1,569 Days.
A watershed moment.
1. The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be “the last of the last” once seemed unthinkable. That is just what happened on Thursday. The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I. (Source: nytimes.com)
2. Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed. We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].” The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometers over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.” (Source: newscientist.com)
3. The New York Times:
First Ukraine assembled an arsenal of millions of drones that, along with Russia’s own buildup, turned a 25-mile-wide strip along the front line into a killing ground. Then Kyiv expanded its reach deep into the Russian heartland as it targeted oil infrastructure and military factories, making long-range violence in the war a two-way street.
Now, Ukraine is focusing on the middle ground — the critical roads and railways, in some cases more than 100 miles from the front, that feed Russian troops and matériel into battle. Kyiv is calling the effort a “logistics lockdown,” and it is systematically reshaping the battlefield, at least until Russian forces find a way to adapt. (Source: nytimes.com)
4. The U.S. began a fresh wave of attacks on Iran yesterday, launching strikes against several targets on President Trump’s orders, the American military said. The attack came hours after Trump said Iran was “playing us for suckers” because it hadn’t accepted U.S. terms for a nuclear deal. The Pentagon cast the attacks as an act of coercive diplomacy designed to force Iranian concessions at the negotiating table. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday afternoon as he visited the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of U.S. Central Command. Iran responded, launching strikes against Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. (Sources: wsj.com)
