The Low-Down

Ukraine's Drones Force Russian Convoys To Ride With Gun Trucks and A Prayer

2026-06-13T10:56:05.568-04:00

With Russia losing 500 trucks a day, on average, it would appear that the mobile anti-drone truck gun teams aren't working - and that the Russian prayers are not being heard. JL

David Axe reports in Euromaidan Press:

Russian logisticians are desperately scrambling to save their truck convoys from Ukrainian drones. Besides rerouting convoys away from the most vulnerable highways, some commanders are also deploying mobile gun teams to escort the cargo trucks. Ukrainian drone units flying jam-resistant middle-strike drones with AI-assisted targeting—the $5,000 Swift Beat Hornet is one of the most common—initially targeted convoys traveling along the most obvious routes, including the west-to-east M-14 highway connecting southern Russia to occupied Crimea. The M-14 is the Ukrainian portion of the wider European E-58 highway. By late May, they were tallying hits on 500 Russian trucks every day, a ninefold increase on the overall average of daily truck strikes since February 2022. Just 3,500 Russian cargo trucks plied the M-14 every day, so the losses were significant.
Russian logisticians are desperately scrambling to save their truck convoys from Ukrainian drones. Besides rerouting convoys away from the most vulnerable highways, some commanders are also deploying mobile gun teams to escort the cargo trucks.
Whether those gun teams can shoot down enough drones to turn the tide of the escalating logistics war remains to be seen. How high the drones fly before they strike could make all the difference.
This spring, Ukrainian drone units launched an intensive campaign of strikes targeting the thousands of Russian trucks that, every day, shuttle supplies and reinforcements from depots deep in the rear area to front-line field armies. The aim: to weaken Russian regiments before they can launch an assault across the gray zone.
"We are launching a 'logistics lockdown' for the Russian army," Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced. "We are scaling middle-strike operations to systematically destroy enemy logistics and supply lines, stripping them of their capacity to mount offensive actions."

The counterlogistics campaign, mostly carried out by Ukrainian drone units flying jam-resistant middle-strike drones with AI-assisted targeting—the $5,000 Swift Beat Hornet is one of the most common—initially targeted convoys traveling along the most obvious routes, including the west-to-east M-14 highway connecting southern Russia to occupied Crimea. The M-14 is the Ukrainian portion of the wider European E-58 highway.
By late May, the Ukrainian defense ministry was tallying hits on nearly 500 Russian trucks every day, a ninefold increase on the overall average of daily truck strikes since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022. Just 3,500 Russian cargo trucks plied the M-14 every day, so the losses were significant. For now, the Kremlin is able to make good its truck losses by redeploying vehicles from the active fleet.
But soon, it may have to tap the tens of thousands of older trucks sitting in long-term storage. And those decades-old trucks are in pretty bad shape. "Most of them are scrap metal husk, utterly impossible to reactivate," analyst Jompy noted.
A Ukrainian Hornet drone about to strike a buhanka. Via WarTranslated.
Hardening the convoys
Clearly realizing they can't sustain the loss of 500 trucks a day, Russian commanders are getting creative. They've begun rerouting trucks away from the M-14 and sending them along back roads instead in order to spread them out and complicate the Ukrainians' drone sortie planning. Military traffic along the M-14 has dropped by 71% since late May as trucks follow alternate routes to forward bases, according to Robert Brovdi, commander of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces.

Map: Euromaidan Press
But the Russians are also arming the truck convoys, which previously traveled without any defensive weapons. Observer Kim Hovik claimed they recently saw videos depicting Russian convoys that included as many as four trucks and utility vehicles carrying gunners.
Guns aren't the best defenses against drones, but the Russians don't have many other options. Electronic warfare systems that scramble drones' control signals don't work against drones with self-contained AI targeting systems that can spot and home in on trucks without any input from a remote operation.
And Russia's longer-range air defense systems, its fixed and mobile surface-to-air missile systems, have been ravaged by a parallel Ukrainian drone campaign specifically targeting air defenses. Between June 2025 and March 2026, Ukrainian drones blew up more than 400 radars and SAM systems: far more than Russia can replace in just nine months.
How well the gunners work against Hornets and other Ukrainian drones might depend on how high the drones fly while patrolling for trucks. Ukraine's own mobile gun teams were effective against Russian Shahed drones until the Shaheds began flying thousands of feet in the air. Now the Ukrainian gunners are "largely ineffective," according to a Ukrainian electronic warfare officer who goes by "Alchemist."
It's unclear how high a Hornet drone can cruise while still effectively scanning for trucks. Higher flights might be necessary, however. Ukrainian drone forces must adapt to Russian adaptation as the counterlogistics drone war grinds on.

OpenAI Considering "Steep" Price Cuts To Compete With Anthropic

2026-06-13T10:54:45.238-04:00

Amidst the euphoria generated by SpaceX's IPO yesterday, which apparently suggests to many that there is nowhere to go but up for AI, the two real AI leaders - OpenAI and Anthropic - who are also planning for stratospheric IPOs, are locked in brutal competition. And that is heightened by growing reluctance on the part of corporate customers to continue to pay eye-watering sums for AI access.

As a result, OpenAI is actively contemplating significant price cuts to keep customers because it thinks Anthropic will do the same. As a general rule of economics, and even of tech, this does not bode well for hockey stick financial projections on which the two firms' valuations are currently based. Just sayin'. JL

Cris Tolomia reports in Quartz:

OpenAI is considering significant price cuts to its AI services as it looks to pull customers away from rival Anthropic. Tokens are among the areas where OpenAI is considering charging less, driven partly by expectations that Anthropic will pursue its own reductions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged pricing pressure from business customers "a huge issue." Business leaders have grown increasingly reluctant to authorize large AI spending. Steep discounting would put additional pressure on two businesses that are already deep in the red, given the massive infrastructure expenditures involved in powering AI systems at scale even as both companies prepare for IPOs.
OpenAI is considering significant price cuts to its AI services as it looks to pull customers away from rival Anthropic,

Tokens — the standard unit AI companies use to meter and price their services — are among the areas where OpenAI is considering charging less, driven partly by expectations that Anthropic will pursue its own reductions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged pricing pressure from business customers. "I think we'll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend," Altman said at a recent event. He called costs "a huge issue."
Steep discounting would put additional pressure on two businesses that are already deep in the red, given the massive infrastructure expenditures involved in powering AI systems at scale. The outlet also noted that business leaders have grown increasingly reluctant to authorize large AI spending, with some companies having already maxed out their budgets for AI tools.
The potential cuts come as competition between the two companies has intensified. Anthropic's revenue has risen after its coding tool Claude Code gained traction among software engineers, and the company closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion valuation in May, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation for the first time. OpenAI has since made its own coding tool, Codex, a priority.
The pricing deliberations come as both companies prepare for public listings. OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week, with Goldman Sachs $GS +2.62% and Morgan Stanley $MS +0.65% leading the process ahead of a potential fall debut. Anthropic submitted its own confidential IPO prospectus a week prior.
The Journal noted that a key risk investors have identified for both companies is how interchangeable their products are — and how easily customers can switch between them. A price war would test both business models ahead of those listings.
For consumers, GPT-5.5 access through OpenAI runs $8, $20, or $100-plus per month depending on the tier chosen. On the Anthropic side, Claude Pro carries a $17 monthly price tag under an annual plan, while Claude Max starts at $100 a month, CNBC noted.

The War In Ukraine Is the Last In Which Soviet Armor Will Fight

2026-06-12T10:52:52.189-04:00

It is not so much that tanks are obsolete, though that is still being determined by drone warfare developments on both sides, but that the Kremlin has almost completely exhausted the stockpiled inventory it had accumulated over eight decades before invading Ukraine.

While some remain to be upgraded, their value had diminished in light of the contemporary battlefield's challenges. JL

Jompy reports in Fronts.Co:

This will be the last great war fought with Soviet-era armor. The Ukraine invasion war’s opening months were characterized by losses we can politely call 'eyewatering' That Russia had started deploying ancient T-54/55s in summer 2023 was proof of how far they had to reach to keep their formations equipped, and even then they were frequently understrength. (Now) armor is) still being used, but rarely and almost never in the amounts it used to be; a few tanks and IFVs trying small pushes, or tanks used as APCs to transport infantry. The loss of the vast Soviet stockpiles means the capability to quickly regenerate after attritional warfare won’t be there anymore for Russia. They’ll have to change their approach to warfare, not being able to throw massive armored pushes at the enemy anymore nor waste any piece of equipment

Since February 2022 we’ve likely all heard the (in)famous phrase: ‘Russia has run out of equipment’. Most of the time, the claim is made about armored vehicles, particularly tanks. But is that really the case? Well, not exactly.
To truly grasp the nuances here, we first have to understand where the Russian fleet of stored tanks stood prewar. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in December 1991, Moscow had been presiding over a war economy for decades. The Soviet Army fielded dozens of thousands of tanks, on top of several times that number of other armored vehicles such as infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), armored personnel carriers (APCs), artillery, both self-propelled (SPGs) and towed, engineering vehicles, and so-on.
Inevitably, these huge stockpiles of heavy equipment were inherited by post Soviet states. However, for obvious reasons, the bulk of it ended up in the hands of the new Russian Federation. Russia, knee deep in their 1990s economic and political crisis, was not able to properly field and maintain as much military hardware as the Soviets did, so both for economic reasons and to comply with the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), they dismantled, scrapped and in some cases put in storage most of their tanks and other armored equipment.
When this process was over, Russia only retained barely 10-15% of the tank fleet the Soviet Union had possessed right before its end. Not only that, but the collapse of the Soviet war economy and its sphere of influence and the lack of investment meant that a huge share of the Russian defense industry decayed and went bankrupt, including many tank and armor-related design bureaus and manufacturers. In the end, production was limited to a small set of products, such as the new T-90 and BMP-3, mainly to fulfill foreign orders. And even in these cases, Russia relied on selling their equipment in storage to friendly states; offering military equipment at cheap prices has been one of the main tools for Russian diplomacy ever since.
With that in mind, let’s fast forward to February 24th 2022. That day, Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine with the intention of seizing the eastern regions and installing a puppet government in Kyiv. Despite their planning, the Russian army quickly found itself stalled by stiff Ukrainian defenses. Soviet military doctrine, which Russia had maintained in its military thinking, sought to push the enemy through mechanized columns. However, Ukrainian doctrinal changes since the start of the Dombas conflict in 2014, new technological advances such as FPV drones, and arms supplies by NATO and EU states allowed them to nullify for the most part the effectiveness of Russian armored attacks. Russian heavy equipment losses started mounting to levels unseen in a European conflict since the days of the Second World War. In view of this, many started to wonder just how long could Russia keep up these tactics until they depleted their ground forces of anything heavier than a truck. The hard truth is: a long, long time.
It is estimated that the Russian army started this war with around 2,700-3,300 tanks in active service (3,000 being the most common estimate), these active tanks mostly being modernized versions of late Soviet tank designs, such as T-72B3s and T-80BV/BVMs, plus around 280 T-90s (mainly T-90As, as Russia had just started delivering newly designed T-90Ms to their Ground Forces).
But those were just the active tanks, quickly fielded for the invasion by the Ground Forces, Airborne (VDV) and Marines. On top of them, there were up to some 8,500 more tanks of different types, mainly old, obsolete ones, in military storage facilities by 2022, plus circa 20,000 IFVs and APCs: the remains of the huge Soviet-era tank fleet Russia couldn’t afford to maintain in an operational state, but neither scrapped nor sold abroad in order to maintain a ‘fleet-in-being’ that could cheaply replenish any potential tank losses.
While the numbers on paper were large, though, these storage bases were often located in the heart of Siberian territory, with the equipment parked outdoors with no protection from the extreme Siberian climate. As such, many became critically worn down.
Barely 3,500 of these tanks in storage were relatively modern T-72Bs, T-80B/BVs and T-90s. Just over 100 units of these in storage before the start of the war were T-90s, mainly original T-90 Obr. 1992 tanks, not more modern T-90As. The rest of the stored tanks were old T-54/55s, T-64s (which for the most part are useless to Russia as they lack the knowhow to refurbish them, since they were a Soviet Ukrainian product) and T-62s, which Russia had already started prepping some years before the war to ship to allies such as Assad’s Syria.
Comparison of an area of the 22nd Central Tank Reserve Base in Bui, Russia, between 2021 and 2025. Almost all modern T-72Bs, T-80BVs, T-80U/UDs and T-90s tanks stored here were gone by late 2023. Most that remain there are old, broken BMP-1s, BTR-80s and BRDM-2s. Entire sections of this base have since been abandoned and vegetation has reclaimed the grounds. Source: Google Earth.
These stored tanks and other armored vehicles had been up to that point being used as sources of spare parts to maintain active vehicles and chassis for rebuilt, modernized vehicles to feed the Russian army with armor replacements whenever it needed. Repairs and overhauls were mainly done at Armor Repair Plants (BTRZs in Russian). However, when equipment losses started to mount in Ukraine in the very first weeks of the Special Military Operation, Russian tank units required shipments of tanks and armor in general to replenish their lost equipment and remain operative on the frontline, and to keep pushing their mechanized assaults. New production of T-90Ms, BTR-82s, BMP-3s, 2S19s and other armored vehicles such as MRAPs and IMVs was too low to satisfy military requirements for the war effort, so Russia turned to its huge stockpile of Soviet-era armor to reinforce its forces, which - after all - was the raison d'etre for this stockpile in the first place.
It was at this point that the myth of ‘Russia running out of tanks’ began. To be honest, yes, Russia lost unbelievable amounts of armored vehicles during the first weeks of the invasion, until it pulled its forces from northern Ukraine once it became clear that it wouldn't be able to take Kyiv. Based on data from WarSpotting, of the 3,704 tanks lost by Russia up to the time this article was written, 1,304 were lost between February 24th 2022 and December 31st 2022. Of these, a staggering 669 were lost between February 24th and July 1st. And that’s on top of thousands more pieces of heavy equipment: 21,512 lost up to this day, of which 4,450 were taken off the board just between February and July 2022.
In short, the war’s opening weeks and months were characterized by losses we can politely call “eyewatering”. This was the time of Javelins, primitive ‘cope cages’, coordinated artillery precision strikes (drones still had yet to appear in the battlefield) and mechanized columns that clogged Ukrainian roads and made them easy prey.
Russian tank losses by type since the start of the invasion until the end of 2025. 2022 stands out over the average of Russian tank losses, while so far 2026 has seen even fewer armor losses. Source: WarSpotting.
Obviously, such rate of attrition for Russia’s mechanized forces, had it been sustained longer, would have exhausted Russian armor reserves very quickly. However, after the retreat from the Kyiv area and an initial push to take Donbas which quickly failed and exhausted the Russian forces for months (it was at this time that Wagner took precedence in the battle of Bakhmut, as most Russian core units were combat incapable for the time being), Russian armor losses fell to a level that was manageable, even if still brutally high for most European militaries.
All the while, Russia had already begun pouring as many assets as it had available into Ukraine to reinforce the invasion, far beyond the initial strength dedicated to the attack in February 2022. On September 11th 2022, Russia lost its first T-90M tank against Ukrainian forces; everything available was being committed. But as the Russian prewar tank fleet was halved in the first war of the year, yet armored attacks still remained Russian officers’ preferred tactic until late 2024, it’s clear that Moscow had already started a massive effort to refurbish and overhaul their huge tank reserves to replenish their losses.
Early in the war, satellite imagery from the main Russian armor storage bases showed that, initially, the staff at these facilities focused on bringing back to service the most up-to-date and easy-to-fix pieces: the few T-90s to be modernized to T-90A/M variants in Uralvangozavod (UVZ), T-80B/BVs either repaired and sent to the frontline or modernized in Omsktranshmash to T-80BVMs, and of course T-72Bs, mostly sent as were to the frontline, though some were also modernized to T-72B3/B3Ms in UVZ.
Nonetheless, they faced one problem: repair facilities could only reactivate so many tanks at a time, each took weeks to be ready, and focusing just on the most modern tank types meant facing a bottleneck that would make it impossible to resupply many units to the point that they could maintain their combat capabilities. The 1st Tank Guards Army, decimated first in Chernihiv and later in Kharkiv, was one such example. Therefore, it was necessary to expand the tank overhaul effort to older types. Even more so as some plants are specialized in specific types of equipment: for example, the 61st BTRZ in Chita is focused on repairing and modernizing T-62 tanks.
It was then, in late 2022, that we started seeing shipments of older types of Russian armored vehicles, many of them long out of service, being sent to Russian forces in Ukraine to keep them equipped, even if with obsolete hardware. This is when T-62s, mainly modernized T-62M/MVs, started to be spotted among Russian forces, specially those tasked with holding the bridgehead in Kherson; older tanks were initially expected to just hold the line, not be used in offensive operations. Soon, however, that too would prove unfeasible as equipment losses keep stacking.
Eventually, after the lessons learned from Wagner in Bakhmut and further pyrrhic victories for Russia in their advance over Eastern Ukraine, as well as their first wave of mobilization in late 2022 and early 2023 following their defeat in Kharkiv and Kherson, Russia would find itself in a rough spot: they started the war with ‘lots of metal (equipment), but little meat (manpower)’, but now the situation was the reverse, as they now had more manpower thanks to mobilization and volunteers, yet equipment losses had had such a cumulative effect over time that it was now becoming difficult to replenish armor losses in some sectors of the frontline, creating a need to prioritize which units got equipment. And it wasn’t just combat losses and wear and tear, but also the fact that the 2022 mobilization created several dozen new brigades, which also had to be equipped, and that after the failed 2023 Wagner rebellion, Putin authorized the Rosgvardiya (National Guard) to field heavy armor as well to quell any potential future military attempts.
Or, to put it simply: Russia hadn’t run out of tanks, but some sectors of its frontline were running out of tanks.
If the war had started with Russia having over 28,000 pieces of heavy equipment in storage, by late 2024 there were around 14,000 left, just half of the original stocks. And as one can expect, the best preserved, easiest to reactive, more whole pieces of equipment were first pulled out from storage to repair plants and sent off to the front. As time passes, therefore only the more useless and harder to restore pieces are left, giving diminishing returns on refurbishing efforts.
If the war started with 7,216 stored tanks in total (313 T-54/55s, 1,822 T-62s, 594 T-64s, 1,218 T-72As, 1,478 T-72Bs, 1,486 T-80B/BVs, 193 T-80U/UDs and 112 T-90s), by late 2024 there were only 3,345 left, with no T-90s left and only a few hundred T-80B/BVs and T-72Bs, the rest being T-54/55s, T-62s and T-64s. The fact that Russia had already started deploying ancient T-54/55s in summer 2023 was proof of how far they had to reach to keep their formations equipped, and even then they were frequently understrength.
Russian T-55 fielded by Russian forces in the Russia-occupied part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Spring 2023. Source: *Romanov*.
It was then that we started seeing a change in Russian tactics: mechanized attacks had usually yielded little in the way of results, and only after many attempts were Ukrainian units forced to give up ground. But improvised small, light infantry infiltration tactics had usually proved far better at taking ground and surprising enemy formations, not least because the innovations brought forth by FPV drones had made armor concentrations too easy to detect even in the rear. By the latest stages of the battle of Avdiivka, a paradigm shift was clearly noticeable, as the Russian high command switched to infantry-intensive tactics, disregarding the high casualty rates they incurred.
Armor was (and is) still being used, but rarely and almost never in the amounts it used to be, but rather with up to three tanks and IFVs trying small pushes, or with tanks being used as improvised, uparmored APCs to transport infantry as close to Ukrainian positions as possible (the so-called ‘turtle tanks’). In fact, ever since, there has been a clear preference for IFVs such as BMPs and BTR-82s rather than tanks, a complete inversion of the war’s early days. Nowadays, more modern tanks are very rarely used. After all, if armor is almost invariably lost when supporting an attack, why waste a T-90M when a cheaply refurbished T-62 does the job equally well?
Two examples of Russian ‘turtle’ tanks deployed in the frontline in Ukraine. Source: Telegram.
Even at this point, at the lowest point of Russian armor preservation, Russia was probably still fielding some 1,500 tanks, plus several more APCs and IFVs. However, since the latter half of 2024, Russia has been able to reconsolidate their mechanized forces, and in a way, just in time: while their stockpile of armored vehicles has by now reached bottom (2,088 tanks and 9,650 armored vehicles of all types, mainly older types such as T-62s, BTR-60/70s, BRDM-2s… all missing parts or outright cannibalized to keep other vehicles running), their BTRZs have been working overtime to churn out thousands of refurbished pieces per year. Of the remaining tanks, 122 are T-54/55s, 775 T-62s, 440 T-64s, 414 T-72As, 163 T-72Bs, 52 T-80B/BVs and 82 T-80U/UDs.
Despite storage numbers running awfully low, a tank pulled from storage doesn’t mean it’s replacing another tank that has been destroyed. Take T-80s: 1,679 were in outdoor storage in 2021, now there are only roughly 100 left, but Omsktranshmash still has another 250 or so parked in the yards outside the factory, waiting their turn to be modernized. Meanwhile current estimates place the number of T-80s in service in 2026 at 250 T-80BV/U and 350 T-80BVM, while losses remain minimal. While storage will probably reach zero this year, their T-80 fleet will also slightly increase in size at the current rate.
Evolution of Russian tank storages from 2021 to 2026. Source: *Covert Cabal*.
Recently, an investigation by Frontelligence Insight discovered that UVZ was planning on switching their T-72 efforts from T-72Bs, pretty much now exhausted in storage, to older T-72As, until now untouched by the Russian reactivation efforts, and in quantities that fairly match the number of T-72As that were in storage right before they started shipping them to UVZ. The months prior to that Russia had already taken around 50% (from 900 to 461 units left in storage) of their T-72A stockpile from storage bases to UVZ. And recently we have indeed started to see visual confirmation of refurbished and modernized T-72As back to service in Russian formations. All in all, expanding refurbishment efforts to T-72As opens up a further thousand tank hulls that Russia could eventually press back to their ground forces.
Modernized T-72A (official designation: T-72B3M) as shown in early May by Russian state television being delivered by Uralvangozavod to the army. Source: Russia Television and Radio
This is just one among several such efforts recently undertaken by Russian authorities and manufacturers to resuscitate what’s left in storage. But besides several hundred ancient yet still workable types such as T-72As and a few hundred T-62s, the rest of the remaining stored equipment is so rundown that it will probably never be repaired. A good example of this is the recent trend of taking armored vehicles from storage bases to turn them into public monuments in Russian cities, by putting them on pedestals in places such as roundabouts. Or, in other instances, transforming stored tank hulls into specialized vehicles such as armored recovery vehicles because they’re too degraded/too many spare parts are lacking to be modernized as proper tanks (e.g. BREM-80 ARVs based on T-80BV hulls).
However, while Russia pulled back to their proper territory some core formations such as the 1st TGA, it was not just stockpiles that were worked through in BTRZs; UVZ and other major producers such as Kurganmashzavod (BMP-3) or Arzamas (BTR-82) managed to expand their producing capabilities. Estimates put new production at roughly 200-250 T-90Ms, some 400-480 BMP-3Ms, around 100-120 BMD-4Ms and some 500-700 BTR-82s, on top of several hundred more IMVs and MRAPs, and 2,000-3,000 refurbished armored vehicles taken from storage just in 2025. By now the Russian tank fleet likely surpasses in size the prewar fleet by a few hundred tanks, yet the overall quality has gone down considerably, with it today being a mix of high-low tech equipment, from plain, unmodernized T-54/55s to newly-made T-90Ms.
To sum it up, this will be the last great war fought with Soviet-era armor. Russia is managing to reform their core armored formations, but there are some caveats:
*1. Clearly they are thinking in the long run, predicting that eventually a solution to the current drone saturated environment will be reached that allows them to bring back fast, mobile warfare via armored vehicles, and preserving and rebuilding the mechanized corps in the meantime. They could also be forced to go back to mechanized warfare if Russia fails to meet its recruitment target for this year.
*2. Even if new production has surged (it is estimated that Russia barely produced 60–70 T-90Ms in 2022, rising to 140–180 in 2023), it probably has by now reached its maximum capacity and in itself won’t be able to replenish all those huge fields of Soviet tanks accumulated over decades of war economy production.
*3. Russia’s war economy itself is already showing its cracks and won’t be able to maintain its current arms production rate in the long run. However, that doesn’t mean Russia won’t be able to again field huge tank formations in Ukraine if it ever finds a workaround for the current threats to armor.
*4. The loss of the vast Soviet legacy stockpiles means the capability to quickly regenerate after high attritional warfare won’t be there anymore for Russia and they’ll have to change their approach to mechanized warfare, not being able to throw massive armored pushes at the enemy anymore nor waste any piece of equipment (including as a way of diplomacy by giving armor for free to friendly/satellite regimes).
In short, the death of Russian armor has been greatly exaggerated. But the impact of these last four years of fighting has not been negligible, and the impacts will echo through the Russian armed forces for years or decades to come.

Ukraine Has Now Turned Crimea From An Asset To A Liability For Russia

2026-06-12T10:47:58.109-04:00

What is happening to Crimea right now is emblematic of the larger strategic failure with Putin's overall Ukrainian invasion strategy. Economically, the areas he has captured have either been reduced to smoking heaps of rubble (thanks to Russia's indiscriminate bombardment tactics) which means, rather than contributing to the Russian economy, they will require years of investment and rebuilding from Kremlin funds; and militarily they have become a trap in which tens of thousands of Russian soldiers or secret police are required to keep them quiescent.

Crimea is a microcosm of this larger problem. It has been bombarded by the Ukrainians since the beginning of the invasion to such a degree that the Black Sea Fleet had to flee Sevastopol, its storied headquarters for centuries. Ukraine has also struck Russia's Crimean air defenses, its airfields and its logistics centers which a few years helped support Russian attacks in southern Ukraine. The result is that Crimea has turned from an asset to a liability: much of its military infrastructure is in ruins, it needs troops, artillery, planes, air defenses and investment - which might more effectively be sent to other sectors - in order not to fall to the Ukrainians. But due to Ukraine's increasingly successful 'logistics lockdown' of the routes and bridges to Crimea, it has become a sinkhole of suboptimally deployed resources . JL

Stefan Korshak reports in Medium and Dmytro Basmat reports in the Kyiv Independent:

Ukraine's drone forces struck an S-400 air defense position in Kurortne and severely damaged the Black Sea Fleet Naval Aviation command center in Sevastopol. This is part of a broader campaign that has steadily degraded Russia's air defenses and logistical infrastructure across the peninsula. Several other air defense systems were degraded to pave the way for deeper attacks. Attacks also struck roads, bridges, supply depots, temporary headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol as well as airfields in Kacha and Saki. This is a calculated bombardment campaign aiming to cut Crimea off from the mainland logistically; ruin the Russian Crimea/Azov Sea economy, especially the summer holiday season, because tens of thousands of canceled tours can’t be spun by the Kremlin; reach a point where Russian forces north of Crimea are so poorly-supplied, they will become so weak, they will be vulnerable to an offensive and possible breakthrough.

Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces struck an S-400 air defense position in Kurortne and severely damaged the Black Sea Fleet Naval Aviation command center at 37 Gogol Street in Sevastopol. This is part of a broader campaign that has steadily degraded Russia's air defenses and logistical infrastructure across the peninsula. Several other localized air defense systems were targeted and degraded to pave the way for deeper attacks.

Coordinated operations also struck temporary headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet Air Force in Sevastopol as well as airfields in Kacha and Saki, heavily impacting hangars and runways
If anyone was in doubt that cutting overland supply to Crimea is a Ukrainian strategic objective, this week should have pushed many off the fence. This review decided it was happening more than a month ago.
This week most visibly the Ukrainians returned to the old tactic of targeting bridges, or better put causeways through marshes, that connect Crimea with occupied Ukraine and eventually the mainland. There are three bridge causeways, from west to east, usually referred to as Armyansk-Perekop, and Chongar. The latter is more important because all traffic moving through the rail hub Dzhankoi, further south, connects with the Kherson region road network via Chognar.
The Ukrainians back when they had some British/French Storm Shadow/SCALP precision-guided rockets back in 2023-early 2024, had used those precision-guided weapons to blast holes in the roadway at Chonhar, forcing the Russians to do detours until the holes were fixed. The British and French had very few of these missiles to give so the Ukrainians had to be very careful about what targets they fired them at. Some of you may recall the Americans at the time that giving Ukraine too much military material might make the Russians angry and aggressive, so the hope was the Americans would give the Ukrainians long-range missiles of which the Americans had deeper supplies. The missile came but at a dribble, so in due time the Russians fixed the bottlenecks.
Then Trump came to power and Russia was designated America’s friend and excellent future business partner, and Ukraine became an evil parasite state run by a dictator (Trump’s words, not mine) that Americans should hate, so long-range missile deliveries to Ukraine from America dried up pretty much completely after that.
That state of affairs — the northern neck of Crimea is vulnerable, the Ukrainians know it, but they don’t have weapons precise and powerful enough to blow a significant hole in a reinforced concrete bridge crossing the neck at long range, so the Ukrainians concentrated the weapons they had on other targets and left the Crimea northern road bottlenecks alone, generally speaking, for the next two years. Until Sunday.
Overnight Saturday-Sunday, at least one Ukrainian drone with what appears to have been a 100+ kg. warhead, probably fused for a penetrating detonation, blew a refrigerator-sized hole in the automobile bridge over Lake Sivash in the Chongar district. Given the tech we’ve seen, the reasonable conclusion is that the Ukrainians developed a drone that traded range for extra payload, and possibly used some of the gained weight to make the drone more jamming resistant. Maybe a specially-trained pilot team flew the strike, because hitting a bridge with a big drone at the correct angle to blow a hole in it isn’t easy.
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Tarmac torn up in bridge across Sivash marsh/Azov Sea lagoon near Chongar road checkpoint into Crimea, Sunday (ZSU)
We know because the SBS told us that the 1st Special Center (formerly 414 SBS Rgt) carried out the attack, and they are the ZSU go-to unit for high responsibility, high value target attacks. So maybe it was just pilot skill.
The Russian-appointed “head” of the occupied part of the Kherson region , Vladimir Saldo, announced the bridge was unfortunately probably not going to be working again for a month, and traffic moving between Crimea and occupied Kherson territory would detour further west, via the Armyansk-Perekop route, which on your map is the Kherson-Simferopol highway, or (mostly) the N-05.

This would already have been a logistics problem for the Russian army, under any circumstances, because its forces in Kherson and especially Zaporizhzhia region are supplied from bases in Crimea, and overnight that supply flow was reduced to one route to deliver beans and bullets to the front line: the N-05 (and its approach leg E-97). This means the entire supply for at least one (the 58th) Russian combined arms army, and part and possibly a lot of a (the 5th) combined arms army, are being fueled, armed, receiving replacements and getting crates of champagne and caviar delivered to the generals and some 25–30,000 men in southern occupied Ukraine, via a single causeway across a marsh. That’s not speculation, that’s just reality.
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A map illustrating Russia’s latest Crimea logistics issue, image by Yury Butusov
But as readers of this review and now even some mainstream readers understand, Ukraine isn’t just carrying out precision strikes on single, very vulnerable points on the Russian logistics network. Since early May a pack (am avoiding the obvious “swarm”) of other elite SBS long-range strike units (among them Nemesis, Ptakhi Madyara, Luftwaffe) have pushed the drone kill zone out of the 0–25 km. envelope from the front lines, to up to 100–150 km., and they have been concentrating on roads and particularly roads in south, occupied Ukraine leading to and from Crimea. The primary target is fuel trucks followed by military vehicles followed by civilians heavy trucks.
So unwanted Russian outcome next: That air operation attacking Russian logistics just became twice as easy, because now more targets are crowded on less road.
Since traffic moves both ways, the problem of getting supplies INTO Crimea is similarly complicated; as we noted last review the Ukrainians are hunting ferries moving between Crimea and the Russian mainland. June 1 is the traditional launch date of Russia’s summer vacation season, so, along with the trucks being concentrated on a smaller space of road, because the way the Ukrainians timed it, the Chongar strike makes it even worse. Now a tourist family wanting to visit from Crimea has to travel an extra 100 km.
And, since the top priority of the Ukrainian strikes is fuel trucks, this means that with more vehicles on less road, chances of fuel shortages increase. And that’s already a fact too: right now fuel in Crimea 20 liters a week basically by rationing, similar shortages are being reported across the Russia-controlled sides of Kherson and Zaporizhia region, and spot shortages have surfaced as far away as Rostov, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Saldo on Sunday — without apologizing that he had promised to fix the fuel crisis by Wednesday — announced civilian traffic will be banned from the entire highway route Rostov-Mariupol-Melitopol-Crimea.
Sure, there are probably some out there who still believe all these downstream effects are either Ukrainian lies or the Ukrainians just getting lucky by accident.
Me, I am seeing a calculating bombardment campaign aiming to:
Generally cut Crimea off from the mainland logistically
Ruin the Russian Crimea/Azov Sea summer holiday season, because tens of thousands of canceled tours can’t be spun by the Kremlin, either the family can take package trip or not
Reach a point where Russian forces north of Crimea are so poorly-supplied, that they either will immolate themselves attacking Ukrainian defenses or, become so weak, they will be vulnerable to a substantial offensive that will retake land fast and possibly achieve breakthrough.
The timeline is probably “by early winter or earlier”, but the launch date would be when the Ukrainians calulate Russian forces in the Zaporizhahia-Kherson sector are so weakened and their supply chains so degraded, that a major offensive is possible. That moment may never come, but certainly right now it looks like the Ukrainians are working towards that point.

Anthropic's Mythos Warning Was Both Responsible - and Clever Marketing

2026-06-12T10:45:13.957-04:00

As today's SpaceX IPO reveals, marketing and scarcity remain among Silicon Valley's most potent assets, something their dotcom predecessors honed to a fine skill.

While it would be inaccurate to claim the maneuvering around Anthropic's Mythos is misleading, it is fair to say that promotion is still an important part of the tech oeuvre, especially in the early stages before customer experience and knowledge surpasses suppliers optimistic claims. JL

Ashley Capoot reports in CNBC and Blake Montgomery reports in The Guardian :

Two months after Anthropic rolled out Mythos to a limited number of users, citing concerns about the AI model’s potential to do damage, the company is ready to release it to the public. With the launch of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic is honoring its “eventual goal” to deploy Mythos-class models at scale. It’s also capitalizing on growing momentum and investor interest ahead of a massive IPO. Anthropic will be under pressure to justify it’s valuation, and Claude Fable 5 could become a valuable new money-maker. The model costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, The technology is powerful, but so is the manipulation of attention. “Mythos is a real development and Anthropic was right to treat it seriously,” (but) it is clever marketing to say: “You can’t have this; it’s too strong.” Nothing sparks a stronger desire than withholding.

Two months after Anthropic rolled out Mythos to a limited number of users, citing concerns about the artificial intelligence model’s potential to do damage in the wrong hands, the company said it’s ready to release an equally powerful model to the public.
Anthropic on Tuesday announced Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model that will be available to its enterprise customers and paid subscribers. The company said the broad release is possible because of new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas, including cybersecurity and biology.
“For us, it’s really around what we call ‘race to the top,’ being able to provide this technology in a valuable fashion, and at the same time providing the right safety guardrails so that it can do asymmetrically more benefits than harm,” Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management for research, told CNBC in an interview.
Anthropic captivated Wall Street and government officials in April with the unveiling of Mythos, which excels at identifying security flaws within software. The company said it did not plan to make the model generally available, and it has limited the rollout to a select group of companies as part of a cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing.
But with the launch of Claude Fable 5, Anthropic is honoring its stated “eventual goal” to deploy Mythos-class models at scale. It’s also capitalizing on growing momentum and investor interest in its technology ahead of a potentially massive IPO, which is expected to take place as soon as this year.

Artificial intelligence companies make powerful products. They also make outlandish claims.
When Anthropic released Claude Mythos, an AI model focused on cybersecurity, which has inspired widespread thrill and panic over how capable it is said to be. There was a catch, though: the public can’t touch it. OpenAI declared at the end of last week that it, too, had developed a frighteningly capable cybersecurity AI.
Anthropic called Mythos a “reckoning” for the cybersecurity industry because of how keenly adept at exposing software weaknesses the new tool had proven. According to Anthropic, Mythos has laid bare thousands of vulnerabilities in commonly used applications for which no patch or fix exists, prompting the startup to form an alliance with cybersecurity specialists, nicknamed Project Glasswing, to bolster defenses against hacking and withhold the model from wide distribution, much like an arthouse film that plays solely in Los Angeles and New York.

Shakeel Hashim writes in a Guardian op-ed:

Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software.
If such technology was widely available and as capable as Anthropic claims, the implications could be catastrophic. Cyber-attacks are no longer a solely digital problem. Almost everything we rely on in the physical world involves software. In recent years, airports, hospitals and transport networks have been crippled by cyber-attacks. Until now, attacks of this scale required serious expertise. Mythos would put that capability in reach of amateurs – and turbocharge the professionals’ ability to wreak havoc.
Already, though, cybersecurity experts are pushing back on Anthropic’s claims. My colleague Aisha Down reports:
It is unclear if Anthropic has built the machine god. What is more apparent is that the San Francisco startup widely seen as the “responsible” AI company is brilliant at marketing.
“Mythos is a real development and Anthropic was right to treat it seriously,” said Jameison O’Reilly, an expert in offensive cybersecurity. But, he said, some of Anthropic’s claims, such as that it found thousands of “zero-day vulnerabilities” in major operating systems, were not that significant to real-world cybersecurity considerations.
In 2017, BuzzFeed News’s tech editor argued that the engineering of desire was Apple’s greatest strength. I agree, and Anthropic seems to possess a similar genius. The technology is powerful, but so is the manipulation of attention. Like Apple’s genuinely transformative iPhone, Claude is the real deal. Businesses can’t get enough of its coding capabilities. Serious companies – Apple, Nvidia, Google, JPMorganChase, Amazon Web Services, Broadcom – have partnered with Anthropic on Project Glasswing. However, it is also a clever bit of marketing to say: “You can’t have this; it’s too strong.” Nothing sparks a stronger desire than withholding. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic was the talk of the town at the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco last week.
Hype has obscured the public’s understanding of generative AI since the technology’s advent. Journalists and clear-eyed observers have been trying to pierce it for just as long. In 2019, Slate published a piece, “OpenAI says its text-generating algorithm GPT-2 is too dangerous to release” (hat tip to X’s @Banteg for surfacing the story in a tweet). The headlines may look similar because Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, was once the vice-president of research at OpenAI. He left the company in 2020. OpenAI also withheld its video generator Sora from wide release for many months. Did that kill Hollywood and film-making as we know it? No. The company shuttered Sora late last month.
Concerns over the hazards of simple text generation might seem quaint in comparison to the complete end of digital security, but the fact that we have moved past the fears of 2019 points to a heartening likelihood: we will move on from today’s fears of cybersecurity’s demise as well, settling in a middle-ground reality between the present status quo and the hyperbolic future.

Fierce competition means Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will be under pressure to justify the startup’s valuation to investors, and Claude Fable 5 could become a valuable new money-maker for the company. The model costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, which is twice as expensive as Claude Opus 4.8.

Real-Time Satellite Intel Is Making Ukrainian Drone Strikes Deadlier

2026-06-11T06:11:50.282-04:00

In another first for the Ukrainian military, its drone teams now have direct access to unclassified, commercial satellite imagery - the same used to update Google Maps - to improve the speed, precision and lethality of their drone strikes against Russian targets.

The imagery and data are fed directly to the laptops, phones or tablets being used by soldiers in the field in as little as 15 minutes after it is requested, shortening the time it takes to identify and then strike what may be a fast moving target. JL

Heather Somerville reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Ukrainian drone teams are using images from commercial satellites operated by Colorado-based Vantor which have improved the speed and precision of Ukraine’s drone attacks. The rapid delivery to soldiers of geospatial intelligence has shortened by 90% the time it takes to locate and strike Russian assets. The images go directly from the satellite to the soldier’s tablet, phone or laptop in 15 minutes. Software lets users identify targets in detail. The program marks the first instance of unclassified, commercial satellite imagery going directly to a soldier to guide real-time battle decisions. The satellite intel allows them to do within hours what used to require weeks, because of the relative slowness of launching a drone and waiting for it to survey large areas. “Compressing the sensor-to-shooter cycle is the defining trend of this war at the tactical level. ” The same satellites used to update Google Maps have found a new and deadly application.

The small unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, stationed about 6 miles from the front line in the country’s southeast, knew there was something afoot in a building obscured by thick tree cover. The spring foliage hid its outline but not the signals from the electronic devices within.
The team launched a reconnaissance drone, which couldn’t see much through the trees. But the soldiers had another card to play: high-definition, near-real-time images taken by commercial satellites, delivered directly to their phones, tablets and laptops.
The satellite sensors showed the thick, metal frames of armored vehicles—the type used by senior Russian military officials—parked around the building. After three days of surveilling the site from orbit, the unit determined it was a Russian meeting spot for planning operations, members said. Then they struck the building and vehicles with an attack drone, one of the members said.
“It was good work,” he said. “We made problems for our enemy.”
Over the past six months, during small-team missions to test the technology, images from commercial satellites operated by Colorado-based Vantor have improved the speed and precision of Ukraine’s drone attacks. The rapid delivery to soldiers of geospatial intelligence has shortened by as much as 90% the time it takes to locate and strike Russian assets, according to the technology providers and people involved in the missions. Augmenting the images is software that lets users identify and investigate targets in detail.
Members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces viewing Vantor software displaying geospatial intelligence. Bravo1Alpha
In this grinding war now well into its fifth year, Ukraine continues to spark new and unexpected technology innovation that its weary military hopes might provide an edge against the Russians. After a brutal winter, Ukraine has emerged this spring with a tactical and technological advantage over Russia. Part of that is being driven by Ukraine’s improvements in midrange strikes on Russia’s logistics hubs, warehouses and air defenses. Using faster, more accurate satellite imagery to guide strikes is part of Ukraine’s strategy for launching more precise attacks from a distance.
The Ukrainian military’s deployment of the program marks the first known instance of unclassified, commercial satellite imagery going directly to a soldier to guide real-time battle decisions, according to the companies and military analysts. The same satellites used to monitor illegal fishing and update Google Maps have found a new and deadly application.
The technology is a trans-Atlantic collaboration between Vantor, Dutch geospatial intelligence company Bravo1Alpha, U.S.-based Persistent Systems and Ukrainian defense firm Burevii.

The Ukrainian involved in the strike on the Russian planning site said the new technology helps preserve Kyiv’s two scarcest assets: “It is money, it is time,” he said. With access to the satellite images, his team didn’t have to rely on surveillance drones that can be expensive and are more easily jammed or shot down by the Russians.
During a springtime mission, called Starfall II, a Ukrainian unit spent 2½ weeks destroying billions of dollars in Russian assets. Among the targets was a Russian ammunition depot in occupied Ukraine that soldiers had identified after pulling a satellite image of the structures, which had once been used to store grain, members of the team said. Comparing the new image with older photos of the property dating back to before the Russian invasion, soldiers identified changes that convinced them it was no longer an agricultural operation and spotted fresh tire tracks that were consistent with military vehicles unloading ammunition. Members of Ukraine’s Brigade 422, a midrange strike team, dispatched attack drones.
“Every ammunition depot you destroy is at least a couple of Ukrainian soldiers’ lives you save,” said one member of the operation, a technical adviser assisting the armed forces.
A member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces interacts with Vantor satellite data on a mobile phone. Bravo1Alpha
The satellite intelligence has allowed them to do within hours what used to require weeks, either because of a lag in getting intelligence out to the front, or the relative slowness of launching a drone and waiting for it to survey large areas, often made slower by fog or snow.
“Compressing the sensor-to-shooter cycle is the defining trend of this war at the tactical level,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst and founder of defense advisory firm Gady Consulting.
As with every technology, satellites have their limitations: They are not particularly helpful on days of thick cloud cover, which is much of the winter in Ukraine, and can’t loiter over a moving target.

Satellite imagery itself is nothing new in war. Commercial and government satellite operators have long been key intelligence sources. Vantor published satellite images of Russian tanks and troops in position near the border of Ukraine before the war began. Ukraine has been heavily dependent on U.S. intelligence sources to conduct strikes.
Vantor’s push into defense helped it reach $900 million in annual recurring revenue last year, when the company, which is owned by private equity, also added more than 10 European defense and intelligence customers. Part of what those agencies are seeking, Vantor said, is the capability now being used by Ukraine.
Vantor’s images go directly from the satellite to the soldier’s tablet, phone or laptop in as little as 15 minutes, bypassing a centralized review in Kyiv that has tended to slow down the flow of intelligence to the front line by hours or days.
One Ukrainian fighter said intelligence received from human sources on the location of Russian targets required at least two days of review time in Kyiv. A former soldier in Ukraine said geospatial intelligence was sometimes so stale by the time it reached the units at the front line, soldiers couldn’t act on it. Military analysts say the turf war over access to satellite images between Ukraine’s government and military branches has hindered the dissemination of intelligence.

The press office for the Armed Forces of Ukraine declined to comment. The military intelligence unit didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Vantor software allows soldiers to compare a current satellite image with historical images, as Brigade 422 did with the ammunition depot, and see infrastructure changes or movement. Artificial intelligence monitors large areas and detects when a target shifts. The software generates 3-D renderings that soldiers can use to simulate the best flight path for a drone.

Vantor’s 10 satellites cover 2.7 million square miles of Earth a day, hitting any one point on the globe 12 to 15 times, said Will Cocos, Vantor’s chief transformation officer and a former Navy SEAL. Typically, the coordinates on Vantor’s images are within 5 meters (16 feet) of an object’s real position, plenty accurate for a 50-kilogram (110-pound) explosive, the Ukrainian users said.
Ukraine is now previewing for much of the West what’s possible when the chain of intelligence gets compressed, said intelligence analysts. U.S. Special Operations Command last year added new software to provide near-real-time commercial satellite images on soldiers’ mobile devices, a Socom spokeswoman said.
Army spokesman Maj. Sean Minton said the service doesn’t yet send satellite intelligence directly to soldiers’ devices, but is working toward it through a broader effort to create a high-speed information system that gives soldiers of all ranks access to satellite data “free from headquarters reviews.”

Removing some of these intermediaries responsible for vetting might speed things up, but it also raises the risks that soldiers get wrong information—and act on it, said Nand Mulchandani, former chief technology officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department’s artificial intelligence office.
“There are processes in place that slow things down, but there are processes in place for a reason,” Mulchandani said.

Putin Is Losing To Ukraine By Every Measure of Strategy, But Especially In Battle

2026-06-11T06:10:45.656-04:00

The Russian military and its leader, Vladimir Putin, are losing the war with Ukraine according to every measure by which success in such conflicts is determined.

But among those assessments, it is the repeated and now escalating failures on the battlefield which are especially noteworthy and strategically significant. For over four years the Russian army, navy and air force have failed - despite their initial advantages and repeated attempts - to overcome their Ukrainian adversaries. This inability to find a way to win on the battlefield has now led to an increasingly common belief among diplomatic and military experts, that Russia cannot win this war. JL

Mick Ryan reports in Futura Doctrina:

Vladimir Putin is losing - not in one or two dimensions of the conflict, but in every dimension by which one might measure strategic progress - military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic. The central premise of Putin’s strategy has been attritional: trade bodies and equipment for territory at a rate Ukraine cannot sustain. (But) Russia’s spring offensive has produced catastrophic losses since its opening days. The seizure of Ukraine's Fortress Belt in 2026 is unlikely. Russia has been forced to redeploy elite units to respond to Ukrainian counterattacks - cannibalising its offensive to plug defensive holes. Putin is grinding through Russian men faster than Russia can produce them without results on the battlefield. Despite the support of China and North Korea, it has failed to leverage advantages that create impact on the ground or in aerial assaults on Ukraine. It does not appear able to win this war.

Vladimir Putin is losing — not in one or two dimensions of the conflict, but in every dimension by which one might honestly measure strategic progress — military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic. His only viable claim to advantage at present is the disposition of the American president.
If the evidentiary case for this holds, it is an extraordinary strategic indictment of Russian strategy, Russian military capacity and Putin’s leadership. If it is even partially true, it should force an in-depth rethink of how Western governments and analysts have been narrating Russia’s position, and how they prepare for a Russia that could lose this war. And of course, it should drive further support for Ukraine and Western nations bringing still greater pressure to bear on Russia and its enablers.
On previous occasions I have used a structured framework of measures of success and failure to assess Ukraine’s war effort. These consistent measures of success and failure are useful because they set benchmarks for performance against which evidence can be gathered, and assessments made against whether success or failure is clear.
It should be noted however that there is no perfect method for assessing a war in progress. Besides the inherent uncertainties in war, systemic difficulties are present in any assessment process. In their book, Assessing War, Blanken, Rothstein and Lepore examine these difficulties in some detail, with political friction, bureaucratic friction, as well as motivational and cognitive biases being some of the biggest obstructions. That said, assessment is still vital to inform the evolution of strategy, the prioritisation of resources, the mobilisation of societal will and the maintenance of alliances.
For this assessment, I have used a method similar to my recent assessment on the trajectory of the war for Ukraine. You can read that assessment at this link. This assessment examines five dimensions — military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic — and measures Russia’s performance against each, before turning to the failure conditions that could still rescue Moscow’s strategic position.
Russia’s War in 2026: Measuring Strategic Failure
But nowhere, and I mean nowhere, can you find Russians talking about “victory” unless it is a person salaried directly by the Russian state, and sometimes not even all of them. Stefan Korshak, 8 June 2026
A useful foundation for the assessments in this article was my late 2025 examination of Russia’s 2025 Spring and Summer offensives, and the overall trajectory of its war effort. In that piece I concluded the following:
Russia has however demonstrated an ability to learn and improve its performance since the beginning of the war. It has evolved its higher command and control arrangements and has significantly improved their industrial support for the war. The Russians have also experimented with force structure changes and tactics.
This year offers another good case study of a Russian military institution, that despite its gains in learning, industrial production and ability to exploit the support of supporters such as China, North Korea and Iran, has failed to effectively leverage its advantages in a way that creates a decisive impact on the ground or in its aerial assaults on Ukraine.
On its current trajectory, it does not appear able to win this war.
That has profound implications for how this war should now be prosecuted and how Ukraine’s supporters might provide the assistance to allow Ukraine to achieve its strategic goals of sustaining national sovereignty, denying undue Russian influence over its politics and society and establishing a robust deterrent against future Russian aggression.
Now, what do the five dimensions of Russian power — military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic — look like against the context of the war in Ukraine in 2026?
Dimension 1: Military — Russia’s “meat grinder” and massed aerial attacks are consuming Russian resources for minimal return. The central premise of Putin’s military strategy since 2023 has been attritional: trade bodies and equipment for territory at a rate Ukraine and its supporters cannot sustain, while bringing Ukraine under sustained aerial attack, until Ukrainian resistance collapses or Western will fractures. That strategy requires Russia to absorb casualties at a rate it can replenish and for its aerial campaign to support battlefield gains with impacts on Ukraine’s defence industry and civilian morale. In 2026, the arithmetic of that calculation has turned against the Kremlin.
Assessment: One of the most significant military data points of early 2026 is that Russia’s current offensive operations are yielding few gains. Indeed, over the past three months, territorial gains have favoured Ukraine and not Russia (see graph below from Russia Matters). For Russian commanders, given the enormous commitment of manpower along the front line, this is a very worrying trend as they progress into the summer months. This shortfall in territorial gains, contrary to recent comments by Putin who on 5 June claimed that Russia has seized territory four times the size of Ukraine, is exacerbated by combat losses.
Now, for the first time since the invasion began, Russia is losing more troops than it is mobilising. Since the start of 2026, according to Ukrainian General Staff estimates, Russian forces lost over 160,000 personnel killed or seriously wounded. March 2026 alone produced 35,000 Russian casualties — a single-month record for the entire conflict. The Kremlin had targeted daily recruitment of between 1,100 and 1,150 personnel; the actual figure has fallen to approximately 940. For four consecutive months from December 2025, Russia’s losses have exceeded its intake.
Ukrainian General Staff statistics.1 January and 7 June 2026
The cost of territorial gain has also risen sharply. According to figures from Russia Matters and the Ukrainian General Staff, Russia suffered 200 casualties for each square mile taken in 2025. But, in the first five months of 2026 with a net gain of 17 square miles, it suffered over 9600 casualties for each. In the past three months, the capture of territory has moved in Ukraine’s favour.
Source: Russia Matter.
Russia’s spring offensive against the Fortress Belt opened in mid-March with large, armoured column attacks and produced catastrophic losses in its opening days, with the Institute for the Study of War assessing that the seizure of the Belt in 2026 is unlikely. Russia has been forced to redeploy elite Airborne and naval infantry units southward to respond to Ukrainian counterattacks — cannibalising its offensive timetable to plug defensive holes. Putin’s “meat grinder” is grinding through Russian men faster than Russia can produce them without much in the way of results on the battlefield...

Car Bomb Kills Russian Ammo, MIssile Supply Commander Near Moscow

2026-06-10T09:21:45.083-04:00

A car bomb detonating near Moscow killed the Russian officer in charge of the military's artillery and missile ammunition supplies.

Given the importance to Russia of its missile, drone and artillery ammunition, his assassination has a significant symbolic and well as practical impact. He was the latest in a string of senior Russian officials killed by bombs in or near Moscow. JL

Pjotr Sauer reports in The Guardian:

An explosive device planted underneath a BMW detonated at about 5.30am on Tuesday as Col Damir Davydov was driving near his home in the city of Balashikha. Davydov headed the Russian military’s artillery and missile ammunition supply directorate, a key logistics role responsible for overseeing the distribution of weapons to the armed forces. Security camera footage show Davydov’s vehicle erupting in flames and rolling into a parked car. He was still alive after being pulled from the vehicle but he died from his injuries shortly afterwards. It was the latest in a string of assassinations targeting Russian military officials and prominent pro-war figures since the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine.

A senior Russian military official has been killed in a car bombing near Moscow, according to media reports.
An explosive device planted underneath a BMW detonated at about 5.30am on Tuesday as Col Damir Davydov was driving near his home in the city of Balashikha, the independent outlet Astra reported. It was the latest in a string of assassinations targeting Russian military officials and prominent pro-war figures since the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Davydov, 57, headed the Russian military’s artillery and missile ammunition supply directorate, a key logistics role responsible for overseeing the distribution of weapons to the armed forces.
The Kremlin on Wednesday confirmed that an explosion had taken place and that Vladimir Putin had been informed. Asked about the investigation, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to provide details, saying: “As you understand, information related to the ongoing investigation cannot be disclosed. This is, of course, a matter for our special services.”

Security camera footage shared by pro-Kremlin media appeared to show Davydov’s vehicle erupting in flames and rolling into a parked car. The Telegram channel Mash reported that bystanders rushed to pull the driver from the wreckage, but he died from his injuries shortly afterwards.
A bystander who tried to help Davydov told Astra the colonel was still alive after being pulled from the vehicle.
“All of his clothes were on fire. I put out the flames on his T-shirt and tore it off so it wouldn’t burn his skin … Looking at him, it was clear he was unlikely to survive,” the person said.

Bomb meant for ‘Butcher of Buc say
Read more
Ukraine has not yet commented on the incident.
Without directly blaming Ukraine, Vladimir Shamanov, a Russian lawmaker and retired general, condemned the attack as an “outrage”, adding: “Such insolence should be met with the same.”
Since the start of the war, Ukrainian intelligence agencies have targeted dozens of senior Russian military officers and Moscow-installed officials in occupied territories, accusing many being involved in war crimes.
The latest assassination will intensify scrutiny of Russia’s internal security apparatus and its ability to protect senior officials. It came despite heightened security measures introduced for top military and political figures, including Vladimir Putin, after a number of high-profile attacks.
In an added embarrassment for the security services, the attack took place less than a mile from the spot where, just over a year ago, Lt Gen Yaroslav Moskalik, the deputy head of the Russian armed forces’ main operations directorate, was killed in a similar car bombing.
Little is known about the clandestine Ukrainian networks believed to be operating inside Russia and Russia-controlled territories, carrying out assassinations and attacks on military infrastructure far behind the frontline.
Successful Ukrainian intelligence operations targeting Russian officials are believed to be one of the reasons behind Russia’s growing use of internet shutdowns, a measure that has caused public frustration across the country.
Russian state media also reported a separate incident in Moscow on Tuesday, saying there had been an attempt to kill an employee of a scientific-industrial enterprise.
Citing Russia’s investigative committee, RIA Novosti reported that a teenage girl had allegedly retrieved an explosive device from a dead drop on the instructions of Ukrainian handlers and passed it to a teenage boy. Authorities said both teenagers had been detained before the device could be used.

Russia Forced To Ration Ammo As Ukraine Strikes Degrade Supplies

2026-06-10T09:03:47.387-04:00

In its latest strike on Russian ammunition storage depots, Ukraine's drones blew up an arsenal outside Belgorod in Russia near the Ukrainian border, resulting in the explosion captured in the photo at left.

The strategic impact of Ukraine's relentless targeting of these depots is that Russian units have been forced to ration the amount of ammunition they use, curtailing the impact on Ukrainian operations. JL

Bohuslav Romanenko reports in New Voice of Ukraine:

Ukrainian strikes on Russian logistics routes and ammunition depots have forced the Russians to impose limits on artillery ammunition use. "Some Russian units, including the 36th Army command have introduced limits on the use of artillery ammunition. Earlier, on a specific section of the front, the enemy concentrated fire and kept firing until it destroyed the entire position; now such cases have decreased.” Because of the shortage of artillery ammunition, Russian forces are also reducing the use of weapons systems positioned closer to the line of combat.
Ukrainian strikes on Russian logistics routes and ammunition depots have forced some Russian units to impose limits on artillery ammunition use, Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesman for Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces, said on national television on June 9.
Speaking on the United News telethon, Voloshyn said Ukrainian forces have been targeting Russian supply routes and ammunition storage sites.
“This has led to the fact that in some Russian units, including the 36th Army, the command has introduced limits on the use of artillery ammunition,” Voloshyn said. “Earlier, on a specific section of the front, the enemy concentrated fire and kept firing until it destroyed the entire position; now such cases have decreased.”

Because of the shortage of artillery ammunition, Russian forces are also reducing the use of weapons systems positioned closer to the line of combat, he added.
Read also:

Ukrainian drones obliterate Russian logistics to Crimea
At the same time, the Southern Defense Forces said Russia is compensating for reduced artillery use with airstrikes, using guided aerial bombs and missile strikes against Ukrainian military positions as well as towns and villages.
Overnight into June 7, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces attacked 26 Russian military targets in temporarily occupied parts of Ukraine and in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast.

Analysts at the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War previously said Ukraine’s medium- and long-range strikes were causing anger and panic among Russian milbloggers, who complained that Ukrainian forces were hitting critical defense infrastructure and knocking out radar stations and air defense systems.

Russia's Retreat From Kinburn Spit Enables Direct Ukraine Threat To Crimea

2026-06-10T08:49:04.014-04:00

The noose appears to be tightening. Yesterday, the Chonhar Bridge from the mainland to Crimea was reported destroyed, a day after it had been severely damaged and rendered unusable.

As Ukrainian mid and long range drones make the routes through occupied southern Ukraine toward Crimea increasingly untenable, if not suicidal for Russian truckers, other Ukrainian advances are threatening Crimea from the northwest. Russian troops deployed on the Kinburn spit, which lies at the mouth of the Dnipro as it enters the Black Sea, are withdrawing (as best they can) because Ukraine's drone blockade had prevented their resupply and reinforcement. This means that Ukraine can flank the Russians still occupying the parts of Kherson oblast between the Dnipro and Crimea. The Kremlin will either have to take some of its scarce troop strength to defend that shoreline - or pull back further - which means the routes to Crimea will be exposed and vulnerable. JL

The Kyiv Post reports:

Russian units of the 337th Regiment are withdrawing from parts of the Kinburn Spit in southern Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region after Ukrainian strikes disrupted supply routes to the area. Deliveries of food, fuel and ammunition to Russian positions on the spit have effectively ceased. (This matters) because the spit could pave the way for the liberation of Crimea. It is “an important strategic point” as “the Kinburn Spit controls the Dnipro River’s outlet into the Black Sea and is used for shelling southern parts of the Mykolaiv region. For Russia, this point is important to prevent the landing of troops from our side.” Attacks on Russian logistics supplying Crimea have intensified in recent weeks

Russian forces are reportedly withdrawing from parts of the Kinburn Spit in southern Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region after Ukrainian strikes disrupted supply routes to the area.
Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan movement, said Monday that units of Russia’s 337th Regiment had begun leaving positions due to logistical difficulties and personnel shortages, citing information allegedly provided by one of its agents embedded within Russia’s Dnipro Grouping of Forces.
The partisan group said deliveries of food, fuel and ammunition to Russian positions on the spit have effectively ceased after Ukrainian forces targeted supply routes serving the area.

“The occupiers were forced to urgently evacuate from the Kinburn Spit,” Atesh wrote, adding that Russian troops remaining on the peninsula no longer have sufficient personnel to maintain defensive positions.

The claim came amid reports of intensified Ukrainian mid-range attacks against Russian supply routes to occupied Ukraine, including those supplying the Crimea peninsula and eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region.
Where’s the Kinburn Spit?
The Kinburn Spit is a narrow sandy peninsula stretching between the Black Sea and the Dnipro-Buh estuary, roughly 60 kilometers (37 miles) southwest of the city of Mykolaiv.
It is positioned at the Dnipro River’s outlet into the Black Sea.
While most of the Mykolaiv region remains under Ukrainian control, Russian forces have occupied the spit since the early months of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Why is the Kinburn Spit a big deal?
Observers argued that the spit could pave the way for the liberation of Crimea.
In late 2025, Ukrainian Navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk called it “an important strategic point” for Moscow as it allows it to “close the exit to the sea from the Kherson and Mykolaiv ports.”
“For them, this is an important strategic point, because due to the ability to be there, they control the Dnieper-Buz estuary, that is, they actually close the exit to the sea from the Kherson and Mykolaiv ports,” Pletenchuk said, according to state media Ukrinform.

“In addition, the Kinburn Spit is used for shelling the southern parts of the Mykolaiv region. For them, this point is important to prevent the landing of troops from our side,” he added.
In late 2022, Ukrainian commandos conducted an amphibious landing at the spit. At the time, a Forbes report argued that seizing the spit could allow Ukrainian troops to “flank the defensive positions the Russians are building on their side of the Dnipro River.”
Around the same time, an analysis published by The Conversation also noted its historical significance for Russia and argued that liberating the spit could “[open] up the recapture of Crimea.”
“Since the Russians took an active interest in this area in 1737, several major battles have been fought for control of the peninsula and the local area,” the report says.
What’s the latest development?
Atesh said elements of Russia’s 337th Regiment had suffered major casualties, where Russian fire teams stationed on the spit have struggled to counter Ukrainian drones.
The group added that some personnel had previously been redeployed to the Zaporizhzhia front, while remaining troops were being shuffled between positions without receiving reinforcements.

Kyiv has not officially commented on the claims as of early Tuesday afternoon, and Kyiv Post could not independently verify the reported withdrawal.
While attacks on Russian logistics supplying Crimea have intensified in recent weeks, there are no signs of an imminent Ukrainian offensive to retake the Crimean peninsula.

Corporate CFOs Struggle To Track AI Costs As Token Expense Accelerates

2026-06-10T08:38:44.047-04:00

As if the exponential rise in AI token use - and related expenses - were not troublesome enough for putative corporate customers, the Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) of those organizations are finding that just tracking usage is difficult. An underwhelming 26% admit to having a 'comprehensive' view of their AI costs. Some are probably asking AI to estimate it for them.

And in a related challenge, determining whether - and how - those investments generate returns for the customers - and, in turn, for their customers - is equally hard. At some point, as systems for monitoring and measuring catch up with the technology, there will be greater clarity. In the meantime, which is to say, in time for the next quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts, there will be a lot of optimistic hemming, hawing and corporate finance doublespeak. JL

Kristin Broughton and colleagues report in the Wall Street Journal:

The shift to pricing based on usage, as measured by AI tokens, is creating new challenges for even experienced finance teams. CFOs used to paying flat amounts for technology are finding costs more unpredictable and harder to model as they build agents and embark on ambitious AI investments. 26% of companies have a comprehensive view of their AI costs, 50% have some visibility and 22% report no visibility. Charging per token helps AI firms manage the risk that customers could cut their subscriptions, but usage-based pricing shifts risk to customers, forcing them to track consumption. Many CFOs “are going to see their Anthropic bill and freak out this quarter. I don’t want everyone using tokens and setting up AI agents or AI processes that don’t have long-term scalable benefits.”

Finance chiefs are trying to get a better read on how much AI their companies are using to avoid a sticker shock moment as vendors begin charging for the technology by tokens.
The shift to pricing based on usage, and measured by tokens—the basic unit of measurement for AI computing—is creating new challenges for even the most experienced finance teams. CFOs used to paying flat amounts for technology are finding costs more unpredictable and harder to model as they build agents and embark on ambitious AI investments.
Twenty-six percent of companies say they have a comprehensive view of their AI costs, while 50% have some visibility and 22% report no visibility or visibility after billing, according to an as-yet-unreleased survey from KPMG. “It’s a new resource that needs to be managed that didn’t exist quite that way, and we’re seeing exponential growth,” said Steve Chase, KPMG’s global head of AI.
KPMG is working with companies that have blown through their annual token and cloud computing budgets in a matter of months, according to Chase. Another KPMG client has seen its token usage explode sixfold, he said.
Life360, a company that provides location sharing and digital safety services, has taken steps to manage AI spending by implementing tools that reduce token consumption and redesigning AI agents.
Russell Burke, Life360’s finance chief, said the company doesn’t yet have a real-time monitor of its token spending, but he hopes to have one soon. “We hope that’s right around the corner,” he said.

AI firms and software companies have implemented metered usage as a component of their enterprise pricing as customers have boosted investments. Charging per token can better align revenue with costs, and can help software companies manage the risk that enterprise customers could cut seats from their subscriptions, analysts said. Usage-based pricing can also provide customers with more flexibility.
AI providers including Anthropic and OpenAI, and software companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce, charge enterprise customers, at least in part, by usage.
Usage-based pricing shifts risk to the customers, because it forces them to track consumption, said Gil Luria, head of technology research at financial services firm D.A. Davidson. While some big companies have pushed employees to tokenmaxx, many other CFOs “are going to see their Anthropic bill and freak out this quarter,” Luria said. Tokenmaxxing refers to using as much computing as possible to be seen as AI-forward.
Token spending was a focus during Affirm’s annual budgeting process, which wrapped up last month, said Rob O’Hare, the company’s finance chief. The company during its March quarter significantly increased the amount of code that it writes using agents, which boosted productivity of its software development teams. “We saw this almost overnight step-function change in token consumption,” O’Hare said.
Affirm monitors AI usage on a near-real-time basis, and reviews costs including through weekly reports to the company’s leadership team. The company said it has increased productivity on its engineering team, and is seeing a strong return on its investments.
Reckitt CFO Shannon Eisenhardt. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
Reckitt, the U.K. consumer-goods giant, is scrutinizing how employees are using AI and adjusting spending where needed, Chief Financial Officer Shannon Eisenhardt said. For example, when Reckitt rolled out 12 AI solutions for its marketing team, it noticed usage for some tools dropped off after a few weeks as employees reverted to old habits, she said.
The company found that one of the marketing solutions led to inaccurate and insufficient data and slowed its rollout to ensure the data were reliable, Eisenhardt said.
“Have the ROIs adjusted down a bit? Yes, because, of course, as you push out the savings, that has an implication of it’s coming in a bit slower,” Eisenhardt said. “But it’s not in any way where it starts to make you think, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if we should be doing this.’ ”
Analysts and executives drew parallels between the surge in AI costs and companies’ investments in cloud computing during the pandemic. Companies at the time invested heavily in enterprise software as corporate employees worked from home, but later pared software spending, citing a need to control costs. The rush of investment into AI could face a similar pullback, they said.
Corning, the glassmaker that now supplies fiber optics for data centers, has limited the number of AI tools employees have access to, and focused its AI budget on a smaller number of major projects, CFO Ed Schlesinger said.
The company, at the same time, wants to encourage employees to experiment with the technology and use in their roles daily. “We’re limiting ourselves in total, but we’re not preventing employees from learning and experimenting,” Schlesinger said.
Sporting brands owner Amer Sports is considering potential uses for AI, from processing invoices to closing the books and account reconciliation, finance chief Andrew Page said. But the company behind brands including Arc’teryx and Salomon is moving slowly, in part to avoid ballooning costs for AI usage, he said.
“I didn’t want everyone going out, you know, using tokens and setting up AI agents or setting up AI processes that didn’t have long-term scalable benefits for the entire back-end process,” Page said.

Russians Pull 381 Billion Rubles From Banks As Cars Deliver Fuel To Front

2026-06-09T10:49:39.444-04:00

In related signs of the Kremlin's economic and military desperation,

the Russian central bank has begun limiting the amount of cash that Russians can withdraw from ATMs after a 30 year record 381.2 billion rubles were taken out by citizens in May.

At the same time, the Russian government has begun using civilians driving their own cars to deliver fuel to the frontlines in an attempt to avoid increasingly accurate and devastating Ukrainian drone strikes on trucks behind the fighting front. JL

UA News reports and Sania Kozatskyi reports in Militarnyi:

In May, the Russian banking system faced a massive outflow of cash - 381.2 billion rubles (approximately $5.2 billion) - the highest figure in the past three decades. Russians are increasingly choosing “cash” due to uncertainty—both geopolitical and macroeconomic. People want to have money on hand for expenses. The Russian central bank tightened controls on cash withdrawals via ATMs starting June 1. From now on, banks will monitor monthly cash withdrawal limits. Russia has started using civilian vehicles to transport fuel to its military units in occupied Ukraine. The move is an attempt to conceal military logistics from Ukrainian drone strikes, which have increasingly targeted Russian supply routes and fuel shipments far behind the front lines.
In May, the Russian banking system faced a massive outflow of cash. According to media reports, this figure was the highest in the last three decades. Experts attribute the situation to changes in the population’s financial behavior and economic processes taking place in the country.

In Russia, the amount of cash in circulation increased by another 381.2 billion rubles in May, setting a record for that month since statistics began in 1995.
It is noted that in April, the volume of cash in the Russian economy jumped by 678.7 billion rubles, and in March—by 301.1 billion.
The cumulative total of paper banknotes in circulation in Russia since the beginning of the year has increased by 1.09 trillion rubles.
Natalia Milchakova, a leading analyst at Freedom Finance Global, explained that Russians are increasingly choosing “cash” due to uncertainty—both geopolitical and macroeconomic. According to her, people want to have money on hand for unplanned expenses “right here, right now.”
In addition, internet outages—which deprive Russians of access to online banking and cashless payments—as well as the Russian Central Bank’s key rate cuts, which make bank deposits less attractive, are also playing a role.
In response, the Russian central bank tightened controls on cash withdrawals via ATMs starting June 1. From now on, banks will monitor monthly cash withdrawal limits, and suspicious transactions—such as large withdrawals after a long hiatus or multiple transactions within a short period—may be blocked.
Russia has started using civilian vehicles to transport fuel to its military units in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
A video published by the Exilenova+ Telegram channel captures Russians describing the operation themselves.
According to a man speaking in the video, a convoy of civilian cars carrying one ton of gasoline was organized in the city of Kizilyurt, Dagestan.

The fuel was packed in jerry cans and loaded into the trunks of private vehicles. The shipment was reportedly arranged at the request of the city’s authorities.
The gasoline is said to be intended for Russian military units stationed in Tokmak, a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

In addition to transporting fuel, the drivers in the convoy are carrying 1.5 million rubles to purchase another batch of gasoline for the military.
Beyond supplying vehicles, gasoline is a critically important resource for maintaining the combat readiness of Russian units at the front lines. Modern warfare requires a constant power supply for electronic warfare (EW) systems, charging batteries for reconnaissance and strike drones, and powering communication equipment and other devices. Generators are the primary power source in dugouts and observation posts.
Russian forces have also begun disguising military trucks as civilian vehicles due to active attacks by Ukrainian drones deep behind the lines.
In the northern part of Crimea, an unusually fresh blue-painted Ural truck was spotted. A man in civilian clothes with a short haircut was driving, even though the vehicle still bore military license plates.

The vehicle’s cargo bed also stands out. Although it is designed to resemble a civilian dump truck, its dimensions appear unusually large, suggesting it may have been modified to transport military supplies.
According to the Crimean Wind monitoring project, the command of Russia’s Dnepr Group of Forces has ordered the large-scale use of civilian-looking vehicles to transport fuel along the highway linking Rostov-on-Don with Russian-occupied Crimea.
The move is believed to be an attempt to conceal military logistics from Ukrainian drone strikes, which have increasingly targeted Russian supply routes and fuel shipments far behind the front lines.

In recent weeks, the Ukrainian Defense Forces have intensified drone attacks on logistics trucks and fuel tankers traveling along routes from Russia to occupied Crimea. The increased frequency of these strikes has already forced the invaders to restrict cargo movement through the temporarily occupied parts of the Kherson region toward the peninsula.

Ukraine's 3rd Corps Ran 18,000 Ground Robot Missions, Inc 600 Wounded Evacs

2026-06-09T10:03:30.305-04:00

In its first full year of ground robot deployment at operational scale, Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps conducted 18,000 missions, including the evacuation of 600 wounded soldiers.

The significance of this achievement lies in both the corps' ability to manage the complexities of this new type of maneuver across the breadth of its areas of responsibility, but also in demonstrating that ground robots have now become an essential, integrated element of a fighting unit's success. JL

Roman Kohanets reports in United 24:

Ukraine's Third Army Corps carried out more than 18,000 ground-robot missions over its first year of operations, evacuating more than 600 wounded soldiers and transporting 4,500 tons of cargo. Officers attributed the throughput to streamlined paperwork and a mission-command model that lets junior commanders decide how to execute orders while senior officers set the intent. A dedicated "Battle Captain" software runs each engagement directly and coordinates between units without clarifying decisions up the chain of command.
Ukraine's Third Army Corps carried out more than 18,000 ground-robot missions over its first year of operations, evacuating more than 600 wounded soldiers and transporting 4,500 tons of cargo.
Corps officers presented the figures on June 8 at a press conference marking one year since the unit deployed on the Lyman–Borova front.

The deputy chief of staff of the Third Army Corps, Danylo "Boroda" Novytskyi, framed the scale of the effort.
"In terms of technological development, we can clearly state that we are the first and, so far, the only corps using ground robotic complexes at this level. Every second ground robot in Ukraine's Armed Forces fights with the Third Corps," Novytskyi stated.
The corps logged further unmanned-systems tallies over the same period:
More than 300,000 strike missions by unmanned systems;
More than 17,000 Russian drones hit.
Officers attributed the throughput to streamlined paperwork and a mission-command model that lets junior commanders decide how to execute orders while senior officers set the intent. A dedicated "Battle Captain" software runs each engagement directly and coordinates between units without clarifying decisions up the chain of command.
Ground robotic complexes, or unmanned ground vehicles, are remotely operated platforms used to move ammunition and supplies, evacuate casualties, and conduct demining in zones too exposed for crewed vehicles.
A ground robotic system pulls a stretcher during a simulated evacuation of a wounded soldier. (Photo: open source)
Medical-evacuation variants are commonly fitted with armored capsules to shield wounded personnel during extraction. Their value has grown as dense FPV-drone coverage near the front has made manned transport along the final kilometers increasingly untenable.
The corps has paired its robotic logistics buildup with a widening long-range strike reach. In late May, its 3rd Separate Assault Brigade pushed attack drones more than 205 kilometers into the temporarily occupied Luhansk region, striking Russian supply routes, ammunition depots, and armored vehicles near the Izvaryne border crossing.
The operation ranked among the deepest publicly reported drone strikes on Russian logistics in the region.

Why A Sudden Russian Army Collapse Is No Longer Out of the Question

2026-06-09T09:15:24.284-04:00

Soldiers of the Russian army have endured more misery than any other fighting force in recent memory: massive losses, corrupt, cruel and incompetent officers, inadequate supplies, indifferent medical care and now, after four bloody years with little to show for that sacrifice, the surging success of their Ukrainian enemies.

Students of history will recall that the Russian Revolution was sparked by the mutiny of the Tsar's field armies on the Eastern Front in WWI - as well as the rebellion of Baltic Fleet sailors at Kronstadt naval base outside St Petersburg (which was bombed last week by Ukrainian drones). That this generation of Russian soldiers and sailors have endured their privations for so long, given the horrific scale of their casualties and paucity of success, is a matter of surprise to observers from more civilized societies. But now, as the following article reveals, all of the elements that have historically led to military mutinies are present for Russian troops in Ukraine. The most soul-destroying may be the Ukrainians' offensive successes, both at the front and striking the Russians' rear areas, including cities once considered untouchable. In addition to the lack of any hope of success for their own efforts, the troops must now confront the fact that, in many areas and perhaps overall, they are losing. There are no rumors or stories about mutinies to date, but that final blow to morale, on top of leadership's refusal to admit any problems, may be the last straw. JL

Brynn Tannehill reports in The Bulwark:

Hemingway famously observed that one goes bankrupt “gradually and then suddenly.” The same can be said of armies. The biggest army does not automatically win. Armies fall apart in months due to a combination of poor leadership, lack of logistic support, exhaustion, corrupt regimes, failed offensives, and broken morale. Many of the conditions for Russian army collapse have been in place for a long time: corruption is endemic, commanders extort money from their troops, soldiers are punished with violence, tactics have resulted in high losses with minimal gains, all with predictable effects on combat effectiveness. (And) the most important condition - logistics - is now trending in the wrong direction. There is no hope of breakthrough. The spring offensive of 2026 has failed. (But) the best guarantor of poor Russian leadership is Putin's (good) health.

HEMINGWAY FAMOUSLY OBSERVED in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises that one goes bankrupt “gradually and then suddenly.” The same can be said of armies. Sometimes they’re routed in great, decisive actions, like the French in 1940, but often their ability to fight is eroded slowly over time by many factors, so gradually as to be almost imperceptible, before reaching a tipping point where the illusion of strength shatters all at once.
The war in Ukraine—just counting the high-intensity phase of it since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022—has been going on longer than World War I, and seems likely to surpass World War II in duration. Until this spring, the general consensus was that the war was in a perpetual stalemate of drones, trench warfare, and attrition that would go on, for all intents and purposes, forever. Many of those who subscribed to the theory of perpetual stalemate concluded that the only way for the war to end was for Ukraine to capitulate and cede all the territory it had lost (plus perhaps some more) to the Russians. Yet history teaches that as long as a country has the will to continue to fight, it will find a way to do so until it either loses the will or fighting becomes materially impossible.
For years, casual and expert observers alike assumed that if one of the armies in Ukraine were to collapse—to suddenly lose the wherewithal to fight—it would be the Ukrainians. But now it seems more likely to be the Russians. And that’s no accident, as it appears the Ukrainians’ theory of victory is not that they will drive the Russians from their land in great, sweeping offensives like those of late 2022 but that they will break the Russian army’s back by attacking its logistics, its manpower, and its will to fight.
What if the fate of Ukraine isn’t a perpetual attritional stalemate? What causes an army to collapse, and an invading tide to reverse itself? Here are four historical examples that might be instructive today.

The Russian Army in 1917
Russia suffered horrific casualties and numerous defeats during World War I, starting with the battle of Tannenberg in 1914. Russian peasant conscripts were poorly trained and poorly equipped, and the tsarist economy was not sufficiently industrialized to match that of Germany. Russian logistics, particularly railways, were ill equipped to move what troops and matériel they did have where they needed to be in a timely manner and in sufficient quantities.
About a year after the war began, with shocking defeats and even more shocking casualty lists, Tsar Nicholas II took personal command of the army, stocking his command staff with loyalists, cronies, and relatives. He embraced magical thinking about the mystical connection between the tsar and the people and believed that his personal command of the forces would lead to a boost in morale sufficient to ensure victory.
The decision backfired. The war continued to go poorly, the losses continued to mount, and there was no one for the people to blame but the tsar.
Nicholas was unsuited to supreme command during a modern war. Not only did he lack a mastery of industrial manufacturing, wartime economics, logistics, and strategy, but he chose underlings based more on their personal proximity to him and his court than their expertise. When his government was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1917, much of the army deserted.
The interim government that followed the Romanov dynasty was able to amass enough force to mount one last offensive—the so-called Kerensky Offensive in the summer of 1917—but when that failed, Russian soldiers lost all faith and quit fighting en masse.
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The German Army in 1918
After Bolshevik Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in December 1917, surrendering huge swaths of land and people to the Germans and all but ending the war in the east, Germany raced somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. Here they launched an offensive in hopes of finishing the war before American troops could make it across the Atlantic and augment the French and British military structure. The resulting spring offensive of 1918 was initially a success: German forces pushed close to Paris, roughly equaling their furthest advance of the war—but they outran their logistics and failed to break the French logistics before American forces arrived to help stabilize the lines and eventually push the front lines back toward the pre-war border. In the end, Germany suffered nearly a million irreplaceable casualties while leaving its army exhausted.
Behind the German lines, the economy was in tatters. The allied naval blockade of Germany had forced the introduction of ersatz (“substitute”) goods, often of inferior quality, both for industrial inputs and individual consumption: synthetic rubber, coal-tar industrial lubricants, “coffee” made from acorns, “tea” made from catnip, paper instead of cotton, “eggs” made from corn, and so on. When German workers went on strike in early 1918, the high command ordered that strikers immediately be conscripted and sent to the front. That helped ameliorate neither overall morale nor the growing problem of hunger.
Exhausted and demoralized German troops faced hordes of fresh Americans who brought the industrial and agricultural capacity of the United States with them. After four fruitless years of fighting in France, German troops began surrendering at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, believing that the war was lost, and the quickest way to end it and live was to capitulate.
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The Japanese Burma Area Army in 1944
By the standards of World War II, Burma was a backwater, constantly starved of men and matériel. Political infighting between the United States, Great Britain, and Chinese Nationalists under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek left the northern region of Burma a mess that no one wanted responsibility for. The Japanese objective in the theater was to prevent the Allied forces—especially British Indian forces—from invading the Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, which they were unprepared to do, while the Allied objective was to prevent the Japanese from invading and conquering India, which they didn’t intend to do either. Still, between 1941 and 1944, Japan steadily drove Commonwealth troops back toward the Indian border.
Then, in early 1944, Lt. Gen. Renya Mutaguchi, who believed he was destined to win the decisive campaign of the war, launched what may have been the most ill-considered offensive in history: Operation U-Go. He sent out 90,000 men to conduct a four-month long campaign—but with only twenty days of supplies on hand. He wrongly assumed they could simply live off the land as they advanced. These starving and diseased Japanese troops were decisively defeated at the Battles of Kohima and Imphal, where most of them died in wave after wave of doomed attacks. In the end, only 12,000 of these troops lived to see Japan again: a breathtaking 87 percent casualty rate. The Japanese Burma Area Army never recovered and spent the rest of the war retreating.
The failure of Japan in Burma was caused by poor leadership at all multiple levels: primarily Mutaguchi’s arrogance and delusions of world-historical grandeur, but also the Japanese high command’s lack of oversight and failure to rein in his foolhardy plans. At an operational level, failure to plan for adequate logistical support doomed U-Go as much as it’s overly ambitious premise.
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The South Vietnamese Army in 1975
As part of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the United States withdrew its forces from South Vietnam. In December 1974, North Vietnam began sending troops into South Vietnam preparatory to the 1975 spring offensive. In March 1975, South Vietnamese leadership realized that they could not effectively hold the Central Highlands and ordered a withdrawal to a more defensible line farther south.
The result was a chaotic rout in which both civilians and military personnel clogged a solitary highway running south. Despite pleas from the South Vietnamese government, the United States refused to intervene. North Vietnamese troops retained the support of China and the Soviet Union.
Though South Vietnamese troops rallied somewhat, the capital of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975. The mayhem as the city fell produced images of desperate American and Vietnamese civilians boarding helicopters on the roof of the U.S. embassy to escape the onrushing Communist regime. Forty-six years later, a similar scene played out in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The collapse of South Vietnam was primarily due to severe equipment and fuel shortages following heavily slashed U.S. aid, cascading logistical failures, and the fatal blunder of their ill-conceived retreat from the Central Highlands. South Vietnamese political and military leadership suffered from deeply ingrained corruption, and its heavy reliance on American-style warfare became impossible to sustain without American logistics and firepower to back it up. Even the threat of spending years in brutal North Vietnamese re-education camps was not enough to compel South Vietnamese troops to fight to the last man in service of a despised, corrupt, unpopular regime.
ALL OF THESE ARMIES STARTED OUT in positions of strength. Tsarist Russia had the largest standing army in Europe in 1917. Germany had numerical superiority and the best designed trench system on the Western Front in early 1918. Japan had more front-line troops in Burma at the end of 1943 than the British, and those troops were battle-hardened and well-trained compared to the Allied troops, who were ill-prepared for jungle warfare. South Vietnamese troops outnumbered their North Vietnamese counterparts four to one on paper, and were fighting to avoid ending up in concentration camps.
But the biggest army does not automatically win. All of these armies fell apart in a matter of months due to some combination of poor leadership, lack of logistic support, exhaustion, corrupt regimes, failed offensives, and broken morale.
None of these factors acts alone. Bad leadership can lead to bad logistics and failed offensives. Corrupt regimes can produce low morale and poor leaders. Lack of logistic support leads to cold, sick, starving, demoralized soldiers, and so on.
The conventional wisdom about the Russo–Ukrainian war has become that it is an attritional stalemate, where the front lines are unlikely to move again without some massive external force. This reading of the situation may be due in part to projection and extrapolation bias. Projection bias leads people to assume that the future will look exactly like today; extrapolation bias leads people to assume that if a trend has been going up (or down), it will continue to do so in a straight line indefinitely.
Russia displays many of the characteristics common to armies that fail. Poor leadership: Putin demands constant advances, while being fed lies by his underlings who are afraid of admitting failure. Corruption is endemic to every aspect of Russian life, and money in the military budget often doesn’t end up where it needs to be. Even when it isn’t diverted to vanity projects, it often is used in head-scratchingly ineffective ways, like the $50 million Oreshnik ballistic missile used to destroy a parking garage two weeks ago. Russia has also blown up the same McDonald’s in Kyiv four times now, and it brings into question the effectiveness of their targeting strategy and munitions allocation.
Troop morale is terrible; commanders constantly extort money from their troops. Russian soldiers are punished with violence, rape, torture, starvation, and occasionally murder, with predictable effects on combat effectiveness. The Russian tactic of the past year of sending in small infiltration teams to constantly probe Ukrainian defenses has resulted in extremely high losses and minimal territorial gains. There is no real hope (or intention of) a combined-arms breakthrough. The Russian spring offensive of 2026 has failed, and those creeping gains have effectively flatlined.
There have been constant reports of troops being shot when they attempt to retreat. Now, despite massive economic incentives to sign a military contract, Russia is struggling to replace their losses. Additionally, Russian soldiers don’t seem to be buying into the narrative that they’re liberating Ukraine—which may make them wonder whether it’s worth fighting in the first place.
Lastly, Russian logistics are suffering. After Russia mostly solved the HIMARS/GMLRS problem with better electronic warfare, their rear areas were generally safe from interdiction. Now, however, Ukrainian FPV drones are striking military transport vehicles 150 kilometers from the front. When the Russians send convoys at night to avoid Ukrainian drones, the Ukrainians simply use their drones to lay mines on the highways. The frequency of these strikes has been growing geometrically since January, and civilian fuel in Crimea is either rationed or gone completely. Russian “milbloggers” are starting to panic about the logistics of the Russian Army in southern and southeast Ukraine.
It is impossible to say if the Russian military will collapse; it has so far confounded all previous predictions that it would. However, many of the conditions for collapse have been in place for a long time, and the most important one (logistics) is now trending in the wrong direction.
It does seem, however, that military collapse is the Ukrainian theory of victory. They have publicly announced that their goal on the front lines is not to gain territory but to kill more soldiers than the Russians can replace, which is an attack against both Russian morale and the labor-starved Russian economy. Ukrainian long-range strikes against Russian energy infrastructure similarly attacks two of the factors that keep armies in the field: logistics and productive domestic economies. The more spectacular Ukrainian strikes—such as the recent strikes in the Moscow region and in St. Petersburg just as the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum was opening, are designed to weaken Russian morale and raise questions in the minds of Russian leaders, civilians, and soldiers about what the “special military operation” is really accomplishing. The Ukrainian assassination campaign against Russian general officers is similarly designed to erode morale, and to degrade leadership—though as always, the best guarantor of poor Russian leadership is Vladimir Putin’s health.

With @ $1 Billion Per Month Google, Anthropic Compute Power Deals, SpaceX Emerges As Major AI Infrastructure Provider

2026-06-09T08:54:34.002-04:00

With two recent deals to provide computing power to AI leaders Google and Anthropic at around $1 billion per month ($920 million per month for Google, $1.25 billion monthly for Anthropic), SpaceX is emerging as a - and possibly the - major provider of compute power for the AI industry.

It is the latest iteration of the Bay Area economic success story exemplified by a merchant named Levi Strauss who, rather than panning or digging himself during the 1849 Gold Rush, found another way to get rich by selling tools and strong pants made of denim to miners. In the current instance, SpaceX and its subsidiary xAI, after realizing that, at least so far, they would catch up to leading AI providers like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, can make as much or more by selling them the computing power they need. This is especially timely as it comes just as SpaceX is about to launch its IPO at a time when questions are being raised about the viability of AI companies' revenue and profit projections. JL

Kate Conger reports in the New York Times:

SpaceX revealed in a regulatory filing that Google will pay it $920 million a month for computing power, pumping billions of dollars into the company as it prepares for its IPO. The agreement, which starts in October and runs through June 2029, could earn SpaceX $30 billion. SpaceX reached a similar deal last month to provide Anthropic with computing power. Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month. It also helps establish SpaceX — which owns xAI — as a major infrastructure provider. As part of the agreement, Google will gain access to 110,000 A.I. chips from Nvidia, which would help it meet larger-than-expected customer demand for its A.I. models.

SpaceX revealed in a regulatory filing on Friday that Google will pay it $920 million a month for computing power, pumping billions of dollars into Elon Musk’s rocket company as it prepares for a blockbuster initial public offering.
The agreement, which starts in October and runs through June 2029, could earn SpaceX about $30 billion in total. It also helps establish SpaceX — which owns Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence lab, xAI — as a major infrastructure provider as companies compete in a fierce global race to dominate A.I.
As part of the agreement, Google will gain access to about 110,000 A.I. chips from Nvidia, which Google said would help it meet larger-than-expected customer demand for its A.I. models. The tech giant said in April that its cloud business had contracts totaling $460 billion that had yet to be fulfilled as revenue, indicating enormous demand for its services.
“Google Cloud and SpaceX are longtime partners,” a Google Cloud spokesman said in a statement. “This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected.” SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SpaceX reached a similar deal last month to provide Anthropic, another leading A.I. lab, with computing power. Anthropic, which is also expected to go public this year, is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month.
SpaceX is expected to go public next week in a deal that could value the company at more than $1.7 trillion and make Mr. Musk a trillionaire. As part of that process, the company has shed more light on its financial details in recent weeks to entice investors.
Mr. Musk has built a massive supercomputer in Memphis to power xAI. But the company has largely lagged behind competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
In the run-up to SpaceX’s going public, Mr. Musk has increasingly leaned into A.I. He has promoted xAI’s computing power as an asset, demonstrating that it can be turned into revenue through deals with Anthropic and Google.
Mr. Musk has also announced details of a giant chip factory he’s building in Texas. And in April, SpaceX announced a $60 billion deal to acquire the A.I. start-up Cursor, which makes a code-writing assistant.
The deal with Google deepens ties between the search giant and the rocket maker. Google owns a roughly 5 percent stake in SpaceX, and has explored the possibility of using SpaceX as a launch partner as Google seeks to put data centers in space, an effort known as Project Suncatcher.

Not Only Is Russia Not Winning, It Doesn't Know How To Win

2026-06-08T10:20:56.763-04:00

It is the second part of that headline which may be the most important.

It is apparent that Russia is not winning on the battlefield. But it is the fact that, after over four years of trying, they don't know how to win. The Russian command has tried everything: armor, motorcycles, mass infantry 'meat' attacks. Nothing has worked. They are almost out of weaponry and men, but more importantly, they are out of ideas. JL

Anne Applebaum reports in The Atlantic:

Suddenly, many people understand the Russian narrative is wrong: The Ukrainians are not losing. The Russians are not winning, and more important, they don’t know how to win. It is hard to see how the Russian army can move forward, because the front line is a no-go zone, 20 miles wide. Everything inside is visible to drones, which means any Russian truck, tank, or infantryman is instantly identified and easily hit. Because Russian commanders keep attacking, the Ukrainians are killing and wounding thousands of enemy soldiers. Putin is running out of air defense, too, making it difficult for the Russians to supply their troops. That also helps Ukraine target Russian infrastructure. At some point the front line will become a demilitarized zone, similar to North and South Korea, patrolled by drones. After that, it could become a border, one not be recognized by either side, but a major defeat for Putin, whose central goal - the removal of Ukraine from the map - would never be realized.

In a field outside of Kyiv last weekend, a van was parked discreetly behind some trees. Inside the van there were no passenger seats, just a long desk, two office chairs, two laptops, extra screens. Outside appearances to the contrary, this was a mobile drone-interceptor base, one of hundreds of similar vehicles now scattered around Ukraine. It’s also part of something much bigger: a set of technological advances that have changed the war with Russia, and maybe all wars, forever.
On one of the laptops, a soldier showed me a bird’s-eye view of a part of the Ukrainian countryside more than 100 miles away. His job is to identify the objects flying above it, to distinguish birds and bats from lethal Russian drones. When he sees the latter, the soldier on the laptop beside him can then direct an interceptor—a small drone that looks like a miniature rocket ship—to track and destroy the incoming Russian aerial vehicles before they hit their targets.

At first glance, the images on the screens look simple, like a video game. But this is not a low-tech operation. The AI-powered drone interceptors are made possible by a complicated network of radar systems, acoustic sensors, and other tools that hundreds of large and small Ukrainian tech companies are creating and updating every day, using data they get directly from soldiers like the ones I met. Almost none of these companies existed four years ago. They have emerged from a tech-literate civil society whose members changed their professions or their focus to help defend their country. I have met Ukrainian defense-company CEOs who come from financial services, architecture, politics. I met another one last weekend who had returned just that day from the front line. He told me he finds it useful to learn how soldiers are using his products, and how they might be improved.

Other kinds of teams across the country are connected to this constantly improving information system too, and not just in vans. Last year I was in an underground room in Ukraine where dozens of people were monitoring hundreds of miles of the front line on a series of screens. The Ukrainian defense analyst Andriy Zagorodnyuk calls this system of drones, monitors, AI-powered navigation, battle-tested robots, and interconnected soldiers “networked situational awareness,” and it explains why perceptions of this war have suddenly changed.
Ukrainian military technology has been evolving rapidly since the first years of the war. But only now are outsiders—in Europe, the United States, the Persian Gulf, and of course Russia—beginning to understand what that evolution means. Since 2022, many public arguments about the war, even in Europe and the U.S., have adopted the narrative put out by Russian propaganda, tacitly assuming that Ukraine, outmanned and outgunned, would eventually lose. Helping Ukraine was a way to stave off disaster, nothing more. When the Trump administration stopped sending military and financial aid to Kyiv in 2025, some in Washington expected (and maybe wanted) the end to come quickly.

Instead, Europeans have provided money. Ukrainian society produced networked situational awareness. And when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured the Gulf states in late March and signed a series of security agreements, something changed in the international narrative. The leaders of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were talking to Ukraine, not because they felt sorry for a war victim, but because they wanted to acquire drone interceptors like the ones I saw in action last weekend. Iranians use the same drone technology as the Russians, and the Ukrainians know better than anyone how to fight it. The Gulf leaders are not alone: Suddenly, many people have understood that the Russian narrative is wrong: The Ukrainians are not losing. The Russians are not winning, and more important, they don’t know how to win. Ukrainians and outside analysts have described this dynamic in three main theaters of the war.
The ground war. If the story of the past two years was one of slow, grinding forward progress for Russia, the story of this year is very different. Since early spring, at the start of its annual offensive, Russia has lost more territory in Ukraine than it has gained. Right now, it is hard to see how the Russian army can move forward, because the front line is not a line at all, but rather a broad no-go zone, some 20 miles wide. Everything inside this zone is visible to drones, which means that any Russian truck, tank, or infantryman seeking to attack new territory is instantly identified and can easily be hit. Because the Russian commanders keep attacking anyway, the Ukrainians are killing and wounding thousands of enemy soldiers, perhaps as many as 30,000, every month. They say their goal is to remove more Russians from the battlefield than can be recruited to replace them, and they may be close to succeeding.
The long-range war. Although they are unable to move the front line, Russians can still use drones and missiles to kill civilians and destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, as they did once again this week. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for this kind of attack is escalating, as he has no other practical way to damage Ukraine. He also knows that the Ukrainians don’t have enough air defense to stop ballistic missiles, even if they can now stop the majority of drones. Ukraine still relies heavily on air-defense equipment from the United States, especially ammunition for Patriot batteries. A European fund was set up to purchase these interceptor missiles, although some observers fear that there are simply not enough to buy. According to Zelensky, more Patriots were used during the first three days of the U.S.-Iran conflict than have been used during the entire Russia-Ukraine war.

What Putin doesn’t acknowledge is that his side is running out of air defense, too. That has helped Ukraine’s long-range drones more reliably target Russian oil and gas infrastructure, producing spectacular explosions and reducing Russian refining capacity by at least 20 percent. Almost all major oil refineries in central Russia ‌have halted or scaled back production, and some have been hit more than once.
With equal regularity, a new crop of Ukrainian drones with a range of 100 miles can target arms depots, logistical centers, and supply chains far behind the front line in Russian-occupied territories. These strikes are less spectacular than ones deep inside Russia, but they have already created crucial fuel shortages on the Crimean peninsula, and they are making it difficult for the Russians to supply their troops fighting in the East and the South.
The psychological war. For the past four years, the Kremlin has repeatedly told the Russian public that the war is going well, that Ukraine isn’t a real country, that victory is certain. But that’s hard to square with the panic that took hold of Moscow last month, when an annual military parade was shortened for fear it would be interrupted by Ukrainian drones. Nor does it square with the spectacular columns of black smoke that were billowing into the air on Wednesday morning, after Ukrainian drones hit a local refinery on the opening day of the Kremlin’s annual St. Petersburg economic forum. Kyrill Budanov, the former defense-intelligence chief who is now head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told me there is a lot of evidence that Russians are now finally facing the up to the falsehood of state propaganda: “They cannot understand why they have to keep fighting and why they are getting hit now, because they were told they were going to win and Ukraine is nothing.”

Not everybody thinks this means the war will end soon. One young woman, a Ukrainian civil servant, told me last weekend that she and her friends have already given up on the idea that they will ever live in a “normal” country again, because the war will last forever. She reminisced about a flight she and some friends took to Barcelona, before the war: “That beautiful life will never return.”
But there are signs that some in Moscow, at least, are preparing for the war to end. Recently, a set of slides leaked from the office of Sergei Kiryienko, a former Russian prime minister and now a senior official in Putin’s administration. They describe a plan to sell the end of the war to the country: declare victory, describe the Russian army as “the most combat-ready in the world,” portray small territorial gains as a huge success, claim that Europe suffered a huge economic blow, from which it will not recover, and that Ukraine will soon fall apart. Budanov believes that the Kremlin’s decision to cut off Telegram, the social-media platform most widely used in Russia, was a preemptive move, designed to prepare for this kind of narrative change, “so that when the time comes, they have only one official position and nothing else but that.”

Budanov also continues to believe that the negotiations started by the Trump administration could produce a cease-fire, along the current front line, as early as this year. “And then we will start resolving the other issues we have.” On Thursday, Zelensky wrote a letter directly to Putin proposing exactly that: an immediate cease-fire, accompanied by face-to-face negotiations between the two leaders. Putin publicly dismissed the idea, saying he sees “no point” in a meeting.

Russia still has other options. The Russian president, who has never acknowledged that Ukraine is a legitimate country, or that Zelensky is its legitimate president, could continue to bomb Ukrainian cities, hoping to destroy the electrical grid and make the country unlivable. He could call for mass mobilization, and continue trying to overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses, sacrificing thousands of lives. Some fear he could use this moment to widen the conflict and to attack a NATO country, possibly to test American willingness to defend allies. A Latvian general this week said that even if Russian drones can’t win in Ukraine, they have an advantage over NATO defenses that have yet to catch up with the fast-evolving technology.
Even without negotiations, Russia and Ukraine may be heading toward a new status quo. The transparent frontline zone may now be 20 miles wide, but as drone technology improves, it could soon be 30 or even 40 miles wide. At some point the front line will become not just a no-man’s-land but a de facto demilitarized zone, similar to the one that separates North and South Korea, regularly patrolled and maintained by drones.
After that, it could become a border—a temporary border, one that will not be recognized by either side—but a border nevertheless: no different from a river or mountain range, impossible to move, difficult to cross. This would not be a clear victory for Ukraine, but it would be a major defeat for Putin, whose central goal—the destruction of all of Ukraine, the removal of Ukraine from the map—would never be realized.

Ukraine Recaptured 600 Sq Km So Far This Year, Signaling Momentum Shift

2026-06-08T09:53:01.935-04:00

As of earlier this morning, Ukraine has recaptured over 600 square kilometers of territory, and is continuing to maintain aggressive counteroffensive operations, taking a major momentum shift away from the Russians.

Pokrovsk, which the Kremlin claimed to have taken six months ago, remains the scene of heavy fighting, a reality which has contributed to Russian forces inability, so far, to focus on Ukraine's heavily fortified fortress belt. The devastating mid and long range attacks on Russian logistics are also hindering the Kremlin's plans, making it difficult to supply, transport and assemble sufficient forces for attacks. JL

Anna Pruchnicka reports in Reuters:

Ukrainian forces have recaptured more than 600 square km of territory so far this year, the latest sign of shifting momentum. In May alone, Ukraine recaptured 100 square km more of territory than it lost and Ukrainian forces continue to maintain the initiative. The area around Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to capture fully since mid-2024, was among the most intense places of fighting. Russia claimed to have captured it last December. Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole in the southeast and south are also sectors where the heaviest fighting was taking ⁠place.
Ukrainian forces have recaptured more than 600 square km of territory so far this year, Ukraine's top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Monday, the latest sign of shifting momentum after years ‌of slow but relentless Russian gains.
In May alone, Ukraine recaptured 100 square km more of territory than it lost, Syrskyi said on the Telegram messaging app.

Syrskyi did not specify where the gains took place, saying only that in certain areas of the 1,200 km (800-mile) frontline, Ukrainian forces continued to maintain the initiative.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also said last month that Ukraine had ⁠recaptured around 600 square km in 2026.
Reuters was not able to verify the assertions. Independently determining lines of territorial control in Ukraine is difficult because of drone warfare that has created a wide no-man's land "kill zone" along the front. But independent groups that map the battlefield have also reported Russia's total advances slowing or reversing in recent months, for the first time since a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023.
Syrskyi said Russian forces were still trying to advance in the country's east and south, noting that the number of daily ‌battlefield ⁠clashes has substantially increased and describing the frontline situation as "difficult and dynamic".

The area around the embattled eastern city of Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to capture fully since mid-2024, was among the most intense places of fighting, he said.
DeepState, an independent Ukrainian battlefield map, has shown Pokrovsk as ⁠fully held by Russia for weeks. Russia claimed to have captured it last December.
Syrskyi also singled out the Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole areas in the southeast and south where the heaviest fighting was taking ⁠place.
In the initial months after Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian forces recaptured swathes of territory in a series of counterstrikes. But a major Ukrainian counter-offensive failed in ⁠2023, and Moscow has since been making grinding gains.
Ukraine made a push earlier this year in the south and southeast, which analysts have said helped to disrupt Moscow's spring offensive and its efforts around Pokrovsk.

Why "Nvidia Inside" May Power PCs and Consumer AI Adoption

2026-06-08T09:29:27.275-04:00

One of the concerns affecting AI growth is the slower than expected uptake from corporations and consumers. Cost is certainly part of that equation, but so is a related - and unanticipated - caution in figuring out how best to use AI. Which is why Nvidia's announcement that a new line of PC chips to be installed in Windows laptops could truly revolutionize the market.

For a technology billed as changing how humanity lives and works, AI needs to be as convenient and easily accessible as possible. PCs, and laptops in particular, are, in addition to cell phones, the the path to that missing impetus. That Nvidia has chosen Windows-based models first is both a knock on Apple's AI efforts to date, but also a warning shot against an anticipated rival who should never be counted out of any tech initiative. Moving into PCs is a smart evolutionary tactic in Nvidia's long term dominance strategy. JL

Dan Gallagher and Asa Fitch report in the Wall Street Journal:

Nvidia is betting its new line of PC chips, with its AI cachet, set to be in Windows-based computers later this year, will succeed, upending order in the PC world that has prevailed for the past five decades. The move puts Nvidia in a position to supercharge the market for AI-enabled computers and disrupt incumbents in the process. Intel and other players in the PC market haven’t been able to convince huge numbers of consumers or companies to buy new computers because of the AI capabilities of their chips. 270 million PCs were sold last year, up 9% from 2024. That isn’t a stellar increase amid an AI boom that is supposed to transform how people work and live. The total is below its Covid-era peak of 340 million in 2021. It will likely be much easier for Nvidia to sell people and companies on new AI-ready computers than it has been for Intel or AMD—or, Apple.

The “Intel Inside” marketing campaign made Intel a household name and a ubiquitous personal-computer chip supplier in the 1990s.
These days, “Nvidia Inside” has a lot more selling power.
That is what Nvidia NVDA -6.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle is betting with its new line of PC chips, set to be in Windows-based computers launching later this year. With its artificial-intelligence cachet, it is very likely that Nvidia will succeed, potentially upending an order in the PC world that has prevailed for pretty much the past five decades.
Investors are optimistic. Nvidia’s shares jumped more than 6% on Monday, while Windows-maker Microsoft MSFT -2.66%decrease; red down pointing triangle rose more than 2%. Shares of PC makers Dell Technologies DELL -6.55%decrease; red down pointing triangle and HP HPQ -2.74%decrease; red down pointing triangle both surged more than 8%. Arm Holdings ARM -12.84%decrease; red down pointing triangle, which licenses the basic blueprints that Nvidia uses in its PC chips, jumped more than 15%.
The direct impact of Nvidia’s PC play on its finances will likely be limited, given the enormous size of the company’s business selling AI chips for data centers. But the move does put Nvidia in a position to supercharge the market for AI-enabled computers and disrupt incumbents in the process.
Nvidia isn’t exactly a new entrant to the market. It has been a big player in PCs for decades through its graphics chips, which produce sharper and smoother images on computer monitors—a capability videogamers prize. But before detailing its latest chips at a trade show in Taiwan, it hadn’t made the central-processing units at the computational hearts of PCs. Intel INTC -11.28%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Advanced Micro Devices AMD -10.86%decrease; red down pointing triangle dominate that market.
Nvidia’s new chips, which combine a CPU with the company’s wildly popular AI-computing hardware, come at a time of weakness for Intel. Intel remains the biggest supplier of CPUs for traditional Windows PCs, with a market share of about 64% in the final quarter of last year, according to Mercury Research. But Intel and other players in the PC market haven’t been able to convince huge numbers of consumers or companies to buy new computers because of the AI capabilities of their chips.
Around 270 million PCs were sold last year, according to Gartner, up by around 9% from 2024. That isn’t a stellar increase amid an AI boom that is supposed to transform how people work and live. The total is still below its Covid-era peak of about 340 million in 2021.
So far, most sales of AI-enabled PCs to date have been by default. Computer makers are adding neural-processing chips that enable some on-device AI functions to all of their higher-performing product lines.
“The buyers choosing AI PCs today aren’t necessarily doing so for the AI,” said Jitesh Ubrani of market research firm IDC, which tracks PC sales. “They’re doing so because, at a certain performance tier, there’s no alternative.”
For Nvidia, PCs are a small part of its business now. But the company boasts a strong appeal in the segment, which bodes well for its latest effort. Nvidia’s PC-related revenue jumped 41% in the fiscal year ended January to a little over $16 billion, thanks in part to the introduction of new videogaming chips under the company’s popular Blackwell brand. Total PC unit sales grew only 8% during the calendar year, according to IDC data.

Whether Nvidia makes further inroads with its PC chips will be a test of the power of its brand and its close association with the AI boom. It will likely be much easier for Nvidia to sell people and companies on new AI-ready computers than it has been for Intel or AMD—or for that matter, Apple AAPL -1.25%
decrease; red down pointing triangle, which also has a popular line of computers that use homegrown chips.
Nvidia’s rise won’t come without challenges—the largest of which may be the software stickiness that has built up around Intel’s and AMD’s processors. They use a basic chip architecture called x86. But software that works on x86 processors needs to be adapted to work well on Nvidia’s or Apple’s Arm-based chips.
There is now a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for Arm-based chips, and software engineers have been developing more programs for Arm as the number of Arm-based PCs grows. But Arm as a PC platform remains at a software-development disadvantage vis-à-vis x86, including in areas such as gaming, which remains an important end market for Nvidia.
Ultimately though, Nvidia’s entrance into CPUs for PCs is likely to further erode the remaining x86 advantage, especially in the world of Windows-based PCs, where it has been difficult for new Arm-based players to gain a foothold.

“Intel Inside” worked for many years. But in tech, even memorable marketing slogans have a shelf life.

"Puffy-Looking and Weird:" Putin's Physical and Mental Decline Is "Obvious"

2026-06-07T11:08:05.037-04:00

Some say he is being misled by his subordinates.

But given his control over Russia's people and information sources, the more likely explanation is that he, like his ally in the White House, simply refuses to admit that anything is amiss, believing that the Big Lie, if repeated often and loudly enough, will overawe his enemies. Until it doesn't. JL

Robert Fox reports in The Indepedent:

Putin now appears to be imitating his frenemy Donald Trump in his increasingly volatile unpredictability. This makes him more dangerous. Victory in Ukraine seems remote – and the lack of progress is stinging Putin into new actions and provocation. (But) Putin’s claims and boasts seem wide of the mark. He said the war would be won, and Russia wanted chunks of four oblasts in Ukraine that his army had failed to dominate completely by force of arms. This war is unsustainable for another year and probably Putin knows it: another cause for concern for his state of mind and political judgment. As the Russian leadership becomes psychologically bunkered, the risk rises Is Putin “is getting weirder? Yes.”

We have seen a rather different face of Vladimir Putin this week for his showpiece St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s answer to the regular gathering of world economic bigwigs at Davos each February. Hoarse of voice, puffy of cheek, coughing and spluttering through a heavy cold, the Russian president claimed his country was winning on the battlefield in Ukraine, with business and the economy booming at home and abroad.
It didn’t help him that as the delegates began arriving on Wednesday Ukraine’s drones hit an oil terminal just 10 miles off, and bombed the naval dockyard at Kronstadt. Plumes of black smoke hung in the sky for several hours. In the news briefings before his curtain-raising speech on Friday, Putin’s claims and boasts seemed wide of the mark, quite wild in fact. He said the war could and would be won, and Russia wanted chunks of four oblasts in Ukraine that his army had failed to dominate completely by force of arms.
He was prepared to talk peace, however, on the kinds of terms that Donald Trump and the USA might propose. He referred back to talks with Donald Trump in Alaska last August – terms the Kremlin information machine reduced to mincemeat within hours of the event.

Putin now appears to be imitating his familiar and frenemy Donald Trump in his increasing – and increasingly volatile – unpredictability. This makes him more dangerous. I asked Dr Fiona Hill, the Russian adviser to three US presidents, including Trump in his first term, if Putin “is getting weirder?” “Yes,” she replied, “but don’t count him out.”
Donald Trump sent a delegation to the St Petersburg jamboree this week, led by Rodney Mims Cook Jr, the overseer of the extravagant Trump Ballroom project in the East Wing of the White House. The real estate broker diplomats Jared Kuchner and Steve Witkoff have not shown themselves yet. But their favoured interlocutor Kirill Dmitriev has made a gesture for peace in proposing building a 55-mile tunnel from the Chukotka peninsula in Russia to Alaska, at a cost of around $65bn (£49bn) – which, I suppose, is cheap as chips compared to the bill for HS2. Apparently the Elon Musk “Boring Company”, which drills tunnels, could cut the budget by $8bn.

Outright victory in Ukraine still seems remote – and the lack of progress is stinging Putin into new areas of action and provocation. Russians at home are fretting as they are threatened by Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile strikes. Sporadic fuel rationing and unreliable phone and internet connections are fuelling vociferous criticism from bloggers and even the mainstream press.
Putin is now framing Europe as the main agent behind Zelensky – Russian state media blames European military and industry for providing the fleets of drones keeping the Ukrainian war machine going. This deliberately ignores that Ukraine is now the premier world power for the manufacture and deployment of drones, building millions a year, and is now the instructor in drone warfare to the armies of Western Europe, including the UK.
Innovation with drones, electronic jammers, and robotic ground vehicles – UGVs – means Ukrainian forces have been gaining ground in a well-camouflaged summer offensive. The drones have been attacking resupply trucks and ammunition and fuel dumps. More to the point, they have been cutting food and water supplies to thousands of Russian troops. Crimea, occupied since 2014, is running dry.

The focus of the ground battle is Russia’s attempt to break through a belt of fortresses in northern Donetsk – with the key engagement in and around Kostyantynivka. Without the fortresses, the Kremlin won’t be able to claim victory or a deal with Kyiv, and Zelensky has said he’s not prepared to give away an inch of territory – at any price.
This heightens the risk of Russia staging “false flag” incidents to justify spreading the war, to Belarus, and beyond into the Baltic states and eastern Balkans, which would mean attacking Nato partners. There are fears of staged “accidents” at the nuclear power plants – and both Chernobyl, which suffered the biggest civil nuclear accident of modern times in 1986 – and Zaporizhzhia – have seen military action lately.

This past week Putin said he was confident Russia could continue the war to 2027 and beyond because of its huge population reserves – 140 million to Ukraine’s 40 million or just under. This is cold comfort because some 70 per cent of the Russian entire 140 million are within range of Ukraine’s missiles and drones, a fact now being proved on an almost daily basis.
Russia still has strengths and advantages over Ukraine – especially in advanced electronic warfare and military communications. Putin is still in charge, but his circle of counsellors and ideologues is narrowing and ageing. And they have failed – they have produced no formula for winning the war, or achieving a truce or armistice. Even the Trump card is devalued for them this week after a dozen GOP lawmakers in the Congress defying Trump to approve a major bill to deliver billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine while imposing steep sanctions on Russia.
As the Russian leadership becomes psychologically bunkered, the risk arises of them resorting to old tricks of the exotic arsenal – chemical and biological weapons, which they have used in the past – grows higher. Peter Frankopan, the professor of global history at Oxford, has suggested that a collapse of the Putin regime would mean anarchy across vast areas of Eastern Russia – which in his words is “where the arsenals of the really bad stuff are – and who knows what would happen” if they were on the loose. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko by polonium in London in 2006, and at the attempt on the Skripals with Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, would be just a foretaste.
Biggest pause for thought should be the horrendous human toll in Ukraine, civilian as much as military. Conservative estimates put Russian casualties since February 2022 at around 1.4 million, including half a million dead. Ukraine has suffered around 600,000 dead and injured – a guesstimate as accurate casualty numbers are a state secret. This means roughly one in 25 of all Russian males have been killed and injured in the four years and three months, and one in 16 Ukrainians.

This is unsustainable for another year for both sides – and probably Vladimir Putin knows it: another cause for concern for his state of mind and political judgment.
This, as much as anything I suspect, has triggered the warning from the head of UK armed forces, Sir Rich Knighton to the BBC that we are now in greater danger than at any other point in his lifetime. Sir Rich is not pleading merely for more money for the security and armed services across the piece. His argument is more basic. We need to be ready before the new crisis hits, because if it does hit and we’re not ready, it’ll be too late – for all of us.

Momentum Shift: In May, Russia Lost Double the Ground It Lost In April

2026-06-07T10:19:49.897-04:00

The overarching strategic question is no longer whether the Russians can turn this situation around - because it is increasingly apparent that they have neither the resources nor the leadership to do so - but at what point losing the territory they have remaining becomes irreversible. JL

Mick Ryan reports in Futura Doctrina:

Russian forces surrendered a net 93 square miles of Ukrainian territory over the four weeks to 3 June, double their losses in the preceding month. Ukraine’s drone strikes in the Pokrovsk sector destroyed 105 Russian artillery systems in May, twice April’s tally, and a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger conceded Ukrainian drones are preventing Russian forces from rotating troops. Ukraine announced fire control over the Crimea to Donetsk corridor on 29 May. Open-source analysis has logged more than a thousand geolocated Ukrainian strikes in the Russian rear since the start of 2026, with 35% hitting ammunition, fuel and equipment depots, 20% hitting transport and 7% striking air defences. Western analysts count more than 125 destroyed trucks on the route.

For all the action in the skies and behind the frontlines, there was minimal exchange of territory in the past week. From Russia Matters, Russian forces surrendered a net 93 square miles of Ukrainian territory over the four weeks to 3 June, roughly double their losses in the preceding month, while Ukraine’s own DeepState monitors recorded a near-static line, a net Russian gain of about three square miles. Over the year to early June, Russia’s net territorial gain is 1,427 square miles, around six tenths of one per cent of Ukraine.
Source: Russia Matters
The decisive ground remains the Donbas, where Russia’s summer campaign is once again organised around the Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk axis and the fortress belt that anchors the roughly one fifth of Donetsk Oblast still in Ukrainian hands. The clearest Russian progress this week lay in the Kostiantynivka to Druzhkivka tactical area, with the Russians seeking progress against the fortress belt on several axes concurrently.
While it is true that drones cannot seize and hold ground, they still play a crucial role. Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Reaction Corps reported that its drone strikes in the Pokrovsk direction destroyed more than 105 Russian artillery systems in May, twice April’s tally, and a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger conceded that Ukrainian drones are preventing Russian forces from rotating troops into their forward infiltration positions, blunting the advance before it begins.
Strangling the Road to Crimea. If Russia’s focus this week was terror raining down from the skies, Ukraine’s was Russian operational logistics. The most important development on the Ukrainian side is the maturation of what Ukrainian planners now call the “middle strike,” the systematic destruction of Russian supply lines in the operational depth between roughly fifty and two hundred and fifty kilometres behind the front. On 27 May, Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced a “logistics lockdown,” allocating an additional five billion hryvnia, around 112 million US dollars, directly to brigades to buy mid-range strike drones through a points-based system that rewards the most effective units.
The campaign’s effects are now visible along the land bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea. Ukrainian drones have taken aerial control of the R-280, M-14 and N-20 highways running through Berdiansk and Melitopol, turning the corridor into what one analysis described as a road of burning fuel trucks. In May alone, observers counted at least seventeen destroyed fuel and military trucks on the Melitopol to Crimea stretch, and occupation authorities in Sevastopol and across Crimea imposed fuel rationing.
The French open-source analyst Clément Molin has logged more than a thousand geolocated Ukrainian strikes deep in the Russian rear since the start of 2026, with around thirty-five per cent hitting ammunition, fuel and equipment depots, twenty per cent hitting transport and seven per cent striking air defence. Western analysts count more than 125 destroyed trucks on the key route, and the Washington-based CEPA aptly titled its assessment “Russia’s Land Bridge is Becoming a Highway to Hell” which noted that:
With no single point of failure, the Kremlin believed its logistics network was more secure. But certainties don’t last long in the Ukraine war. Hornet drones were initially used selectively and in limited numbers. Their widening use by more brigades now suggests production is increasing and access is spreading.That advantage may not last forever. Russia will almost certainly develop countermeasures over time, making the current period especially important.
Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate announced fire control over the Crimea to Donetsk corridor on 29 May, and the 3rd Army Corps reported strikes in Luhansk Oblast as far as 205 kilometres from the front on 31 May. The Institute for the Study of War has geolocated drone flights along highways in Donetsk Oblast roughly a hundred kilometres deep, assessing that the strikes complicate Russia’s use of the Rostov to Crimea route. Its analyst George Barros argues that these mid-range strikes degrade Russia’s ability to mass forces and sustain the front, with Ukraine holding a slight but meaningful advantage in drone innovation.
In a 4 June article, military expert Viktor Kevliuk estimates that Ukrainian drones have already destroyed something on the order of seventy-five thousand general-purpose vehicles in the Russian rear, achieved by AI-guided systems which acquire and home on targets autonomously in the terminal phase even under electronic-warfare suppression.
This mid-range strike campaign is not just focused on military vehicles. It is also hitting Russian ships carrying cargo into occupied ports in southern Ukraine. On the evening of 6 June, the Ukrainians hit five Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov, as part of this campaign.
This is operational art. And it is integrated with tactical ground operations and long-range strategic strike to form a unified military strategy.
As reported by Fortune, long-range strikes reduce the volume of fuel Russia can refine, while mid-range strikes degrade its ability to move what remains. Gasoline shortages in occupied Ukraine are, for now, having only a limited effect on Russian forces, but the analysts noted that “more militarily consequential diesel shortages are beginning to materialise.”
The week also brought a strike that Ukraine called the first of its kind in modern history, the destruction of a Russian drone base at the occupied Donetsk airport.

Multiple Sources Point To Declining Russian Battlefield Combat Effectiveness

2026-06-07T10:03:27.811-04:00

By a variety of measures that multiple sources employ, Russian battlefield combat effectiveness is declining, resulting in growing Ukrainian offensive success.

The Russian declines are reflected in measures including the loss of territory, increased casualties and failure to either penetrate Ukrainian defenses or to halt Ukrainian offensive operations. JL

Alex Stezhensky reports in New Voice of Ukraine:

Multiple sources point to declining Russian combat effectiveness on the battlefield, even though they use different mapping methods to assess territorial gains and losses. Analysts said the current battlefield situation, with Ukrainian and Russian positions often overlapping and the “kill zone” — an area of heightened drone strike risk — expanding, makes precise calculations of both sides’ gains and losses more difficult. Each source likely uses different methods to measure Ukrainian and Russian advances, but all reach broadly similar conclusions about combat performance at this stage of the war, pointing to a slowdown in Russia’s offensive pace and increased Ukrainian offensive activity.
Multiple sources point to declining Russian combat effectiveness on the battlefield, even though they use different mapping methods to assess territorial gains and losses, the Institute for the Study of War said in its June 6 report.
Ukrainian military outlet Militarnyi, citing sources in Ukraine’s Defense Forces, reported on June 6 that Ukrainian troops liberated more territory in May 2026 than Russian forces captured. In May, Ukrainian forces regained control of or cleared Russian sabotage groups from about 250 square kilometers of territory, while Russian troops captured only 130 square kilometers over the same period, Militarnyi reported.

In April 2026, Ukraine’s Defense Forces liberated or cleared about 80 square kilometers of territory, while Russian forces captured between 150 and 160 square kilometers, the outlet’s source said. Militarnyi’s latest estimates, as well as those from other sources, including ones linked to Ukrainian military intelligence, differ from ISW’s figures because of methodological differences. But they also point to a slowdown in Russia’s offensive pace and increased Ukrainian offensive activity, ISW analysts said.
ISW estimates that Russian forces captured or penetrated about 40 square kilometers of territory in May while losing control of about 280 square kilometers. In April, Russian troops captured or penetrated about 28 square kilometers but lost control of 116 square kilometers, ISW said.
Analysts said the current battlefield situation, with Ukrainian and Russian positions often overlapping and the “kill zone” — an area of heightened drone strike risk — expanding, makes precise calculations of both sides’ gains and losses more difficult. Each source likely uses different methods to measure Ukrainian and Russian advances, but all reach broadly similar conclusions about combat performance at this stage of the war.
Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces, said on June 6 that Ukrainian troops are conducting active combat operations in parts of the Oleksandrivka sector and gradually regaining control of previously lost positions. Russian forces have been forced to shift to defense and deploy reinforcements in response, he said.

The Absurdity of Wall Street's SpaceX IPO Projections

2026-06-07T09:47:04.229-04:00

This article appeared Friday morning, before the big market crash. Tomorrow, investors will see whether the panic continues or whether the chest-thumping AI hype machine recovers and begins to turn things around. Either way, increasing questions are being raised about the assumptions underlying the boom.

And at the core of those questions lies the biggest assumption of all: that such projections, at this stage of an historic rally, have any relationship with probability, let alone reality. Believe what you will, based on your own experience and the guidance of those you trust, but given that no one has ever seen such numbers before, ask why this time should actually be different. JL

Barry Ritholtz reports in The Big Picture:

Thinking back in 2012 about 2026 was AI the top of your list? Intel rallying after the US government took a 10% stake? Korea up 4X? GameStop short squeeze? Did you anticipate the pandemic, the rise of EVs, the invasion of Ukraine, or either Trump election? January 6, or October 7? The world is composed of countless co-variables - things we cannot predict, but also secondary effects and unforeseen consequences that are even more impossible to forecast - the further out you look, the possible outcomes increase exponentially. Allow me to present Exhibit A in whatever subsequent litigation arises: “SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4 trillion in 2040, according to Morgan Stanley. The firm’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2040 could top $2.7 trillion." It is hilarious anyone imagines they can forecast revenues and/or profits a decade and a half into the future, let alone $3.4 trillion.

Of all the dumb things Wall Street is infamous for, perhaps none is sillier than the all too regular forecasting game. Quarterly earnings, Non-farm payrolls, annual S&P predictions, oil prices, inflation rates, FOMC cuts — it’s a never-ending parade of predictions, forecasts, and guestimates, most of which are wildly, often laughably wrong.
Guessing the revenues and profits of any company is tough enough; it becomes even more difficult for any company with only a few years of history.
Allow me to present to you Exhibit A in whatever subsequent litigation arises, via the WSJ:
“SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4 trillion in 2040, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis shared with top investors Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.
Morgan Stanley told investors the rocket maker’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2040 could top $2.7 trillion, the people said.”
I find it hilarious that anyone imagines they forecast revenues and/or profits a decade and a half into the future, let alone $3.4 trillion. Hey, you gotta move some shares, and this seems to be one way to accomplish that.
Just recall whatever you were thinking back in 2012 about 2026 (or the early 2010s about the mid 2020s) — was Artificial Intelligence the top of your list? Intel finally rallying after the US government took a 10% stakle in it? Korea up 4X? GameStop / meme-stock short squeeze? Silicon Valley Bank / digital bank run? 500 basis point rate hikes in 2022? Did you anticipate the pandemic, the rise of EVs, the invasion of Ukraine, or either Trump elections? January 6, or October 7? A treatment/cure for Pancreatic Cancer?
The world is composed of countless co-variables — not only things we cannot predict, but also secondary effects and unforeseen consequences that are even more impossible to forecast — the further out you look, the number of possible outcomes increases exponentially.
So much happens over the course of a year that it makes forecasting challenging; 10-15 years into the future is utterly laughable.
Look, I get it, analysts’ jobs are hard enough as is, and many of them are justifiably terrified about being replaced by Claude.
Still, f*ckery tomfoolery like this does not give one confidence in this IPO process…

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.