The Low-Down

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.

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

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

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

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

Matthew Loh reports in Business Insider:

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

Ukraine Establishes Fire Control Over Russian-Occupied Donetsk Airport

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

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

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

Stanislav Pohorilov reports in Ukraine Pravda:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oleksii Hetman comments in Ukrinform, David Axe reports:

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

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

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

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

Companies Begin To Ration AI For Employees As Token Costs Skyrocket

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

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

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

Bradley Olson reports in the Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Newdick reports in The Warzone:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russia Shows Weakness On Battlefield So Increases Ukraine Civilian Attacks

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

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

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

Lara Jakes reports in the New York Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Axe reports in Trench Art:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Message from Kyiv delivered. JL

Elmira Aliieva reports in NBC News:

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

Ukraine Is Now Talking About Winning, Not Just Surviving

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

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

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

Patrick Tucker reports in Defense One:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strike drones FTW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing fortunes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunk, Unconscious Russian Troops Enable Ukraine To Collapse Zaporizhzhia Flank

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

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

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

RFU News reports:

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

Anthropic Filing Before OpenAI For IPO Is Financially Significant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a delicious irony in watching

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

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

Michael Kimmidge comments in the New York Times:

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Rushton and Asami Terajima report in the Kyiv Independent:

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

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

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

Russian Forces Cleared From Positions By Ukrainian Ground Drone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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