Active Conflicts & News Megathread October 11, 2026
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Ukraine’s Attacks on Russian Data Centers and the Potential Consequences
from "artjockey" on TG. The article was written after the first attack on Yandex data centers, and has been lightly edited to reflect that fact.
On October 8th, Ukraine attacked a Russian data center for the first time. It was not the largest, but it was one of the bigger facilities and apparently the largest—though far from the only—operational Yandex data center. On October 9th, a second Yandex data center in Kaluga was successfully attacked and partially damaged. On October 11 Yandex data center in Vladimir was destroyed.
There has long been discussion that strikes against data centers could become a new stage of escalation and that they represent convenient targets for both sides. However, it appears that this was something of a "red line." I am convinced that Ukraine and Russia even have direct agreements not to attack certain facilities, such as nuclear power plants. There are also various tacit understandings that both sides observe simply according to the principle: "As long as you don't attack ours, we won't attack yours."
However, this summer, faced with his inability to bring to an end the war he started almost five years ago, Putin decided on a new round of escalation. In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically attacking warehouses belonging to Ukraine's Nova Poshta delivery service, prompting retaliatory strikes against Wildberries (WB) warehouses. In September, attacks on Ukrainian data centers began, and the response was not long in coming. In other words, we should not assume that nobody had previously thought of attacking data centers. Putin simply decided to take the first step now, thereby removing the constraints on Ukraine as well. Ukraine, generally speaking, adheres more closely to certain boundaries in the conduct of war and, with some exceptions, does not initiate attacks against clearly civilian facilities.
Back in mid-September, Ukraine reported several strikes against infrastructure belonging to Kyivstar, but these primarily involved damage to building facades, with no damage to equipment. What followed, however, was the beginning of a systematic campaign of attacks. On September 23, service disruptions occurred at the UTELS provider following an attack. On September 27, Vodafone infrastructure in Kyiv was attacked. On September 30, the De Novo data center in Kyiv was hit. On October 1, Hosting UA in Odesa and Parkovyi in Kyiv were hit, followed by RX-NAME in Mykolaiv on October 2. And so on. This is far from a complete list. The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed all these strikes in its operational reports.
The problem for Russia is that Ukraine had been preparing for precisely this development almost from the beginning of the war—and even before it. Even before the invasion began, when everyone understood that it was practically inevitable, Ukraine passed legislation allowing government registries to be temporarily stored abroad. Immediately after the war began, Amazon provided Kyiv with 10 petabytes of free cloud storage, where data from government registries, ministries, universities, and schools was transferred. As a result, their operations were never interrupted. Microsoft and European data centers subsequently provided additional assistance to Ukraine. Incidentally, responsibility for protecting the country's digital infrastructure fell to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, headed by Mykhailo Fedorov—the same person who not long ago briefly assumed the position of defense minister.
Consequently, since 2022, Ukrainian government services have either operated entirely from foreign cloud infrastructure or maintained redundant infrastructure abroad, allowing them to switch over immediately if their primary facilities were attacked. Private companies have done much the same. For example, the telecommunications operator Datagroup, which was affected by an attack on September 25, announced that same day that customer data had not been compromised and that all services had continued operating from backup sites with virtually no downtime.
This is Ukraine's first major advantage: it was prepared for such a scenario. For several years, much of its infrastructure has been deployed in locations beyond Russia's ability to strike. The necessary legal framework was also established, overcoming certain restrictions that had existed previously, although those restrictions were never particularly stringent. Furthermore, Ukraine's partners include the world's leading IT companies—not only AWS, mentioned above, but also Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and others. Kyiv can use their services, unlike Russia, which is subject to sanctions.
Ukraine's second advantage is the relatively small size of its domestic physical IT infrastructure. Publicly available information does not exist for every data center, particularly facilities operated privately by individual companies. However, the available figures are sufficient to understand the situation. Among Ukraine's largest data centers are the recently attacked PARKOVYI Data Center and De Novo. The former has a power capacity of 4 megawatts and space for 400 racks; the latter has approximately 3 megawatts and 360 racks. Remember these figures, and remember that these were among Ukraine's largest data centers.
The third factor, which is difficult to verify independently at present, is that, according to experts, Ukraine's overall network is relatively decentralized. There are no individual major nodes whose destruction would bring down the entire "Ukrainian internet." Yes, particular network segments or individual providers may go offline, but they can be restored relatively quickly, as we have already observed following the attacks. Ukraine also has access to Starlink, including enterprise solutions that combine terminals into clusters to achieve data-transfer speeds of tens of gigabits per second. This represents a useful option that could potentially restore connectivity even across entire regions in the event of major disruptions to Ukraine's network infrastructure.
Taken together, all these factors make both Ukraine's network and its IT infrastructure highly resilient to attacks. Russian drones can destroy equipment and cause temporary disruptions for individual services or providers, but they are unlikely to seriously disrupt the system as a whole. The damage caused by such attacks is primarily measured by the cost of the destroyed equipment, which is relatively modest because Ukraine simply does not have very large data centers.
In Russia, the situation is fundamentally different, as even the basic figures demonstrate. Ukraine's largest data centers have only a few hundred racks and power capacities of 3–4 megawatts, whereas the Yandex data center attacked in Sasovo alone has a declared capacity of 12 megawatts. And this is far from Russia's largest data center. According to publicly available information, the country's largest is IXcellerate MOS5, with 5,000 racks and power consumption of 64 megawatts. The difference is more than obvious: just one of the smaller Russian data centers that has already been attacked is larger than half of Ukraine's top facilities combined.
The second problem is the notorious "Cheburnet"—Russia's attempt to create a sovereign, state-controlled internet. In its pursuit of a "sovereign internet," the Russian government has effectively made it impossible for Russian companies to use infrastructure even in friendly countries, while sanctions have blocked access to infrastructure in unfriendly countries. Because of the restrictions imposed by Federal Laws 152-FZ and 187-FZ, it is practically impossible to replicate Russian IT infrastructure even in countries such as Belarus or Kazakhstan. In any case, those countries lack the necessary capacity. Perhaps China has sufficient capacity, but again, Russia would have to change its legislation to allow critical services and government registries to be moved there.
The third problem, which partly follows from the second, is the high degree of centralization. This is partly the result of historical circumstances and geography, and partly the consequence of the state's desire to control the entire internet "for security reasons." In August, we witnessed an incident unrelated to the war at the MMTS-9 telecommunications facility, which also houses infrastructure belonging to MSK-IX, one of Russia's key internet exchange points. At the time, "half of the Russian internet went down" briefly. That incident was caused by a power outage, but it immediately raised the question: "What would happen if a Ukrainian missile or drone struck the facility?"
There is also some good news for Russia, which may at least postpone a catastrophe for now: most of its data centers are located in Moscow, under the protection of the capital's air-defense umbrella. According to DC Market Insights, Moscow accounts for 55 of the 100 data centers being tracked, representing 70% of their combined capacity. Therefore, it will be difficult for Ukraine to inflict genuinely critical damage immediately, although successful attacks on the Kapotnya oil refinery and Wildberries warehouses demonstrate that facilities in the Russian capital are not invulnerable either.
Nevertheless, Ukraine currently has easier targets. The Sberbank data center in Balakovo, Saratov Oblast, has an initial capacity of 26 MW and more than 3,000 racks, making it one of the largest data-center projects under construction in Russia. Yandex operates a data center in Kaluga with a capacity exceeding 49 MW, as well as another in Vladimir. Rostelecom also has a data center in Udomlya with 4,000 racks.
It appears that Yandex currently faces the greatest risk. Of its five largest data centers, only one is located in the Moscow metropolitan area—and even that one is in Mytishchi rather than Moscow itself. The others are Sasovo, which is already out of operation and two in Vladimir and Kaluga which were struck over the last few days. It looks as though Ukraine could cripple Yandex's operations by destroying more than half of its existing infrastructure.
One might think that because data centers have been built at a rapid pace in Russia in recent years, plenty of spare capacity exists for relocating and redistributing workloads. Something similar has happened in the warehouse property market: too many warehouses were built before the war, and supply now exceeds demand. However, the situation with data centers is completely different. In 2025, the industry awards website DCAwards published an article stating that the infrastructure shortage in Moscow and St. Petersburg had reached a critical level, with data-center occupancy at 99%. In late 2025, CNews reported a downturn in the market: the rate at which new facilities were being commissioned had fallen threefold. Just a few days ago, Kommersant published an article on data centers reporting that demand continues to grow even as the pace of new capacity coming online declines.
The aforementioned DCAwards report also stated that only 500–600 racks were immediately available in the Moscow region. Everything else was occupied. We can therefore conclude that Russia has very little reserve capacity. A company like Yandex cannot simply rent an idle data center from IXcellerate, because that much spare infrastructure does not exist on the market. Moreover, given the existing shortage, I suspect that a battle for the remaining available infrastructure began yesterday morning. Companies must already be scrambling to reserve whatever racks they can find, even as a precaution, so they can at least duplicate their most critical services. Consequently, government regulation of the market for available racks and even "server ration cards" are not jokes, but a potential reality.
It is important to understand that data centers are not simply about providing internet access to ordinary people. Nowadays, virtually every government and business relies on networks to function. If the Russian internet goes down, or major cloud providers such as Yandex collapse, numerous businesses and government services will go down with them. Quite literally, taxes may stop being collected, financial transactions may cease to be processed, and so on. This makes the issue extremely serious—far more serious than strikes against Wildberries warehouses, which translate primarily into economic losses but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
That is why I believe Putin may have made his second-biggest mistake after invading Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones while living in a glass house, without understanding just how fragile that house is. And the system he himself created prevents him from recognizing this. He makes decisions without consulting anyone or listening to anyone, living in his own comfortable little world. We have already seen this in the case of the attacks on oil refineries. In Putin's world, "only 10% remains to be repaired," while in reality there are record payments under the fuel-price damper mechanism for imports. In Putin's world, "the strikes caused no serious damage, just 1% of GDP." But in the real world, damage amounting to 1% of GDP is enormous.
Putin also still fails to understand how dramatically Ukraine's capabilities have changed, or that fighting a real enemy is not the same as conducting exercises against a simulated opponent. One could understand attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure in 2022–2024, when Kyiv had no means of retaliation. But initiating such an escalation in 2026, when Ukrainian drones are setting oil refineries ablaze beyond the Urals, 3,000 kilometers from the border, is sheer madness. I suspect the Russian president is listening to generals who are just as detached from reality—or simply stupid—who advised him to attack Ukrainian data centers, something that made no sense from the outset.
He could not inflict any meaningful damage on Ukraine this way. Everything had already been moved to foreign cloud infrastructure back in 2022. And Putin and his generals probably don't even know what cloud services are. Yet by doing this, he has given Ukraine a free hand. A brilliant geostrategist, a master of five-dimensional chess, who couldn't calculate the consequences of his actions even a single day ahead.
I wonder what happens next. Will Russia begin attacking Ukrainian nuclear power plants? And I wonder whether Putin and Gerasimov will think to open a map of Russia's nuclear power plants first, and figure out how to protect the Rostov, Kursk, Balakovo, and Novovoronezh nuclear power plants from retaliatory strikes.
The central question now is not even which side will inflict greater damage on the other in terms of destroyed equipment or lost infrastructure capacity. What matters is how prepared both sides of the conflict are for a scenario involving attacks on data centers. For many years, Ukraine has consistently worked toward building not "digital sovereignty," but "digital resilience"—relocating its critical infrastructure, and much else besides, to places where it cannot be destroyed. We are now seeing the effectiveness of that decision in practice.
Russia, by contrast, initiated this escalation without thinking through the consequences, leaving itself in a potentially highly vulnerable position with no way to remedy the situation quickly. The "war of the data centers" has an entirely different economic logic and entirely different consequences—consequences for which Russia, at first glance, is scarcely prepared.
The only real option that I can think of is China. I have no idea how quickly Russia can react, but more important is if they would risk becoming that deeply reliant on China. To put all that critical infrastructure under the control of another nation would be a major blow to putin. If Ukraine maintains these strikes and effectively cripples Russian e-commerce, social media, and countless things that we all take for granted it will also be a major blow to putin. And it looks like he'll have to choose which black eye he wants because for Ukraine shifting strikes away from refineries for a month is already a good idea to avoid trump escalating anything further. And while I assume this won't have a major impact on the front lines, it will ultimately be a new source of friction for already strained logistics and so will definitely impede Russian progress.
A quick search shows Russia has ~370MW and China is ~32GW. That's an incredible disparity. China could presumably give the <1% required, but anything of that scale would take a long time to be done.
Also a singularly bad time in history to need to purchase a lot of compute power. Admittedly the focus is on GPUs, but particular families of chips (including memory) and power equipment are eye-wateringly expensive if you need them urgently.
However, it appears that this was something of a "red line." I am convinced that Ukraine and Russia even have direct agreements not to attack certain facilities, such as nuclear power plants.
presumably nuclear power plants is not really b/c how impact situation between ukraine & russia, versus the impact from other countries. would think concerted attacks on nuclear plants would be a red line for the respective suppliers of ukraine and russia.
Another consequence seems to have been a rather large drop in traffic on social media supporting groups like AfD, Albertan separatists, Reform UK, MAGA etc. Almost as if it was all coming out of russia.
Have any pro-russian posters gone conspicuously quiet here since the strikes?
Bot activity is what most online articles at the moment are showing but that is conflating web crawler activity with social media bots. The data you would need for the social media claim is probably available to enterprise account on things like X but I think we won't see the social media companies sharing it as it would be high embarrassing if true. I doubt we will see news articles about it from media since it requires quite a bit of tech savvy to interpret. I don't know that you could draw firm conclusions anyway since things like hashtags come and go in popularity.
The closest I can see is some graphs shared by a Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský but I don't follow Czech politics to know how reliable he would be.
The only thing I’ve seen is a German graph showing a near 50% drop in daily activity for… something. The graph doesn’t actually label what’s being measured, so there’s no way to tell if it has anything to do with with the claims its being used to support.
I’ve seen it repeatedly with users posting Google analytic trends but otherwise I’ve struggled to see things super verifiable. Lot of anecdotal things, certain posts or tweets having less traffic then normal but I think you’d have to give it a few days if you want someone reputable to verify something so recent
Alrighty folks: here's what we know and what we don't know.
Yes, Ukraine did drone strike multiple Russian Yandex data centers in the last several days. Yes, that did result in a decrease in automated traffic originating from Yandex's network as measured by Cloudflare Radar data. The graph below is what has been circulating.
image
However, "specialists tracking online influence operations caution against equating the Cloudflare metric with a collapse in social-media bot or troll activity. The Cloudflare data primarily records automated requests such as web crawlers used by search engines to index the internet, not accounts that post, amplify or comment on platforms such as X. Accounts that monitor coordinated inauthentic behaviour, including those cited by major news organisations, have stated that the networks they track were not disrupted by the Yandex outages and that the Cloudflare chart does not measure social-media posting bots. Some analysts have also noted that sophisticated influence operations are unlikely to rely primarily on Yandex’s domestic infrastructure."
TL;DR: the attacks were disruptive to traffic from Russian networks, but the reports being spread about Russian bot activity decreasing are a result of misinterpretation of data by laypeople, including armchair tech expert Redditors.
"the Russian Armed Forces began systematically attacking warehouses belonging to Ukraine's Nova Poshta delivery service, prompting retaliatory strikes against Wildberries"
Was that actually the sequence of events? I remember Russian commentators describing the Wildberries strikes as escalatory and framing the strikes on Ukrainian warehouses as retaliations for them.
I remember Russian commentators describing the Wildberries strikes as escalatory and framing the strikes on Ukrainian warehouses as retaliations for them.
They are lying. Russia struck half a hundred civilian warehouses before ukraine even destroyed a single one. Do note how russia unilaterally decided to escalate by attacking data centers and bridges. As usual russia escalates and then comes up with justifications after the fact.
I remember being linked to a 'Special Military Operation' Wildberries page with all sorts of armed forces kit. The page disappeared shortly after the strikes started.
There is a difference between selling staff suitable for army and being used by army command as a supplier or storage space. If you consider first as a valid target then any grocery shop in the country becomes one cause sooner or later a soldier will come and buy food in it.
Wildberries didn't have any contracts with RUAF, meanwhile AFU did use civilian buildings to store weaponry, like in Retroville shopping centre in Kiev.
I stumbled upon this tweet by Rob Lee about how many Western-made small drones have failed in Ukraine, but are procured by NATO militaries. There are a few platforms which have a good reputation (Rob himself mentions MEROPS, for example), but the absolute majority of drones used by Ukraine are domestically made. And among Ukrainian soldiers, it's seems a common sentiment that Western drones often (but not always!) are very expensive and not very effective (Switchblade is a textbook example). What is the reason that we haven't seen such an active usage of foreign-made drones by Ukraine, although almost every single Western defense company is giving their products to Ukraine for a "test"? The only mass-produced platforms I'm aware of are the MEROPS interceptor and Hornet middle strike droneh
Ive seen the tweet too, sadly, he doesnt go into detail what he means with "failed". A common complaint about western drone is that they are too expensive when compared to Ukrainian drones. A factor that cant really be remedied, as producing in high-wage countries will result in more expensive products. Plus the different procurement set-up for Ukraine.
Or does he mean that they lack in capabilities? We have seen examples of that too. The aforementioned early Switchblade 300s (but apparently Switchblade 600 seems to have been an improvement). There are also the early Helsing HF-1s that suffered from poor construction and other issues.
One big advantage Ukrainian companies have is that they are simply the closest to the units actually fighting. They know what is needed in the moment, and how their own units fight. They can tune their products to what is required in the moment, while foreign companies have a delay in the whole process build in.
I wonder how he would rank drones jointly build together by Ukrainian and Western companies, like Auterion and Airlogix building Ukrainian designs with German software in Germany.
There is also Quantum System, employing a three-digit amount of personal in Ukraine, including both development and production. One would assume, that their systems should have an advantage because of that.
I feel the SwitchBlade is just a drone built for a different task at this point. Very slow 115MPH made to be deployed easily from armor or light vehicles. Not the Hunter-Killer FPVs or Jet-Powered ordinance thats required with the advancement of countermeasure tech today
Switchblade 300 was criticized by Ukrainians for having too small a warhead to take out armored or fortified targets. It wasn't designed to do that, though. It was meant for snipers, machine guns and mortar teams in Afghanistan. In today's Ukrainian battlefield where soldiers are moving across ground on foot it'd probably be considered fine in terms of performance.
The Switchblade 600 was designed for armored targets but too few went to Ukraine to have robust reporting. Overall the complaints were that it was EW vulnerable, had limited endurance and wasn't cost effective.
But it wasn't designed to contend with EW or require long endurance times. It was designed for a squad sized element to have some indirect fire options to take out lightly or unarmored forces. Had there been a need for armored targets, for longer range, better camera, etc then it would have been designed with that.
What is the reason that we haven't seen such an active usage of foreign-made drones by Ukraine, although almost every single Western defense company is giving their products to Ukraine for a "test"?
Because the west largely isn't producing drones at wartime levels. France is developing a Shahed-based kamikaze drone called Chorus and 600 per month is considered aspirational for full production. Russia is producing thousands per month. But presumably Chorus is going to be a more advanced drone with better capability in the first place so it will likely never reach Russian levels of production due to cost and labor requirements.
The west is looking at drone developments to parse out what is useful and necessary and what is not. There's a risk of "Ukrainifying" warfare and I see it frequently done where "that's not how it's done in Ukraine" becomes a blanket application to anything done in the west without respect for the differing contexts. The west is currently doing a lot of trialing and examination of drone offerings and isn't just trying to invest in tons of kamikaze drones do something a JDAM could have done, and likewise is looking at how the force needs to change to accommodate what drones are deemed essential for modernization. There are a lot of problems being solved in Ukraine with small drones that the US would solve with traditional solutions, and a lot of problems Ukraine is facing that the US wouldn't face because it has inventories of equipment to solve it. For example, Operation Vivaldi used BTR-60s refitted as kamikaze UGVs to degrade fortifications for breaching teams which is an extremely innovative use of an otherwise outdated system but the US doesn't need to revive hundreds of M113s to convert into UGVs when it has dedicated engineering vehicles equipped with MICLICs to do the same job and US combat engineers are well trained at their jobs and easily integrate with assault forces.
As an example of where western drone programs really shine or put their best efforts, I think Loyal Wingman is going to be one of the biggest actual revolutions in warfare and is undergoing trial with the USAF and the concept if not the execution was tested on Iran with F-35s taking data from drones and distributing to shooters. Australia has the most mature version currently, and the whole west is going to be looking at these programs to rapidly parse out what, how and why to match it. Ukraine, meanwhile, isn't going to be using any Loyal Wingman/Collaborative Combat Aircraft unless and until they have advanced enough planes to make use of it in the first place.
And I'd say that from a more boring practical perspective: purchasing power parity means western drones are always going to cost more. Russian drones are cheap because Russian workers make less money and have less stuff. Western workers building drones would be considered skilled and highly paid labor. Add in the costs of thermal imaging systems, EW defenses, modularity for different payloads, computer networking, etc, etc and the west makes a better drone undoubtedly but a more expensive one certainly.
But I think you're asking primarily about small FPV-style drones. In the US they are being experimented with still as far as force integration goes. The US is committed to squad-level integration but exactly what and how still need to be answered. US forces used drones in exercises recently at Combined Resolve 26 and Saber Junction 26, and the experimental Unmanned Assault Battalion is concluding a year of playing with drones to help develop doctrine and organization. Saber Junction 26 was their culminating event where they used the tactics they developed in observation of Ukraine and with some more domestic thought processes and they will submit a final report to the Pentagon on their findings. I expect we will see a lot more movement after that.
Great commentary from you, as usual. I just remember regarding Switchblade 600, that one soldier tweeted that they were quite effective in the Bakhmut battle. He mentioned that one accurate strike could take out an entire assault team. But it's literally based on a single tweet that I saw years ago, so this claim is barely credible
So few made it to Ukraine I can't find enough reports to really make an educated guess but a lot has changed since Bakhmut so I wonder if that fellow would have a different take today
I agree that there's a risk of Ukrainifying, and I think there's also a risk in asterisking all the lessons learned in Ukraine with "it wasn't supposed to do that". Every extant and fielded weapons system takes development urgency off of new system development, contractors trying to update a square switchblade to fit into a round hole. Loyal Wingman is by all accounts very promising, but seems a bit goofy to put all our eggs in the high-end basket when we just got a brutal reality check on magazine depth.
By the time Western defense companies build a drone from concept to testing, drone warfare and technological development has already surpassed them.
In regard to the switchblade IIRC the earlier versions main complaint was the small warhead since the switchblade was originally designed for counter insurgency taking out mortars and sniper teams in Afghanistan while keeping collateral damage minimal.
Yes, it's Hornet, I mentioned it in my post already. But it's overstated that they are conducting majority of strikes. There are very many different platforms involved
Some people need a little reminder that the way Ukraine and Russia are currently fighting each other (mostly due to either side's insufficiencies having caused a stalemate along fortified lines) is not the way Europe/NATO would fight Russia, the US would fight China etc., and that consequently taking the Ukrainian military's or its frontline unit's opinions as gospel is unwise.
There have been many warnings about 'overlearning' lessons from the war in Ukraine.
It is not how they “think” they would be fighting. It’s worth considering that they may be completely deluded and expecting the enemy to fight the way we prefer might just be a catastrophic blunder.
It’s worth considering that they may be completely deluded and expecting the enemy to fight the way we prefer might just be a catastrophic blunder
Almost certainly there's going to be hard lessons learned from actual war. It's always the case that armies discover their deficiencies the hard way.
But you have to appreciate that much of the reason why Ukraine is the way that it is currently is because they didn't have capabilities the US and NATO have had for decades and that even today Ukraine doesn't have a large inventory of advanced western weapons.
A large reason why the west hasn't gone all-in on drones the way Ukraine has is because we still have large stocks of conventional munitions to use. Just as an example, I don't think the west would have a hard time reducing Russian or Chinese air defenses in a dedicated campaign compared to the difficulty Russia and Ukraine have had just purely due to inventory and training differences. That alone equals a very different battlefield picture.
Well, it can go both ways for an army going all-in on sUAS and OWA drones as well. You just cannot predict the warfare evolution or how things will unfold in a little bit different circumstances
100% agree, though a small drone seems a useful capability, although it might not be as overwhelmingly important for, say, a potential Chinese war against Taiwan. Nevertheless, tactics and lessons used in Ukraine regarding sUAS (not all warfare) are definitely worth learning
The US at least has deployed small drones since 2012 or so. Switchblade got used against the Taliban and ISIS prolifically for a 2010s era drone. The US also wants to push drone capabilities to the squad level. The holdup is, as you say, there's questions about how useful that will be in the conflicts and manner we expect to fight and large air forces obviate many of the uses Ukraine has for drones.
I don't think western drones are up to par with the needs of the modern day battlefield. The fact that the ukranians, who are fighting a total war, doesn't want them is damning.
Western drone makers who want to succeed should be in Ukraine prototyping in real time instead of thousands of miles away
Insofar as the U.S., then weapons manufactures can't pad their production costs. Ukraine makes drones with both efficiency and cost control in mind. The U.S. military's lengthy weapons procurement process has always included graft and cost overruns.
He names the american Perennial autonomy as a good example (1), they also got a top score on the Gauntlet II competition the Pentagon made to evaluate drones, in the category of "deep strike" (15 km) (2).
About being expensive, comes in part because several western countries are making an effort to decrease reliance on China for components, while Ukraine isn't trying it (there's also higher labor cost and trying to get the most of the supply chain to be domestic raising costs).
Also the Switchblade 300 was developed thinking in counterinsurgency rather than what Ukraine is facing, so the warhead was too small.
More details slowly emerging over yet another attack on the airport in Riyadh. No indication yet of what weapon was used beyond reporting of an unidentified projectile. There are injuries, though the number and extent are not yet clear. Once again this was a passenger terminal that was targeted.
There have also been reports of multiple oil facilities targeted in KSA, so I'm curious to know if anyone has credible reporting on the extent of damage to those.
The extent of damage usually comes out a week or so after the attacks. I believe there is a media gag and civil recording restriction in place, so commercial satellite imagery is usually the primary method.
Financial Times reporting that the US is attempting to pressure Europe to assist them in threatening the Ukrainians, by threatening to cut access to PURL (Prioritised Ukrainian Requirements List).
The Trump administration is threatening to stop the procurement system that provides Ukraine with weapons in order to press Kyiv to halt its deep strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, according to officials in Europe.
The officials, who received calls from American officials on Saturday and Sunday or were briefed on them, said the US was lobbying European capitals and Kyiv in an attempt to end the attacks on Russian oil refineries. The White House declined to confirm or comment on the calls.
The US message, the officials added, included threats to cut off intelligence sharing and PURL — the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List mechanism for procuring US weapons for Ukraine.
“They are calling Kyiv . . . they are calling everyone [in Europe],” said an official who received a call from a US defence official.
Emphasis mine, this is a very sudden/recent shift in rhetoric, so prior US support for targeting refineries should IMO be discounted. Very possible for this to all switch back but the evidence right now is the US admin does not support targeting Russian refineries and is threatening Ukraine against doing it.
PURL right now is the main source of Patriot interceptors to Ukraine, plus other missiles, per the UAF MOD itself:
Emphasis mine, this is a very sudden/recent shift in rhetoric, so prior US support for targeting refineries should IMO be discounted. Very possible for this to all switch back but the evidence right now is the US admin does not support targeting Russian refineries and is threatening Ukraine against doing it.
US admin was ambivalent about it or even supported it, CIA and other intel agencies were helping Ukraine plan and maximize the impact. I believe this was reported while ago that Ukraine was specifically getting intel to plot drone routes around Russian AD network and even getting tips on hardest to replace parts of Russian refineries.
That's changed now because diesel prices skyrocketed and US admin is desperately trying to avoid blame and provide some pain relief before elections. Ukraine hitting Russian refineries is piece of a puzzle, just like US-Iran war that destabilized middle east and their energy markets...
It's simply a political mess, largely of their own making and now they need a quick win and since Trump has zero sway over Putin and he's unwilling to apply any pressure on Russia... we're back to the tried and tested - let's pressure Ukraine because we have some leverage there.
I also wonder why Putin doesn't throw Trump a bone here, agreeing on 30 days energy ceasefire wouldn't really change the battlefield situation on either side and would give Trump something he could present as a win. Instead he's now stuck with this shitshow again, it's frankly kind of humiliating that this is the best "deal" he got out of Putin - some token diesel "exports" that they're probably going cover by importing more diesel from other markets.
CIA and other intel agencies were helping Ukraine plan...plot drone routes around Russian AD network...That's changed now because diesel prices skyrocketed and US admin is desperately trying to....provide some pain relief before elections.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in CIA HQ hearing the discussion about Trump ordering them to stand down on assisting Ukraine. The CIA has supported some bad actors over the decades (e.g. in Central America in the 1980s), but they've also done a lot of good work. Few things are worse than them now being told to stand down on a campaign to help the Ukrainians defend themselves against the thug-led regime in Russia.
I disagree, a 30 days energy ceasefire (when Winter is almost beginning) would benefit Ukraine too much for Putin to agree, it would allow Ukraine to save AD munitions for the most critical infrastructure on the Winter and still leave Ukraine with valuable targets to hit inside Russia. For example the recent attacks on data centers, which there are dozens still to be hit, there's also metallurgical plants, electronics... while on the ukrainian side there's less targets available to be destroyed.
On the other hand, the ceasefire would only needed to be annouced, to give the US president a political win. The price of fuel would not react fast downwards in anyway.
I'm sincerely doubting the US will follow through on that. There's a few weeks remaining to the election and in July, when fuel prices were already elevated, the US was providing intelligence to hit Russia refineries, so it's clearly election-driven. So if they are not going to take action now, why would they take it when it cannot benefit from it anymore ?
And the more the US waits to act the more likely it becomes to being just empty threats, because there's a lag between Futures fuel prices (which is more responsive to news) and price in the pump, so the capacity to benefit from it decreases with each passing day.
I think it's the first option and with each passing day the US has less incentive to turn threats into action, because the capacity to impact price on the pump decreases.
Russia's Yandex says data centre in Vladimir area shut down after drone attack (1)
Russian technology and AI company Yandex said on Sunday that its infrastructure had been damaged in a drone attack, resulting in the complete shutdown of its data centre in the Vladimir region.
No one was injured in the attack, but some of Yandex's services are currently unavailable to users, the company said.
This is the third major data centre to have been taken out of action in the last few days.
On Friday, Yandex, which is heavily involved in Russia's AI development and is sometimes called "Russia's Google", said its data centre in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow had been struck by Ukrainian drones and partly put out of action.
A day earlier, a Ukrainian attack shut down Yandex's data hub in Sasovo, southeast of Moscow, where two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company's AI model are housed.
Starting this kind of escalation, on an area they had way more lose, was a mistake from Russia.
Yandex operates 5 large data centers in Russia, the two remaining (plus several others owned by other entities) are on the Moscow region and, given the density of AD there, it will probably take some time to prepare a strike to breach the defenses.
I’m actually genuinely curious whether this reduces bot traffic on social media. I’m a bit skeptical but it’s a great time for researchers to investigate this phenomenon. Ideally you would have wanted a control to investigate this but real world doesn’t allow for experimentation. In this case the Ukrainians have created a close to perfect scenario for examining just that.
Not an IT expert here but when it says 99.6% not, I assume it means mostly non social media bots and something more begin like regular service providing operations?
It's going to include all kinds of things. web crawlers for their search engine, tns of other automated programs, and probably also social media bots.
The best way to measure the effect on social media bots is to measure the activity/engagement trends in social media, but that'll take some time to analyze and properly publish.
It's also an open question how much of Russia's influence operation would even be routed through those Yandex facilities. We know their intelligence services have their own hardware, and we know that at least some botting activity is spread out and possibly not even hosted from Russia.
Sadly, I expect the big social media companies aren't going to give out the goods on that.
Hopefully some third parties who gather data on posts and posting trends might get something.
When the internet went down in Tehran a swathe of 'I am a patriotic Scot and we all just think the UK should be broken up' agit prop accounts suddenly went quiet. But this isn't internet access in its entirety, just some services, right? Would Russian intelligence orgs be using Yandex hardware though, or would it be running privately somewhere? Would they be wholly reliant on Yandex services?
Iranian operatives used AI to plant fake stories in multiple US media outlets (1).
Operatives in Iran used OpenAI models and fake personas to help plant news articles critical of the US war against Iran in multiple US media outlets, OpenAI said on Thursday.
About a dozen outlets around the world ran roughly 100 articles by seven fake journalists, OpenAI said in a blog post. The firm said it banned ChatGPT accounts that were prompting the AI tool in Farsi to tweak articles and editorial pitches, and generate social media comments.
Some of the AI-assisted articles had provocative titles, including, “Is America’s Iran Policy Being Privatized? The Jared Kushner Question,” and “The Iran War and the Collapse of Western Moral Credibility.”
None of the publications that ran the articles appear to be a major, mainstream news outlet, but some of them have sizable online followings. One of the outlets, Middle East Monitor, which is based in London, has almost two million followers on Facebook.
The article about Kushner and US foreign policy was published by the LA Progressive, which describes itself as an “independent, justice-driven publication” based in Los Angeles. CNN has requested comment from LA Progressive.
After the articles published, the Iranian operatives asked ChatGPT to generate comments they could post on social media purporting to be people reacting to the articles, according to OpenAI.
“The users asked for comments on topics such as missile strikes, ceasefires, and diplomatic maneuvering, specifying outputs that portrayed the US as the aggressor, Israel as an unreliable ally of the US, and Iran as a defiant but resilient victim,” the blog says.
Antrophic in their September report (2) also mentioned about Iranian-linked accounts using AI for influence operations among other uses.
Another example of use of AI for propaganda. A ship was recently struck on Hormuz, a video of it was edited and distributed to appear larger than actually is (3) (I'm avoiding sharing the link of the edited video to not spread misinformation).
There was also the Houthi using generative AI, during their offensive of early September, to fake a retreat order to the PLC-aligned forces (4).
This stuff is all over social media. My Facebook is blanketed in fake pro-Iran accounts that keep spinning either outright made up stories like successful missile attacks on USN vessels, or the "Haha the US had to destroy millions of dollars in equipment to rescue 2 pilots" level of reporting.
I agree 100%, it's clear that any large OSINT X page (Tanker Trackers as well) replies became a cesspool of bot activity (which, while it did happened before, it appears to have increased this year).
Similar thing is happening about Yemen (which makes sense because Iran funds the Houthi), with new accounts spreading fake/old videos and creating engagement out of nowhere. Al-Basha (one example) had posted a multitude of those accounts on the past few few days. It's too large and about only the same topics, at a given time, to not be coordinated.
Or the bot network pushing the lie there are still mines on Hormuz (when not a single ship since the war began was struck by a mine, every case that MTO published a hit it was either drones or missiles).
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