company’s confrontation with DOD has proved more effective than some of the world’s most expensive advertising—at least according to one metric. After a Super Bowl campaign earlier this year, Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, became one of the top 10 most-downloaded free apps in America, per Apple’s charts. The day after Hegseth announced that the government was severing ties, it took the No. 1 spot, a position it still holds as of this writing. Downloads have topped 1 million a day, according to Anthropic’s chief product officer. A spokesperson told me that the company “has broken its own sign-up record every day since early last week, across every country where Claude is available.”
Users aren’t just signing up for Claude—they are also abandoning OpenAI (which has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic). Uninstalls of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship app, spiked 295 percent on February 28, as details of OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon emerged. One-star reviews surged nearly 800 percent, and five-star reviews fell by half.
Perhaps more consequential, Anthropic has gained the trust and admiration of engineers across the AI industry. Letters of support for the company are circulating among its competitors’ employees. One such letter had some 850 signatures as of Monday. Many of these employees are demanding that their companies show solidarity with Anthropic and honor the same red lines. Some have reportedly threatened to leave if those demands are not met.

Anthropic has won admiration outside Silicon Valley too. Before the company’s clash with DOD, former Republican Representative Denver Riggleman, who now leads a cybersecurity firm, was preparing to pick an AI firm to partner with. He was considering a range of options; Anthropic’s stand narrowed them to one. Riggleman has since directed his company to work with Anthropic on all future projects. “Anthropic had its nonnegotiables,” he told me, and “we have ours.” Drawing from his experience on a congressional AI task force focused on foreign adversaries, Riggleman thinks that Hegseth’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk will likely be overturned in court. The U.S. government has never applied the label to an American company, typically reserving it for corporations run by hostile foreign actors, such as Huawei. Moreover, this is the first time that the label appears to have been used in retaliation for a business declining contract terms. “To say it rests on shaky legal ground,” Riggleman said, “would be generous.”
The former congressman once trusted his country to regulate technologies that had the power to reshape Americans’ lives. “These days,” Riggleman said, “the government is no longer creating those safeguards—it’s destroying them.” He continued, “I don’t think we appreciate yet, as a society, what it means to have private firms controlling this amount of information about citizens.”
The Department of Defense has said that the contract it offered Anthropic contained adequate safeguards, in part because the text limited AI’s uses to “all lawful purposes.” Anthropic argued that this clause wasn’t sufficient—that a new executive order or reinterpretation of statute could shift the existing legal boundaries. “We don’t want to sell something,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, “that could get our own people killed, or that could get innocent people killed.”

OpenAI has contended that its subsequent deal with the Pentagon is safer than Anthropic’s. Its contract does appear to prohibit mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. But it retains the “all lawful purposes” language, rendering that prohibition dependent on DOD’s willingness to respect legal norms. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, conceded that the deal was “definitely rushed” and that “the optics don’t look good.” On Monday, the company said it had added restrictions to the contract regarding surveillance, but critics are skeptical that they will prove any more binding.
The events of the past week reminded me of my early days as a Navy pilot nearly three decades ago. One of my first tasks was to sign a document pledging never to surveil American citizens. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, I was an aircraft commander, leading combat-reconnaissance aircrews that gathered large-scale intelligence and informed battlefield targeting decisions. I took for granted that somewhere along those decision chains, a human being was in the loop.
I could not have defined artificial intelligence then, but I understood instinctively that a person, not a machine, would bear the weight of life-and-death choices. This was not a bureaucratic consideration. It was a hard line that those of us in uniform were expected to hold.
In the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon, a private company was forced to hold the line against its own government. In doing so, Anthropic may have earned something more valuable than the contract it lost. In an industry where trust is the scarcest resource, Anthropic just banked a substantial deposit.

Russian Marines Slaughtered Trying To Stop Ukraine Huliaipole Attacks

2026-03-08T11:24:00.001-04:00

Recently redeployed Russian naval infantry sent from Pokrovsk to the Huliaipole sector were slaughtered in what appears to have been a vain attempt to stop Ukraine's ongoing counterattacks there.

Despite the 'elite's designation enjoyed by Russian marines and air assault forces, they do not appear to have been any more successful than their less exalted comrades have been in that area of the front. JL

Dmytro Shumlianskyi reports in Militarnyi:

Russian marines from the newly deployed 40th Naval Infantry Brigade launched an unsuccessful mechanized assault on Ukrainian positions in the Huliaipole sector. A Russian tank, an armored fighting vehicle, and two quad bikes carrying troops were advancing along the Malynivka–Zelenyi Hai–Huliaipole route. Operators of the 414th Birds of Magyar Unmanned Systems Brigade detected and destroyed them. Surviving troops who tried to hide in residential buildings were eliminated. Shortly before this assault, the Russian command redeployed several brigades from the Donetsk region to the Huliaipole area in the Zaporizhzhia region. This was a response to a series of counterattacks by the Ukrainian forces.
Russians from the newly deployed 40th Naval Infantry Brigade launched an unsuccessful mechanized assault on Ukrainian Defense Forces positions in the Huliaipole sector.
The 225th Assault Regiment’s press service released footage of the attack being repelled.
According to the military, a Russian tank, an armored fighting vehicle, and two quad bikes carrying troops were advancing along the Malynivka–Zelenyi Hai–Huliaipole route. However, operators of the 414th Birds of Magyar Unmanned Systems Brigade detected them in time.
After that, drones from the 225th Assault Regiment joined in destroying the invaders, along with assets from the 5th Kyiv Assault Brigade and other units of the Ukrainian Defense Forces.
It is reported that as a result of the battle, the Russian equipment was destroyed, and the troops who tried to hide in residential buildings were eliminated.
Overall, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, on March 7, there were 12 attacks by Russian forces in the Huliaipole direction, in the areas of Dobropillia, Zaliznychne, Varvarivka, Myrne, and Zelenе.
Shortly before this assault, the Russian command redeployed several brigades from the Donetsk region to the Huliaipole area in the Zaporizhzhia region. This maneuver was a response to Ukraine reinforcing the front line and a series of counterattacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The 68th Army Corps of Russia’s Eastern Military District, which had previously operated on the Pokrovsk–Dobropillia sector, also returned to the Vostok grouping.

Marine infantry units have also appeared on the southern front, including the 55th Naval Infantry Division, which has not yet been observed in active combat, and the 40th Naval Infantry Brigade (military unit 10103).

US and Gulf Allies Rush To Buy, Deploy Ukraine Anti-Drone Systems Vs Iran Attacks

2026-03-08T10:54:00.001-04:00

As the US and its Middle Eastern allies find themselves in more of a fight than they bargained for against Iran, they are now rushing to buy and deploy Ukrainian anti-drone systems - as well as Ukrainian trainers to show them how to use the systems optimally (why they were delusional enough to believe that Iran was going to be as easy as Venezuela is a story for another day).

The Ukrainian systems, especially the AI-powered Merops anti-drone unit, has been particularly effective against Iranian Shaheds. And the contrast between Ukraine helping the US while Russia provides Iran with targeting information on US bases has been lost on no one - outside the White House, that is. JL

Michael Gordon and colleagues report in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Army is rushing to the Middle East counterdrone systems that have been battle-tested in Ukraine in an effort to thwart Tehran’s attacks across the region. Gulf states targeted by Iranian drones and missiles have traveled to meet with the Ukrainians and learn from their experience. “Everyone’s phone is ringing. Calls from Oman, Dubai, Qatar, U.A.E.” Ukraine's Merops counterdrone is small enough to be launched from a pickup truck. It can autonomously seek an incoming drone using radio waves, radar or the target’s heat signature. A mile from its target, it uses AI to lock onto the target and detonate nearby. It can travel at 180 miles an hour and reach an altitude of 16,000 feet. “The Shahed isn’t a simple target. Ukrainian forces learned how to intercept them effectively through hard experience, but that took time.”
The U.S. Army is rushing to the Middle East counterdrone systems that have been battle-tested in Ukraine, in an effort to thwart Tehran’s destructive attacks across the region, U.S. officials said.
A small number of the defensive systems, dubbed Merops, are being sent from U.S. Army stocks in Europe, along with U.S. personnel to operate them and train other troops, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials said that additional systems will be provided by the U.S. company that produces them, Perennial Autonomy, in which billionaire Eric Schmidt is an investor. Schmidt declined to comment.
A U.S. official said that Ukraine is likely to provide trainers. Ukraine didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the U.S. and its regional allies have sought Kyiv’s help against Iranian strikes.
The U.S. isn’t the only country interested in Ukraine’s battlefield experience. Representatives of Qatar and other Gulf states targeted by Iranian drones and missiles have traveled to meet with Ukrainian arms manufacturers and learn from their experience in building supply chains.
U.S. use of Ukraine-tested innovations marks a turnabout. For several years, U.S. military officers have sent equipment to Ukraine and studied the war there to learn how to defend against Russia’s large fleet of one-way attack drones. Now, Ukraine has become a laboratory for defensive systems to be used in President Trump’s new war against Iran—specifically in fending off Iran’s Shahed drones.
Shaheds, which Russia uses extensively, are an Iranian-developed weapon, so the U.S. faces a threat that is familiar from Ukraine. Moscow manufactures its own Shaheds and has developed versions that are even more advanced than those Iran is now launching.
The U.S. and its allies deployed some Merops systems in Poland and Romania last year following incursions by Russian drones. It has proved to be a popular system with Ukraine forces.
The Merops is itself a drone, small enough to be launched from a pickup truck. It can autonomously seek an incoming drone using radio waves, radar or the target’s heat signature. When roughly a mile from its target, it uses artificial intelligence to lock onto the target and detonate nearby, according to its users. Merops can travel at speeds of more than 180 miles an hour and reach an altitude of up to around 16,000 feet, according to one user.
Each Merops counterdrone drone costs less than $10,000, said one U.S. military official. The cost per unit should drop to around $7,000 as production volume increases, the official said. At least some of the Merops are produced in Taiwan, the official said.
The unit price is far lower than the cost of systems the U.S. and allies are now firing at incoming Iranian missiles and drones. Interceptor missiles from U.S.-made Patriot air-defense systems can cost around $4 million and producing them is a slow process.
A U.S. soldier installs part of a counter-drone system. Kacper Pempel/Reuters
The U.S. Air Force has also put relatively cheap laser-guided rockets on jet fighters to shoot down enemy drones, a capability it employed in the clash last year with the Houthis.
Still, many interceptors—including Merops—have limitations. They have a short range and their effectiveness declines in poor weather, operators say, though that is less of a concern in the Middle East than in Ukraine.
Since Saturday, Iran has used hundreds of ballistic missiles and Shahed drones in strikes against neighboring states and U.S. military bases. One UAV attack killed six American servicemembers. The United Arab Emirates said that it was targeted by 689 drones in just the first three days of this conflict, with 44 hitting the country. An Iranian drone damaged a radar that was for the U.S. Thaad radar system in Jordan, where numerous U.S. combat aircraft are based. The Thaad is a sophisticated and costly ground-based missile-defense system that intercepts ballistic missiles above the atmosphere. U.S. Central Command declined to comment on the radar but said that the U.S. maintains “full combat capability.”
“The Shahed isn’t a simple target,” said Col. Yuri Ihnat, a spokesman for the Air Force. “Ukrainian forces learned how to intercept them effectively through hard experience, but that process took time,” he said.
More than a dozen Qatari officials toured the production facilities of a major Ukrainian defense company on Wednesday, according to its management, and sat for meetings with its directors. That visit came the same day as Zelensky fielded calls with Gulf leaders.
Qatari officials also visited a secret training ground in Ukraine, where Merops is also used, to learn how the country brings down Russian drones with Ukrainian and other technology.
“Everyone’s phone is ringing constantly. Calls from Oman, Dubai, Qatar, U.A.E.,” said Yury Hudymenko, the head of an independent group that oversees defense procurement.

Russia's Winter Bombardment Campaign of Ukraine Has Failed

2026-03-08T10:27:00.007-04:00

Spring is beginning to arrive in Ukraine. The worst of the winter weather is over. And with it, the worst of Russia's attempt to freeze Ukrainians into submission has failed, like so many of its other military attempts.

Through a combination of heroic energy repair efforts despite Russian attacks on civilian energy workers, additional electrical power provided by Poland and Romania, as well as thousands of portable generators - many provided by Norway, Japan and other countries - the Ukrainians have largely restored their power grid and have again defeated Putin's efforts to defeat them. JL

Stefan Korshak reports in the Kyiv Post:

The Russian bid to defeat Ukraine by destroying power grid and heating infrastructure in the middle of winter and forcing Ukrainians to suffer sub-zero temperatures in unheated homes has failed. At the height of the Russian bombardment, in early February, Ukrainian power generation had fallen to 23% of normal. Blackouts and electricity rationing imposed nationwide left consumers with the lights off 8-12 hours a day. In the worst-hit cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, some were without power for 24-36 hours. Yet, in a little more than two weeks, Ukrainian generation capacity had rebounded to 73% of normal. The heroes were field maintenance teams: dispatchers, truck drivers, crane operators and supply chain managers repairing power line breaks and damaged equipment. Poland Romania surged power to Ukraine and other countries sent portable generators which provided 25% of electricity.
A Russian bid to defeat Ukraine by destroying power grid and heating infrastructure in the middle of winter and forcing Ukrainians to suffer sub-zero temperatures in unheated homes without electricity has failed. Spring has arrived in Ukraine, the lights are on across the country and Ukrainian defiance is undimmed as well.
The Russian Federation, led by authoritarian President Vladimir Putin, kicked off a strategic bombardment operation with the objective of demolishing Ukraine’s ability to generate electricity and keep homes and businesses cold in mid-December. The strikes, aiming to force Ukraine to accept Russian peace terms by making Ukraine’s civilian population miserable, alternated between “small” daily attacks usually of 80-100 kamikaze drones accompanied by one or two missiles, and major air assaults with 300-500 drones and 20-40 missiles, taking place every five to seven days.

Each attack drone carried a warhead with 50-100 kilograms of high explosive sufficient to demolish a few apartments or knock offline a single power transformer station. Each missile carried a warhead with between 500-1,000 kilograms of high explosives, sufficient to leveling two or three stories of an apartment building and everyone in it, or to smash beyond replacement a generator turbine at a city power plant.

Practically every long-range weapon in the Kremlin arsenal was employed: ground-launched ballistic missiles, air-dropped “aeroballistic” missiles, cruise missiles fired from warships, bombers and giant trucks, hypersonic missiles, kamikaze drones made in Iran, and kamikaze drones made in Russia under Iranian license.

Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, during a Dec. 7 broadcast on the national Rossiya-1 television channel, said the strikes would “turn off the lights for good and make them [Ukrainians] freeze in the dark this winter…[and] break the will of the Ukrainian people.”
In total, from December 2025 to February 2026, Russia launched 14 major attacks and at least 45 smaller ones at Ukraine, the most massive taking place on Dec. 6, with 704 Russian weapons violating Ukrainian airspace, including 51 missiles. Most major Ukrainian cities were hit, particularly northeastern Kharkiv and southern Dnipro and Odesa, but the capital Kyiv was overwhelmingly the main Russian target.

“The Russians had a clear goal; they wanted to destroy our power grid and heating infrastructure, and they made significant progress in that process,” said Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine [and former chief of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR] in a Feb. 28 interview with TSN television.
Ukrainian regions near or bordering Russia faced, in addition, daily attacks by glide bombs dropped by Russian combat aircraft flying outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses. Navigating mostly by inertia and fairly easily jammed, the glide bombs were the most inaccurate weapon used by Russia in the attacks, but the explosive payload – up to three tons of high explosive – meant a precise hit wasn’t always needed.
Ukraine’s air defenses went into the battle handicapped by shortages of modern air-to-air missiles launched by fighter jets, and interceptor missiles fired by ground launchers, because those weapons were made in the US, and White House peacemaking tacticians were hoping air defense ammunition shortages might pressure Ukraine into a capitulation peace agreement with Russia.

America’s throttling of PAC-3 missile deliveries to Ukraine was particularly damaging because that was the only weapon in the Ukrainian inventory capable of shooting down a Russian ballistic missile.
Cut off from advanced air defense weapons in sufficient quantities, Ukraine’s air defense command turned to alternatives: machine guns mounted on pickup trucks, jammers around key infrastructure, reinforced concrete blocks armoring power transformers, door gunners in intercepting helicopter gunships, and above all, domestically developed interceptor drones designed to blow up the Russian drones by ramming them. Aside from ballistic missiles, over the course of the bombardment, Ukrainian air defenses managed to shoot down around 80% of all incoming weapons, and on some nights it was above 90%.
According to statistics released by DTEK on March 1, at the height of the Russian bombardment, in early February, Ukrainian power generation capacity had fallen to about 23% of normal capacity. Forced blackouts and electricity rationing imposed nationwide left most consumers with the lights off 8-12 hours a day. In the worst-hit cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, some districts were without power for 24-36 hours.

Yet, in a little more than two weeks, by Feb. 24, Ukrainian generation capacity had vigorously rebounded to 73% of normal volumes, and DTEK was delivering continuous power almost nationwide.
The acknowledged engineers and heroes of that national recovery and repair effort – in Ukraine considered a near-miracle – were thousands of police, firemen and ambulance crews responding to the scene of the Russian strikes, and the field maintenance teams, with dispatchers, truck drivers, crane operators and supply chain managers arriving next to repair power line breaks and damaged equipment faster than the Russian military could inflict more. Day after day, high-voltage linemen climbed towers to string new cable in temperatures 20 degrees below zero Celsius.
Crews on the ground faced a different threat: the Russian “double-tap” tactic of hitting a site already hit with another missile, to injure or kill emergency response personnel and power company employees. On Feb. 1, a Russian drone struck a bus carrying DTEK staff en route to a power plant and adjacent coal mine near the city of Dnipro, killing 12 and injuring 16 workers.
In January alone, per news reports, 161 Ukrainian civilians were killed and 757 injured nationwide by Russian long-range weapons. But throughout the bombardment, despite the danger and discomfort, public dissent was practically non-existent.

“Society, notwithstanding all its variety, it held out,” Budanov said. “We didn’t have mass protests about blackouts, which was what the Russian Federation was really depending on. There weren’t any serious incidents of social tension against the authorities in government. Everyone understands that the reason the lights aren’t on in a person’s house, it’s missile strikes, with missiles launched from Russian Federation territory. Here, they [the Kremlin] just calculated wrong.”
Also important were quick decisions by Poland and Romania to surge electricity generation to add capacity to Ukraine’s grid. Most of those exports went directly to major consumers like Ukrainian industry and the national railroad, or to power generation inside Ukraine.

Poland also led an international effort to ship portable generators into Ukraine, sending 379 from government strategic reserves, 447 via EU funds, along with city-level donations, like 90 donated by Warsaw to Kyiv in January. The EU, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Spain, and Norway sent generators and other help ranging from cogeneration units and spare parts to construction materials and protective gear for field workers. Even Japan was a donor.

Power generation capacity in the hands of individual Ukrainians or small businesses was another pillar of Ukrainian energy resilience. According to a March 1 DTEK estimate, as much as 5-6 GW of daily power consumption in Ukraine – or about 20-25% of total national winter daily demand – was generated by smaller generators powered by gas, diesel, gasoline, or by wind or solar, or just run off power storage devices.
“By deploying portable generation, Ukraine is transitioning from a highly centralized vulnerable model to a distributed grid architecture that is more resilient,” a March 2 analysis published by research group RFU news said. “This makes them significantly more difficult to disable with attacks, and far harder to disrupt, which will protect Ukraine against future blackouts.”
Ukraine’s Air Force on Monday summed up the campaign in an openly triumphant Monday statement:
“Ukraine’s skies have stood firm. The energy system has been preserved thanks to the professionalism of the anti-aircraft missile troops, mobile fire groups, radio engineering troops and aviation….At the same time, we thank every power engineer and repair crew who, under fire, restored the lights and kept the power grid alive…We know that the enemy is preparing new attacks, but every unit of our air defense is on full combat readiness…We fought! We survived! We will win!”
In a business/residential district near Kyiv’s Olympic Stadium on Thursday, a Kyiv Post reporter observed entire blocks of storefront including high-end restaurants and humble food shops, during a blackout, each operating on its own generator. On Feb. 28 in Kyiv’s Golden Gate neighborhood, a scheduled blackout shut down power in a building with a major press conference in progress: a generator kicked in and light was restored in less than a minute, the reporter saw.
“I have giant gratitude to our entire Ukrainian people. That they bore the stress and are patient. I already can say they have come through the hard part. In principle, it’s already spring,” Budanov said.

Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Assault Gains Force Russia To Redeploy Elite Troops South

2026-03-08T10:09:00.003-04:00

Russia is being forced to redeploy elite paratroopers and marines from Pokrovsk to Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk as the surprisingly successful Ukrainian assault in those sectors takes more ground and overwhelms Russian defenses.

Ukraine's own assault units have now broken through a series of Russian defensive lines and have yet to be stopped by the Russians. JL

Alex Stezhensky reports in New Voice of Ukraine:

South of Zaporizhzhia, a carefully prepared offensive has unsettled Russian defenses. Russia has redeployed elite airborne and naval infantry units from the Pokrovsk sector and Dobropillia to southern Ukraine in response to recent Ukrainian battlefield gains in Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts. During the first days of the offensive, Ukrainian assault groups infiltrated behind Russian defensive lines and positioned themselves inside Russian defensive areas. When the main Ukrainian assault began, those small units attacked Russian positions from within triggering panic as rumors of a breakthrough spread. Russian forces were fragmented and poorly coordinated. Neighboring units did not know the positions of adjacent formations.
Near the front line south of Zaporizhzhya, Ukrainian paratroopers say a carefully prepared offensive has begun to unsettle Russian defenses after months of stalemate. NV journalist Serhii Okunev visited positions held by the 95th Air Assault Brigade, which was urgently redeployed to the sector in January, and spoke with commanders who described the operation in detail.
The interviews provide one of the first detailed accounts from Ukrainian troops involved in the recent counterattacks in southern Ukraine, which have fueled speculation about the scale of Kyiv’s offensive.
Ukrainian forces have already retaken about 460 square kilometers in the south, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, in what analysts say are the largest Ukrainian counteroffensive actions in the region since the summer of 2023.

Russia has redeployed elite airborne and naval infantry units from the Pokrovsk sector and the area around Dobropillia to southern Ukraine in response to recent Ukrainian battlefield gains in Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, the Institute for the Study of War reported on March 7.
The troop movements indicate Moscow is reacting to Ukrainian counterattacks that began in late January 2026 and may be forced to revise plans for a broader spring–summer offensive.

A brigade built for offense
The 95th Air Assault Brigade has developed a reputation as one of Ukraine’s most mobile combat units — repeatedly sent to stabilize the most difficult sectors of the front during Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In 2022 the brigade pushed Russian troops away from the strategically important Izyum–Sloviansk highway before joining the Kharkiv counteroffensive that autumn. It later participated in the first phase of Ukraine’s operation in Russia’s Kursk Oblast in 2024.
After breaking across the Russian border during that campaign, Ukrainian paratroopers shifted to defense and for months repelled Russian assaults in Kursk Oblast, including attacks involving North Korean units. Later they held a critical defense sector in Sumy Oblast when Russian forces attempted to advance toward the city of Sumy.
When Russia’s northern offensive stalled, the brigade was redeployed to the intense Pokrovsk sector, where it completed several urgent missions before receiving new orders.
At the end of January 2026 the 95th Brigade was ordered to urgently move south to the Zaporizhzhya sector, where Russian forces had captured significant territory during the autumn and launched battles for a key Ukrainian defensive line around the city of Huliaipole.
Those advances created a serious threat to Zaporizhzhya, the regional capital. Ukrainian forces had been retreating in the sector for several months.
The 95th Brigade has been deployed on key sectors since 2022. / Photo: communications department of the 95th Air Assault Brigade
Moving an entire brigade — including armored vehicles, artillery, headquarters units and assault groups — is a complex operation requiring careful coordination. The 95th had to move quickly, avoid detection and enter combat almost immediately after arriving.
Earlier in the winter several Assault Forces units were publicly redeployed to the Huliaipole area. According to a source in Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces who spoke to NV on condition of anonymity, that publicity may have been intended to distract Russian forces from tracking the movement of several Ukrainian brigades, including the 95th.
NV cannot disclose the full composition of Ukrainian forces operating in the sector, but at least one additional brigade with experience in offensive operations moved south alongside the 95th.
“It’s difficult to say whether the plan really was to distract the enemy with assault regiments and conceal the movement of Air Assault Forces units,” the source said. “But in practice that’s exactly how it worked.”
Foreign OSINT analysts tracked Ukrainian offensive activity from the first day, but even they did not immediately detect the presence of the 95th Brigade in the Zaporizhzhya sector.
“Overall this isn’t something new for us. We already had experience moving quickly and starting combat operations while still deploying on a sector,” said the commander of the brigade’s 1st Air Assault Battalion, whose call sign is One Four.
“Some of our assault units were already conducting offensive actions and achieving success while the rest of the brigade was still arriving. But these were organized actions. That’s how we operate.”

Number-based call signs among command staff are a long-standing tradition within Ukraine’s Air Assault Forces.
The battalion commander joined the brigade during the ATO/JFO period. His battalion later achieved significant successes in Kursk Oblast, fought North Korean units and captured numerous Russian prisoners of war for future exchanges.
Now his soldiers are actively participating in the offensive south of Zaporizhzhya.
‘We managed to sow chaos among the occupiers’
One Four speaks calmly even when describing intense assaults. But when discussing the successes of his soldiers, his tone becomes noticeably more animated.
“There was a case a few days ago. Our assault group captured a strongpoint and fought for it for a long time. Now it’s a position we are using to develop further offensive actions,” he said.
During the clearing operation, the soldiers captured an enemy radio and began listening to Russian communications. The radio traffic included insults aimed at Ukrainians.
“The soldiers told their commander: we can’t just leave that like that — we need to deal with it,” he said. “They went to attack the very position from which those insults were coming over the radio.”
The position was captured even though it had not originally been assigned as an objective.
“They attacked successfully. Now we’ve secured it.”
At the start of the Ukrainian attacks, many analysts linked the offensive to Russian forces losing access to Starlink satellite internet on the front line.
Some even suggested the offensive began because Russian units were cut off from the system.
“Starlink for the occupiers stopped working several days after we had already begun the offensive,” One Four said.
“Our actions were not triggered by that shutdown. By that time we already knew our tasks, were moving and preparing.”
He acknowledged that communication disruptions benefited Ukrainian forces but warned against exaggerated expectations.
“If someone thinks Starlink stopped working and now the enemy will run dozens of kilometers like during the Kharkiv operation — that’s not the case.”
“Yes, it created problems for them. It gave us advantages. But their infantry is still in its positions.”
Their drone operators remain positioned farther from the zero line, he said, where they can still maintain some communication.
Reconnaissance had revealed significant organizational weaknesses among Russian troops in the sector.
Russian forces here were fragmented and poorly coordinated. Neighboring units sometimes did not even know the positions of adjacent formations.
“We took advantage of that,” the commander said.
During the first days of the offensive, some Ukrainian assault groups infiltrated behind Russian defensive lines and positioned themselves inside Russian defensive areas.
When the main Ukrainian assault began, those small units attacked Russian positions from within.
“While our main forces carried out assaults, our diversionary actions in the rear created the impression that we had already advanced much deeper,” One Four said.
Special forces group training. / Photo: communications department of the 95th Air Assault Brigade
Russian forward positions began losing track of where their rear actually was.
Although the diversionary operations involved only small numbers of soldiers, they created confusion among Russian troops. Combined with communication problems and rumors of deep Ukrainian breakthroughs, the attacks triggered panic.
Some Russian units began retreating.
Intercepted radio communications included calls for Russian soldiers to abandon artillery and flee because Ukrainian paratroopers had allegedly broken deep into their defenses.
At certain moments the battalion even used armored vehicles to support the advance.
Enemy panic also helped create opportunities for advances by other Ukrainian units.
One Four described another episode during the fighting.
“There was a situation when our soldiers captured one position and eliminated the enemy there,” he said.
“There were wooden pallets on the floor. Our soldiers threw some bags on top to make it more comfortable.”
A day later they heard a voice from beneath the pallets.
“Guys, I surrender.”
An enemy soldier had hidden there during the assault, hoping the Ukrainian troops would soon leave so he could escape.
After a day he realized he was trapped.
“So he surrendered,” the commander said.
The diversionary group that helped create panic among Russian troops returned without losses and continues to participate in combat operations.
How big is the offensive?
As the first reports of Ukrainian attacks appeared online, debates quickly emerged about their scale.
Some observers began describing the operation as a “counteroffensive.” Ukrainian soldiers currently fighting in Zaporizhzhya Oblast caution against exaggerated conclusions.
A true counteroffensive usually involves large-scale breakthroughs and sustained advances across multiple sectors.
“For now we are not talking about sectors, settlements or scale,” said an officer from the 95th Air Assault Brigade.
“We have a principle: only when we fully control a settlement, when our checkpoint stands there and we can safely drive there — only then do we say it has been liberated.”
One Four also rejects claims that the offensive has slowed after the first days of success.
“My groups are successfully attacking today as well,” he said.
“Modern war doesn’t look like five days of rapid advance followed by two days of pause that would mean the attack is over.”
“There are waves. There are enemy strongpoints. The key question is whether we still have the ability to advance.”
“I believe we do.”
Military textbooks often suggest that offensive operations produce higher casualties than defensive fighting. But the battalion commander said modern warfare — especially under constant drone surveillance — does not always follow those rules.
“Have losses increased significantly? I can say they have actually decreased. That’s not a joke.”
Compared with the final phase of the Kursk operation, when Ukrainian troops were already defending, losses during the current offensive have been significantly lower, he said.

Some people imagine columns of armored vehicles and hundreds of soldiers charging across open fields like in Soviet war movies.
“But a modern offensive — especially in a drone war — looks completely different.”
Small assault groups operate in coordination with drones, artillery and sometimes armored vehicles. Their losses are limited.
Defensive positions under constant drone and artillery fire can be even more dangerous.
“Try sitting in defense when artillery hits you 24 hours a day, when your position has long been detected, when drones attack every hour and logistics become difficult,” he said.
“Would losses really be lower in those conditions?”
A brigade officer confirmed that according to medical data, the number of wounded during offensive operations can sometimes be lower than during defensive fighting under intense enemy attacks.
Still, the enemy’s resistance should not be underestimated, and the operation is not without risk.
On the day of NV’s interview with the battalion commander, his unit was evacuating a damaged Humvee from the battlefield.
All soldiers were rescued and none were injured.

Kremlin Kostiantynivka Assault Force Massacred, Driven Back

2026-03-07T08:38:00.000-05:00

Attempting to take a previously unattainable fortress city in Donetsk, the Russians infiltrated a unit of assault troops, then blew up a dam (because who cares about longer term consequences, so why not...?) in order that Ukrainian forces could not reach them. But the Ukrainians were not so easily discouraged, infiltrated their own troops, massacring and ousting the Russians. The lesson, at this point in the war, is that there is little the Russians can do that the Ukrainians cannot undo. JL

Euromaidan Press reports

On 24 February, the Russian air force lobbed a 3-ton guided bomb at the earthen dam across the Khrushchove Reservoir just west of the fortress city of Kostiantynivka flooding some areas. It was a key supporting effort for a Russian assault on the western edge of the city. The Russian 13th Assault Company infiltrated the Khutir neighborhood in Kostiantynivka. Luckily for the Ukrainians, the Russians were struggling to communicate after Elon Musk's Starlink blocked Russian forces' thousands of terminals. The Ukrainian 100th Mechanized Brigade, garrisoned between the shattered dam and Kostiantynivka, rolled into Khutir and drove out the Russian assault groups. The Ukrainian force counterattack pushed the Russians back.

On 24 February, the Russian air force lobbed a 3-ton guided bomb at the earthen dam across the Khrushchove Reservoir just west of the fortress city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.
It was a key supporting effort for a Russian assault on the western edge of Kostiantynivka, one of the few remaining urban strongpoints standing between the Russian Center Group of Forces and the twin free cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, 20 km to the north.
Situation around Kostiantynivka. Map: Euromaidan Press
For a few days, it may have seemed like the Russians were poised for a major advance into Kostiantynivka. But Ukrainian forces counterattacked and pushed the Russians back.
Kostiantynivka holds. But for how long?
For much of 2025, all eyes were on the Kostiantynivka and the cities of Myrnohrad and Pokrovsk to the west. The Russians steadily advanced toward Myrnohrad and Pokrovsk and, under the cover of a thick winter fog in early November, finally marched into Pokrovsk. A few weeks later, the Russians controlled most of both cities. The Ukrainians' urban defenses south of Kramatorsk were on the verge of fully shattering.
But the garrison in Kostiantynivka fought on even as the Russians captured key villages just south of the city. In mid-February, the Russians organized a simultaneous attack on Kostiantynivka from the ground and from the air.
Dam busting
Around 23 February, the Russian 13th Assault Company infiltrated the Khutir neighborhood in southwestern Kostiantynivka. A day later, the Russian air force busted the Khrushchove Reservoir dam, flooding the area just west of the city and blocking the most direct route for Ukrainian reinforcements aiming to counterattack the 13th Assault Company.
It was a pivotal moment in the long battle for Kostiantynivka. Luckily for the Ukrainians, the Russians were struggling to communicate after Elon Musk's Starlink blocked Russian forces' thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite communications terminals.

The abrupt Starlink bricking blinded many Russian drones and blocked the most reliable comms channel between Russian headquarters and their front-line troops. The Russians' reaction time slowed all along the 1,200-km front line of Russia's 49-month wider war on Ukraine.
Sensing opportunity, Ukrainian forces counterattacked. Especially in the southeast where Dnipropetrovsk Oblast meets Zaporizhzhia Oblast. But also in Kostiantynivka. The Ukrainian 100th Mechanized Brigade, garrisoned between the shattered dam and Kostiantynivka, rolled into Khutir and drove out the Russian assault groups.
The counterattack had the effect of "partially stabilizing the situation in the western part of the city," according to mapper Thorkill.
The stabilization may not last. The few supply lines into the city from the north and west are under constant Russian fire, compelling the Ukrainian garrison to receive the bulk of its supplies via unmanned ground vehicles that mostly roll out under the cover of darkness.
In what mapper Playfra described as a "significant Russian advancement" in mid-February, Russian forces captured the hills south of Kostiantynivka. Yes, their comms were disrupted, but Playfra predicted Russian drone teams to stage on the hills and "further complicate the already very difficult logistics to Kostiantynivka city."
The result is slow strangulation as Ukrainian troops bravely fight on with less food, ammunition, and heavy equipment. Kostiantynivka holds, but tenuously. And it's still a top target for Russian forces in the east as the weather warms and they look to resume major offensive action all along the front.

Ukraine's Southern Attacks 'Outran Original Scope, Wrecked Russian Plans'

2026-03-06T08:54:00.002-05:00

When Ukrainian forces began their initial counterattacks in late January, they were taking advantage of an opportunity caused by the now famous Russian Starlink and Telegram cutoff as well as bad weather that grounded already hobbled Russian drones.

But the original scope of the attacks was exceeded in a few weeks, permitting the Ukrainians to adapt, and resulting in far greater advances than had been considered possible. Ukraine's attacks, which are continuing at a more deliberate pace, not only gained unexpected new territory, but 'wrecked' Russia's own plans and forced them to react to the Ukrainians, who were then able to dictate both the timing and location of ongoing fighting, contrary to the Kremlin's winter and spring plans. In that regard, it has been an unanticipated double victory. JL

David Axe reports in Trench Art, Yuri Zoria reports in Euromaidan Press:

The Ukrainian push on the Oleksandrivka-Huliaipole axis began in early February, exploiting the collapse of Russian Starlink terminals. By late February, the operation had outrun its original scope and was recapturing villages Russia once firmly held. February was the first month Ukraine recaptured more territory than Russia seized since the 2024 Kursk incursion. Before the operation, Russian forces were actively regrouping and moving in reserves on the Huliaipole axis. Those intentions have been wrecked by the Ukrainian attacks. Russia is now forced to react to what Ukrainian units impose on it, rather than execute its own plans
A contested road threading the 27 miles from Velyka Novosilka to Huliaipole in southeastern Ukraine may explain why, in early February, Ukrainian forces went on the offensive in the area despite being outnumbered and outgunned.
The Velyka Novosilka-Huliaipole Road carries supplies to the Russian 5th Combined Army, which has been chipping away at dense Ukrainian fortifications just west of Huliaipole, a key logistics node the Russians captured in late December. Ukraine's recent battlefield gains near Huliaipole were a deliberate tactical operation completed weeks before the public learned of them, a regimental commander told Hromadske Radio. Dmytro Filatov, callsign Perun, commander of the 1st Separate Assault Regiment, said the window that made the operation possible has since closed — and no active moves are coming while skies stay clear.
This comes as Russia kept pushing in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian push on the Oleksandrivka-Huliaipole axis began in early February, exploiting the collapse of Russian Starlink terminals, and top general Syrskyi hinted that the situation in the area could "change radically." President Zelenskyy later said Ukrainian forces had reclaimed around 300 km² on the southern front.
By late February, the operation had outrun its original scope and was recapturing villages Russia once firmly held. Syrskyi subsequently declared February the first month Ukraine recaptured more territory than Russia seized since the 2024 Kursk incursion.
Not a counteroffensive — a tactical operation with a weather window
The Huliaipole advances that made headlines last week were not a counteroffensive, Filatov said. Ukraine's Defense Forces executed the operation earlier, exploiting a stretch of fog and powerful winds— conditions that ground reconnaissance and strike drones on both sides.
"The successes of the Armed Forces that were reported a week ago were actually achieved much earlier — during favorable weather conditions, when there was a period of fogs and strong winds," he said. Those are conditions under which drones, including reconnaissance ones, cannot properly do their work, Hromadske Radio noted.
During that window, Ukraine's Defense Forces launched an offensive aimed at improving the tactical and operational situation on this front sector, stabilizing it, and blocking Russian advances. Filatov was specific about what it was not:
"This is not some grand counteroffensive that everyone is shouting about. This is operational level. Maybe a little more."
Assessed control of terrain in Zaporizhzhia Oblast as of 5 March 2026, showing significant fighting near Huliaipole and Vozdvyzhivka. Map: ISW
Russia's plans disrupted — now it adapts to Ukraine
Before the operation, Russian forces were actively regrouping and moving in reserves on the Huliaipole axis. Filatov said those intentions have been wrecked. Russia is now forced to react to what Ukrainian units impose on it, rather than execute its own plans
The Russians aim to breach the fortress around Verkhnia in order to clear a path toward Orikhiv, itself a major obstacle to a march on Zaporizhzhia City, 50 miles west of the current line of contact in the southeast.
The 5th CAA will only be as successful as its supplies are reliable. And that may be why, a month ago, Ukrainian forces seized on a rare opportunity to go on the attack north of Huliaipole.

Don't Trust AI To File Your Taxes, New Research Shows

2026-03-06T08:13:00.002-05:00

The more people use AI, the more they learn about what it is really good at - and what it is not so good at. Based on recent research conducted by the New York Times, add doing one's taxes to the latter category.

The issue appears to be, based on these test cases, that AI is good a predicting approximate outcomes. The problem is, as the old saying goes, that 'close enough is only works for (the game of) horseshoes and for hand grenades.' For taxes, precision is crucial. It is fair to assume that AI will get better at this as they absorb more training, probably based on tech companies use, without permission, of your tax filings. JL

Stuart Thompson reports in the New York Times:

The New York Times tested four A.I. - Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok - to see how well they fared with eight tax situations written as training materials by a tax-filing service. The AI miscalculated refunds or amounts owed to the IRS by an average of $2,000. Even when provided with necessary materials, including all forms to fill out, chatbots whiffed on some calculations. AI do not understand the complex relationships among the information they process - and are exceptionally weak in remembering interconnected information without errors in their responses. Tax software is procedural, following ‘if-then’ logic built for precision.” Large language models, by contrast, are prediction engines that “ fail at tasks that seem simple to humans. With taxes, all those very small details matter."

Artificial intelligence is used by the world’s military to operate sophisticated drones. It has replaced thousands of coders at the most advanced technology companies. It is even upending how cancer patients are treated, potentially saving lives.
Just don’t, whatever you do, use it to file your taxes.
To assess the technology’s ability to file a federal income tax return, The New York Times tested four A.I. chatbots — Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok — to see how well they fared with eight fictional tax situations written as part of training materials by TaxSlayer, a tax-filing service.
They struggled, hard, miscalculating the refund or amount owed to the Internal Revenue Service by an average of more than $2,000. Even when provided with all the necessary materials, including all the forms they needed to fill out, the chatbots whiffed on some calculations.
“The problem with taxes is all those very small little details matter, and it’s not going to get every single little detail right,” said Benedict Evans, an analyst who writes a technology newsletter. “These models get dramatically better over the course of every six months,” he added. “But they still give you what is roughly the right answer, and that’s not what you want.”
(The Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
The problem comes down to how A.I. chatbots are fundamentally designed: They do not truly understand the complex relationships among the pieces of information they are processing. Their power to predict the next appropriate word in a sequence makes them smart in some areas — like reading and writing — but leaves them exceptionally weak in others — like actively remembering a lot of interconnected information without errors sneaking into their responses.
Those weaknesses prove tricky for filing taxes, which can require dozens of forms that inform one another and need to be updated in a specific sequence. A.I. tools struggle to follow complex procedures perfectly, and errors can accumulate as a task becomes more complex.
The issue amounts to a “tax-code paradox,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I. The shortcoming reflects much larger challenges that A.I. companies are facing in expanding the tools into all areas of life. “Traditional tax software like TurboTax is procedural, following ‘if-then’ logic built for mathematical precision,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said of existing online filing tools. Large language models, by contrast, are prediction engines that “can be superhuman at many tasks yet fail at some that seem simpler to humans.”
The chatbots did better in our tests when we gave the most advanced models a very organized picture of a fictional user’s finances, including sorting every piece of information by the corresponding I.R.S. document they should have used and then uploading those documents.
But most people don’t file their taxes this way; they don’t know what documents to use or what claims to make. Modern tax software asks filers about their life — whether they have children in day care, for example, or use a car for work — then transfers that information directly into the correct forms. Chatbots struggle with this kind of operation. Without specific instructions, they can only surface what is probably the most relevant information, which might not be what you need.
“If you ask it how many R’s are in ‘strawberry,’ it tells you how many R’s are probably in ‘strawberry,’” Mr. Evans said.
A.I. optimists hold a different view about where the tools might go next. They argue that the existing tools may begin to “think” more clearly through complex problems like taxes, applying active reasoning to find their way through I.R.S. document. Adding tools on top of the chatbots — like a program that could validate whether the tax return passes all the I.R.S. rules — could give them the help they need to get things right. That is similar to how A.I. chatbots have learned to code: They occasionally program things incorrectly but are good at understanding errors and coming up with fixes.
Claude, the A.I. chatbot from Anthropic, shows its “thought process” in real time. When we asked it to calculate how much a fictional user owed in federal taxes, it determined it needed a form from the I.R.S. that it didn’t have. It described the need to fetch it from the internet and then did just that, downloading the form and completing the math required.
In that case, Claude got the tax refund correct. But it made many errors in other tests, including calculating a lower refund than the fictional person was owed.
Tax experts have suggested that the tools are still a helpful assistant to use alongside manual research. When we asked the chatbots simple tax questions, or asked the chatbots to describe in familiar language a complex I.R.S. form, they performed well. Everyday tax filers — and even professionals — can make plenty of mistakes when navigating the tax code on their own, too.
But experts have emphasized keeping humans in the loop.

Data Reveal Putin Is Failing In Ukraine

2026-03-05T07:53:00.004-05:00

Putin's intractable negotiating position with the US and Ukraine is based on a bluff and a lie: the bluff is that his faltering forces will 'inevitably' overcome the Ukrainian defenses. The lie is that he will be satisfied with anything less than Ukrainian annihilation.

The reality is that data reveal early to mid 2025 was Russia's high water mark in Ukraine. Since then, his depleted forces have not only failed to gain any ground of significance, but are now giving up territory to advancing Ukrainian troops. The only question is how long Putin can keep this up before China and North Korea, the suppliers on whom he depends, force him to stop wasting their resources. JL

Frederick and Kimberly Kagan report in the Washington Post:

Since 2022, Russia has seized only 1.5% more Ukrainian land while suffering over 1 million casualties: it has needed 3.5 years to seize 9,318 square kilometers, an area smaller than Los Angeles. Ukraine's forces have not only held Russian advances to a slow crawl, they have begun to push Russian forces back in local counterattacks since last autumn. Ukraine has also embarked on a long-range strike campaign, using both drones and a new domestically produced cruise missile. They are beginning to deploy midrange weapons to disrupt Russian attacks before they reach the line of contact. And they have been able to take advantage of Russian overextensions and missteps to retake ground. Military leaders we spoke to during a recent trip to Ukraine are increasingly confident they can continue to keep the Russians at bay. The Russian negotiating position is based on a bluff and a lie.

Four years into fighting back an unprovoked full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s army is keeping Russian forces to marginal gains while at the same time extracting exorbitant costs in lives and treasure. Though this winter has been particularly difficult for Ukraine’s civilians because of Russian attacks on the power grid that have plunged many cities into darkness, the front lines have remained stable.

The Kremlin’s claims that Russian forces are about to break through and overrun the fortified cities in Donetsk oblast — or any other region of Ukraine for that matter — are bluster. Data we track at the Institute for the Study of War bear this out. And military leaders we spoke to during a recent trip to Ukraine wre increasingly confident they can continue to keep the Russians at bay as long as Western aid continues to flow.

Currently, Russian forces occupy 19.4 percent of Ukrainian territory. They had taken about 7 percent of Ukraine during the first phase of the war in 2014, and came to occupy a total of 26.8 percent shortly after the full-scale invasion began in 2022. Subsequent Ukrainian counteroffensives left the Russians holding only about 17.9 percent of Ukraine in November that year. Since then, Russia has seized only 1.5 percent more Ukrainian land while suffering over 1 million casualties in total. Let that sink in: Russia has needed three and a half years to seize 9,318 square kilometers, an area smaller than Lebanon or Los Angeles County. President Vladimir Putin’s supposedly inexorable march to victory has been proceeding, as others have noted, more slowly than at a snail’s pace.

Ukrainian forces have not only held Russian advances to a slow crawl, but they have begun to push Russian forces back in localized counterattacks since last autumn. Ukrainian forces liberated the town of Kupyansk in Kharkiv oblast in November and retook tactically important positions in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts last month. In fact, Ukrainian forces have made net daily gains more frequently over the past six months than they had in the previous nine months.

Meanwhile, Russian weekly gains this year are below their highs from last year. Indeed, Ukraine liberated more land than Russian forces seized the last two weeks of February.

Nothing in the data supports Russian claims that Ukrainian lines are about to break.

Speaking directly with Ukrainians only underlines the point. Ukrainian commanders with whom we met on a recent trip seemed more confident about their ability to hold the Russians off than they have been since 2023. When we spoke with these same commanders last year, they were concerned about the prospects of renewed enemy advances. But the Ukrainian armed forces have held the Russian fall and winter offensive to limited territorial gains. And the commanders rightly pointed out that most of those gains were empty fields and tiny villages, not large cities or fortified positions.

Ukraine’s army has continued to improve and perfect its so-called “wall of drones” defense, which has managed to blunt Russia’s manpower advantage on the front. Ukraine has also embarked on a remarkable long-range strike campaign, using both drones and even a new type of domestically produced cruise missile. They are beginning to deploy midrange weapons to disrupt Russian offensive efforts before they reach the line of contact. And they have even been able to take advantage of Russian overextensions and missteps to retake ground.

We came away from our meetings concluding that Russia’s relentless advance is much less impressive and significant than Ukraine’s relentless defense. Estimates of how long it would take the Russians to complete the seizure of Donetsk at current rates of advance range from two to three years. But it’s far from obvious that the Russians can sustain their current rate of advance, especially as they try to take fortified urban areas that constitute the fortress belt.
The Russian negotiating position is based on a bluff and a lie. The bluff is that the Russians will overwhelm Ukraine and take what they want anyway. The lie is that they will be satisfied with less than what they continually demand: complete political control over Ukraine, the withdrawal of NATO forces from all states admitted after 1997, restrictions on U.S. weapons and exercises in Europe, and an end to NATO’s open-door policy. Whether or not Putin might ultimately compromise, the Russians have thus far refused to bend.

Even their territorial claims transcend Donetsk. They claim to have already annexed Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in addition to Donetsk and Luhansk and that their constitution requires them to seize and govern even the parts of those regions that Ukrainian forces still hold. They also claim a right to Ukrainian territory beyond that — Odesa, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv oblasts.
U.S. pressure on Ukraine, to make territorial concessions and sue for peace, is encouraging Putin to keep fighting and refrain from making compromises necessary for an enduring peace. Pressuring Kyiv is not an act of mercy meant to avoid needless casualties in a hopeless defense. On the contrary, the Ukrainian defense is proving to be durable and it’s the Russian offensive that’s struggling. The way to end this war is not to rescue Putin from a failing campaign, but to help Ukraine make it fail faster.

Ukrainian Forces Show First Net Gain In Land Retaken Since 2023

2026-03-05T07:37:00.001-05:00

Not only are Ukrainian forces advancing, but they have attained a net gain in territory - eg, subtracting Russian gains from Ukrainian, the result is a net gain for the Ukrainians.

The significance is less in the total amount of territory than in the fact that the Russians no longer appear capable of major strategic breakthroughs. JL

The Kyiv Post reports:

Ukrainian forces liberated more territory than they lost during the last two weeks of February 2026, marking the first net territorial gains since Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in 2023. Ukrainian forces achieved a net gain of nearly 33 square kilometers between Feb. 14 and Feb. 20, followed by another 57 square kilometers between Feb. 21 and Feb. 27.
Ukrainian forces liberated more territory than they lost during the last two weeks of February 2026, marking the first net territorial gains since Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in 2023, according to a report by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
ISW analysts said available evidence suggests Ukrainian troops have retaken roughly 257 square kilometers since Jan. 1.
According to the report, Ukrainian forces achieved a net gain of nearly 33 square kilometers between Feb. 14 and Feb. 20, followed by another 57 square kilometers between Feb. 21 and Feb. 27.

The last time Ukraine recorded similar net territorial gains was during the summer 2023 counteroffensive, when Ukrainian troops regained 377 square kilometers in June, 257 square kilometers in July, slowing to 1.47 square kilometers in September, ISW said, or notably two to three orders of magnitude less than the first two months of summer.

In an interview published on March 3, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces have regained 460 square kilometers since the start of 2026.
“I won’t go into too many details,” Zelensky said, “but today I can congratulate our army first and foremost – all the defense forces – because as of today, 300 square kilometers have been liberated.”
ISW stated that its mapping methodology may underestimate Ukrainian advances because analysts depict the furthest confirmed extent of Russian control until open-source evidence shows that Russian forces no longer hold those positions.

The think tank also pointed out that the frontline in Ukraine has become increasingly porous, with a lack of continuous defensive lines complicating assessments of territorial control.
Despite differences between Zelensky’s figures and ISW’s estimates, analysts described Ukraine’s recent battlefield successes as notable.
However, ISW said the localized Ukrainian counterattacks are unlikely to develop into a large-scale counteroffensive. The report added that Russian forces will likely stabilize their positions and attempt to resume advances.

However, Ukraine’s recent gains have disrupted Russian efforts to prepare for a planned spring-summer 2026 offensive, forcing Russian troops to focus on establishing stable defenses before attempting to retake lost ground.
Kyiv’s troops still control around one-fifth of the Donetsk region, while Russia has seized roughly the entire Luhansk region – the two are together referred to as the Donbas.