The Low-Down

Ukrainian Battlefield Success Reflects Its Strength More Than Russian Weakness

2026-06-06T08:56:21.624-04:00

Commentary on Russia's cascading setbacks in 2026 have focused primarily on its own missteps. But this ignores what may be the most important reason for the change in fortunes; Ukraine's growing strengths.

The Ukrainians drone performance, while obviously significant, has become almost a cliche. Behind it are a welter of other Ukrainian successes including war-experienced younger leadership, more accurate and lethal weapons, a resilient, determined military and an uncowed populace. Combined, they are on the cusp of creating a legend. JL

Peter Dickinson reports in The Atlantic Council:

The Russian army has failed to achieve any of the key objectives set at the start of the invasion. This underwhelming outcome reflects Ukrainian strength rather than Russian weakness. Ukraine’s success in stemming the tide of Russia’s invasion will be studied for decades. It is the collective achievement of a society that has mobilized to an unprecedented degree. Everyone has played their part, from the numbers of men and women in uniform, to the innovative Ukrainian defense tech industry.
All across Europe, governments are rushing to increase defense budgets, sign new security pacts, and warn of the growing threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. According to some European leaders, the continent is presently entering the most dangerous period since World War II.
Not everyone is convinced. In fact, a significant portion of the European population appears to be unimpressed by the current talk of an imminent Russian threat. While relatively few people actually support or condone the Kremlin’s criminal actions in Ukraine, there are plenty of doubters across Europe who question whether Putin’s territorial ambitions extend beyond the limited confines of the former Soviet Empire.
Others are openly dismissive of Moscow’s ability to menace Europe. Skeptics typically point to Putin’s lack of progress in Ukraine as proof that modern Russia is a paper tiger and does not deserve to be taken so seriously. “Russia can’t even beat Ukraine,” they contemptuously declare. This argument may appear persuasive at first glance, but it represents a fundamentally flawed assessment of the security situation that risks fueling complacency at a time when a sense of urgency is required.
While it is true that the Russian army has failed to achieve any of the key objectives set at the start of the invasion, this underwhelming outcome reflects Ukrainian strength rather than Russian weakness. However, the Ukrainians are not superheroes and their ability to withstand the onslaught of a far larger opponent is limited. If Ukraine’s remarkable resistance eventually falters, Europe will find itself face to face with a formidable fighting force that it is utterly unprepared to confront.

It is easy to see why some international observers have been lulled into a false sense of security regarding Moscow’s military capabilities. After all, when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many predicted a complete Russian victory within a matter of days. Instead, more than four years on, the Russian army has seized less than 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and is still struggling to advance.

Ukraine’s success in stemming the tide of Russia’s invasion is a military miracle that will be studied for decades. It is the collective achievement of a society that has mobilized since 2022 to an unprecedented degree. Everyone has played their part, from the huge numbers of men and women in uniform, to the incredibly innovative Ukrainian defense tech industry, and all the ordinary folk who keep the country running in the most extraordinary of wartime conditions.
At the same time, it is vital to recognize that this success has come at a terrible cost. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions have been forced to flee their homes. Countless Ukrainian families have been torn apart. Dozens of cities lie in ruins. The whole country has been left deeply traumatized by Putin’s invasion and will carry emotional scars for decades. Anyone who feels tempted to make light of the Russian threat should take this unbearable burden into consideration and keep in mind the price Ukraine has paid to limit Moscow’s gains.

While there is no disguising the many setbacks Russia has suffered in Ukraine, it would be reckless to underestimate Moscow’s current military potential. Headlines about Russian human wave attacks, massive battlefield losses, and medieval discipline create the impression of a primitive barbarian horde, but this convenient caricature conceals the true picture of Putin’s rapidly evolving armed forces.
The Russian army today is significantly larger than it was in 2022. It is also infinitely more attuned to the demands of modern warfare. Crucially, Russia has emerged over the past four years as a world leader in drone warfare, and is now capable of launching sophisticated mass bombardments involving hundreds of highly destructive strike drones together with cruise and ballistic missiles.
In contrast, European defense doctrines lag far behind and have not adapted to the new realities of drone-based warfare. At numerous military exercises over the past year, Ukrainian drone crews have embarrassed their NATO colleagues and exposed shocking vulnerabilities that have yet to be adequately addressed. Europe’s major cities and key civilian infrastructure sites are even less prepared to cope with swarms of Russian drones.
Meanwhile, Russian industry has switched to a war footing and is now manufacturing drones and other armaments in record quantities. Last month, European Union Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius warned that Moscow was also outproducing Europe in a number of key munitions categories including artillery shells and cruise missiles. In other words, Putin has created an extremely powerful and technologically advanced war machine that Europe must contend with for the foreseeable future.
This does not necessarily mean that Russia is poised to launch an imminent offensive into Central Europe. For the time being, at least, Putin’s commanders still have their hands full in Ukraine. But if European support for Kyiv wavers and Ukraine finally succumbs, Russia would almost certainly seek to press home its considerable military advantage. Indeed, victory in Ukraine would dramatically strengthen Putin’s position, leaving him in control of Europe’s two largest and most battle-hardened armies. In such uniquely favorable circumstances, it is delusional to think he would not go further.
Putin’s ultimate political goals remain the subject of much debate. The one thing we can confidently say at this stage is that he shows virtually no interest whatsoever in peaceful coexistence with the rest of Europe. On the contrary, the Russian dictator’s uncompromising stance toward the invasion of Ukraine and his increasingly repressive policies on the domestic front are clear signals that he is preparing his country for a long war.
In all likelihood, Russia will remain a hostile power until Putin’s reign comes to an end, with an expansionist agenda and exceptionally well-armed military. Europe cannot afford to underestimate the scale of the security challenge this represents. Ukraine continues to stun the world with its resilience and heroism, but this should not be mistaken for evidence of Russian weakness.

Since December, Putin's Army Has Not Been Able To Hold Ground In Ukraine

2026-06-06T08:49:58.428-04:00

Ukrainian President Zelensky's letter to Putin suggesting they meet directly was rejected by the Russians. Clearly not surprised, Zelensky then went on to point out the Russian military's manifest failures, especially on the battlefield. The Kremlin forces' performance has become so underachieving that it can no longer hold ground against counterattacking Ukrainian troops. Much of the territory the Russians ostensibly 'occupy' is, in fact, merely infiltrated and cannot be contested by the Russians when Ukraine attacks.

Ballistic terror attacks against civilian targets are Russia's last throw of the military dice "the last Russian argument in the war." The Ukrainians went on to mock Putin, saying "you wont have enough money and political power to continue buying the loyalty of Russians." JL

John Psaropoulos reports in Al Jazeera:

Ukraine's tactcs seem to be winning. Battlefield analysts have come to the conclusion that the Ukrainians have forced the Russian army to a standstill. Many of the areas previously thought to be Russian-controlled were merely infiltrated and contested. “There are no safe roads for Russia in the south and east of our country. You hope that ballistics will do for you what everything else has failed to do. Ballistics is the last Russian argument in the war. Your resources are significantly dwindling,” Zelenskyy wrote. “You won’t have enough money and political power to continue buying the loyalty of Russians, as you’ve been doing for 26 years.”

Ukraine’s ability to impede the flow of Russian supplies and personnel to the front lines has grown in recent days, from the southern regions of Zaporizhia and Kherson to the eastern front, and has forced the Russian army to a standstill, according to battlefield analysis.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has continued to strike refineries and munitions factories deep inside Russia, weakening its war effort.

Sensing the growing strength of their position, Ukrainian forces struck the city of St Petersburg as Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived there for a high-profile economic forum, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote him an open letter telling him he could not win the war.
“Your resources are significantly dwindling,” Zelenskyy wrote. “You won’t have enough money and political power to continue buying the loyalty of Russians, as you’ve been doing for 26 years.”
Zelenskyy invited Putin to face-to-face talks. Russia did not respond directly, nor did it acknowledge its deteriorating battlefield situation.
There is one area where Zelenskyy conceded the Russians had an advantage.
“You hope that ballistics will do for you what everything else has failed to do,” he wrote to Putin.
Russia produces 120 ballistic missiles a month, Zelenskyy told the Ukraine-NATO Council, twice as many as the Patriot interceptors the United States produces.
“Compared to the current challenges, this is nothing,” Zelenskyy told Face the Nation.
The effectiveness of Russia’s ballistics was demonstrated on June 2, when it fired a cocktail of 656 drones and 73 missiles into Ukrainian civilian areas, killing 23 people and injuring at least 130.

Ukraine intercepted 91.7 percent of the drones and 90.6 percent of the cruise missiles, but only 27 percent of the ballistic missiles, according to its Air Force.

Serhiy Beskrestnov, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said Russia also keeps a strategic stockpile of 180-250 Iskander ballistic missiles, unlike other types of missiles, which are fired within a few months of manufacture, or drones, which are fired within two weeks of production.
“Ballistics is the last Russian argument in the war,” Zelenskyy wrote, and called for the US to allow it to produce Patriot interceptors under licence.
The US has refused to do so, but Zelenskyy has pledged to produce a Ukrainian version of the Patriot system by the end of 2027.
[Al Jazeera]
On May 31, Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps said it had established fire control over the cities of Luhansk, Starobilsk, Alchevsk, Bryanka, and Kadiivka, all 50 to 90 kilometres (30 to 55 miles) inside occupied Luhansk, and was able to strike armoured vehicles and ammunition depots at the Russian border, 205km (130 miles) away.
It was the first time Ukraine declared it had such interdiction power over the eastern region.
Russian military reporters confirmed Ukraine’s capability to strike queues of Russian trucks lumbering through border checkpoints.
In addition to traffic, Ukraine has also begun striking training centres.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander, Robert Brovdi, said that on Saturday his forces struck the Tryokhizbenko training ground of the Russian 3rd Army in Luhansk, incurring at least 30 casualties.
[Al Jazeera]
Ukraine has been constantly improving the range and performance of its drones, and has reportedly now sent a first-person view drone, normally a short-range weapon, more than 100km (60 miles) into enemy territory.
Ukraine’s Beskrestnov confirmed that Kyiv was also using drones to remotely mine major supply roads in occupied Ukraine, after this was reported on Russian military reporters’ sites.
Russia at a standstill
Ukraine’s tactics seem to be winning. Battlefield analysts have come to the conclusion that Russia is essentially at a standstill.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, recently assessed that Russia had made a net gain of just 104 square kilometres (40 square miles) this year.
In the past week, it said it had used new evidence to reassess those gains at 40.64sq km (15sq miles), including December 2025, judging that many of the areas previously thought to be Russian-controlled were merely infiltrated and contested.

Over the same period, the ISW said, Russia lost control of 281.1sq km (108sq miles) it had occupied, as Ukraine contested those lands.
[Al Jazeera]
The open source intelligence project DeepState estimated that Russia had gained a total of 14sq km (five square miles) in May, its worst performance since September 2023.
“There are practically no safe roads for the occupier in the south and east of our country,” wrote Zelenskyy on his Telegram messaging channel.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed that Moscow had heard Zelenskyy loud and clear, describing the Ukrainian leader’s intentions as being “to recapture these lands”.

Russia has insisted on shuttle diplomacy via Washington, but showed disappointment with the fact that United States President Donald Trump’s efforts to reposition the US as a neutral appeared to be failing.
“Right now, they’re saying in the EU: ‘We’re not mediators, we’re firmly on Ukraine’s side’. I was surprised that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio said the same thing the other day while speaking in Congress,” Lavrov told RT Arabic.
He saw that as a departure from what Trump had promised Putin at their Alaska summit in August 2025.

How One Company Created 13 New Types of Jobs Because of AI

2026-06-06T08:47:31.303-04:00

Most of the commentary about AI and jobs has had to do with which ones and how many will be eliminated. But as with all new technologies, there has also been the expectation that some new, unanticipated roles will be created.

Some of those new positions are starting to appear. Unsurprisingly, many are designed to help customers implement tools to use the new technology. And others to help internal employees deploy it more productively. It would be prudent to assume that many of these roles will be transitional, fading away as growing numbers of people become more competent in evaluating, designing and implementing AI. A percentage will probably become permanent in order to keep improving productivity and customer satisfaction. The larger point is that there will be a need for new AI-related skills. JL

Kalley Huang reports in the New York Times:

Box posted a new job: senior director of A.I., data and integration, to help it wire together its internal systems and data. The job was one of 13 new roles Box has created because of A.I., with titles like A.I. architect, A.I. solutions manager, A.I. platform leader and forward deployed engineers, who help customers which dont have the technical know-how to use AI. Another is A.I. business automation engineer, to help colleagues use A.I. more productively. It also created new roles for evaluating A.I. models. As A.I. models advance, the way they answer questions or are structured can change. That means customers need help using new models. With the proliferation of these positions, Box expects to have more than 3,000 employees next year, up from 2,900 at the this year. “We are selling A.I. to our customers, causing us to need more people, and as a user of A.I., we’re getting new forms of productivity that’s also causing us to hire.”

When artificial intelligence began changing his business four years ago, Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, decided to adjust.
Box, a Silicon Valley maker of software for storing and managing data, started weaving A.I. into its products. It began selling A.I. aimed at automating tasks like reviewing and approving contracts. And it asked employees to set aside their usual work to help other colleagues use A.I.
That led Box to post a new job last fall: senior director of A.I., data and integration, to help it wire together its internal systems and data so its workers could better use A.I.
The job was one of 13 new kinds of roles that Box has created because of A.I., with titles like A.I. architect, A.I. solutions manager and A.I. platform leader. With the proliferation of these positions, Box expects to have more than 3,000 employees by early next year, up from 2,900 at the start of this year. “We ourselves are selling A.I. to our customers, so that’s actually causing us to need to hire more people,” Mr. Levie, 41, said. “And as a user of A.I., we’re getting new forms of productivity that’s also causing us to hire people.”
Across the tech industry, companies such as Meta and Coinbase have been laying off workers in the name of A.I. Many people fear that the powerful technology, which can generate code and answers to questions, will increasingly replace workers in jobs like computer programming and engineering management.
But Box shows that A.I. can also spur job creation, making the labor picture more nuanced. Demand for cybersecurity experts has soared because of an explosion of A.I.-generated code that needs to be vetted, for instance, while companies including Google are recruiting more engineers to help integrate A.I. into their customers’ systems.
The growth of such roles is unlikely to make up for A.I.-related job cuts. With the technology still evolving, it is unclear whether these jobs are permanent or temporary, and whether companies can find workers with the skills to do the work, said Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School.
But new technologies have long created new jobs, he said. In the 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of computers in the workplace led to information technology departments, so “there is now I.T., there is a chief information officer and so on,” Mr. Meier said. “Completely new jobs, new businesses, new degrees were created." Mr. Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software, which is often deployed behind the scenes, helps companies store and work on documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.
Box has typically taken a slow-and-steady approach to hiring. The company, based in Redwood City, Calif., did not go on a hiring binge during the pandemic, as much of the tech industry did. From 2019 to 2022, its work force increased 20 percent to about 2,500 employees. Some of its peers, which have cut thousands of jobs in recent months, doubled or tripled in size during those years.
“We have never done any kind of broad-scale layoffs, and that remains a huge commitment of ours,” said Jessica Swank, Box’s chief people officer.
When OpenAI kicked off the A.I. frenzy with its release of ChatGPT in 2022, Mr. Levie said, he was excited by the technology’s power. Box has infused its software with A.I., adding features where the technology performs tasks like drafting documents.
The moves are starting to pay off. Box’s revenue in the most recent quarter rose 11 percent from a year earlier, the company reported in May, its fastest growth since 2022. But anxieties over whether A.I. will eventually replace Box’s software have weighed on the company, which has seen its stock decline about 7 percent this year. Mr. Levie has said he believes companies will continue buying software, rather than making their own with A.I., since third-party software is likely to be more secure and reliable. In the meantime, his company is investing in incorporating A.I. into its products.
Box is also investing in the new jobs, which it sees as long-term roles. As A.I. models advance, the way they answer questions or are structured can change, Mr. Levie said. That means Box’s customers will need help using new models, he said.
“It’s kind of a question of, when does A.I. slow down?” Mr. Levie said. “That would be the moment when maybe you have some sort of sustaining, plateauing” of hiring.
Among the jobs that Box is adding are “forward deployed engineers,” who will help customers that may want to use A.I. but do not have the technical know-how. Another is “A.I. business automation engineers,” who are part of the I.T. department and help colleagues use A.I. to be more productive and to remove drudgery from their jobs.
Box also created new roles for evaluating A.I. models, hiring people like Sidharth Srinivasan, 23. Mr. Srinivasan, who joined Box full time last year after graduating from Stanford University, measures the performance of A.I. models to help customers decide which models are best for certain tasks. “If I talked to myself two years ago, and I told myself I was working on A.I. evals, I would be like, what is that?” Mr. Srinivasan said. “With any technological innovation, the type of work that you have to do to adapt to that is just slightly different.”
The company said its pace of hiring software engineers had not slowed, even as A.I. has improved at coding. With the arrival of A.I. agents that can perform tasks autonomously, a software engineer can manage agents and achieve what once would have required a team of engineers, Mr. Levie said. That means every additional engineer contributes more, he said, so hiring them is even more worthwhile.
“A role that we’re just adding more of is in core engineering,” Mr. Levie said. “Now that we can basically build way more features for our customers, it actually for us is attractive to have more engineers doing that.”
The increased productivity from A.I. has allowed Box to justify hiring people it would not have in the past, Mr. Levie said. The company has recruited employees to market to specific industries, something it could not do before because the tasks would have needed too many workers, he said. But A.I. has made this work more efficient and more possible.
“Now, you’re hiring one or two to do the work of 10 because you can finally afford to do that work,” Mr. Levie said.

Why, Despite Launching 37% More Attacks In May, Russia Still Lost Ground

2026-06-05T11:07:38.726-04:00

Russian forces have begun to lost the battlefield initiative, as Ukrainian troops launch as many, or more, assaults. But before this change began, Russia increased its number of attacks by over one-third in May. The problem was, that despite the rise, they still lost territory compared to the Ukrainians.

The reasons appear to be better commanders at more senior levels as more young leaders who have fought for the past four years begin to move up the ranks; the increasing effectiveness - accuracy and lethality - of Ukraine's drone forces; and the new focus on cutting Russian logistics from 50 to 200 miles from the front, which has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Russians to organize and then initiate attacks. JL

Matthew Loh reports in Business Insider:

Despite Russia launching more frequent attacks on Ukrainian positions, with over 7,000 recorded assaults in May amounting to a 37.5% monthly increase, Russia suffered a net monthly territorial loss for the first time since 2023, when Kyiv launched its major counterpush. The Kremlin's losses were attributed to Ukraine putting capable commanders in higher positions under the new Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who's been running the war effort since January. Some of Ukraine's success is also due to Kyiv conducting more mid-range drone strikes, at distances of about 30 to 50 miles, on Russian logistics hubs and operations.
A prominent Ukrainian war tracker said on Monday that Russia suffered a net monthly territorial loss for the first time since 2023, when Kyiv launched its major counterpush.
DeepState UA, an open-source intelligence tracker widely used by Ukrainians and analysts to monitor the front lines, said Moscow had gained 14 square kilometers, or about 5.4 square miles, in May.
The volunteer organization delayed releasing information about Ukraine's advances for the full month, citing security reasons. But the group said it was "ready to declare" that the final tally would show that Russia had lost ground.
That's despite Russia launching more frequent attacks on Ukrainian positions, with over 7,000 recorded assaults in May amounting to a 37.5% monthly increase, it added.
Ukraine's defense ministry cited a similar figure in a statement on Monday, saying that it had counted 7,008 combat encounters on the front lines in May, up from 5,085 in April.
Ukraine's first net gains since 2023
DeepState's statement is one of several recent analyses that say Russia's advance is slowing significantly and that territorial gains, as of late spring this year, are starting to turn in Kyiv's favor.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, recorded a net loss of 44.78 square miles for Russia in April.
The organization measures such progress differently from DeepState, tracking the land that the Kremlin decisively controls. That means its tally does not factor in contested areas or territory that Russian troops are still infiltrating.
Per that approach, the think tank said on Monday that it recorded a further net loss of 108 square miles for Russia in May.
Conversely, Russia had, in prior months, sometimes taken hundreds of square miles of territory in several weeks. Its fastest advance saw it claim a reported 280 square miles in November 2024 alone.
A swing back in Ukraine's favor would mark the first time Kyiv has reclaimed territory overall since the summer of 2023, when it mounted a major offensive in the east and south with NATO equipment.
The 2023 effort was its third significant counterpush against Russia's hold on Ukrainian territories, following Kyiv's forces liberating large swaths of Kherson and Kharkiv the year before.
But the offensive failed to achieve the same success, with Ukraine regaining only about 150 square miles of territory. The front lines soon turned largely stagnant — each year, Russia gained about 1% to 1.5% of Ukraine's total land area, which is about 233,032 square miles.
Better commanders and new drone strikes
In its Monday update, DeepState attributed Russia's recent losses partially to Ukraine putting capable commanders in higher positions under the new Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who's been running the war effort since January.
The ISW also said on Sunday that some of Ukraine's success was due to Kyiv conducting more mid-range drone strikes, at distances of about 30 to 50 miles, on Russian logistics hubs and operations.
The UK's defense ministry echoed the sentiment in an intelligence update on Monday, highlighting Ukraine's recent drone strikes in Russia's transportation operations in the rear.

Ukraine Establishes Fire Control Over Russian-Occupied Donetsk Airport

2026-06-05T10:28:08.743-04:00

As part of its expanding 'logistics lockdown' of Russian capabilities, Ukraine's drone forces have now established fire control over the occupied Donetsk airport, which has been turned by the Russians into a logistics hub and drone launch site.

By doing so, the Ukrainians have further degraded Russia's ability to maintain its army in the field, contributing to the relative loss of tactical initiative at the front. JL

Stanislav Pohorilov reports in Ukraine Pravda:

Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (14th Regiment) has taken Donetsk airport under fire control, destroying Shahed loitering munition launchers, construction cranes, vehicles and supply depots at the facility in the first operation of its kind. "The occupiers turned Donetsk airport into a military logistics hub and a launch platform for Shahed attack drones. Our forces are systematically burning enemy infrastructure, launch systems, vehicles and crews, degrading the airport and making operations impossible."
The 1st Separate Centre of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) (14th Regiment) has reported taking Donetsk airport under fire control, destroying Shahed loitering munition launchers, construction cranes, vehicles and supply depots at the facility in the first operation of its kind.
Source: 1st Separate Centre of USF (14th Regiment) on social media
Quote: "The occupiers have turned Donetsk airport into a military logistics hub and a key launch platform for Shahed attack drones. Our unit is systematically burning out enemy infrastructure, making operation of the airfield impossible."
Details: The unit reported that attack drone operators are destroying launch systems, transport vehicles and wiping out crews directly on the runway.

"In parallel, we are conducting systematic hunting of enemy mobile fire groups and air defence assets, forcing the enemy to cancel sorties," the statement reads.
The military also explained that by striking engineering equipment, fuel tankers and logistics nodes, they are fully degrading the airfield ecosystem. "The result of our work – destroyed Shahed drone launchers, construction cranes, enemy vehicles and supply depots eliminated," the USF wrote.
"Fire control of Donetsk airport, carried out by the 1st Separate Centre, is an example of an asymmetric operation in which exclusively small forces disrupted the enemy's operational and strategic plans. This is what makes us who we are," stated Serafym "Falko" Hordiienko, the officer responsible for planning the operation.

Half Of Frontline Combat Now From Ukraine Attacks As Russia Loses Tactical Initiative

2026-06-05T10:06:00.256-04:00

Ukrainians and their supporters have become inured over the past few years to daily reports about Ukrainian forces responding to Russian attacks.

So it is extremely significant that analyses now indicate as many as half of all combat between the Ukraine and Russia along the front over the past month have been Ukrainian attacks on Russian forces. And that the trend is growing to such an extent that Ukrainian-initiated operations may soon exceed Russians'. The implication is that Russia has lost the tactical initiative, which has been gained by Ukraine, meaning that Kyiv's forces control the pace, location and nature of the battle, applying it to their advantage and the Russians' disadvantage. JL

Oleksii Hetman comments in Ukrinform, David Axe reports:

The ratio of attack and counterattack in combat engagements indicates that Ukraine’s forces are gaining the tactical initiative from Russia which no longer has the most assault actions in its war on Ukraine. (And), the Russians are losing the momentum at the time of year they usually have the most momentum: springtime. "There were 300 engagements a few days ago: about 150 were Russian assaults and 150 were Ukrainian counterattacks. This ratio has grown to 50–50. Compared to March, when it was 30–70 in favor of Russian attacks, the situation has now equalized.” If this trend continues, Ukrainian counterattacks may soon exceed Russian assault activity.

The ratio of combat engagements indicates that Ukraine’s Defense Forces are gaining tactical initiative.
“There are days when more than 300 combat engagements were recorded per day. But many people assume that General Staff reports reflect only Russian assault actions. That is not what is actually happening on the front line,” he said.
He noted that, according to statements by Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, about half of the engagements now represent Ukrainian counterattacks.
“If there were 300 engagements a few days ago, about 150 were Russian assaults and 150 were Ukrainian counterattacks. This ratio has grown to 50–50. Compared to March, when it was 30–70 in favor of Russian attacks, the situation has now equalized,” Hetman said.
According to him, if this trend continues, Ukrainian counterattacks may soon exceed Russian assault activity.

Russia’s main objective in Ukraine this year is to capture Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.
The Russians have two options. One, to attack toward Kramatorsk—the southernmost of the twin cities—from the south, from the direction of occupied Pokrovsk. Or two, to drive on Sloviansk from the north.
But the northern approach first means marching through Lyman, 10 miles north of Sloviansk. And the Ukrainians aren’t just sitting around waiting for the Russians to move. At least twice since late May, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps has counterattacked north of Lyman.
It’s not yet apparent the Ukrainians have gained much ground along this axis. But it’s telling that they’re trying—and that they’re able to try. Russia no longer has the initiative in its 52-month wider war on Ukraine. Incredibly, the Russians are losing the momentum at the time of year they usually have the most momentum: springtime.
On or just before Wednesday, Russian troops continued what mapper and analyst AMK Mapping described as “limited assault operations” around Hrekivka, 17 miles north of Lyman, while Ukrainian troops launched their own counterattack toward Nove, 10 miles north of Lyman.

Ukraine is actively targeting Russian logistics and preventing the delivery of supplies to the front line. He also pointed to the reported destruction of up to 40% of Russia’s primary oil refining capacity.
“All these actions are leading to the stabilization of the front line. If the number of strikes on both sides is roughly equal and there is no significant advance, it means the front line is militarily stabilized,” he said.
Hetman also answered affirmatively when asked whether Ukraine has seized the initiative in the war.
“Yes. The number of combat engagements has equalized. Previously it was lower, almost negligible. Now it has increased and has effectively matched Russia’s level. This is tactical initiative,” he said.
He added that on some sections of the front, Ukrainian forces even hold an advantage in manpower and equipment.
“There are all signs that the initiative, at least at the tactical level, is already on our side. Not yet strategic, but it is in our hands. If the trend continues, Russia may be forced to retreat. This could resemble the Kherson or Kharkiv operations,” the analyst noted.

Companies Begin To Ration AI For Employees As Token Costs Skyrocket

2026-06-05T09:49:40.206-04:00

As the financial and tech worlds contemplate their first trillionaire, cost seems like such a relative issue.

But even OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, no shrinking violet when it comes to extolling AI's virtues, is admitting that exponentially exploding token costs are becoming a problem. No one is yet willing to state that such eye-watering expenditures will slow demand for AI (Heaven Forefend!) but the implication is there, along with lingering concerns about measuring how token use contributes to business results. Expect to see an initial burst of explanatory bombast about 'efficiencies' followed by more serious attempts to somehow mitigate the cost impact without denying AI firms their massive payday. JL

Bradley Olson reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Costs are skyrocketing for tokens, the basic unit of measurement for AI computing, as AI model providers seek to balance supply, demand and manage their costs. Some enterprises report their AI spending double or triple. The shift to usage-based pricing has forced enterprise customers to reckon with consumption. Corporate leaders are scrambling to bring down expenses by finding ways to ration AI use in their organizations and increase computing efficiency. Microsoft limited access to an Anthropic program for employees who can use an internal coding assistant instead. Companies using advanced AI coding tools have found only 18% of spending on tokens translating into shipped coding products that reach real users so Salesforce introduced a system for tracking how token use contributes to positive business outcomes.

Use of artificial intelligence by big companies is exploding—and the soaring cost has some of them pumping the brakes in a way that could complicate AI’s triumphal march across the economy.
Executives across industries this year have urged employees to integrate AI tools into their work, spending freely to encourage experimentation and seeking to send a message to Wall Street that their companies won’t be left behind in a coming wave of disruption.
All that enthusiasm has resulted in skyrocketing costs for so-called tokens, the basic unit of measurement for AI computing, as AI model providers seek to balance supply and demand and manage their own costs. Some enterprises have hit their annual budget in just three months or reported seeing their AI spending bills double or triple.
Now corporate leaders are scrambling to bring down expenses by finding ways to ration AI use in their organizations, steer workers toward cheaper, homegrown tools and help them hone their skills to improve returns.
Top technical executives at Uber Technologies, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Salesforce, DoorDash and other companies have all talked about new efforts to ensure AI use contributes to productivity or have taken steps to reduce the availability of some tools for certain employees.
AI critics have pointed to efforts to direct AI spending more carefully as evidence of a warning sign that the ultrafast pace of AI growth could slow. That would potentially hurt Anthropic or ChatGPT maker OpenAI as they take steps toward public listings this year. Anthropic on Thursday closed a $65 billion fundraising round that values the startup at $965 billion.
But a number of investors and tech executives cautioned against betting on a pullback, noting that sales and usage by corporate AI customers have climbed far faster than forecasts.

“We’re still in the pretty early innings” for AI adoption, said Will McGough, chief investment officer at wealth manager Prime Capital Financial, which is invested in a number of tech companies and is closely evaluating the coming IPOs of giant AI startups. “Even massive companies are still figuring things out.”
Just a few months ago, the prevailing sentiment around AI use at many big companies was the more, the better. All-you-can-eat subscriptions amounted to a subsidy by the model-makers, which often lost money on the intensive activity of power users. Exhorted to embrace the wave of change, employees at some companies engaged in tokenmaxxing, or using as much computing as possible in order to be seen as AI-forward—a practice that continued even as the model companies shifted to usage-based pricing.
Matan Grinberg, chief executive of coding automator Factory, said one executive at a top financial institution told him his employees were burning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens. Some, the executive said, were using powerful premium-tier models to answer the simplest of questions, or just engage in small talk.
“If your daughter needs tutoring in algebra, you can probably find someone cheaper than Albert Einstein,” he said.
Matan Grinberg, CEO of coding automator Factory, said some companies’ employees are using expensive models to answer simple questions. Factory
Higher costs may eventually steer users toward cheaper models that cost a fraction of the price, but many companies remain wary of such AI systems because several of the cheapest options were developed in China, according to executives. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others also offer cheaper versions of their flagship models, and Factory and others have developed systems to help companies triage queries and steer some tasks to cheaper options.
Token use continues to grow immensely. Google said at a recent event that it now processes over 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month, seven times as much as a year ago. The company and others are seeking to reduce the cost of AI use in a variety of ways, including increasing computing efficiency.
That shift to usage-based pricing has forced enterprise customers to reckon with their consumption. An Uber executive said by March, the company had blown through its annual budget for agentic, or autonomous, AI use. Microsoft limited access to an Anthropic program for some employees who can use an internal coding assistant instead. Salesforce introduced a system for tracking how token use ultimately contributes to positive business outcomes.

“It has been great to let people experiment but now we have too many overlapping tools,” Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said in an April memo to employees. “Nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them. All motion is not progress and token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind.”
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, says employees shouldn’t be using AI tools ‘just for the sake of using them.’ David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
A Microsoft spokesman said the company’s decision to reduce access to Anthropic’s Claude Code program wasn’t rooted in cost but stemmed from a desire to standardize what employees use across its organization.
An Anthropic spokeswoman said the company’s models help customers achieve greater productivity, such as completing complex tasks in less than two weeks that would have taken more than seven months in the past.
“As with any new technology and way of working, teams are still discovering where the biggest gains are and how best to measure them,” she said. “We’re working with customers to give them the tools to make sure the return is something they can see, not just feel.”
Software engineers and startup executives warn that even though it is possible to complete tasks far more quickly, spending on debugging, reviewing and rewriting AI-generated code remains high, indicating that the models still need to be improved.
For companies using advanced AI coding tools, only 18% of spending on tokens is translating into shipped coding products that reach real users, according to EntelligenceAI, a startup that aggregated data on more than 2,000 companies using advanced AI tools for coding.

Having Destroyed Russia's Black Sea Fleet, Ukraine Is Now Striking Its Baltic Fleet

2026-06-04T10:09:57.561-04:00

Russia's Black Sea Fleet is mostly resting on the bottom of that watery expanse, having been systematically eliminated by Ukraine's aerial and nautical drones.

The Ukrainians have now turned their attention to Russia's Baltic Fleet, headquartered near St Petersburg - Putin's beloved home town - and hundreds of miles from the front. The Baltic Fleet also has a storied history, as one of the signal events of the Russian Revolution was the revolt of Baltic sailors at the Kronstadt base. It now provides ships to escort the Kremlin's shadow fleet of tankers so was attacked by Ukraine yesterday in what signaled the opening of a new front in its war on Russian military capabilities. JL

Thomas Newdick reports in The Warzone:

The Russian Navy base at Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg, came under Ukrainian drone attack overnight, in a strike against the Baltic Fleet. Ukrainian drones targeted the base, including the Steregushchiy class corvette Boikiy, highlighting Russian warships' vulnerability hundreds of miles from Ukraine’s borders. By targeting Kronstadt, the attacks signify the opening of a new front in the drone war, against the Baltic Fleet. Located on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, 18 miles west of St. Petersburg, Kronstadt is one of the principal bases associated with the Fleet. Since any naval threat approaching St. Petersburg must pass Kronstadt, the base acts as the maritime gateway to Russia’s second-largest city. Until now, there have been very few confirmed Ukrainian attacks of any kind on the Baltic Fleet compared with the extensive campaign waged against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
The prestigious Russian Navy base at Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg, came under Ukrainian drone attack overnight, in what may well be the first strike of its kind against the Baltic Fleet. Ukrainian drones targeted the naval base, including the Project 20380 Steregushchiy class corvette Boikiy, highlighting the fact that Russian warships are vulnerable even when hundreds of miles from Ukraine’s borders.
According to the official account of the Ukrainian 414th Separate Unmanned Strike Aviation System Brigade on X, the corvette was set ablaze while in the Veleshchynskyi dry dock in Kronstadt, where it is said to have entered scheduled maintenance in February of this year. The same account posted a video showing the attack. While we are used to kamikaze drone video feeds cutting out just before detonation, the fact that multiple drones were involved means we can see the burning vessel from several angles.
Reportedly, the drones that hit the corvette were from the 1st Separate Center of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. Considering the long distance to the target, it is interesting to note that video from the seekers was available. This indicates that either a local operator on the ground was involved in targeting and recording the feed, or otherwise a satcom link was used to do the same. While it is conceivable that the drones used autonomous guidance, they would still have needed someone nearby or connected via satcom to record the seeker’s view. Another possibility is that shorter-range drones were used for the attack, something that Ukraine has done before for attacks deep in Russia, although this seems less likely here.
A drone’s eye view of the Russian corvette Boikiy ablaze in the Veleshchynskyi dry dock in Kronstadt. Ukrainian Ministry of Defense screencap
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces stated that the Boikiy was involved in escorting ships associated with Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the collection of older tankers operating under foreign flags that Moscow relies on to export oil despite Western sanctions. According to Ukrainian officials, Russia has increasingly tasked Baltic Fleet vessels with escort, monitoring, and security missions for these tankers as they transit the Baltic Sea carrying sanctioned Russian oil to markets prepared to bypass Western restrictions.

The Steregushchiy class ships are among Russia’s more modern corvettes. With a standard displacement of 1,800 tons, a length of 343 feet, and a flight deck for a helicopter, the corvettes are closer to frigates, according to some classification systems. Their primary armament consists of two quadruple launchers for Uran anti-ship missiles, a 12-cell Redut vertical launch system for various air defense missiles, and two quadruple tubes for Paket-NK anti-torpedo/anti-submarine torpedoes.
The British offshore patrol vessels HMS Mersey and HMS Severn shadow the Russian corvette Boikiy in the English Channel in 2017.
The attack on the naval base was part of a wider Ukrainian drone barrage directed against other military and energy sites in and around St. Petersburg early on Wednesday. Footage of the attacks showed drones, reportedly FP-1/2 types, low over the Gulf of Finland and in the skies above the city.
The attacks occurred just hours before international guests gathered for the city’s flagship economic forum. “The Petersburg forum is opening with a nice plume of black smoke in the background after Ukrainian strikes,” posted Serhiy Sternenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian defence minister.

Several long-range drones also crashed into oil storage facilities in St. Petersburg after Russian air defenses reportedly tried unsuccessfully to shoot them down. Loud explosions were heard, and black smoke could be seen rising from the blazing oil terminal, one of the largest on Russia’s Baltic Sea coast.

Russian authorities confirmed that the attacks had taken place, with St. Petersburg’s governor, Alexander Beglov, saying that the Kirovsky and Krasnoselsky districts had been targeted.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, writing on social media, said that drones had hit “important facilities on Russian territory,” including the St. Petersburg oil terminal, the Kronstadt base, and a weapons factory in the Tambov region.
“I thank our warriors for their precision. Ukraine’s plan for long-range sanctions is being implemented exactly as needed to bring peace closer,” Zelensky said.

The significance of the strikes is manifold.
First off, the drone strikes have a highly symbolic value, and will be especially embarrassing for the Kremlin, since they come immediately in advance of the three-day annual summit being held in St. Petersburg, and billed as Russia’s answer to Davos.

Guests arrived for today’s opening ceremony under a pall of thick smoke, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to make a keynote speech at the event on Friday. There was further disruption for arriving guests as St. Petersburg’s airport was temporarily closed.
Secondly, the drone strikes underscore Ukraine’s ability to strike targets deep within Russia, using a growing array of long-range one-way attack drones and cruise missiles. The targets are around 680 miles from the nearest Ukrainian border.
The approximate location of Kronstadt and St. Petersburg in relation to Ukraine. Google Earth
Finally, by targeting Kronstadt, the attacks also signify the opening up of a new front in the drone war, namely against the Baltic Fleet while it is in port.

Located on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, about 18 miles west of St. Petersburg, Kronstadt is one of the principal bases associated with the Baltic Fleet. Today, it primarily hosts corvettes and patrol vessels, naval support ships, training units, as well as repair and maintenance facilities. Since any naval threat approaching St. Petersburg from the Gulf of Finland must pass near Kronstadt, the base effectively acts as the maritime gateway to Russia’s second-largest city.
The approximate location of Kronstadt, at the gateway to St. Petersburg, and at the far east end of the Baltic. Google Earth
There have been very few confirmed Ukrainian attacks of any kind on the Baltic Fleet compared with the extensive campaign waged against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
In April 2024, there was a fire on a Russian warship at Baltiysk in Kaliningrad. The fire damaged communications and electronic systems aboard the Buyan class corvette Serpukhov. A Ukrainian military intelligence official subsequently claimed that this was the result of a covert joint operation conducted by his GUR agency and a pro-Kyiv Russian military group.

In recent months, Ukraine has waged an aerial campaign to disrupt Russia’s economy. Long-range drones have hit ports and oil storage facilities, military factories, and airbases. There has also been an uptick in attacks against tankers and trucks moving between occupied southern Ukraine and Crimea, leading to fuel shortages across the peninsula.

Meanwhile, the scale of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine remains undiminished. On Monday, a barrage of Russian strikes killed 23 people across Ukraine and injured many more. This led Zelenskyy to renew his plea for the U.S. government to provide Kyiv with more Patriot missiles. Today, he said that “an agreement at the highest political level on the purchase of Patriot systems […] is awaiting implementation at the financial, legal, and technical levels.”
Whether or not the overnight strike caused significant damage, its strategic message was unmistakable. By reaching Kronstadt, one of Russia’s most historic naval bases, Ukraine demonstrated that even the Baltic Fleet is no longer beyond its reach. The attack highlights Kyiv’s growing long-range capabilities and signals that Russia’s efforts to protect both its regular fleet and its shadow oil-export network may face increasing pressure, even far from the front lines.

Russia Shows Weakness On Battlefield So Increases Ukraine Civilian Attacks

2026-06-04T09:28:16.028-04:00

Russia's terror attacks on civilian targets in Ukrainian cities are increasingly being called out by the global media for what they are: a Putinesque tantrum spurred by impotent rage at the inability of its military to win on the battlefield, despite their initial advantages in manpower and weaponry.

It is important to note that the New York Times, in which the article below appeared this week, has been a persistent Ukraine skeptic, seemingly never missing an opportunity to cluck its tongue at Ukrainian weakness and futility. That it is now joining the media consensus about Russia's failing Ukraine prospects suggests that it can no longer defend its previous editorial bias nor the waning power of the regime that initially prompted it. JL

Lara Jakes reports in the New York Times:

Russia has rained Ukraine with hundreds of drones and missiles, but cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the war. It's advance in Ukraine has slowed to a halt. Its combat performance is waning. Its recruitment efforts have fallen short. Domestic discontent is growing. Europe is providing new support to Ukraine, whose battlefield gains have turned the tide in the war, (and) whose military feels increasingly confident about their battlefield position.”
The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the four-year war.
Russia’s frontline advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts have fallen short. Domestic discontent is growing. Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. And peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended.
All this adds up to a loss of momentum by Russia, analysts say.
“Ukraine’s position is much, much more formidable now than just a year ago,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst based in Vienna, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Some analysts say they believe that Russia’s recently stepped-up strikes are an attempt to reclaim an advantage in potential peace talks and to re-engage the Trump administration, which has become more focused on the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine. Ukraine’s battlefield gains, nonetheless, have turned the tide in the war, said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization in London.
While Russia’s airstrikes could continue “for a long period,” Mr. Watling said on Tuesday, its combat performance is waning. That has led to “a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” he wrote in an analysis this week for Foreign Affairs.
That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities.

In Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman said the war could end as soon as Ukraine withdrew from the Donbas region, where Russia has claimed territory. Mr. Gady said Russia was unlikely to seize full control of the Donbas by the end of 2026, as it had sought to do before returning to cease-fire negotiations. But, he said, the barrage of airstrikes like those on Tuesday show that Russia’s air power cannot be discounted, and “Ukraine is certainly going to see more of these attacks.”
Ukraine, in the meantime, is holding the line on the ground.
Analysts with DeepState UA, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence tracker, reported this week that the Russian military appeared to have lost more territory in May than it had gained, its first month with such a loss since Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
That was despite a 37.5 percent increase in the number of Russian attacks. Analysts said Russian battlefield forces had most likely degraded to the point that, at times, attacks were left to only one or two soldiers to launch.
“The war is entering a new phase, and it’s important for the Ukrainian state not to lose the initiative,” the DeepState analysts concluded. Ukraine’s battlefield position continues to be backed by new military aid from Europe, including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week.
Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties. Last week, the British spy chief, Anne Keast-Butler, said nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022.
“As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” Ms. Keast-Butler said in a speech in London.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia was losing 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers every month. “Not injured — dead,” Mr. Rubio said on Fox News. “It’s a bad war.”
That is why Moscow is trying to get more soldiers from eastern Ukraine.
Students in the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions have seen their mobilization deferrals canceled, and the Russian occupation authorities have resorted to mandatory registration, raids and threats of legal punishment to force Ukrainians into the Russian Army, according to Maksym Beznosiuk of the Jamestown Foundation, a policy group in Washington.
“The Kremlin’s mobilization strategy in the occupied territories aims to fill the personnel gap caused by catastrophic Russian military losses and reshape the demographic balance by removing some Ukrainian residents,” Mr. Beznosiuk, an expert on Russia’s military and E.U.-Ukraine relations, wrote in an analysis this week. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Zelensky called the latest assault “a large-scale attack and a completely transparent statement from Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic and other missile strikes, these attacks will continue.”

And they could extend into Europe the longer that allies there supply Ukraine with weapons, Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian and Soviet diplomat, said in an interview on Tuesday.

Russia’s ability to prolong the war in Ukraine, Mr. Sokov said, should not be discounted.

“What I do not see in European policy is the understanding that instead of accepting defeat, actually Moscow may choose escalation,” said Mr. Sokov, now a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in Austria. “That would be my concern.” In his interview on Fox News, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that American efforts to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine had “lost some momentum over the last few months, for a variety of reasons.”

“Hopefully, we’ll reach a point here soon where both parties re-engage,” Mr. Rubio said. “And we’re prepared to play the role to mediate and to bring that to a conclusion.”

He also said Russia might have recently felt “a little bit optimistic” because profits from the high costs of oil caused by the closed Strait of Hormuz had given the Kremlin an economic lifeline to continue supporting the military effort.

Even so, Mr. Rubio said, “the Ukrainians feel increasingly confident about their battlefield position.”

Losing 1000s of Trucks To Drone Hits, Russia Is Facing Logistical Dead-End

2026-06-04T09:06:13.002-04:00

Resource-strapped and economically sinking Russia is now losing hundreds of trucks a day and thousands per month due to Ukrainian drone strikes on the mid range logistical routes supporting its military in Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Lunhansk.

Once again, the Ukrainians strategic identification of Russian weaknesses followed by a plan to make them worse is producing results for which the Kremlin has no answer. JL

David Axe reports in Trench Art:

The campaign of AI drone strikes is intensifying. And now the Russians are losing hundreds of trucks every day. Far more than they can replace with new production. While Russian ground forces possess tens of thousands of cargo vehicles, and buy thousands of new ones every year, they're currently on track to lose thousands per month. Russia lost 7,000 trucks in May, around 6,500 in April and slightly more than 6,000 in March. The number of old Cold War cargo vehicles in storage in Russia is 40,000 or 50,000. But that's just 100 days' worth of trucks at the current rate of loss. (And) the stored trucks have been parked "for decades without proper maintenance. Most are junk."

The Russian military keeps tens of thousands of old trucks in storage. It might need them soon. This spring, Ukrainian forces launched a counterlogistics campaign targeting Russian trucks, vans and other cargo vehicles across the logistical zone stretching 200 km behind the disputed gray zone.
The campaign of AI drone strikes is intensifying. And now the Russians are losing potentially hundreds of trucks every day. Far more than they can immediately replace with new production. While Russian ground forces possess tens of thousands of cargo vehicles, and buy thousands of new ones every year, they're currently on track to lose thousands per month.
If truck losses continue at the current rate, or get worse, the Russians may have no choice but to begin doing for trucks what they've long done for tanks: pull very old vehicles out of long-term storage and do their best to refurbish them for continued use.

It could be tough. "Russia has an immense number of stored trucks," analyst Jompy noted. They placed the number of old Cold War cargo vehicles in storage in Russia at 40,000 or 50,000. That's more trucks than most armies have in their entire inventories, but it's also just 100 days' worth of trucks at the current rate of loss across the logistical zone.
Worse for Russian logisticians, most of the stored trucks have been parked "for decades without proper maintenance," according to Jompy. "Most are junk."
How long Russia's current truck inventory lasts, and how urgently it may need to tap reserves of rusty older vehicles, depends on exactly how many trucks Ukrainian drones are knocking out every day.

The Ukrainian general staff reported 483 destroyed Russian trucks on 30 May, another 524 on 31 May and 384 on 1 June. The average across the past three days is 463 trucks. That's more than five times Russia's average daily truck losses since widening its war on Ukraine in February 2022.
Russian trucks destroyed by Ukraine. Chart: Euromaidan Press

According to the Ukrainian defense ministry, Russia lost nearly 7,000 trucks in May, around 6,500 in April and slightly more than 6,000 in March. Cargo vehicle losses in previous months were much lower, including just 4,000 or so per month between December and February. That makes sense, as the Ukrainian counterlogistics campaign began in earnest as the weather warmed and the winter fog lifted over the Russian logistical zone this spring.
The intensifying drone raids on Russian supply lines out to a distance of 200 km marks a strategic pivot for Ukraine. As recently as late last year, Ukrainian leaders were under scrutiny for focusing their drone strikes on Russian infantry in the gray zone as well as on largely symbolic targets deep inside Russia. That bifurcated focus risked neglecting the logistical middle zone.
But that was before the spring pivot. Now the middle zone and its supply lines are the main focus of Ukraine's best new drones, including Swift Beat Hornets and other inexpensive fixed-wing drones with jam-resistant AI-targeting. "A battlefield runs on logistics," the Ukrainian defense ministry conceded. "Ukraine is making sure Russia's does not."

Electronic warfare might not save Russia's logistics, given how many of the Ukrainian drones ranging across the logistical zone have self-contained AI for targeting and don't need a low-lag connection to a distant operator in order to strike their targets.
Russia can fight back by deploying more air defenses along the main supply routes. The problem there is that Ukrainian drones are also targeting the air defenses, hitting hundreds of them in just the last year.
The Russians could also erect anti-drone nets over the most vulnerable highways. But there are hundreds of miles of roads, and nets are fragile.
Most likely, the Kremlin will try a little of everything to keep supplies and reinforcements flowing to the front-line regiments. The all-of-the-above logistical effort could very well include refurbishing—or at least trying to refurbish—a whole lot of very old trucks.

Putin Hometown St Petersburg Struck On First Day Of Conference He Is Hosting

2026-06-03T11:01:24.272-04:00

Message from Kyiv delivered. JL

Elmira Aliieva reports in NBC News:

Ukraine launched hundreds of drones at Russian targets early Wednesday, sending black smoke rising above St. Petersburg just as the event dubbed “Putin’s Davos” was due to get underway in the city. The attack on President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, which hosts the flagship annual economic forum, was the latest signal from Kyiv that it can strike deep inside enemy territory and embarrass the Kremlin. Emergency crews were responding to the attacks and assessing damage, St. Petersburg Mayor Alexander Beglov said. Kyiv appeared to be sending a message, targeting the city hosting one of the Kremlin’s most important international events.
Ukraine launched hundreds of drones at Russian targets early Wednesday, sending black smoke rising above the historic heart of St. Petersburg just as the event dubbed “Putin’s Davos” was due to get underway in the city.
The attack on President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, which hosts the flagship annual economic forum, was the latest signal from Kyiv that it can strike deep inside enemy territory and seek to embarrass the Kremlin.
With peace talks deadlocked and battlefield progress stalled, the two sides have been exchanging intensifying aerial attacks.
In St. Petersburg, where the International Economic Forum was set to begin later Wednesday, local authorities reported several people were injured as Ukraine said it had struck an oil export terminal.
“Important facilities on Russian territory were hit last night,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X early Wednesday, with the St. Petersburg oil terminal among the targets. The drones flew more than 600 miles to hit the terminal, he said.
“Ukraine’s plan for long-range sanctions is being implemented exactly as needed to bring peace closer,” Zelenskyy added.
Emergency crews were responding to the attacks and assessing damage, St. Petersburg Mayor Alexander Beglov said on Telegram.
The broader Leningrad region, which includes St. Petersburg, also came under attack, with Russian air defenses intercepting 50 Ukrainian drones overnight, according to the regional governor. Alexander Drozdenko.
Moscow was also targeted, with air defenses downing 13 drones approaching the capital, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram.
Overall, 754 Ukrainian drones were shot down in the past 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry said, according to the news agency Interfax.
Russian authorities have imposed restrictions on the publication of photos and videos showing the ‌aftermath of attacks.
Separately, seven people were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a passenger bus in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, said Denis Pushilin, the Kremlin-installed leader of the area.
The Ukrainian attacks came a day after Russia launched one of its largest aerial assaults on Ukraine in months, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than a hundred across several major cities.
Russia had vowed more intense attacks and warned foreign diplomats to abandon Kyiv. In recent months, Ukrainian attacks have been largely focused on Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure in a bid to pressure Putin’s wartime economy.
Ukraine has targeted the oil industry because “it is very important for Russia economically,” said Nick Reynolds, research fellow for land warfare at Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security think-tank.
“Ukraine is trying to reduce Russian oil revenue, and therefore write down its capacity to continue the war, and make life more difficult economically for the Russian state and the Russian people,” Reynolds told NBC News in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
Kyiv appeared to be sending its own message Wednesday, targeting the city hosting one of the Kremlin’s most important international events.
The economic forum in St. Petersburg brings together senior Russian officials, business leaders and foreign delegates each year and serves as a showcase for Putin’s efforts to project economic resilience despite the war and Western sanctions.
The Kremlin said Tuesday that a U.S. delegation would attend the event this week for the first time in many years. It will be led by Rodney Cook, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts and the man who oversees President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom extension, the Kremlin said.
Right-wing influencer Candace Owens is also set to appear at the event.
This year’s special guest country is Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf power and U.S. ally sending a high-level business delegation, while other prominent guests include senior officials from countries such as Iran and China.
Ukrainian attacks coinciding with the International Economic Forum will “not just be sending a message to Russia — they will also send a message to Russia’s partners or potential partners,” Reynolds said.
“Russia is once again demonstrating its unwillingness to engage in any pragmatic dialogue on ending the war against Ukraine” Ukraine’s Security Service said in a statement Wednesday, taking aim at the economic forum’s slogan, “Pragmatic Dialogue — the Path to a Stable Future.”
“The longer Russia chooses war over peace, the more frequently the facilities sustaining that war will burn,” it said

Ukraine Is Now Talking About Winning, Not Just Surviving

2026-06-03T10:20:20.692-04:00

The Ukrainians are beginning to dare to believe. Not that they will survive, which now seems assured, but that they may prevail. In fact, in some sectors of the Ukrainian government, the biggest concern is that Ukraine's allies will become overconfident and expect victory too soon.

The strategic challenge on which Ukraine is focusing is not just a cessation of hostilities, but that Russia be left too weak to contemplate any war again soon. JL

Patrick Tucker reports in Defense One:

A growing number of European officials are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its war with Russia, it is thriving and may be on a path to victory. Just as important as new drone tech are new tactics. Given latitude to experiment, Ukrainian fighters have developed robot-forward infantry concepts, like combined-arms attacks by airborne and ground systems. Ukraine is more willing than Russia to rebuild its doctrine, acquisition, and supply systems around autonomous warfare. “All the systems are being linked with each other and with people” to create a distributed network at various locations to be activated when needed. "One day we will have just 10 guys responsible for approving interception automatically to the target.” (But) for Ukraine, victory will require more than cessation of hostilities. The invading country must be left “much weaker.”A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.

This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.

Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.

In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory—even take it back. Some are fully controlled by humans, like supply robots and medical-evacuation vehicles. But an increasing number are controlled in at least some aspects by dozens of AI products, from guidance packages on aerial drones to decision aids at the highest levels. Take the TFL-1 module, which can enable a one-way drone to function autonomously after a human has selected its target, reducing its susceptibility to jamming and other defenses. Its manufacturer, a Ukrainian company called The Fourth Law, says TFL-1 makes a drone four times more likely to hit its target

.Just as important as the tech are the new tactics. Given unusual latitude to experiment, Ukrainian fighters began to develop robot-forward infantry concepts, like combined-arms attacks by airborne and ground systems, “more than a year ago. Right now, we're massively starting to implement this,” said Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the coordinating body on domestic and international security, in an interview.

Ukraine and its partners are also steaming ahead on new concepts for highly autonomous defenses against Russian drones, combining ISR sensors and AI to detect and identify enemy drones in less time and with more certainty.

“All of the systems are being linked with each other and with people” to create a distributed network with interceptor drones at various locations to be activated when needed, Aloian said. “One day we will have only like 10 guys who are just going to be responsible for approving interception. And it will automatically go direct to the target.”

The human operators will be dispersed as well. “Everything can be controlled from Kyiv, Lviv, from cities in other countries,” he said.

Ukraine’s advantages go beyond weapons and tactics. It is more willing than Russia—or even Kyiv’s Western backers—to rebuild its doctrine, acquisition, and resupply systems around autonomous warfare.

Countries that fail to follow suit risk disaster, one of Ukraine’s top dronemakers warned attendees at the GLOBSEC conference here.

“It's not what happened to Ukraine”—meaning Russia’s barrage of Shahed drones—that “should scare us in Europe,” said Swarmer CEO Serhii Kupriienko.

Instead, Kupriienko said, people should be scared by how quickly a middling military—in this case, Ukraine’s—developed the ability to inflict precise, devastating, and long-range damage.“We are behind by literally 10 years or 20 years” in some defense-technology areas, such as satellite imagery, Kupriienko said, and yet his country has climbed a capability curve that just two years ago seemed insurmountable. So could others, he said.

“The answer is always AI solutions and integrating the AI into even the daily routine work within the bureaucracy,” he said.

Ukraine has also developed a defense industry that can keep up with the Russian threat. Its success is reflected not only on the battlefield, but in the growing number of foreign investors who see potential in defense products developed in and with Ukraine.

“We have evolved since 2022, the industry has and our defense has as well. Right now we are able to provide not only [large quantities of drone] assets but everything what is needed to build out the ecosystem,” including parts and production, training, modification, etc. Aloian said.

Strike drones FTW

Ukraine’s strike drones, more than any other factor, have helped counter a key Russian advantage: a large population of economically desperate young men and a comparative willingness to discount the cost of their deaths. Vladimir Putin has drawn hundreds of thousands into service with upfront bonuses and insurance benefits, which has provided numerical superiority on Ukrainian battlefields along with “considerable stimulus for the ailing Russian economy,” writes expatriate economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, who calls the system “deathonomics.”

But human waves are ineffective if drones kill soldiers faster than they can be replaced at the front—and that has become the case, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War wrote this week.

“Ukraine's successful mid-range and frontline drone strike campaigns are limiting Russia's ability to transport personnel to the frontline and to supply and sustain frontline positions,” they wrote.

Putin must now “convince an increasingly tired Russian populace not only to support a fifth year of war but also to accept involuntary mobilization for a war that has already cost Russia well over a million casualties.”

Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities have changed the game in other ways as well. Oil infrastructure deep in Russian territory is no longer safe, giving Kyiv leverage over Moscow’s export revenues no matter what the White House does with sanctions relief. Even more humiliating, the drone threat forced Putin to hold his annual Victory Day parade this month without Soviet-esque ranks of tanks and missiles.

“Believe us. We were in the occupation of the Soviet Union for 50 years, and we know how important” the Victory Day parade is,” Estonian foreign minister Margus Tsahkna told the GLOBSEC audience. “For the first time, Putin was not able to wage this parade. This is the facade actually collapsing. And Putin is losing face among the Russian people, not only among us.”

“Putin thought that Ukraine was a question of five days. And, let's be frank, we, too, we said, ‘Five days, and then it's finished,’” said Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg's deputy prime minister. “In fact, the resilience of the Ukrainians was a big surprise for all of us.”

Changing fortunes

To understand how dramatically Ukraine’s prospects have changed, consider that in March, then-ODNI director Tulsi Gabbard, testified that the U.S. intelligence community believed that Russia had the “upper hand” in the conflict.

Now Ukrainian officials and other observers have begun to worry about a premature sense of victory among Ukraine’s foreign backers. Kyiv still depends on aid and imported weapons. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the government continues to be “very persistent” in its efforts to secure advanced Patriot missiles from the United States. “I believe [the U.S.] must act quicker,” he told reporters during a visit to Sweden.

Some European governments, however, are ever more eager to forge deeper ties with their continent’s new defense leader—not just for Ukraine’s sake but for their own.

“It means enlargement processes for the European Union, for NATO in the future,” Estonia’s Tsahkna said. It means security guarantees not only to Ukraine and for Ukraine, but the other way around, because actually Ukraine is the largest military power in Europe at the moment, and increasing as well its industrial base.”

As for the Ukrainian government, declaring victory will require more than the cessation of hostilities. The invading country must be left “much weaker,” so that it can’t re-arm as it did after its 2014 invasion of Crimea, Aloian said.

“If there's going to be a ceasefire, there will be very harsh conditions and difficult negotiations for the taking off of the sanctions, and when it will be,” he said. Otherwise, Russia will “renew all of those processes [of military buildup] before the full-scale invasion.”

“Right now, they're aiming like about 30 percent of their economy for the defense industry,” which is too much, he said.

Even the downfall of Putin, who has led Russia since the end of the 20th century, would be insufficient.

“The change of the regime shouldn’t just be only external. It should be also internal,” he said.

If it happens, much of the credit will go to the makers and operators of Ukraine’s drones.

Drunk, Unconscious Russian Troops Enable Ukraine To Collapse Zaporizhzhia Flank

2026-06-03T09:56:51.889-04:00

The cascading elements of this catastrophe for Russia only get more amazing. First Russian troops in a forward position drink themselves to unconsciousness - some, literally, to death - and they are undiscovered by their commanders for almost a week. Then, talk about it on Russian comms is intercepted by Ukrainian forces, who investigate, probe - and launch an attack to take advantage, which may threaten the collapse of the entire Russian flank in Zaporizhzhia oblast.

That Russian troops would be so hopeless and forlorn is, perhaps, not surprising. But the degree of leadership failure, indiscipline and incompetence is a telling indication of why the Kremlin is now losing ground in Ukraine. JL

RFU News reports:

In Zaporizhzhia oblast, dozens of Russian soldiers couldn’t take it anymore and literally drank themselves to death at the frontline. Ukrainian intelligence intercepted a radio call in which Russian troops discussed a mass alcohol poisoning in the sector. Ten bodies were discovered at an observation post in Kamianske after the troops there had drunk themselves to death. The dead soldiers were not collected for six days, indicating a lack of command awareness. Ukrainian drones then destroyed a Russian site for ammunition and drones leaving Russian troops without drone coverage. Ukraine launched attacks on the weakened Russian positions toward Stepove to further isolate Stepnohirsk, pushed back the Russian flank, and now threatening to collapse the Russian flank.
Today, there are important updates from the Zaporizhzhia direction.
Here, dozens of Russian soldiers at once couldn’t take it anymore and literally drank themselves to death at the frontline. Ukrainians followed up with an immediate coordinated assault on the weakened Russian positions, now threating to collapse Russia’s flank.
Recently, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence released an intercepted radio call in which Russian troops discussed a mass alcohol poisoning in the Zaporizhia sector. According to one soldier, ten bodies were discovered at an observation post after the troops stationed there had reportedly drunk themselves to death. What is most revealing is that the incident did not shock the soldiers discussing it, suggesting that severe alcohol abuse and battlefield indiscipline have become normalized within Russian frontline units. One soldier asked the other over the radio how the dead bodies could be evacuated from their positions, which is believed to be in the cottage area in Kamianske. The dead soldiers were not collected for six days, indicating a lack of command awareness and position monitoring. Then one of the soldiers added the shocking fact that all dead soldiers were stacked and covered with sleeping bags, as if they were just sleeping, creating the impression that the position was manned while in reality nobody defended it, underlining the broader Russian command failure.
The fact that the bodies remained at the position for six days before anyone realized the soldiers were dead highlights that commanders didn’t track or care whether such a forward post was functioning, supplied, or combat capable. Even the complete loss of radio contact did not raise any alarm, as no one bothered to see if the position was still Russian or not, effectively making the Russian defense line blind. This indicates that prolonged breakdowns in communication are treated as routine within the Russian army, while allowing Ukraine to find weak points in the Russian line, which they did east of Stepnohirsk.
The Ukrainians immediately exploited the situation by launching preparatory strikes ahead of their counterattack. Ukrainian kamikaze drones destroyed a building in the village of Pryshyb, thirty-six kilometers south of Stepnohirsk, which Russian drone operators were using as a position and storage site for ammunition and drone equipment. As a result, Russian frontline troops were left without full drone coverage, which detects Ukrainian movements, guides artillery, and protects exposed flanks. This further worsened an already critical shortage of drones in the sector, where Russian soldiers had previously complained that Ukrainian drone operators were dominating the battlefield.
After the Russian frontline units were left exposed, Ukrainian artillery struck Russian soldiers positioned in the Mali Shcherbaky area, which was important to suppress before the flank attack could begin. Further west, near Stepove, Ukrainian drone operators attacked Russian personnel and shelters using FPV drones and drone dropped grenades. They also targeted Russian radio antennas to disrupt communications with commanders and interfere with drone operations. These strikes were intended to weaken Russia’s local communications and immediate defensive response, while also securing Ukraine’s eastern flank ahead of the assault. To support the operation, Ukrainian defense forces reinforced the sector with the one hundred and fifty-third Mechanized Brigade. Shortly afterward, the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched attacks toward Stepove and in the direction of Kamianske, which would further isolate Stepnohirks.
This comes at a critical moment for Russian forces, being hit by two problems at the same time, struggling to contain Ukrainian special operations forces infiltrating Stepnohirsk, while facing the risk of its logistics through Kamianske being completely cut off from the east. Notably, the main Ukrainian counterattacks toward Stepnohirsk are being led by special forces units of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate and the International Legion, both of which have extensive experience in urban combat, which is vital inside Stepnohirsk. Despite Russia redeploying airborne assault units to halt the Ukrainian advance, these forces are steadily being pushed back, proving the seriousness of the breach.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian special forces assaulted a Russian position in a wooded area east of Kamianske. After covertly approaching the position and conducting tactical drone reconnaissance, the Ukrainian troops launched the clearing operation against the Russian dugouts. The Russian paratroopers defending the position were eliminated, while six soldiers surrendered against the overwhelming attack and were captured alive. As a result of the counterattack, Ukrainian forces pushed back the Russian flank and narrowed the Russian maneuver space, worsening the cut-off threat.
Overall, the situation near Stepnohirsk demonstrates how rapidly collapsing discipline creates physical gaps in the line. A Russian unit drinks itself to death while commanders fail to notice for nearly a week, exposing catastrophic communication failures across the sector. Ukraine immediately exploited the chaos and pushed Russia’s flank, threatening a collapse. Now, Russia’s local defense is no longer failing only from Ukrainian firepower, but from internal command decay.

Anthropic Filing Before OpenAI For IPO Is Financially Significant

2026-06-03T08:43:10.158-04:00

In the IPO race, being first matters. A lot. And being second matters, too, just not in a positive way.

As Anthropic has filed for its IPO ahead of OpenAI, the financial impact may be significant because economic history demonstrates that the first to file - assuming they are well-managed, and Anthropic is considered the better-run enterprise - is then in the best position to take advantage of the money and talent flowing into the market. Companies filing later don't perform as well as their predecessors. This situation is especially acute now because SpaceX, which is not a pure AI company and has a plethora of well-known leadership and performance challenges, is going to market before the others in this latest generation of tech companies. Despite that, it will raise a huge amount of money. The issue is not that SpaceX is first, but that whoever is third will struggle on a relative basis. That is why Anthropic's filing before OpenAI matters. And don't be surprised if OpenAI tries to jump the queue. JL

Asa Fitch, Kate Clark and colleagues report in the Wall Street Journal:

Anthropic, recently valued at nearly $1 trillion, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering. Banks have told Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever makes it to market first will define the new industry and have first dibs on the large pools of cash eager to back new AI companies. There are clear advantages to being first. As importantly, there are major disadvantages in being second. Research has shown that IPOs come in industry clusters, and that companies listing later in a cycle don’t perform as well. That stands to reason, given that higher-quality companies with deeper moats tend to go public early, triggering a barrage of followers that might not be as strong. And even in a hot market, there isn’t an infinite amount of money to go around. “SpaceX (IPO next week) is going to consume a ton of capital, and the guy that goes second is going to have a better position than the guy that goes third.”
In the bitter rivalry between AI heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic, it will mostly be who has the best technology that determines the ultimate victor. But which one of them gets to its public offering first matters a great deal, too. Anthropic, the artificial intelligence lab recently valued at nearly $1 trillion, said Monday it has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, setting up a blockbuster year for IPOs.
The filing could put the company behind the Claude AI model on a path to go public this fall.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to stage what is likely to be the largest IPO ever next week. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI, was preparing to submit its own IPO filing imminently.
Banks have told both Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever makes it to market first will get to define the new industry and have first dibs on the large pools of cash eager to back new AI companies. If both file initial paperwork with regulators around the same time, either would still have a chance to stage an offering before the other.
The window for initial public offerings is decidedly open, with a receptive market. Cerebras, an AI-chip company, rose 68% on its first day of trading last month. Only digital-design platform Figma’s absurd 250% rise last year was bigger for a company valued at more than $10 billion at listing in the past five years, according to FactSet data.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to follow up this summer in what may well be the largest IPO in history—with a targeted valuation of $1.5 trillion. That will add more heat to the IPO cauldron.

This is all the more reason for OpenAI and Anthropic to try to be the first big artificial-intelligence-model developer to go public. Anthropic filed confidential paperwork Monday for a listing that could come as soon as the fall, while OpenAI has been working with bankers on its own filing.
There are some clear advantages to being first out of the gate. Just as importantly, there are major disadvantages in being second.
Academic research has shown that IPOs tend to come in industry clusters, and that companies listing later in a cycle don’t tend to perform as well. That stands to reason, given that higher-quality companies with deeper moats tend to go public early, triggering a barrage of followers that might not be as strong.
And even in a hot market, there isn’t an infinite amount of money to go around. Investors may rotate out of other stocks to pile into SpaceX, then do more reshuffling to make bets on OpenAI and Anthropic later this year or next. The one that goes first is likely to gobble up more of the increasingly scarce capital.
And both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking for sky-high valuations. Anthropic raised money recently at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. OpenAI was last valued in March at $852 billion.
“There’s only so much oxygen in the room,” said Patrick Healy, founder of Issuer Network, which advises companies going public on leading U.S. exchanges. “SpaceX is going to consume an absolute ton of capital, and the guy that goes second is going to have a better position than the guy that goes third.”
For the better-run company—in this case Anthropic, headed by Dario Amodei—the cost of waiting may be especially large. A lukewarm market reception for an early OpenAI listing, which seems plausible given the steady drumbeat of dysfunction at the Sam Altman-led company, could force Anthropic to delay or scale back.
That is just what happened in 2019, when ride-hailing rivals Lyft and Uber Technologies went public. Lyft, the smaller of the two, was first out of the gate with an IPO that didn’t live up to its hype.
A post-IPO decline in the stock directly affected Uber’s listing two months later. Uber cut its target valuation, but its shares still fell after its debut, even in a market where other tech listings had been doing well.
Going first isn’t risk-free either, of course. The first to list risks that the market takes time to reflect its value, given that it is in a nascent industry without much of a track record.
That has happened with tech listings in the past. Facebook’s stock lost more than half its value in its first three months of trading in 2012 amid worry about whether it could adapt to a shift toward mobile-phone ads. It later went on a sustained upward run as the company showed its resilience and investors grew more comfortable with its business model. But other companies that had been itching to list—notably Twitter—ended up having to wait.
Importantly though, even when the market’s initial verdict is negative, Facebook and other early IPO movers got to reap the benefits of being public as they waited for their shares to recover. This includes whatever money is raised from the IPO, and keeping employees happy by allowing them to cash out. Those factors add urgency to OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs, both of which could come this year.

Which gets there first—and how markets react to it—could help shape the future of the two companies and the next phase of the AI boom, either underlining the market’s confidence in AI’s transformative power or delivering a warning about its excesses. The stakes are high indeed.

Putin - and Putinism - Have No Good Way Out of His War

2026-06-02T10:31:24.801-04:00

There is a delicious irony in watching

Vladimir Putin, the ultimate authoritarian, hoisted on his own hubris. In the fifth year of a war he started, assured - at least in his own mind - of a quick victory, he now finds not only his own rule, but the system he installed and runs with an iron fist threatened by the failure of the military he thought would enforce his will.

While there appears to be no imminent downfall in the offing, seeing what happened to his putative allies in Syria and Venezuela suggests that, like a burning building, regimes may take years to weaken, then collapse all at once. He has no good options for exiting Ukraine that do not result in his own demise. JL

Michael Kimmidge comments in the New York Times:

Perpetuating a war is not the same as winning one. Mr. Putin has few escalatory tools left to change the dynamic. Nor can he simply withdraw from Ukraine. Were Russia to accept a settlement along the current line of contact, he would have little to show for his efforts. As a political survivor he understands that if he were to present such a small prize to Russians, it would be an admission of the war’s senselessness. The poor quality of his strategic thinking and his hubris could become a political factor. Russia’s president has shown himself to be a mediocre head of state. With each Ukrainian strike on Russian territory, the war is eroding the well-being of Russian citizens.
“No Exit,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act existential play on the hell of non-endings, was first performed in Paris in May 1944. World War II was about to enter its fifth year. In the play, three people, recently deceased and apparently locked in a drawing room of hell, face the bad choices of their lives, from which, in death, there is no escape.
If the Russian authorities would allow Sartre’s play to be put on in Moscow in 2026, one wonders what President Vladimir Putin and ordinary Russians, more than four years into Mr. Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, would make of it.
Since the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putinism — the hyperpersonalist system of rule that Mr. Putin has imposed on Russia for around a quarter century — has arrived at what might seem an eerie equilibrium, but on a closer reading is a trap for all involved. Mr. Putin has subordinated his state and his society to a war that is slowly sapping Russia’s strength, depleting the nation’s wealth and consuming the lives of its young people.
On the surface, calm prevails. Mr. Putin has found a way to fund his expensive war, staving off economic collapse and continuing to generate considerable numbers of military recruits, mostly through large cash bonuses. Russia, far from being isolated, interacts diplomatically and commercially with much of the world. Despite some recent signs of domestic discontent — as ordinary citizens have increasingly found themselves poorer, less insulated from the war and increasingly blocked on the internet — Mr. Putin can be confident that he remains in complete control. But perpetuating a war is not the same as winning one. As his army ekes out gains on the front line, Mr. Putin has few escalatory tools left to change the dynamic. Involuntary mobilization would give Russia an advantage, but it would be acutely unpopular among Russians. Nuclear weapons, of any kind, would be a terrible option. Employing them would not guarantee victory, and would risk provoking a harsh military response from the United States and Europe or a rupture in Russia’s relationship with China, its most important ally.
Nor can Mr. Putin simply withdraw from Ukraine. Were Russia to accept a settlement along the current line of contact, Mr. Putin would have little to show for his efforts other than a narrow strip of territory in southern Ukraine. Apart from the injury to his vanity, as a consummate political survivor he understands that if he were to present such a small prize to Russians who have lost family members, it would be an admission of the war’s fundamental senselessness. The poor quality of his strategic thinking and his hubris could then become a pressing political factor within Russia.
Mr. Putin has maneuvered himself into a trap. But, beyond himself, he has burdened the whole project of Putinism, should it outlast his tenure, with some version of this war in perpetuity. Any future leader in Mr. Putin’s mold would not be able to watch passively as a heavily armed and battle-hardened Ukraine integrates into Western security structures and a militarizing Europe.
If Mr. Putin does not have a way out of his war, ordinary Russians do not yet have a way out of Putinism. The recent public dissent in Russia has been misinterpreted. The discontent is absolutely real, but its essence is a frustration with the fact that Putinism, despite its failures, seems interminable.
Today, the president faces no antiwar movement and no opposition party. He can repress Russian citizens at will. Even to go about their daily business is to enable and at times to administer the system that prosecutes the war and fosters repression. Most Russians work for the state in one way or another — the private sector being subordinate to the government — and yet have no say in how the state is run. Finding a collective exit from this system is psychologically and politically impossible for the time being. There are no individuals or institutions that can unseat the president; there is no visible path toward terminating his rule or replacing it with something better. In these circumstances, we might see flickers of verbal opposition — like in response to the throttling of the internet — but with nowhere to go, they are easily extinguished.
Theorists of 18th- and 19th-century revolutions emphasized the importance of rising expectations as a catalyst. When people sense that a better future is possible, they act to expedite the process — as in the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, which followed Gorbachev’s promises of glasnost and perestroika.
Mr. Putin has been assiduous about ensuring Russians’ low expectations. The promise of a modern Russia, prosperous and open to the world, has faded into complacency and numb acceptance of dictatorship and forever wars. This uncomfortable equilibrium cannot last forever. The early promise of Mr. Putin and Putinism, after what he saw as the catastrophe of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a comfortable predictability and an improved standard of living, efficient governance, if not freedom as such. But Russia’s president, who has become a superlative authoritarian over time, has shown himself to be a mediocre head of state, a poor caretaker of the Russian economy and the agent of a regional disorder that is boomeranging back into Russia. With each Ukrainian strike on Russian territory, the war is eroding the well-being of Russian citizens.
The path to competent Russian leadership now appears to require an unraveling of Putinism, and the less legitimate and effective the current system becomes, the fiercer the post-Putin battle for position will be. When it comes, his exit could well shatter the stability he sought to impose when he became Russia’s president more than 20 years ago.

Kremlin's Forces Lost Ground Again In May As Ukraine Gains More Than Russians

2026-06-02T10:05:06.182-04:00

For the first time in three years, Ukrainian forces gained more territory than did the Russians in May. This is significant because the amount of Russian advance has been decreasing for several months, but for the Ukrainians to now surpass the Russians suggests that the trend is systemic, not just episodic, and may reveal a long-term change in the countries' relative military capabilities and strategic fortunes.

The implication is that Ukraine's three-pronged effort to target Kremlin assets at the front, in the mid-range just behind it and at longer ranges inside Russia are having a cascading, and perhaps irreversible, military and economic impact. JL

Jimmy Rushton and Asami Terajima report in the Kyiv Independent:

Ukraine has gained more territory than Russia occupied over the same period in May, pushing overall Russian advances into the negative for the first time since 2023. "This is the first month in recent years after the 'Counteroffensive 2023' when the increase in the occupied territory for the Russians became negative. Russia typically advances faster in the late spring-fall, but we aren't seeing an increase in the rate of advance. It is important because the seasons have already changed and Russian advances have not increased." The reverses Russia suffered came despite a significant increase in Russian assault actions, which jumped up by 37.5% in May.
Ukraine has gained more territory than Russia occupied over the same period in May, pushing overall Russian advances into the negative for the first time since 2023, Ukrainian monitoring group DeepState reported on June 1.
This is despite the group's public map showing a Russian advance of 14 square kilometers (5.4 square miles) in May, due to the delay in publicly acknowledging advances by the Ukrainian military amid security concerns, according to DeepState.
"According to our map, in May the enemy occupied only 14 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory," DeepState posted on Telegram, adding that "for security reasons, we show the advance of the Defense Forces of Ukraine with a delay."
Due to this lag in updating their map, DeepState claimed that "this is the first month in recent years after the 'Counteroffensive 2023' when the increase in the occupied territory for the Russians became negative."
"Russia typically advances faster in the late spring-fall, but we aren't seeing an increase in the rate of advance," Rob Lee, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on the Russian military, told the Kyiv Independent.
"It is important because the seasons have already changed and Russian advances have not increased."
DeepState said in the same Telegram post that the reverses Russia suffered came despite a significant increase in Russian assault actions, which jumped up by 37.5% in May.
Considering the majority of Russian assault troopers are killed or severely wounded during assaults, Russian casualties likely increased as well.

The first non-government report on the Russian advances underperforming Ukraine's battlefield gains in a month since 2023 comes as Kyiv slowly begins to create conditions to turn the tide in its favor, launching counterattacks over the past half a year and honing its deep-strike capabilities inside Russia.
Tracking battlefield gains, however, has become an immense challenge for both government and independent observers, with estimates of liberated and occupied territory varying across sources.

DeepState's report clashes with earlier claims made by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who claimed that Ukraine liberated more territories in February than Russia had occupied over the same period.
Syrskyi's claim came as Ukraine launched a surprise counterattack on the border of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts in the southeast at the end of January. Ukrainian units fighting there told the Kyiv Independent that they were able to advance further in the first weeks in the high-stakes operation that caught the Russian military off guard, but making progress in later months has become much more difficult since Russia reinforced the area with more effective drone units.
With the "gray zone" — the contested forefront part of the battlefield that neither side controls — constantly expanding and shrinking, tracking advances and territorial losses has become more difficult than ever in the current drone-dominated phase of the war. Infiltrations from both sides are constant, obscuring front line boundaries.
Russia hasn't been able to gain "any real momentum" in its spring offensive and has failed to capture similar amounts of territory in recent months to what it occupied over the same period in previous years, retired Australian Army Major-General Mick Ryan said.
But he stressed that the second half of the year, particularly the fall months, would show how much Ukraine has improved its military effectiveness in 2026, as that period tends to see the fiercest fighting.
"I would say that there's a glimmer that a turning point might be coming because the most deadly parts of the year in the ground war are generally in the second half of the year, not in the first half," Ryan told the Kyiv Independent last month.
Russia's reverses in May come as Ukraine has launched a concerted effort to cut Russian supply lines. Ukraine's "Logistical Lockdown" campaign has seen hundreds of Russian supply trucks targeted and destroyed by units using Kyiv's growing arsenal of medium-range drones.
"Dynamics show that Ukraine has significantly slowed the enemy's advance and is gradually regaining the initiative," Ukraine's Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told journalists at a May closed-door briefing.
"At the same time, we are increasing active operations and liberating territory."

Russian Forces Cleared From Positions By Ukrainian Ground Drone

2026-06-02T09:30:09.247-04:00

Russian troops who infiltrated the Kharkiv oblast village of Novoplatonivka were driven out - and the village cleared - by Ukraine's 115th Mechanized Brigade, which used a ground drone for the task.

Such UGVs have now assaulted entrenched Russian units, captured Russian soldiers and defended Ukrainian positions - all without infantry being exposed. There have not, so far, been any reports of the Russians having similar success. JL

Vlad Litnaroych reports in Untied 24 and Valentyna Romanenko reports in Ukraine Pravda:

Ukrainian troops from the 115th Mechanized Brigade used a ground drone to clear Russian troops from Novoplatonivka in Kharkiv oblast. The operation came after Russian sources had claimed the “capture” of Novoplatonivka. Those reports collapsed once again under battlefield reality and new military technology. To clear the area of infiltrated Russian forces, a strike-and-search group from the 115th Brigade first tested the combat module of the ground-based robotic system at a training ground. "The mopping-up of the settlement was carried out in a precise, coordinated manner. The ground-based robotic system provided reliable fire support, allowing the group to successfully complete the mission."
Ukrainian troops used a ground robotic system to help clear Russian infantry from Novoplatonivka in the Kharkiv region after Moscow’s forces had claimed they had captured the village, according to the 115th Mechanized Brigade, part of Ukraine’s 10th Army Corps.
The brigade released footage of the operation on June 1. According to the brigade, Russian infantry had infiltrated the settlement and was later eliminated by a Ukrainian assault-and-search group.

To clear the area of infiltrated Russian forces, a strike-and-search group from the 115th Brigade set out on the mission after first testing the combat module of the ground-based robotic system at a training ground.
The mopping-up of the settlement was carried out in a precise and coordinated manner. The ground-based robotic system provided reliable fire support, allowing the group to successfully complete the mission.

The operation came after Russian sources had loudly claimed the “capture” of Novoplatonivka. Ukraine said those reports collapsed once again under battlefield reality and new military technology.
Before the mission, the 115th Brigade tested the combat module of the ground robotic system at a training range. The system was then deployed to support the assault group during the clearing operation.
“The clearing of the settlement was carried out clearly and smoothly. The ground robotic system provided reliable fire cover, allowing the group to successfully complete the task,” the 115th Brigade said.
“Novoplatonivka is under the control of the Defense Forces of Ukraine,” the brigade added.
The use of a ground robotic platform highlights Ukraine’s expanding battlefield use of unmanned systems not only in the air and at sea, but also in direct infantry operations. In this case, the robot served as mobile fire support, helping Ukrainian troops reduce risk while clearing Russian forces from the village.
Ukraine plans to roughly double its procurement of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in 2026, with the machines now carrying electronic warfare suites, radar, missiles, and mortars in addition to traditional logistics and demining roles.

AI Powers Historic Stock Rally Even As AI Math Becomes "Hallucinatory"

2026-06-02T08:43:57.227-04:00

These are the good old days. The only question is how long they will last. AI is powering an historic rally in stocks. And AI skeptics appear to have largely surrendered to the conventional wisdom: don't fight the tape, the trend is your friend.

But, to the extent there are lingering concerns, they are not if money will be made, about how. Because some of the math underpinning the rally doesn't make sense from an historical perspective: competition lowers prices, such as those for AI usage tokens, whose cost has become so exorbitant that even very deep-pocketed companies like Microsoft are rationing them. The prudent course seems to be: enjoy the ride, but keep an eye for inevitable changes to the underlying economics. JL

Jack Pitcher and Andy Kessler report in the Wall Street Journal:

AI chip stocks powered the S&P 500 up 16% across April and May, a surge matched only four times since 1950. This is driving an historic stock rally, sending shares of tech companies soaring that recalls the dot-com boom. Wall Street—and history—suggest the gains could keep coming: fund managers have reduced their cash levels by the most in a month since 2024, holding significantly more stocks than their benchmarks. Skeptics note there may be 47 million programmers in the world but very few have a budget of $100,000 to spend on AI tokens. Token prices have risen 65% since February. But shortages don’t last, meaning over the next five years we’ll see token costs decline another 90%, maybe 99%. The future AI math is more like 470 million coders with $1,000 of tokens. Even $100. The rosiest AI demand forecasts will be exceeded, but at much lower prices.
The growing frenzy over memory chips is driving a historic stock rally, sending shares of technology companies soaring in ways that recall the heights of the dot-com boom. Wall Street—and history—suggest the gains could keep coming.
Chip stocks powered the S&P 500 up 16% across April and May, a two-month surge matched only four other times since 1950, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The index was higher six months later each time, by a median 17%.
Skeptics remain, with some troubled by the sheer scale of the moves, which span from Seoul to Boise, Idaho. Micron Technology, an Idaho-based memory-chip maker, has increased roughly 10-fold in value over the past 12 months to a market capitalization above $1 trillion. Samsung is up around 465% in South Korea over that period. The PHLX Semiconductor Index just posted its strongest performance through the first 100 trading days of any year on record.
Even some of the companies involved recall the tech-bubble era: Intel has tripled in 2026 to its first record since 2000. Cisco Systems and Qualcomm have both surged around 50%.
Yet many on Wall Street are riding the wave, lifting their year-end targets for the S&P 500 in defiance of the Middle East conflict and rising inflation. Analysts at Goldman Sachs just raised their year-end target for the index to 8000 from 7600, implying a 5.5% rise over the rest of the year on top of the 11% gain since the end of December.
Some analysts said the moves are justified by the blockbuster profits that chip makers have posted in recent weeks and expect the spectacular spending on chips to grow as the artificial-intelligence build-out progresses.
“The AI train is moving forward,” said Joe Tanious, chief investment strategist for North America at Northern Trust Asset Management. “You don’t necessarily want to try to stop it or sit on the sidelines.”

Even doubters have grown reluctant to bet against an index that has just posted nine consecutive weekly gains. In late 1996, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously warned of “irrational exuberance” in the stock market. Over the following three years, the Nasdaq Composite Index tripled.
George Vanderheiden, once a Fidelity portfolio manager with one of Wall Street’s best performance records, shunned tech stocks in the late 1990s in a bet that the bubble would soon burst, loading up on Treasurys instead, hoping to protect his investors. Instead, performance slumped and he retired in February 2000, scribbling a message on his office whiteboard: “Tulip bulbs for sale”—a reminder of 17th-century speculation in the Dutch flower market.
“You try to manage the portfolio for risk,” he told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “But the market hasn’t rewarded you for it. The market has no fear.”
AI fervor has been powering broad market gains since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, but this year, the trade has gained even more steam. Advances in AI models’ ability to write code have wowed software engineers and convinced companies and investors that the technology will be useful and transformative.
Concern around whether AI companies with enormous expenses could eventually turn big profits has eased accordingly. Anthropic, which is expected to go public this year, defied skeptics by posting explosive sales growth and its first operating profit in the second quarter—powered by coding tools that have become popular with corporate clients. Anthropic just closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation. “We are squarely in the acceleration phase of the AI era,” said Kevin Shea, senior equity strategist at BNY Wealth. “You take a look at the revenue growth from some of these large language models, it’s faster than anything we’ve seen before.”
Indeed, strong corporate earnings and upbeat forecasts for the year ahead are underpinning the advance. Companies in the S&P 500 traded Friday at around 22.5 times their projected earnings over the next 12 months, a slightly lower valuation than at the start of the year, because earnings projections have grown significantly.
Micron Technology is up roughly 10-fold over 12 months to a market capitalization above $1 trillion. Todd Meier for WSJ
Jason Pride, chief of investment strategy and research at the wealth-management firm Glenmede, estimated that 75% to 80% of the rally over the past two months “has been fundamental in nature,” fueled by legitimate hopes for a resolution to the Iran conflict and excellent earnings, particularly among the tech companies that have led the market gains.
It is only over the past week or so, he said, that the rally has become a little bit stretched, with investors trying to chase returns. Going forward, he added, there is every reason to think that stocks can keep on rising, if not at their recent breakneck pace.
The biggest threat to the market rally might be inflation, said Angelo Kourkafas, senior global strategist at Edward Jones.
Consumer prices have climbed much faster than expected this year, largely because of energy-supply disruption caused by the war with Iran but also the overwhelming demand for AI-related hardware including memory chips.
If the Fed moves toward raising interest rates, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note could potentially climb back up toward 5%. That, in turn, could “create some more indigestion or volatility,” Kourkafas said.
For now, investors appear more concerned with how they can get as much stock exposure as possible than they are with bracing for a bursting bubble. Recent Bank of America surveys show that fund managers just reduced their cash levels by the most in a month since 2024 and are holding significantly more stocks than their benchmarks.
“Who knows what’s going to happen in three, four, five years from now with these data centers, but at least in the immediate term…it doesn’t seem like it’s going to slow down anytime soon,” Northern Trust’s Tanious said.

IPO mania has begun, and nothing kickstarts initial public offerings like spreadsheets flashing green to incite the crowd. SpaceX’s recent S-1 filing promoted an “actionable total addressable market” of $28.5 trillion, which includes $23 trillion from enterprise artificial-intelligence applications. Woo-hoo! You can hear the gears in investors’ brains grinding: With just 5% of the market, they’ll be a trillion-dollar company! The entire U.S. economy produces $31 trillion a year.
This is on the back of AI chip maker Cerebras’s May IPO, with the stock almost doubling on opening day. Andrew Feldman, Cerebras’s CEO, did more flimsy AI math. “There are 47 million software engineers in the world. If each one uses $100,000 of tokens a year, that’s nearly $5 trillion from just a single use case. Do that bottoms-up and you go, ‘Holy crap.’ ”
Anthropic projects $11 billion in revenue in the June quarter, more than double from March. That’s a $44 billion run rate. If (more brain-gear grinding) sales keep doubling quarter to quarter, even my old HP 12c calculator tells me that Anthropic will have a trillion-dollar run rate by September 2027. Of course, that’s another hallucination.
Still, this kind of thinking is driving investment in AI data centers, some $700 billion this year and $7 trillion (so says McKinsey) by 2030. Many are circular deals, with debt and off-balance-sheet funny accounting. Even that “Shark Tank” guy from the ping-pong movie who got $15 million from Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX is building data centers.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is really the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I’ll repeat, we don’t need 100 gigawatts of toasters.
Does history rhyme? Here’s a story filled with ghosts of Wall Street’s past. In 1997, Gary Winnick’s Global Crossing invested a few hundred million dollars to lay fiber optic cable under the Atlantic. At the time, undersea T-1 lines (which transmit data at 1.5 million bits per second) cost between $10,000 and $20,000 a month. Their AC-1 undersea fiber could handle 40 gigabits per second, or more than 10,000 T-1 lines, which could easily generate more than $100 million a month. Spreadsheets flashed green!
Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch took Global Crossing public in 1998, raising $400 million. The stock peaked at $55 billion in value. Global Crossing borrowed heavily to build out 100,000 miles of fiber. Mr. Winnick paid more than $60 million for a home in Bel Air. Heady times.
But it worked only with $10,000-a-month pricing. The world isn’t static. AT&T and MCI created a joint venture to lay their own undersea cables. Prices plummeted. By 2002 the cost of undersea T-1 lines dropped to $1,000 a month, down more than 90%. Spreadsheets flashed red. After reporting fake revenue that Arthur Andersen blessed, Global Crossing filed for bankruptcy.
As for AI, there may be 47 million programmers in the world, but very few have a budget of $100,000 to spend on tokens. Microsoft recently canceled Anthropic Claude licenses, and Uber has already blown through its 2026 AI budget.
Meanwhile, Nvidia chips are hard to find. Memory prices, which Moore’s Law says should drop 30% a year, have instead exploded upward. Last week Micron and SK Hynix joined Samsung in the $1 trillion stock gang. Token prices—meaning what it costs to use AI models—have risen 65% since February, after dropping 90% since ChatGPT was released.
But shortages don’t last. Competition plus new technology means that token price declines will return as the norm. My gut says over the next five years (the length of Global Crossing’s existence), and likely sooner, we’ll see token costs decline another 90%, maybe 99%. The future AI math is more like 470 million coders with $1,000 of tokens. Even $100.
Watch prices. Everything Global Crossing forecast in undersea demand—per bit—happened and more, but at way lower prices. Same for the overall internet, which grew and grew in demand, but not at 1999 prices that caused flashing green spreadsheets.
It’s starting. New training algorithms show up almost daily that promise to use less memory and less compute and have AI models learn 10 times as fast. This is the natural evolution of technology, not price increases. DeepSeek out of China recently cut prices of the company’s open-source AI model by 75%. Running certain benchmarks, OpenAI costs 12 times as much and Anthropic 19 times.
There were no recessions in bits, only in price per bit. With tokens, the rosiest AI demand forecasts will be exceeded, but at much lower prices. Today, investors are enjoying the ride. This AI rocket ship is flying high. Why get off? But be warned that many spreadsheets go from green to red in a hurry when prices drop.

Putin Has "Air of Desperation" As Ebbing Willpower, Strategic Defeat Loom

2026-06-01T10:59:41.613-04:00

A tenet of military lore holds that ground doesn't matter - it's the enemy's will to fight. By that measure, Ukraine has already demonstrated its strength.

But recent developments suggest that Russia's will to battle, which has not wavered for four years despite historically horrific losses, may have begun to ebb as Ukraine's successes on the ground, in the air and on the sea begin to tell. That multiple observers note 'an air of desperation around Putin' suggests this is systemic, not temporary. JL

Thomas Harding reports in The National:

Russia's minor operations to seize Ukrainian territory are “at best tactical victories leading effectively to strategic defeat. The amount of kit and humans they have expended on very small gains is unsustainable even for a country that has willing manpower." The Ukrainians “have largely replaced trench warfare with “zonal defence." If the Russians attack, they're not being repelled by humans but by air and ground drones collectively. "Ukraine isn't losing so many people, and Russia is losing vast numbers.” Ultimately ground doesn't matter, it’s the enemy's will to fight matters and that willpower could be ebbing on the Russian side. "There's an air of desperation about Putin at the moment.”

Four years into a grinding conflict, the outcome of the Ukraine-Russia war might now rest on the race for which side can develop at speed an army of ground robots to dominate the human battlefield.
Currently, Ukraine is in the lead, using unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) alongside aerial drones to help it take back up to 600 square kilometres of territory this year.
By contrast, Russia continues to rely on thousands of troops to take villages or small towns with an attrition rate that is now far outstripping its ability to recruit replacements. It has, according to one western estimate, lost just under 500,000 soldiers from more than 1.2 million casualties.

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Russia’s huge armoured arsenal has also been depleted to the point that no tanks were on display for its annual Second World War victory parade this month. That humiliation was compounded by President Vladimir Putin essentially requesting his foe President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s permission not to strike the Moscow event with drones.
Diplomatic experts also believe that Russia’s reversals might hint at the first steps to a peace deal.

However, Ukraine has suffered heavily, too, with more than 55,000 soldiers killed, and the fallback to robots is probably because “they are absolutely desperate” to make up for a lack of manpower, a defence source in the eastern city of Kharkiv told The National. He also pointed out the city’s cemetery was crammed full of fresh graves as an indication of Ukraine’s losses in a country where, by law, conscription for men begins at 25.
Ukraine advance
Despite the losses, there has been a vast turnaround for Mr Zelenskyy in 2026, from his humiliation in the White House early last year to the end of US military aid and a miserable winter of Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
But it has survived, in part due to its ability to innovate, largely enforced by America’s withdrawal of hardware and by having a population of less than 40 million, about 100 million fewer than Russia's.
Ukrainian ingenuity has seen it fight off Moscow’s near-daily missile and drone attacks with a system of drones, machine guns and western interceptors.
The war also extended into Romania on Friday, when Moscow’s drones that were allegedly targeting Ukraine struck a block of flats in Romania, injuring two people. The UK’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemned “the violation of Nato airspace” as “extremely dangerous and reckless”.
But it is Ukraine’s development of UGVs that has helped take it on to the offensive, pushing back Moscow’s troops in several areas.
The moment robots debuted in human warfare came last month when President Zelenskyy announced that a Russian position had been taken using only ground and aerial drones.
“The occupiers surrendered, and the operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” he posted on April 14.
In parts of the front line, Ukraine has been able to withdraw its troops beyond the 20km striking distance of Russia’s own sophisticated aerial drones, largely abandoning trench warfare.
They have also deployed Hornet loitering drones that use their AI to avoid Russian jamming and can act autonomously, striking at logistic targets up to 100km behind the front line.
That has seen supplies along the vital M14 motorway that connects the once besieged city of Mariupol to Crimea nearly cut off, with the Hornets taking out more than 125 ammunition, fuel and personnel lorries this month.
Ukraine’s interceptor drones have also become so effective that they have been exported in large numbers to Gulf states to meet the threat from Iran’s Shahed-136 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).
Drone tactics from the war have also been copied by Iran, as well as Hezbollah, which has used the difficult-to-jam fibre-optic drones against Israeli targets.
Robot army
But could the country’s ground robot developments also become its next major export?
Much of their operational effectiveness remains secret, yet it is known that a tracked robot mounted with a heavy 12.7mm Browning machinegun called the Droid TW-12.7 has reportedly been very effective. Built by Ukraine firm Devdroid, it has a night vision capability and is currently remotely operated rather than fully autonomous.
The company has also deployed the Droid NW 40 robot, which has a belt-fed grenade launcher that fires 40mm rounds with 1.5km range that can take out lightly armoured vehicles or enemy sheltering in trenches.
“What is really interesting is the impact that we're now seeing of track or tractor-wheeled killer robots,” said former military intelligence officer Dr Lynette Nusbacher.
“If Ukraine were able to deploy them at range, operating autonomously in large numbers, then they could unleash swarms of drones, and that could break the stalemate.”
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Former British soldier, Conservative MP and Russia specialist Bob Seely, who has visited Ukraine several times, said that while the Ukrainians “haven't quite given up on trench warfare”, they had largely replaced it with “zonal defence”.
“If the Russians attack, they're not being repelled by humans but by air and ground drones collectively and this form of warfare is really beginning to take off this year,” added the author of The New Total War.
Indeed, Kyiv’s generals plan to replace 30 per cent of manpower in the most kinetic frontline zones with drones by purchasing 25,000 UGVs this year, for both attack, logistics and evacuating the wounded.
Developments have now got to the point, argued veteran former diplomat Tim Wilsey, where “Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the 20 to 40 kilometres behind the front line killing zone” saving them precious personnel.
“A year ago we used to say the reason why Russia is probably going to overall win this war is because they've got more people to throw into the meat grinder. Well, Ukraine isn't throwing people into the meat grinder any more,” he added. “They're not losing so many people, and Russia is losing vast numbers.”
Former tank commander Col Hamish de Bretton-Gordon suggested this could soon go one step further with a single crewed main battle tank controlling five autonomous mini-tanks “who, unlike soldiers, don’t have to be trained for a year; you just load up the software”.
He contested that it was now “a truly autonomous war” for Ukraine and that although they might lose thousands of unmanned weapons, “you can replace a drone and train a drone very much more quickly than you can a soldier”.
Fading manpower
Russian losses over more than four years of war have been huge but still, using big financial incentives, the authorities are just about finding new recruits. But for how much longer is this sustainable?
The minor operations to seize Ukrainian territory are “at best tactical victories leading effectively to strategic defeat,” said Mr Seely. “The amount of kit and humans that they have expended on very small gains is unsustainable even for a country that has, to a certain extent, willing manpower.”
This was now becoming a “real problem for Russia”, said Col de Bretton-Gordon. “Russia's got a serious challenge ahead and there's real concern in Moscow that their children are going to be conscripted.”
But Dr Nusbacher did not believe that “Russia is getting anxious about this” or that “bracing themselves for an imminent collapse in army manpower”. Indeed, she argued Russia could, as they have shown before, adapt to Ukraine’s use of “automation”.
Waiver parade
But she also repeated that military tenet that “ultimately ground doesn't matter, it’s the enemy's will to fight matters” and that willpower could well be ebbing on the Russian side.
Mr Wilsey, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, pointed to “a fascinating series of events, which makes one wonder whether for the first time Putin is beginning to waver a bit”.
Alongside other commentators, he highlighted Mr Putin’s humiliation of indirectly asking Mr Zelenskyy not to strike the victory show. “Zelenskyy very cleverly sent out a message saying, ‘Yes, it's OK, I permit the parade to go ahead’, so that's a terrible look for the Russian people.”
Perhaps to reassert Russia’s dominance, the Kremlin launched its biggest missile and drone assault on Ukraine over the last weekend, but only a few days later asked Europe to offer some form of mediation in the war.
“I'm wondering whether 2026 might be the year negotiations started to be serious,” said Mr Wilsey. “There's an air of desperation about Putin at the moment.”

Unjammable Ukraine 'Vampire' Drones Now Destroy $200 Million Russian Jammers

2026-06-01T10:19:31.289-04:00

Russia's Borisoglebsk-2 has been a very effective, electronic warfare jammer. But at $200 million each, the Kremlin has only produced a few dozen of them. Ukraine has now knocked out six of them.

It has been able to do this because of upgrades to its large Vampire "Baba Yaga" drones which make them not only unjammable, but able to locate and destroy the systems designed to jam them. JL

David Axe reports in Trench Art:

Ukrainian iconic Vampire bomber drones have been upgraded to resist Russian electronic warfare. Now the six-rotor drone can not only fly through Russian jamming. It can attack the jammers themselves. The “Vampire” has been upgraded with terrain-following navigation, radio frequency hopping, and an improved jam-resistant CRPA satellite navigation system. A Vampire recently found and bombed a rare Russian Borisoglebsk-2 tracked jamming vehicle, destroying it with several grenades that punched through it's thin top armor. A Borisoglebsk-2 complex is estimated to cost $200 million. Russia has built only a few dozen of them since 2015, and Ukrainian forces have knocked out at least six since 2023.

Ukrainian drone-maker Skyfall has upgraded its iconic Vampire bomber drone to resist Russian electronic warfare. Now the six-rotor drone can not only fly through Russian jamming. It can also attack the jammers themselves.
That matters now because the jammers are some of the last things standing between Ukraine's drones and the Russian air defenses they hunt. Ukrainian forces have destroyed more Russian air defense systems this spring than at any point in the war—81 confirmed since 1 March, by the General Staff's count, with April running roughly double the previous autumn's pace. A drone that shrugs off jamming can go after the jammers that were protecting everything else. Kill the jammer, and the next target gets easier.
Following the upgrades, a Vampire recently found and bombed a rare Russian Borisoglebsk-2 tracked jamming vehicle, likely destroying it with several grenades that punched right through the Borisoglebsk-2's thin top armor.

A complete Borisoglebsk-2 complex is estimated to cost as much as $200 million. Russia has built only a few dozen of them since 2015, and Ukrainian forces have knocked out at least six since 2023. "I think this is the most painful operation carried out against the Russians in a single instance," a Skyfall spokesperson said, somewhat exaggerating.

More strikes on rare and expensive Russian jammers could be coming, now that the Vampires are resistant to the effects of their electronic noise broadcasts. Blowing up more Russian jammers would hasten the wider collapse of Russian air defenses resulting from Ukraine's intensive campaign of drone strikes that began around a year ago.
The standard Vampire is a heavy hexacopter with a payload of around 15 kg and a thermal camera that allows it to operate at night. Also known as "Baba Yagas" by the Russians, a reference to a mythical night witch, the Vampires have been hounding Russian forces since the first year of Russia's wider war on Ukraine.
With their payload of multiple grenades and enough endurance to patiently hunt Russian troops for hours at a time, the Vampires are among the most efficient killers over the disputed gray zone. With better batteries and satellite communications, they've been able to range 45 km to bombard troops before they even reach the gray zone.
Vulnerable to jamming
but the oldest Vampires are vulnerable to Russian jamming. These Vampires are directly controlled by human pilots who connect to their drones via line-of-sight radio. It's a fairly simple matter to interrupt that radio signal with radio noise.
To mitigate the effects of this jamming, Skyfall has added redundant navigation and communication systems to the latest Vampires. The firm replaced the old radio receiver with a Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna that has multiple receivers. It's not impossible to jam all of the receivers, but it's hard.
And in the event the Russians do fully jam the CRPA, cutting off a Vampire from its distant human operator, the drone can switch to a self-contained terrain-matching navigation system that scans the landscape passing beneath it and matches it to a pre-loaded flight path. Terrain-matching navigation might not be as precise as direct human control, but it's jam-proof.

Now the new Vampire "is completely resistant to Russian electronic warfare," the Skyfall spokesperson said, again exaggerating somewhat.
Resistance to jamming doesn't just help a Vampire bomb Russian jammers, it also safeguards the drone during other mission profiles. As the spokesperson noted, Vampires aren't solely bombers anymore. They also drop mines along Russian assault lanes and, increasingly, fly supply missions where they drop food, water, ammunition, batteries and medical supplies on Ukrainian positions instead of dropping live grenades on Russian positions.
As a supply drone, the Vampire keeps human logisticians off the dangerous roads and "helps ensure greater safety for personnel." It's not alone, of course. More unmanned ground vehicles are also plying Ukraine's riskiest supply routes.

"Highway To Hell:" Ukraine's "Logistics Lockdown" Of Kremlin Routes

2026-06-01T09:16:47.090-04:00

Ukraine's interdiction of Russian supplies, fuel, reinforcements - and the vehicles they travel in - plus ancillary targets like air defenses, command centers, warehouses, ammunition dumps and ports has now become legendary, almost overnight.

The Ukrainian defense minister's catchy phraseology - 'logistics lockdown' has a nice alliterative ring - is helpful, but it is the comprehensive and relentless nature of the Ukrainian long range drone attacks, as well as their impact, that is justifiably garnering most of the attention. Not only is much of the Kremlin's occupied southern Ukraine land-bridge under Ukrainian fire control, but Crimea is now isolated and supplies to the faltering offensives in Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk are in danger. Hundreds of Russian trucks have been confirmed destroyed. But again, it is the systematic nature of the Ukrainian effort that impresses most: data reveal that as destruction of Russian logistics increases, their assaults decrease. JL

Phillips O'Brien reports in his substack and Mick Ryan reports :

Ukraine this week announced its ‘Logistics Lockdown' campaign has been going on - and planned - for months. It targets the M-14 road from Rostov-on-Don in Russia, through occupied Mariupol, Berdyansk, and Melitopol, and into Crimea. Headquarters, training camps, air defence, ammunition, fuel storage and other military assets up to 100 kilometres behind the front are also targets. By three weeks ending May 30, 86 burned trucks and tankers were confirmed on the M-14. 125 destroyed trucks were seen far away. "Ukraine has increased fourfold the destruction of enemy logistics, warehouses, equipment, vehicles, command posts, and supply routes at operational depth. Data points to a clear trend: as the destruction of Russian logistics increases, assault operations along the front decreases." This will lead to a constant degradation of Russian fighting power. Supplies will decrease, command will be chaotic, losses will rise and replacements will be inadequate.

Ukrainian claims of losses of Russian material and soldiers have been surprisingly accurate since the start of the Russian full scale invasion. Their claims of losses of Russian soldiers, for instance, seem to be widely confirmed by western intelligence agencies. Just two examples. In May, Dutch intelligence released an estimate of at least 1.2 million Russian casualties (approximately 500k killed). At the end of April a UK source claimed this figure was around 1.3 million. The Ukrainian tally released a few hours ago was just over 1.3 million (see below).
Interestingly, recent claims might even be more accurate because so many of the losses are being filmed by UAV. This makes this war not only the most transparent, it makes it gorily the most “trackable” conflict in human history. The deaths of Russian soldiers and the destruction of Russian equipment are now being filmed regularly.
When it comes to the collapsing of the Russian military from behind, the most immediate thing to pay attention to, as I discussed last week, is the mid-range strike campaign. Looking for evidence from that can be seen in Ukrainian claims. Take a look at this chart of Russian losses from yesterday and see what stands out.
The figure of 1430 personnel is shocking though that is actually not the one I am talking about (more on personnel losses below). No, the one that is even more shocking is the 483 “vehicles and fuel tanks”. That is a daily record for the Ukrainians
And this week the focus on transport attacks has been made much more public by Ukraine. The Ukrainian MOD announced its ‘Logistics Lockdown’ program with an additional UAH 5 billion devoted for middle-strike capabilities. This was how they summarized it—and note how they said that this campaign has been going on (let alone planned for) for many months now.
Over the past several months, Ukraine has increased fourfold the destruction of enemy logistics, warehouses, equipment, vehicles, command posts, and supply routes at operational depth.
Data points to a clear trend: as the destruction of russian logistics increases, the number of assault operations along the line of contact decreases.
The data points that they mention are the interesting ones to track. See if the destruction of Russian trucks remains elevated in this way. You will also see reports (though often not comparative data) the destruction of warehouses and Russian command and control (C2) posts. Two days ago, the Ukrainians released statements about hitting both (see bolded text below).
In the occupied territories, an enemy Tor-M2 anti-aircraft missile system was hit in the area of the village of Berdianske, Zaporizhia region; an enemy command and observation post in the area of the village of Lyman Pershyi, Kharkiv region; an enemy logistics warehouse in the village of Aidar, Luhansk region; as well as enemy UAV command posts in the areas of the village of Tyotkino, Kursk region of Russia, the village of Komar, Donetsk region, and Nesterianka, Zaporizhia region.
Once again the Ukrainians are saying what they are doing. The Ukrainians are going for the trucks, warehouses and C2 posts—and add to that keeping the personnel losses for the Russians above replacement levels. That figure of 1430 personnel losses the other day, along with the truck losses is exactly what the Ukrainians want to see happen. The most important moment in this calculation, however will happen sometime next week when the Ukrainians release their monthly estimate of Russian losses for May and whether these are above new recruitment figures.
If it is, the trend is exactly what the Ukrainians are planning for. It will lead to a constant degradation of the Russian army and fighting power. Supplies will be decreasing, command will be chaotic, losses will be rising and replacements arriving in inadequate numbers. The remaining troops will be in worse shape and be asked to continue attacking. Along the line it will be the Russian military that will be increasingly closer to failure.
This, at least, is what the Ukrainians are saying. Take a Russian army that has to attack and collapse it from behind. The Ukrainians are not hiding their plans—hopefully the western press will not be so slow to understand it this time.

The most significant development of the past week in Ukraine has not taken place along the front line. It has unfolded 100 to 200 kilometres behind it, along the highways that connect Russia’s occupied south to Crimea and, through that peninsula, to Russia. What has brought this issue to the fore was Ukrainian Defence Minister Fedorov on 27 May formalising what had previously been a covert campaign into a declared strategic programme, announcing a $113 million initiative he called the “Logistical Lockdown.” The programme is designed to massively scale up mid-range drone strikes against Russian supply networks deep behind the front line, with the stated objective of depriving Russian forces of the ability to conduct active assault operations.
This approach is hardly new. In western doctrine it is known as Interdiction. The concept of destroying second and third echelon forces, their logistics and C2, was a key aspect of the Cold War era Air-Land Battle developed by the U.S. military. Then, long-range ground fires (such as MLRS) and air force aircraft were central capabilities. Now, drones – for ISR, strike and battle damage assessment – are the key effector for interdiction, or as it is now known, mid-range strike.
The campaign is targeting the R-280 highway, also known as the M-14 and renamed by Russian occupation authorities as the “Novorossiya” route. This road runs from Rostov-on-Don in Russia, through occupied Mariupol, Berdyansk, and Melitopol, and into Crimea. It is Russia’s primary land line of communication to the peninsula. It has only grown in importance since the Kerch Bridge has been progressively degraded by Ukrainian strikes. As the Centre for European Policy Analysis has noted, Russia has invested around $11.8 billion between 2024 and 2026 on roads, railways, ports, and industrial projects across occupied southern Ukraine because it sought geographical dispersion and redundancy to protect its logistics from Ukrainian interdiction. The current Ukrainian mid-range strike campaign is slowly degrading that concept.
But it is not only logistics routes that are the targets of this campaign. Russian headquarters, training camps, air defence, ammunition and fuel storage and other military infrastructure up to 100 kilometres behind the front line are targets. The strikes this week on Russia’s 3^rd Army training ground in occupied Luhansk, and 36^th Army training ground in occupied Zaporizhzhia, are examples of the broader scope of this campaign.
A soon-to-be former Russia oil tanker. Source: 412^th Nemesis Brigade
The Ukrainian instrument that is central to this campaign is a growing family of Ukrainian middle-strike drones. This includes fixed-wing systems designed to bridge the gap between short-range first-person-view strike drones and the deep-strike platforms used to hit targets inside Russia itself. On 26 May, Ukraine’s 412th Nemesis Brigade of the Unmanned Systems Forces disclosed details of a domestically produced drone called the MORRIGAN, which it described as having operated repeatedly in Crimea and against Russian air defence and logistics assets along the Mariupol-to-Crimea corridor. The AI-assisted Hornet drone, reported previously to be capable of autonomous strikes up to 100 miles or more behind the front line, has also been central to the campaign.
The scale of destruction documented by open-source analysts is considerable. , most destroyed during May. The Defence Intelligence of Ukraine reported that its drone operators had established fire control over sections of the highway linking Berdiansk, Melitopol, and Dzhankoi, using RAM-type UAVs (a loitering precision munition) and other domestically produced strike systems to hit fuel tankers, military vehicles, and logistics hubs up to 150 kilometres behind the front.
For an in-depth review of this campaign, see the long thread posted on 30 May by Clement Molin here.
The strategic logic of this campaign is simple. Almost all Russian logistics for the southern front and Crimea are land-based. Russia’s investment in the Azov Ring was intended to provide redundancy, but that network’s very success at concentrating supply flows has created chokepoints. Ukraine, by directing this campaign at the highways themselves, is seeking a form of operational-level interdiction that previous attempts were not able to achieve.
The middle-strike campaign fills an operational gap between tactical defensive and counter-attack operations and the long-range, deep strike activities of the Ukrainian military. By conducting all three forms of operations concurrently, they place increasing pressure on Russian forces, degrade their offensive capabilities, and shape the battlespace for future Ukrainian offensive operations in later 2026 and in 2027.

AI Has Made Memory Chips More Valuable Than Oil

2026-06-01T09:00:14.265-04:00

The combined market capitalization of the world's

three largest memory chip makers is now greater than that of the three largest oil companies. And this calculation does not even include Nvidia.

That valuation disparity appears secure because the AI hyperscalers are increasingly signing long term contracts to lock in the already diminished supply, which will make it harder for others to compete and will enhance the valuations of Big Tech by providing greater predictability. In AI, the rich are most emphatically getting richer. JL

Dan Gallagher reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Memory is now worth more than oil. AI is driving demand for memory chips far beyond what suppliers can produce, driving up prices to previously unseen levels. Memory makers are using their leverage to get customers to sign long-term agreements. The world’s three largest memory-chip makers - Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology - now carry market capitalizations of more than $1 trillion each. That puts them 22% above the combined market cap of the world’s three most valuable oil companies, even with Saudi Aramco at $1.8 trillion. The spending power of AI’s largest investors means future memory production will be covered by multiyear contracts with more stable pricing terms. Such contracts will cover 30% of shipments of DRAM, next year. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon have already secured 66% of global production for DRAM used in servers, exchanging pricing for multiyear supply and greater predictability”

increase; green up pointin SK Hynix 000660 1.92%increase; green up pointing triangle and Micron Technology MU 5.14%increase; green up pointing trianglnow carry market capitalizations of more than $1 trillion each. That puts them about 22% above the combined market cap of the world’s three most valuable oil companies, even with Saudi Aramco weighing in on its own at nearly $1.8 trillion.
Memory is now worth more than oil. Staying that way will depend on how much the notoriously volatile industry can make recent changes stick.
The world’s three largest memory-chip makers—Samsung Electronics 005930 5.84%increase; green up pointing triangle, SK Hynix 000660 1.92%increase; green up pointing triangle and Micron Technology MU 5.14%increase; green up pointing triangle—now carry market capitalizations of more than $1 trillion each. That puts them about 22% above the combined market cap of the world’s three most valuable oil companies, even with Saudi Aramco weighing in on its own at nearly $1.8 trillion.
Values have soared even further down the memory chain. Flash-memory maker Sandisk SNDK 3.25%increase; green up pointing triangle has seen its market cap nearly triple since March and is now worth nearly as much as PetroChina—Asia’s largest oil producer.

Gains like that make memory stocks seem ripe for a fall, especially given how highly cyclical the industry has been historically. But recent changes in business practices make projected earnings far more certain. And against those future earnings, even trillion-dollar memory companies still look cheap.
Like oil, memory chips are widely seen as a commodity prone to violent price swings. But artificial intelligence is now driving demand for memory chips far beyond what existing suppliers can produce, which is driving up prices to previously unseen levels. Memory makers in turn are using their newfound leverage to get customers to sign long-term agreements.
Enough of those deals will recast the industry’s business model in a way that will tame price volatility. The early signs of that effort are good. Micron announced the signing of its first five-year supply agreement in its last earnings report in March, and the company said at an investment conference last week that it has made “meaningful progress” on similar deals with other customers.
In its own report last month, Sandisk said five customers had signed long-term agreements—enough to cover more than a third of the company’s production capacity for the next fiscal year.
SK Hynix hasn’t detailed how many of its customers have signed long-term agreements. But it has clearly talked with those customers about their future needs, given the disclosure in its last earnings call that demand “far exceeds” the company’s supply capacity for the next three years. “Memory today has become so critical that customers now see memory price and supply uncertainties as key business risks,” SK Hynix Chief Financial Officer Kim Woo-hyun said on the call.
The spending power of artificial intelligence’s largest investors means a significant percentage of future memory production will be covered by multiyear contracts with more stable pricing terms. UBS analyst Tim Arcuri estimates that such contracts will cover as much as 30% of shipments of total dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, next year. He thinks hyperscalers—huge tech companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com—have already secured around two-thirds of global production for the type of DRAM used in servers.
“Said differently, hyperscalers appear increasingly willing to exchange pricing for multiyear supply visibility and greater predictability around future deployment economics,” Arcuri wrote in a report earlier this week.

Long-term contracts make future earnings from memory companies far more predictable. And those earnings are substantial. Micron’s adjusted per-share earnings in the February-ended quarter exploded to $12.20 from $1.56 in the year-ago period. Wall Street expects earnings per share to top $60 for the fiscal year ending in August—and to come in around $106 for the next fiscal year, according to estimates from Visible Alpha.
So at its current market cap of just over $1 trillion, Micron trades at less than 10 times projected earnings for the next four quarters. That puts its multiple in the bottom 10% of the S&P 500, with Sandisk not far above at around 10.5 times forward earnings.
The Korean players are even cheaper, with Samsung and SK Hynix in the six- to seven-times range, per FactSet data. The 30 stocks on the PHLX Semiconductor Index average a forward earnings multiple of around 26 times.

Memory may be the new oil, but memory investors aren’t getting gouged at the pump yet.

Ukraine Deploys "100s" of Decoys With Long Range Strikes, Confusing Russians

2026-05-31T11:37:04.256-04:00

Some of the credit for Ukraine's long range drone attack success is due to the fact that it now routinely deploys hundreds of decoy drones engineered to mimic the radar signatures of ballistic missiles along with its live ammunition-carrying drones.

This confuses Russian air defenses, causing them to waste munitions on fakes while inadvertently giving away their radar and anti-missile battery locations which can then be destroyed in follow-up attacks. JL

The Kyiv Post reports:

By deploying hundreds of specialized decoy drones alongside live munitions, Ukraine is blinding, exhausting, and physically dismantling Russia’s air defense network. It is a calculated system where only a specific percentage of the launched fleet is fitted with explosive payloads, while a parallel wave of decoys is deployed simultaneously to oversaturate Russian radar systems. Advanced, jet-powered decoy drones in its strike packages are engineered to mirror the radar signatures of cruise or ballistic missiles. When Russian anti-aircraft crews engage what their radar indicate is a missile threat, they exhaust interceptors on decoys while revealing the geographic coordinates of their radar and missile batteries. Armed drones then neutralize those exposed assets. Ukraine's deep-strikes are distributed and managed through laptops. “It is difficult for Russia to destroy this program; we don’t have single centers, we use dozens of locations."
The Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) has unveiled the core tactical strategy powering its highly effective long-range aerial campaign deep inside Russia. By deploying hundreds of specialized decoy drones alongside live combat munitions, Ukrainian intelligence is successfully blinding, exhausting, and physically dismantling Russia’s domestic air defense networks.
The operational mechanics were detailed by a HUR Deep Strike commander with the callsign “Vector” during a report by CNN on Sunday, May 31.
Tricking Russian radars with jet-powered illusions
During the media briefing, journalists captured the field preparation and launch sequences of Ukraine’s long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The footage exposed a highly calculated system where only a specific percentage of the launched fleet is fitted with heavy explosive payloads, while a parallel wave of specialized decoys is deployed simultaneously to oversaturate Russian radar systems.

“These are decoys,” Vector explained during the broadcast. “We have sent hundreds of them. Some are empty, some carry a combat load. The combat payload is small, but it is enough to destroy air defense systems.”
To further manipulate the Kremlin’s defensive reactions, the HUR has introduced advanced, jet-powered decoy drones into its strike packages. According to Ukrainian operators, these high-velocity assets are explicitly engineered to mirror the precise radar signatures of standard cruise or ballistic missiles.

When Russian anti-aircraft crews scramble to engage what their radar screens indicate is a high-priority missile threat, they inadvertently exhaust their expensive interceptor ammunition on empty decoys while simultaneously revealing the exact geographic coordinates of their radar and missile batteries. The armed decoys are then able to strike and neutralize those newly exposed positions.
The laptop advantage: total decentralization
Vector also shed light on the sophisticated command-and-control software enabling these massive swarms to penetrate Russian airspace. Rather than operating out of a centralized military headquarters or a highly visible command bunker, Ukrainian deep-strike operations are entirely distributed across the country and managed through standard laptops.

“Laptops are our biggest advantage and the reason why it is so difficult for Russia to destroy this program, because we are scattered,” the HUR commander stated. “We don’t have single centers, and we use dozens of locations. Furthermore, this software gives us the opportunity to work with thousands of UAVs.”
The custom-built software allows field teams to seamlessly coordinate the trajectories, flight times, and electronic warfare countermeasures of thousands of distinct drones simultaneously. This ensures that when a massive swarm approaches a Russian target, the drones converge from multiple vectors at once, completely overwhelming the localized processing capabilities of Russian tracking radars.
A strategy of total asymmetric attrition
This calculated use of high-tech decoys and decentralized control provides the tactical foundation for Ukraine’s expanding deep-strike operations. Just hours prior, the Armed Forces of Ukraine executed a massive, multi-regional offensive that systematically crippled vital components of Russia’s domestic energy infrastructure.

Using long-range strike networks, Ukrainian planners delivered a severe economic blow to the Rosneft-owned Saratov Oil Refinery along the Volga River, igniting a massive structural fire at a facility responsible for processing 7 million tons of crude oil annually to supply Russia’s occupying forces.
Parallel waves successfully struck the critical Lazarevo oil pumping station along the Surgut-Gorky-Polotsk trunk pipeline in the remote Kirov region, alongside a major fuel storage terminal in Rostov and retroactively confirmed strikes in occupied Crimea and Donetsk.
At the same time, precision units leveraged this saturation strategy to bypass regional defense nets and wipe out active Russian military command posts in Kursk, drone assembly workshops in Donetsk, and localized radar positions in Belgorod.

Kremlin Can No Longer Assemble Needed Mass As Ukraine Strikes Dominate

2026-05-31T11:05:48.699-04:00

The Kremlin's forces can no longer assemble the mass needed to effect breakthroughs as Ukraine systematic dismantling of air defenses blinds the Russians to threats which Ukrainian troops capitalize on with aerial and ground drones.

The result is that, for the first time in this war, military analysts are consistently declaring that it is Ukraine which has the momentum to break the stalemate of the past few years. And when influential political publications like The Hill (referring to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC), which is read by elected officials and their staffs, declare Ukraine has the advantage, it has a significant impact. JL

Ellen Mitchell reports in The Hill:

Defense analysts this week said the war had entered a new phase, with Kyiv poised to break a stalemate that has been in place since late 2023. Ukraine is gaining momentum on the battlefield, regaining territory for the first time in years as it outflanks Moscow’s forces through its domination of drone warfare. “Only a few months ago, the majority of analysts were saying that by now Russia would have captured the whole of the Donbas. But the Russians simply cannot accumulate the kind of mass and armor needed for breakthroughs.” The shift dates back to late 2025, when the Ukrainians began striking Russian ground-based radars, electronic warfare stations, surface-to-air missiles and drone capabilities, blinding Moscow’s forces from incoming threats.
Ukraine appears to be gaining momentum on the battlefield in its grinding fight with Russia, regaining territory for the first time in years as it outflanks Moscow’s forces through its domination of drone warfare.
Defense analysts this week said the war had entered a new phase, with Kyiv poised to break a stalemate that has been in place since late 2023, with neither side able to make significant gains along a nearly 700-mile front line.

Kyiv is now calling the next six months “crucial” for it to seize the battlefield initiative, as Moscow has responded to the momentum with threats of escalation and stepped up aerial strikes.
“For the very first time since 2023, the Ukrainians have actually managed to take back more terrain than the Russians did,” said George Barros, a longtime analyst on Russia now with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
In a report this week, ISW said the Ukrainian gains show the war is shifting in favor of its forces, at least for the time being, thanks to Kremlin troops stagnating in battlefield advances and Kyiv’s forces effectively using drones and innovative tactics to break out of old positions.

Drones have proven to be the most effective tool for the Ukrainians, who have used them to extend the so-called kill zone — the space around the front line where troops are most vulnerable to attack — more than 10 miles in both directions, according to Anatol Lieven, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
“The Russians simply cannot accumulate the kind of mass and armor needed for a breakthrough,” Lieven told The Hill.
“Only a few months ago, but certainly a year ago, the majority of analysts were saying that by now Russia would have captured the whole of the Donbas,” he added, referring to the region that Russia sees as a “priority goal” to take. “In fact, Russia is still far, far from achieving that objective.”

That has allowed Ukraine to transition from a positional war — in which battle lines barely move, with neither side able to amass the forces necessary to make any serious push into the other’s held territory — to now begin to take more terrain than the Russians did beginning in April.
“That’s because the Ukrainians have gotten more effective at denying the Russians their advances,” Barros told The Hill.
Barros said the shift has been months in the making, dating all the way back to late 2025, when the Ukrainians began striking Russian ground-based radars, electronic warfare stations, surface-to-air missiles and drone capabilities, effectively blinding Moscow’s forces from incoming air threats.

Peter Rough, a senior fellow and director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Hudson Institute who returned from Ukraine earlier this month, said the Ukrainians have shown remarkable innovation when it comes to drone warfare.
He relayed a conversation he had with a military medic, in which the man told him he hadn’t treated a gunshot wound in six months because of all the action around drones.
“There are snipers who have been retrained, sometimes begrudgingly, for drone systems,” Rough noted.

The progress has allowed Kyiv to land more long-range strikes further into Russia on oil and military facilities, dealing blows to the country’s economy and war efforts. Case in point, Ukraine early Wednesday morning struck a Russian air base in Voronezh, a military aircraft repair plant in Taganrog, and an oil refinery in Tuapse.
It has also empowered Ukraine to begin new mechanized assaults that have slowly pried back land from Russian control faster than Moscow could take it.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week declared Ukraine had retaken nearly 230 square miles of territory since the start of the year. Moscow currently controls nearly 20 percent of the country’s territory.

Russia is “going backwards on the battlefield,” Anne Keast-Butler, director of the U.K. communications intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters, said in an annual public address Wednesday.
She added that nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
Russia has responded to the changing atmosphere by escalating attacks on Ukraine and expanding its threats to surrounding European countries.

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday threatened a fresh wave of “systematic strikes” targeting “decision-making centers and command posts” in Kyiv, warning foreign nationals and diplomats they should leave.
An overnight drone attack on Ukraine went astray, slamming into an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people in the NATO member country, officials said.
As NATO members responded with promises to protect every inch of the alliance’s member countries, Dmitry Medvedev, a top adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, warned Europe’s “peaceful sleep is over.”

Russia said the new strikes were a response to an alleged Ukrainian drone attack last week that Moscow claims hit a student dormitory in the Luhansk region and killed at least 21 individuals.
Last weekend, Russia launched one of its heaviest strikes on Kyiv since the fighting began, firing 90 missiles and more than 600 drones, which killed at least four people and injured another 87.
Ukraine is seeking to rally global support during what it says is a pivotal time in the conflict. Zelensky wrote a letter to President Trump and the U.S. Congress this week appealing for more Patriot air defense munitions, given signs that Russia is preparing to “intensify its campaign of terror.”
Andriy Biletsky, a senior Ukrainian commander, told Reuters on Wednesday “the next six to nine months are a turning point.”
Biletsky, who commands Ukraine’s revered Third Army Corps, told the outlet he believes Moscow’s forces are exhausted and unable to make any significant battle wins.
“The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance the way they did, for example, a year ago,” Biletsky told Reuters.
That advantage gives Kyiv the chance to make enough gains to strengthen its position in peace negotiations — which are stalled for the time being, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged last week.
“We just sort of sensed that there wasn’t a lot of progress being made,” Rubio said. “We’re also not interested in getting involved in an endless cycle of meetings that lead to nothing.”
He added that Washington remains open to mediating future talks, stressing that a negotiated settlement — not a military victory — is the only way to end the war.
But Barros argued outside countries should seize on Ukraine’s current advantages and help it exploit the gains, warning that they’re not going to be permanent.
“What the United States and international partners supporting Ukraine are looking at is an extremely rare, ephemeral opportunity to lean into helping Ukraine exploit this advantage that they have while they still have it,” he said.
“I’m not prepared to argue that it’s going to be here nine months from now. So we really have to look at this window for what it is.”

Putin's "Inevitable Victory In History's Dustbin" As Ukraine takes 100 Sq Miles In May

2026-05-31T10:12:00.560-04:00

In the four week period ending May 28th, Ukrainian forces took over 100 square miles from the reeling Russians, confirming the growing sense that Ukraine has changed the war on the ground and the narrative on the airwaves. This followed a net Russian loss of 26 square miles in April.

The combined effect of Ukraine's frontline advances, devastating mid-range logistics destruction campaign and long range economic targeting appear to be too much for the Kremlin's overmatched military. JL

Mick Ryan reports in Futura Doctrina:

The broader picture shows a deterioration for Russian forces. Their progress for the last month has taken small parcels in different areas, but has not been significant and has come at a massive cost in manpower and resources. In the four weeks ending 26 May 2026, Russian forces suffered a net loss of 100 square miles of Ukrainian territory, with a net loss of 26 square miles in the preceding month. In the week of 19-26 May, Russia lost 38 square miles. Ukraine’s mid-range drone campaign appears to be exerting effects on Russian operational capacity in the south. Russia’s Spring offensive, as a cohesive campaign, has not generated the tempo to change the situation on the ground. Putin’s ’inevitable victory’ narrative seems to now be firmly in the dustbin of history.
Along the front line, the picture remains one of grinding pressure. In the north, Russian forces have continued offensive operations in Sumy Oblast, probing and advancing incrementally through forested terrain using infiltration tactics. Russian offensive operations also continue in northern Kharkiv Oblast, where Ukrainian forces were conducting counterattacks.
The capture of Ukraine’s fortress belt remains the Russian main effort on the ground. While the Russian plan continues to seek an operational double envelopment, Russian ground forces are also attacking from the east to draw Ukrainian forces east and fix them in place. As the maps below demonstrate, Russia has made some progress on this axis since January 2026, but it is not significant and has come at a massive cost in manpower and resources.
Russian 'progress' against the Fortress Belt, 1 January - 30 May 2026. Source: DeepState Live
The broader picture for the past month, as analysed by the Russia Matters newsletter, shows a deterioration for Russian forces. In the four weeks ending 26 May 2026, Russian forces registered a net loss of 100 square miles of Ukrainian territory, with a net loss of 26 square miles in the preceding four-week period. In the week of 19-26 May, Russia lost 38 square miles. Ukraine’s mid-range drone campaign appears to be exerting effects on Russian operational capacity in the south.
Russia’s Spring Campaign may be taking small parcels of land in different parts of the frontline, but as a cohesive major campaign, it has not generated the tempo or momentum necessary to change the situation on the ground. Further, the Ukrainian resistance on the eastern and southern fronts, and Putin’s pathetic ‘please don’t attack my Victory Day parade’ plea, have had an impact on Russian strategic influence operations. It is probably obvious by now, but Putin’s ’inevitable victory’ narrative seems to now be firmly in the dustbin of history.
President Zelenskyy held a staff meeting in mid-May to analyse intelligence on Russian planning in the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction, stating that Ukraine was “preparing responses to every possible course of enemy action” and that forces in the northern sector would be increased. He also directed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prepare additional diplomatic measures regarding Belarus, which Russia might use as a staging ground to expand the war. The concern about a northern axis is not new, but the formal intelligence assessment and public communication of preparations signals Kyiv’s seriousness about the threat.