Speaking at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Yevhenii Khmara also said that the majority of the missiles would only be shipped in the coming years, and called for more urgent aid.

In comments posted later by the Defence Ministry, Khmara said Ukraine was asking its Western partners to provide more air defense missiles from their stocks in exchange for improvements in missile performance under contracts signed with Kyiv.

He said Ukraine was being hindered by a shortfall of $27 billion in financing for drone supplies.

Ukraine asks EU to fund first Patriot missiles buy

The ministry’s summary of the meeting said Khmara had presented a plan for Ukraine’s conduct of the war that was already being implemented along with a list of what Kyiv considered to be the biggest threats posed by Moscow.

Khmara said Russia was making no strategic gains along the 1,200-km (750-mile) front line, but Moscow was making up for its battlefield failures with “terror against Ukrainians.”

Russia resumed its near-constant drone and missile attacks on Kyiv on Tuesday after a brief halt for the visit of U.S. peace negotiators. Officials said five people were killed in the capital along with others in various regions.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told the meeting that Ukraine’s allies had no choice but to boost their support to enable Kyiv “to seize the opportunities it is creating now across all fronts and to defend itself in the skies.”

First issued one year ago, the government’s original solicitation from the Missile Defense Agency’s Rapid Response Small Launcher Technology program called on tenders that could “rapidly demonstrate very low cost, modular interceptor designs to counter ballistic and hypersonic threats.”

Two companies, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, have long held the domestic market for the solid rocket motors inside those weapons, while production of the Patriot itself runs through Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Japan remains the only country ever licensed to build the missiles abroad.

“The contract will aim to address the critical need to expand the SRM industrial base, which is currently reliant on a duopoly of two primary manufacturers,” the DoD wrote in its contract announcement last month.

The program has taken on new urgency since the war with Iran left the U.S. with fewer than 1,000 Patriot interceptors and roughly 250 THAAD rounds, with each Patriot replacement costing roughly $3.9 million and taking years to build by a handful of licensed manufacturers facing almost no competition.

“America can’t out-produce today’s threats with yesterday’s supplier base,” X-Bow founder and CEO Jason Hundley said in a statement. “Our new manufacturing technology lets us bring affordable interceptors and rocket motors to the warfighter faster, and this award is a chance to prove it.”

X-Bow prints its solid rocket motors and propellant in-house and will use the phase 2 award, under MDA’s Low-Cost Interceptor effort, to fund further motor development and a first flight test.

“We’re taking a look at propulsion, we’re taking a look at all the expensive parts of an interceptor to look for opportunities to drive down every bit of cost in there as we move forward,” MDA Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins told DefenseScoop at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama earlier this month.

Other parts of the government have also been trying to tackle the global interceptor shortage.

Last year, the U.S. Air Force solicited industry for a counter-air missile under $500,000 that it wants built by the thousands each year, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine.

Allied countries, still dependent on Patriot stocks to protect their own cities, have begun working toward antiballistic capabilities at lower price points, too.

Over the summer, Ukraine and European partners opened at least three new tracks toward cheaper ballistic defense, including the nine-nation Freyja initiative — a $700,000-a-round interceptor that Ukrainian strike-drone maker Fire Point says will be battlefield-ready next year — and Lockheed Martin’s new PAC-3 ACE missile, which the company says will be faster to produce and cost less than half as much as a PAC-3 MSE round.

Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have said little about providing Kyiv with the licensing necessary to begin manufacturing their own Patriot missiles, despite President Donald Trump’s July pledge to license the technology after years of withholding it.

None of the new options, American or Ukrainian-European, is expected before next year.

X-Bow’s agreement stipulates that the company must produce a prototype for the DoD for flight demonstration by late 2027 — not a battle-tested weapon — and the furthest-along Ukrainian alternative would reach the battlefield by mid-2027 at the earliest, according to manufacturers.

The 29-year-old — a former science teacher who joined the army in 2023 — was watching the soldiers on a screen in his command post around 15 km (9 miles) away.

Between them stretched the “kill zone,” riddled with mines and swarmed by aerial drones ready to attack anything that moved.

Polskyi, whose military call-sign is “Teacher,” hopped into his grey pick-up truck and raced past scorched fields and the charred husks of other vehicles left on the battlefield of northern Ukraine. He had no helmet or body armour.

“If it had happened to me, I would’ve wanted them to come take me away, and not just leave me there,” the junior lieutenant told Reuters, recalling his Aug. 15 mission to save both men, who were members of another battalion.

His feat captured the country’s attention and earned him its highest military honour, Hero of Ukraine, days later. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy presented him with the award at Independence Day celebrations in Kyiv on Monday.

“People must be taken care of. Thank you, Vladyslav!” Zelenskiy said, announcing the award.

STRANDED DRONE SHOWED LIMITS OF BATTLEFIELD TECH

Speaking to Reuters less than a week after the operation, Polskyi described speeding toward the men while planning how he would load them onto the flatbed of the truck.

The two Ukrainian soldiers had been wounded during a combat mission in the Kharkiv region and were being evacuated atop an unmanned ground vehicle when it was struck by one of Russia’s small, agile helicopter drones loaded with explosives.

Kyiv’s forces have been using remote-controlled unmanned vehicles to help limit human involvement in dangerous tasks like evacuations inside the “kill zone”, seeking an edge against Moscow’s bigger army.

Russia’s successful attack cast light on the limits of the relatively slow and rudimentary vehicles. The Russian drone knocked out the land drone’s Starlink terminal, severing the link with its pilot and leaving it immobilized.

One of the wounded soldiers had managed to crawl into a ditch off the road and hide in the vegetation; the other lay helpless on the four-wheeled vehicle under an open sky, his right foot dangling from the bone.

Ukraine has also made widespread use of attack drones on the battlefield, and says it is killing or wounding around 30,000 Russian soldiers a month — a figure Moscow dismisses as exaggerated.

Both sides frequently post videos of drones hunting down each other’s soldiers in the “kill zone.”

Surveillance drone footage, obtained exclusively by Reuters from Polskyi’s unit, the 475th Assault Regiment, shows his truck hurtling down a gravel road before turning and rapidly reversing toward the damaged drone.

Reuters was able to verify the exact location of the rescue using the full-length footage. However, the regiment asked not to disclose where it took place for security reasons.

At another nearby command post, drone-platoon leader “Malyi” watched as the rescue played out on screens in real time.

“Everyone in the command centre was shocked,” said the 22-year-old, who asked to be identified by his call-sign. Just a single Russian drone or land mine could have killed all three men, he added.

Polskyi — dressed in T-shirt and shorts — hoisted both men onto his truck and raced home, managing to evade the flying Russian drones that had been detected heading toward their new target.

Looking back, he remembered the fear in the men’s eyes. He was afraid too. “But you need to know how to control it,” he said.

The CIA has worked closely with Ukraine’s intelligence services since Russia’s 2014 invasion, growing a partnership built on assistance and training into a two-way exchange of intelligence, according to Forbes. However, the relationship nearly collapsed in February 2025, when a contentious Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended with Washington temporarily cutting off the flow of intelligence and weapons to Kyiv.

But Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, said this month that the two countries have moved past previous hurdles and returned to a strong intelligence partnership.

“I don’t want to get into any specifics, but it has improved,” Warner told Politico.

The CIA has spent more than a decade and millions of dollars training and equipping Ukrainian intelligence officers, building around a dozen secret forward-operating bases along the Russian border, ABC News reported in January 2025, citing former U.S. officials.

The senator said the current arrangement has helped Kyiv gain an edge, with long-range drones and missiles now hitting targets far inside Russia.

Russian troops survive just 20-30 minutes on Ukraine’s front lines, CIA director says

While American weapons deliveries have taken the spotlight in what Washington gives Ukraine, intelligence is the one U.S. asset Kyiv cannot replace, especially for the long-range strikes now making headlines.

That intelligence reaches directly into the strike campaign, including “the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia,” The Atlantic reported, citing American and Ukrainian sources.

Those sources called intelligence “the one thing the United States still provides free of charge,” crediting CIA Director John Ratcliffe with keeping it that way.

Zelenskyy seems to have risen in Trump’s estimation as Ukraine increasingly fights on its own terms, redefining modern warfare by crafting new tech and strategies, clawing back territory and taking the war deep into Russia — leaving Kyiv looking less dependent and more like an ally with something to trade.

“Trump doesn’t like losers,” one Western intelligence official told the outlet.

Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, another intelligence committee member, and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Politico they see a direct connection between the White House’s view of Ukraine’s battlefield successes and Kyiv’s access to intelligence.

“It sure seems like that,” Cornyn said. “Everybody loves a winner and looks like Ukraine has turned the tide.”

The strengthening relationship between Washington and Kyiv is apparent on multiple fronts.

Trump’s negotiators to end the war, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, plan to head to Ukraine for the first time later this month, a trip that coincides with the country’s independence celebrations, according to Radio Free Europe.

The intel trade is going both ways, with Zelenskyy stating publicly as early as March that Kyiv had proof of Moscow passing intelligence to Iran that he later promised to put in front of Trump.

“We have irrefutable evidence that the Russians continue to provide intelligence to the Iranian regime,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “Russia is using its own signals intelligence and electronic intelligence capabilities, as well as part of the data obtained through cooperation with partners in the Middle East.”

American officials are backpedaling too. Trump on July 20 told the Financial Times that the U.S. has to be “a little bit careful of who we license to.” Despite that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday posted on X that the two sides have “now reached an agreement.”

The glacial progress may reflect American defense giants’ fear that Kyiv could become a defense industry competitor — rather than posing risk to technology or intellectual property — a Republican official on Capitol Hill told The Atlantic.

“Their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do,” the official said, adding that the companies will publicly frame their concerns around “IP theft and tech transfer” instead.

Ukraine’s weapons industry, honed by nearly five years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, has been booming since the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began in the spring. The conflict with Iran has drained an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot interceptor inventory, sparking discussion about inventory and strategy.

Some defense partners are eager to work with Ukraine, a country with rare recent experience fighting a large-scale land war, and have shown strong interest in collaborating with Kyiv to develop and field cheaper, faster-to-produce alternatives to million-dollar weapons.

The race toward competition is problematic for the defense giants, the official said — not because Ukraine might steal the Patriot — but because the country’s partners might outbuild it, cutting into the current monopoly on antiballistic capabilities and profits.

Trump first pledged the license at the July NATO summit in Ankara, promising Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Zelenskyy said the next day that the question had been “resolved politically,” telling reporters that technical teams needed to start work “without delay, so that we can get licenses very quickly and start production in Ukraine as soon as possible.”

Five days after Trump’s pledge, Ukraine, nine European countries and defense heavyweights including Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales and Saab launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new antiballistic system built around a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed unveiled its own cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile at the Farnborough International Airshow, advertising the PAC-3 ACE at roughly $2 million a round – less than half the price of the round Ukraine fires at Russian ballistic missiles today.

The Patriot line rarely moves that fast. Its current top round, the PAC-3 MSE, was first accepted by the U.S. Army in 2015 and took until 2018 to reach full-rate production, per the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance.

On July 21, one day after the ACE debut, Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, described production talks with Ukraine as simply “early,” telling reporters the company will “support the US Army and the [Trump] administration on what they want to go do,” according to Breaking Defense.

Raytheon’s process “has just started,” with the company working with the U.S. government “to determine what is feasible and what is best for Ukraine,” its president of land and air defense systems, Tom Laliberty, said at the same show.

Two days later, Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X that he was “grateful for the company’s readiness to take our partnership to an even higher level, where Ukraine would co-produce, together with Raytheon, some of the most vital air defense assets – Patriot interceptors,” after meeting representatives of the group.

But when Zelenskyy asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at a July 28 Oval Office meeting, the president refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks, The Atlantic reported.

Three days later, Trump reversed course on the license entirely.

“We have not agreed to that,” he said at a Camp David Cabinet meeting. “We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”

Then, U.S. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker dampened expectations further on Aug. 3, telling Fox News that “we do not allow anybody but US manufacturers to make those in the United States,” adding that a long-term production agreement “will not be concluded before this winter,” per Euronews.

The deal’s current status is unclear.

“The decision has been made,” Zelenskyy said during an interview on Ukrainian television over the weekend, according to United24. “It was made by the President of the United States and other important American government institutions.”

American officials have yet to respond to Zelenskyy’s latest comments.

Ukrainian F-16s have destroyed more than 2,500 Geran and Gerbera one-way attack drones, wrote airpower expert Justin Bronk in an analysis of the Ukraine air war for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

“[The] use of fighters against such drones has consumed an unsustainable number of airframe flying hours and air-to-air missiles ... since mid-2024, when the Ukrainian Air Force received its first Western aircraft and trained crews,” the analysis reads.

“Russian industry produces more than 6,000 [one-way attack] drones per month, and fighter aircraft have only a finite number of airframe hours available before they need time consuming deep maintenance cycles to be performed at a factory by expert technicians.”

Ukraine’s fleet currently operates an estimated 39 F-16s, out of about 79 promised by various Western European nations. Ukraine also flies an estimated four Mirage 2000-5 fighters, out of up to 20 promised by France, plus a few Soviet-era Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters.

The F-16s have been a game changer in the Ukraine air war. They enable Ukraine’s small air force to launch stand-off attacks against ground targets using American-made JDAM and French-made AASM Hammer glide bombs. The threat they pose to Russia’s air force became evident earlier this month, when a Ukrainian F-16 reportedly downed an Su-35 over eastern Ukraine.

Ironically, the F-16 has proven such a capable aircraft that it has become a victim of its own success.

“The F-16 fleet has been over-tasked, mostly by C-UAS [counter-drone] interception duties, for which there is almost unlimited demand over time,” Bronk told Defense News.

The root of the dilemmas is that Ukraine is squeezed between multiple aerial threats.

In addition to drone strikes, Russia has launched numerous cruise and ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Russia has become adept at launching massive combined strikes that begin with waves of drones, followed by cruise missiles, such as the Kh-101, and then ballistic missiles, such as the Iskander-M and Kinzhal.

Ukraine has managed to at least partially tame the drone threat by creating dense belts of short-range air defenses, or SHORAD. These SHORAD belts combine short-range anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft guns, mobile machine gun teams and a variety of homegrown interceptor-drones.

The drawback there is maintaining dense SHORAD coverage along the 745-mile front line — plus defending cities in the rear — with short-range weapons.

“What unites all these mobile air defense teams and counter-drone teams is that their equipment and ammunition is relatively cheap and thus their operations are sustainable,” the RUSI analysis noted. “However, they are relatively personnel intensive to deploy at scale and require both force density and geographical depth to be effective.”

These limitations also point to the difficulties NATO would face in creating its own Ukrainian-style SHORAD system.

“NATO cannot replicate the density of SHORAD defenses that Ukraine deploys for C-UAS coverage, due to the huge personnel requirements of doing so on a sustainable basis,” Bronk told Defense News.

However, NATO could invest in radar-guided anti-aircraft guns to protect key installations, such as airbases and headquarters, and develop cheaper drone-killing munitions for aircraft such as the APKWS II rocket.

Nonetheless, this still leaves Russia’s cruise and ballistic missiles, against which SHORAD is largely ineffective.

As with the U.S. and Israel versus Iran’s missiles, Ukraine must carefully manage limited stockpiles of air defense interceptors like the American-made Patriot and the European-made SAMP/T.

Ideally, Ukraine should rely on SHORAD to stop the drones, while reserving its F-16s for other missions, Bronk argues.

“Other systems need to be used wherever possible for [one-way attack] drones so that F-16 capacity can be used to intercept cruise missiles and deliver strike missions,” Bronk explained. “Within the Ukrainian Air Force inventory, it is by far the most efficient asset for this.”

Bronk believes that F-16 stand-off ground attacks could be even more effective — if Ukraine’s high command was less rigid.

“There is potential for the Ukrainian Air Force to have greater effects if squadrons and wings are given more authority to plan strikes themselves rather than being centrally tasked by Army-centric headquarters elements,” he said.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, Kyiv has had to counter Iranian-designed drones deployed by Moscow. Kyiv has offered its drone interception expertise to countries in the Middle East that have suffered strikes from Iran.

Tehran described the attack on its vessel as an act of aggression and said it would defend its national interests and security, while accusing Kyiv of seeking to expand the war in Ukraine.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to convey its protest over what it described as a “hostile and criminal” attack, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported.

The Iranian denunciation coincided with comments by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Kyiv had noted Russia was passing on its satellite observations in the Middle East to Iran to enable it to direct strikes in the region.

Zelenskyy had earlier said that Ukraine’s forces struck a Russian warship and vessels used for transporting Iranian-linked military cargo in the Caspian Sea.

The Ukrainian president, in subsequent remarks posted on X, said Kyiv had recorded since the beginning of July “active Russian satellite surveillance of the Gulf states and U.S. military facilities located there. These images subsequently appear in Iran.”

“At the same time, there is a clear correlation between Russia’s satellite imagery of these sites and Iranian strikes — both before the attacks, in preparation for them, and afterward, to assess the damage inflicted,” Zelenskyy said.

He said that on July 19 and 20 alone, Russian satellite observation had included four air bases: two in Bahrain, one in Jordan and one in Kuwait.

Operating far behind the front line on Ukraine’s sweeping steppe, such units have hit more than 180 vessels and other sea-borne targets around the peninsula over the past three weeks, opening a new front in the war.

The attacks, first in the Sea of Azov and now expanding into the Black Sea that it opens into, are designed to raise the cost for Russia of occupying Crimea and to swing the initiative towards Kyiv in the fifth year of full-scale war in Ukraine.

“We work day and night, every day, without time off,” said battalion commander “Ray” of Magyar’s Birds, a brigade that is an important part of the effort. In line with Ukrainian military practice, he identified himself only by his call sign.

During a recent visit by Reuters, his team launched drones every couple of minutes. The unit said it struck a cargo vessel and floating crane in the Black Sea and a power substation in south Crimea. Reuters could not independently verify this.

The attacks are part of the growing duel in strategic waters in recent weeks, during which Russia has stepped up strikes on Ukrainian ports and international cargo ships.

Kyiv’s agriculture minister said on Thursday that shipowners had ​temporarily suspended vessel arrivals at Ukraine’s Black Sea ports for agricultural exports following the surge in attacks.

BATTLE OVER CRIMEA

Crimea, which serves as a transit and military hub for Moscow’s troops, has become a new focus for Ukraine’s drone forces as they scale up their strike capabilities.

In recent months, they have targeted road and rail links in a swath of occupied southern Ukraine that connects the peninsula to Russia — which seized and annexed it in 2014, long before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

That has led to fuel shortages and a state of emergency in Crimea, with power and gas facilities also systematically hit.

Now, attacks on oil tankers, dry cargo ships and other vessels mark a widening of Kyiv’s effort to pressure Russian forces by starving them of resources.

Since the new phase of their campaign began in July, drone forces under commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi have reported hitting about six vessels per day, detailed by Brovdi in mocking, emoji-riddled reports.

The attacks have choked Russian shipping through the Sea of Azov, which receives ships from Russia’s main southern grain-producing region via the Don River.

Brovdi’s forces said the Kerch ferry crossing between eastern Crimea and Russia’s Krasnodar region had lost around 75% of its capacity. Reuters could not verify this.

The commander told Reuters the attacks were aimed at “ruining the myth” of Russian domination and establishing total control over Ukraine’s territorial waters.

The new campaign is dubbed “Molochko”: a portmanteau that sounds like the word “milk” but denotes the phrase “Moscow will collapse because of Crimea.”

Sidharth Kaushal, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, said Ukrainian attacks on Russian overland logistics had led to an increase in shipping through the Sea of Azov, thus providing more sea-borne targets.

The attacks, he said, are “a logical continuation” of Ukraine’s Crimea campaign.

RUSSIAN ATTACKS ON PORTS AND VESSELS

Ukraine’s strikes have been mirrored by intensifying Russian attacks on southern Ukraine, particularly the city of Odesa and ports that send much of the country’s grain through a maritime corridor to international markets.

On Sunday, 10 sailors were killed after Russian forces struck a Guinea-Bissau-flagged vessel carrying corn from the port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said.

Last week, at least three people were killed in attacks on Odesa and Mykolaiv, another port city.

In the first two weeks of July alone, Russia struck Ukrainian ports 23 times and civilian vessels 17 times, Kyiv’s seaports authority said last Thursday, leaving traders struggling with logistics headaches.

Agricultural exports such as grains and vegetable oils remain Ukraine’s biggest source of foreign currency earnings, with more than 90% shipped from ports in the Odesa ​region through a maritime corridor.

Russia has said its attacks are aimed at infrastructure storing military cargo and fuel.

HUNTED BY RUSSIANS

The Ukrainian-made FP-1 and FP-2 drones used by battalion commander Ray’s team are a staple of Kyiv’s growing arsenal. They fly automatically to the operational zone, then pilots — often based far away — take over to land the final blow.

Minutes after catapulting their last propeller-powered drone using a small jet booster, the launch team packed up and prepared to move. No site is re-used and teams are often sent to new locations at a few hours’ notice.

Although technological advancements have allowed them to launch from over 100 km, or 62 miles, behind front lines, they are still a prized target for enemy drone teams.

“This is a constant war — a continuous struggle of measures and countermeasures,” said Ray, who commands his brigade’s ninth battalion, called Kairos.

Panama, a squadron commander, said he and fellow troops were motivated by the “tangible results” of their operations.

Beyond complicating Russian logistics, the campaign is boosting Ukrainian morale.

“It’s great that our tempo is so high,” he said, “but we still need to sustain it.”

The assessment comes as Ukraine’s battlefield technology has stalled Russia’s advance along the front and drawn foreign partners ready to spend billions of dollars in deals with its defense industry.

European and Ukrainian officials have said for months that Russian casualty rates have climbed to record levels, with Ukraine’s top general telling NATO allies in May that Russia loses at least 1,000 soldiers a day.

“Our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said at the Defense and Innovation Summit in Pennsylvania. “The average life expectancy of a Russian recruit right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.”

“That’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines,” he added.

Ratcliffe’s confirmation shows how decisively emerging technology can shape a war — and why the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind.

The Russia-to-Ukraine casualty ratio reached nearly 8-to-1 in the first half of 2026, up from roughly 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 for most of the war, as AI-powered drones expanded across the front, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

More than 2 million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, with Russia bearing 1.4 million of those casualties, the CSIS researchers found, including as many as 450,000 dead — the highest battlefield death toll suffered by any major power since World War II.

“The takeaway is that the mastery of these emerging technologies is every bit as important as military strength,” Ratcliffe said during the summit. “That’s why an inferior force, four and a half years later, has held off the superior force of Russia.”

Ratcliffe said the U.S. needs to take the lessons learned on the battlefield in Ukraine seriously.

“The pace of their advance has stopped as Ukraine’s mastery of emerging technologies and, in this case, drone warfare, asymmetric warfare, is such a great equalizer, and shows why we have to be leading on this in all respects for us to maintain our place in the global marketplace,” he said.

His remarks came as Washington and its European allies race to fund Ukraine’s drone programs and lock in access to the technology behind them.

The day before, the European Union and Ukraine signed a drone-production deal in Kyiv worth over $6 billion, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that progress had been made on a package of multibillion dollar deals with the U.S.

The balloon-born missile, DART, drops from a balloon at about 7 to 11 miles and runs on satellite guidance until it falls to about 4 miles, where its navigation cuts out and a solid-fuel engine carries it along a fixed course, according to its creators at the Ukrainian company Center of Innovative Technologies Program.

Once the navigation shuts off, Russian jammers can not pull the missile off target.

The company built DART to drop from a balloon rather than fire from a plane or a launcher as a cheap, silent and electronic warfare-resistant vehicle to carry guided weapons deep into Russia.

Its roughly 22-pound warhead scatters conductive graphite filaments designed to short out Russian power grids, according to Militarnyi, though it has not yet cleared Ukrainian military codification.

“Balloons are actively used by the Defense Forces of Ukraine mainly as support platforms and as means for medium and deep strikes,” retired Col. Viktor Kevliuk, a 35-year veteran of the Ukrainian Army now with the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies, told Euromaidan Press last month.

“They are inexpensive, inconspicuous on radars, can hang in the air for a long time and carry a payload,” Kevliuk said.

Ukraine has already floated more than 1,000 of them into Russia, he said.

Now Kyiv is using those balloons to launch a guided missile. They ride the prevailing west-to-east winds deep into Russia and have drifted as far as Moscow, where air defenses tracked them at an altitude of about 6 miles during a strike last September.

The debut comes at a turning point in the war. Ukraine has clawed back more ground than it has lost for the first time since its 2023 counteroffensive, a shift the Institute for the Study of War has linked to Ukraine’s emerging drone dominance over Russian technology across land, sea and air.

That edge has begun to reshape Kyiv’s leverage at the negotiating table, drawing American interest in its battlefield technology as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presses a mid- to long-range strike campaign that sends cruise missiles and one-way drones as far as over 600 miles into Russia, what he has branded the country’s “long-range sanctions” on Moscow’s war economy.

Balloons are a cheap way to reach into that same fight. They can drift over a hundred miles on the wind before they release anything, then hand off to a drone or a missile that flies hundreds more, stacking the two ranges to put a strike far deeper than either could manage alone.

Ukrainian forces have used military balloons in the past, most often for surveillance or as decoys.

The cheap, wind-borne balloons can bait Russian defenses into firing million-dollar S-300 and S-400 interceptors at a target that costs about $200, draining the batteries that guard Russian cities.

Ukraine floated several balloons over Moscow and Tatarstan during an overnight combined strike in September, a strategy that analysts assessed was meant to confuse Russian air defenses, according to United24, citing Russian sources.

The strike side of the story broke into view in May when video circulated online of an American-made attack drone falling from a Ukrainian balloon over the front. The clip, which spread across Ukrainian military channels, was the first public glimpse of Kyiv pairing a balloon with a precision weapon.

The drone was a Hornet, a roughly seven-foot, AI-guided strike drone built by the American firm Perennial Autonomy, and already in wide Ukrainian use against Russian supply lines. Ukrainian troops launched it from a balloon that carried it dozens of miles and released it at over 26,000 feets’ altitude, with the drone just using a tiny percentage of its battery along the way, according to Euromaidan Press.

Launched from Ukrainian-held territory, that balloon reportedly carried the drone dozens of miles toward its target before the flyer ever fired its own engine.

Ukrainian operators say that head start roughly doubles the Hornet’s reach from about 93 miles to at least 186 by adding the balloon’s distance and altitude to the range the drone flies on its own, according to The Defence Blog.

Perennial Autonomy, which produces the Hornet, was founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt out of his earlier White Stork and Swift Beat drone ventures in Ukraine, which won the biggest counter-drone award in American military history, valued at up to $500 million, last month.

“We must be proactive with creating a layered defense that deploys and scales low-cost, attributable air-to-air drone interceptors at all our facilities at home and abroad,” Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, who directs the task force that awarded the Perennial contract, told Inside Unmanned Systems last month.

Weaponized balloons may be part of that plan, evidenced by the U.S. Army’s own testing of balloon carriers.

The service has been evaluating a tethered balloon known as an aerostat, or lighter-than-air, to detect drones and relay communications, with an eye toward launching drone swarms from it.

Russia has gotten wind of the idea too — if not the backing of the breeze itself.

The prevailing winds across the front blow west to east, so a Russian balloon launched at Ukraine tends to drift back over Russia instead — a quirk of geography that runs in Kyiv’s favor.

Moscow is trying to field them anyway.

After SpaceX restricted unauthorized Starlink terminals over occupied territory, cutting Russian units off from a link they had leaned on, the military began trialing the Barrazh-1, a stratospheric balloon meant to haul a 220-pound relay station to an altitude of 65 feet, Defense Ministry adviser Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov told Defense Express last month.

Russian developers say the balloon is built almost entirely from Russian parts, a hedge against the same sanctions that grounded its Starlink link.

“We don’t want this war, we never did, and everyone knows it, and our partners know it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a voice message sent to reporters on a WhatsApp group. “But if Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn.”

Russia, for its part, fired missiles into Kyiv, also for the second time this week, following the attack that damaged the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery and drew international condemnation. Russia denied striking it.

In Moscow, Reuters saw flames and plumes of smoke over the densely populated southeastern district of Kapotnya, where the refinery supplying the capital is located.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that several drones managed to reach the refinery, adding that a shopping centre also suffered minor damage.

DIPLOMATIC PUSH

Russia’s defense ministry said 555 drones were shot down across the country. Sobyanin said 180 were shot down around Moscow alone. State news agency TASS said the attack on Moscow was one of the biggest this year.

Zelenskyy confirmed the attack on the refinery. Ukraine’s military said that Ukrainian forces also hit an oil depot in Russia’s southern Rostov region and another two bridges as Kyiv intensifies its campaign to hamper Russia’s logistics.

More than four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has increasingly been targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure with long-range drone strikes, while Russia has continued firing missiles at Ukrainian cities.

After years when Russian forces made slow but relentless gains on the battlefield, Kyiv says its improving drone capabilities are shifting the war’s momentum in its favor, providing new impetus for Moscow to agree a peace deal.

Zelenskyy has launched a diplomatic push to increase pressure on Russia to negotiate an end to the war.

“One of the most popular questions asked by Muscovites this morning is ‘What is going on?’ I can answer. Your country started a war of aggression against ours. For years, it has been killing our people. Now that you know what’s going on, ask Putin when he is planning to end it,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha posted on X.

MOSCOW SAYS ATTACK PUSHES BACK PROSPECT FOR TALKS

Moscow, which says Ukraine is losing, has demanded Kyiv cede its territory before it will discuss peace.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that Ukraine’s latest attacks on Russia are pushing back the prospect of any direct contacts between President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy, the Interfax news agency reported.

Zelenskyy called the attacks on Russia a “totally fair response to Russian strikes on our cities and communities and another important result of the work of our soldiers on facilities that provide support for the Russian war machine.”

A drone strike on Tuesday on Moscow’s refinery had already halted operations there, sources said, adding to widespread damage to Russian energy facilities.

Russia, the world’s third-biggest oil producer and a major oil and fuel exporter, is set to import fuel by sea this month as it seeks to manage a gasoline shortage following Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries, according to industry sources.

In the surrounding Moscow region, a high-rise residential building, an industrial facility and a number of private houses were damaged in the drone attack, which also injured 16 people, the regional governor said.

Flights were suspended at all Moscow airports and traffic shut on the highway around the capital near the refinery. Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow’s busiest, said it had been evacuated.

Elsewhere in Russia, officials said a Ukrainian drone strike killed a man in his car in the Belgorod border region, and a Ukrainian drone attack killed one person and caused a fire at two commercial facilities in the Rostov region.

EXPLOSIONS IN KYIV

Meanwhile explosions rang out in Kyiv and airstrike alerts were issued for most of Ukraine’s territory.

Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, said Russia was attacking the capital with ballistic missiles. There were no further reports from the authorities on damage or casualties in the city.

Authorities in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy said one person was killed in a drone attack overnight, while a man was killed and a further 11 people were injured in a Russian attack on the southeastern city of Dnipro early on Thursday, the regional governor said.

Russia is now losing roughly 1,000 troops a day in killed and wounded along the front, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.

Western officials are reaching a consensus that Ukraine has gained a serious edge on the battlefield for the first time in years as Russia struggles to break through Ukraine’s multilayer air defense or stand up to Kyiv’s growing arsenal and strengthening counteroffensive.

“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is going backwards on the battlefield, with new intelligence showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed since the conflict began,” the UK’s GCHQ intelligence director Anne Keast-Butler said Wednesday.

Until now, Western governments have hedged on Russia’s total losses, citing only a combined killed-and-wounded of around 1.2 million by late 2025.

The new figure recasts that picture: If nearly half a million Russian troops are dead, hundreds of thousands more are almost certainly wounded — and Moscow’s real casualty cost is far steeper.

The disclosure hardens a growing consensus: Russia is on its heels for the first time since the war’s opening months.

Russian battlefield gains are “approaching net zero” as Ukrainian forces are beginning to break out of the positional warfare that has gripped the front since 2023, the Institute for the Study of War concluded this week, after Russia lost 116 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in April — the first net territorial loss in 20 months.

“This should now be regarded as an official estimate given its source,” Michael Clarke, former director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, told CBS News.

The real toll “might well be higher” because Russian forces are “so neglectful of their front line wounded,” Clarke said.

The figure broadly tracks an earlier Dutch military intelligence assessment that put Russian “permanent losses” at roughly 1.2 million, including more than 500,000 killed.

It runs well above the floor that independent Russian investigators have documented: more than 108,000 Russian war dead individually named through open-source reporting and an extrapolated minimum of around 350,000, according to Meduza.

U.S. intelligence agencies have not publicly endorsed a Russian fatality-specific estimate of their own, but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed in March 2025 that Russia had suffered more than 750,000 killed and wounded.

Britain’s new estimate, covering only the dead, suggests Russia’s total casualty bill now runs far higher than either U.S. assessment noted.

Ukraine’s General Staff has put cumulative Russian losses higher still, at roughly 1.36 million killed and wounded.

The Russian casualty count came up during a broader discussion about Russian hybrid operations targeting the UK, including cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, sabotage attempts and efforts to smuggle Western technology to Moscow’s defense industry, according to British intelligence.

GCHQ is “working tirelessly with intelligence and defence partners to degrade and reduce the Russian threat,” Keast-Butler said.

For now, Moscow is replacing those losses through a recruiting machine built on cash signing bonuses, prisoner conscription and waves of North Korean troops dispatched by Pyongyang to backstop the front, allowing Putin to avoid the politically costly second mobilization wave that destabilized his rule in late 2022, experts have said.

Despite the toll, Russian forces remain on the offensive across Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia and continue to fire massed missile-and-drone salvos at Ukrainian cities, with Moscow recently warning foreign diplomats to leave Kyiv ahead of what it called “systemic and sustained” strikes on decision-making centers.

But the trade is becoming visibly unfavorable.

Russia ground its way through more than a year of combat to capture Pokrovsk in late 2025, an advance the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed was slower than Allied progress at the Battle of the Somme.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this month that Russia is losing roughly five soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty — a ratio that, if accurate, suggests the Kremlin is paying far more per square mile of captured ground than during any earlier phase of the more than four-year war.

“The Ukrainian armed forces are the strongest, most powerful armed forces in all of Europe,” Rubio said earlier this month.

Russian forces have made grinding gains since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but the advances have slowed this year and Ukrainian troops are increasing pressure on the battlefield to try to push them back.

Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, one of Ukraine’s most respected fighting forces, told Reuters in an interview that he believes Russia’s army is exhausted and incapable of making major breakthroughs.

If Ukraine’s military can build and maintain momentum over several months, it can gain the initiative along the frontline and push Russia to abandon its designs on the last part of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine that it does not yet occupy, he said.

“I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point,” Biletsky said at an undisclosed underground location in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

“More precisely, I think the next six are the most critical,” he said.

The issue of who controls Donetsk has been a stumbling block in U.S.-backed peace talks that have stalled, with Russia wanting the entire region and Ukraine refusing to withdraw from territory that Moscow’s troops have been unable to conquer.

“We need to define those directions where we can improve our positions, take some strategic points, and then speak with the Russians from a position of strength - not weakness - about a truly stable truce,” said Biletsky, a right-wing political leader who founded the battle-hardened Azov Battalion and now commands tens of thousands of troops.

“From a military point of view, this is realistic.”

Russia’s Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed victory in Ukraine and said this month he thinks the war is nearing an end.

‘CRITICAL’ MONTHS AHEAD

Russia’s advances have been complicated by a decision by billionaire Elon Musk to deny Moscow’s forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service. Kyiv has meanwhile stepped up medium-range drone attacks on Russian air defenses and logistics, helping more long-range strikes get through to hit oil and military facilities in Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week Ukraine had retaken nearly 600 square km (230 square miles) of territory in 2026. Reuters could not independently verify the figure. Moscow currently controls almost one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Assessing the military situation, John Helin of the Finland-based Black Bird conflict-analysis group echoed Biletsky in saying fatigue was a problem for Russian forces, while Ukraine’s war effort is hampered by a manpower shortage.

“It does seem like, four or five months into this year, it’s much more likely that the Russians will get exhausted before the Ukrainian problems come to a breaking point,” he told Reuters.

On Monday, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said Kyiv’s forces were now “actively challenging the positional character of the war” and could soon be capable of staging limited mechanized assaults.

‘FORTRESS BELT’

Russian troops are bearing down on eastern Ukraine’s “Fortress Belt” where fighting is raging inside the strategic city of Kostiantynivka, its southern end.

The constellation of heavily fortified cities anchors Ukrainian defenses. Capturing it would position Russia to threaten the rest of the Donbas.

Biletsky, whose forces hold over one-tenth of the total front line, said his troops were firmly holding the flank around Sloviansk, the belt’s northern bastion, and forcing Russia to attack the city head-on.

Such costly assaults have helped drain Russian forces and led to heavy losses of field commanders, he said, in what he described as a professional degradation of Moscow’s military.

“The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance the way they did, for example, a year ago,” said Biletsky.

Biletsky said it was too early to draw conclusions from Kyiv’s recent success, but that Ukraine could capitalize on it by continuing mid-range attacks and advancing “carefully”.

Moscow is “radically losing” in battlefield communications because of Musk’s crackdown on use of Starlink, Biletsky said.

But he described the sides at parity in evolving technology - with Ukraine leading in unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and heavy bomber drones, and Russia winning the race for fibre-optic drones, which cannot be jammed.

A potential blueprint for a modernized Ukrainian army, his corps has led efforts to transform training and integrate new technology such as UGVs as an important part of its battlefield strategy.

Biletsky’s units lead the way in deploying stealthy kamikaze drones and robots armed with machine guns or rocket launchers to replace significant portions of infantrymen, aiming for 30% by 2027, he said.

The next “revolution” will allow commanders to stage more “creative” combined assault operations while conserving precious troops, Biletsky said.

“It will happen this year, and I think we’ll show how our corps is a vivid example of it,” he said.

The aerial bomb is a winged but engineless weapon that drops from an aircraft at altitude, gliding to its target on the speed and altitude of release, steered by satellite guidance. It costs much less than cruise missiles per shot, carries much larger warheads than most drones and lets aircraft stay outside the densest air defenses.

“The first Ukrainian guided aerial bomb is ready for combat use,” Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a Telegram post announcing the milestone, noting the Ministry has already purchased an experimental batch and is gearing up to deploy the bombs on the front.

“Ukraine is moving from importing individual solutions to creating its own high-tech weapons, which systematically strengthen the Defense Forces and provide a technological advantage on the battlefield,” Fedorov said.

Until now, Ukraine had no domestic precision glide bomb. The country has relied on scarce Western donations for strikes beyond the reach of conventional artillery, like American-made JDAM-ERs and ATACMS missiles, British Storm Shadows and French SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Cheap to produce and free of donor restrictions, the new bombs let Kyiv press the fight at mid-range and conserve scarce longer-range Western missiles for deeper targets — part of a broader Ukrainian push to use tech to change the mathematics of war in its favor after over four years of defending itself against a much larger and richer enemy.

“We are scaling up solutions that increase the range and accuracy of strikes and change the rules of modern warfare,” Fedorov said.

DG Industry, a little-known Ukrainian firm sponsored by the state-backed defense innovation cluster Brave1, started work on the munition 17 months ago, MoD said.

Ukraine had no guided aerial bomb. Now it does.

DG Industry, a Brave1 participant, has completed all required trials and declared the weapon ready for combat after 17 month of development. The bomb carries a 250 kg warhead, hits targets dozens of kilometers behind enemy lines,… pic.twitter.com/EXP0PiLOHl

— BRAVE1 (@BRAVE1ua) May 18, 2026

The team faced a challenging environment, requiring guidance that could survive Russia’s electronic jamming, an airframe that stays stable across release speeds and altitudes and an interface that integrates with whichever aircraft will carry it, according to Brave1.

The result is a system officials say is different from others in its class.

Russia’s UMPK-equipped FAB bombs, for example, are glide kits bolted onto Soviet-era bomb bodies that were never meant to glide. The Ukrainian weapon is purpose-built from the airframe up, not a glide kit.

“This is not a copy of Western or Soviet solutions, but a development of Ukrainian engineers for effective destruction of fortifications, command posts, and other enemy targets tens of kilometers deep after launch,” Fedorov said.

Glide bombs also offer another edge.

Released from standoff distance, they appear over the target only in the last seconds of flight, leaving traditional air defenses little time to react.

They can be harder to detect, too, flying at different speeds, arcs and altitudes than the threats most air defense systems are optimized to track, according to NATO’s Joint Air Power Competence Centre.

Russian Su-34s release the bombs from well beyond Ukrainian air-defense coverage, and once airborne, the bombs themselves are small, unpowered and hard to track.

Ukraine knows from experience how hard they are to stop.

Russia now drops an average of more than 250 guided aerial bombs on Ukrainian positions and cities each day, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier this month, three FAB-250 strikes on Kramatorsk killed five civilians and injured 12 more, according to regional military officials.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has named glide bombs among Russia’s most dangerous weapons since Moscow began deploying them regularly in 2023.

And they cost far more to shoot down than to produce and deploy.

A UMPK-equipped FAB costs tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, while a single Patriot interceptor capable of stopping one runs in the millions.

The new Ukrainian glide bomb is built to make that asymmetric cost ratio Russia’s problem, too.

“Soon, Ukrainian guided aerial bombs will be used against enemy targets,” the Ministry of Defense said.

Ukraine and Russia agreed on Friday to a ceasefire from May 9 to May 11 as part of a U.S.-led push for peace under President Donald Trump after more than four years of war following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Trump said on Friday he hoped the ceasefire would be extended, but it was already showing signs of strain on Sunday, when each side accused the other of violating it.

Russia, Ukraine to enter temporary ceasefire with prisoner exchange, Trump says

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday Moscow had refrained from large-scale aerial and missile attacks but had continued assaults along parts of the 745-mile front line where Russian forces are advancing.

He said Ukrainian troops were responding and defending their positions.

Russian state news agencies reported on Monday that Russia’s Defence Ministry had said it had recorded 23,802 ceasefire violations by Ukraine since the start of the ceasefire.

Russian troops had responded in kind to Ukrainian attacks on rocket launchers, artillery and drone launch sites, the ministry was quoted as saying.

One person was killed and three wounded in a Ukrainian attack on Russia’s southern Belgorod region, Russian state news agency TASS cited the regional governor as saying on Monday.

Frontline clashes

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military said 180 battlefield clashes had been recorded along the front line over the previous 24 hours. Russian forces had on Sunday deployed “kamikaze” drones and artillery in attacks on settlements and military positions, it said in a Monday morning update.

In its Monday afternoon report, the General Staff said Russian troops had carried out 38 new assaults on Ukrainian positions, adding: “Artillery shelling of border areas continues.”

Regional governors in Ukraine reported early on Monday that at least three people had been killed in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia and southern Kherson regions over the past 24 hours.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he thought the war was coming to an end and that he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, with Germany’s former chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, as his preferred partner.

But European Union foreign ministers, arriving for a meeting in Brussels on Monday, rejected Putin’s suggestion, voicing skepticism that Russia was ready to end the war and negotiate sincerely on peace and security for Europe.

In separate statements, Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the proposal would include a ceasefire running through May 11 and the exchange of 1,000 prisoners from each country.

Trump described the ceasefire as the result of U.S. diplomacy, writing in a Truth Social post that the request “was made directly by me.” He then thanked both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy for agreeing to the pause in fighting.

Zelenskyy, however, framed the agreement around the return of Ukrainian prisoners of war, and he seemed guarded about Russia’s willingness to uphold the ceasefire.

“We expect the United States to ensure that the Russian side fulfills these agreements,” he said in a social media post after thanking Trump for his involvement.

Ukraine’s skepticism toward the Russian commitment comes amid concerns about Moscow’s alignment with Iran.

Last month, a Ukrainian intelligence assessment alleged Russia had shared satellite imagery and cyber support with Tehran to support attacks against the U.S. and other countries.

Trump in late April publicly raised the idea of a temporary ceasefire for marking the anniversary of the end of World War II after a phone call with Putin. At the Time, Trump told reporters that he had suggested “a little bit of a ceasefire,” saying that Putin “might do that.”

The proposed ceasefire coincides with Russia’s Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany during World War II.

He spoke after the Kremlin reported the two leaders discussed a temporary Ukraine ceasefire to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II next month.

“We had a good talk, I’ve known him a long time,” said Trump. The two leaders had their last publicly reported phone call on March 9, although Trump has indicated they speak regularly.

Trump, speaking to reporters as he met with astronauts from the Artemis II mission in the Oval Office, said he suggested “a little bit of a ceasefire” in the war in Ukraine in his phone call with the Russian leader.

“And I think he might do that,” Trump said, then asked reporters whether Putin had already announced a ceasefire.

Putin announced a similar truce last year that lasted three days but was not agreed with Kyiv.

Trump has a history of making positive comments about Putin and sharply criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for not agreeing to make a deal with Russia to end the war.

Help with Iran’s uranium

Trump said Putin offered to help on the issue of Iran’s enriched uranium, a key obstacle to a deal to end the Iran war, but “I said I’d much rather have you be involved with ending the war with Ukraine.”

“I said, before you help me, I want to end your war,” said Trump.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov did not say what proposals Putin had made on Iran. Moscow has previously offered to take enriched uranium out of the country.

Ushakov told reporters Putin had proposed the temporary ceasefire in Ukraine for celebrations on May 9 to mark the Soviet Union’s part in the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War Two. He said Trump reacted positively.

Ushakov added that Trump, in a friendly and businesslike conversation lasting over 1-1/2 hours, had said he believed a deal to end the Ukraine war was close.

He promised to bomb every bridge and power plant in the country. Not as a warning. As an ultimatum, with a countdown, posted for the world to read along with the 93 million people he profanely threatened to annihilate.

The next day, civilians in Tehran were standing on the infrastructure he had threatened to destroy. Mothers, students, old men — they linked arms across overpasses, formed human chains around bridges and power plants, shielding them with their bodies, an NBC News video showed.

Asked whether he was concerned about war crimes, Trump told reporters he was “not at all.”

Retired American military officers said the threats themselves were likely war crimes — and that Trump had handed prosecutors a ready-made record. “He’s essentially self-incriminating,” one retired senior officer told reporters, per The Guardian.

Legal experts noted that threatening to systematically destroy civilian power plants and bridges, regardless of whether the strikes occur, can itself constitute evidence of criminal intent under the laws of armed conflict, according to The New York Times.

At the same time, White House envoys, billionaire Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were supposed to fly to Ukraine after Orthodox Easter this weekend carrying new security guarantees but were rerouted to Pakistan instead, for talks in Islamabad the same weekend the Kyiv visit was planned.

The administration was starting a war with one hand and promising to end one with the other. The same president who threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure in Iran on Tuesday is supposed to guarantee that no one destroys Ukrainian civilian infrastructure ever again.

“Is the U.S. going to provide Ukraine something like mutual security assistance? I don’t think so,” Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British military officer, told Military Times.

“And even if they did, do the Ukrainians believe in it? And pretty critically — does Putin believe in it?”

Moscow already had an answer.

“The Americans have a lot of other things to deal with, if you know what I mean,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Kyiv Independent.

“The primary movers in these so-called peace talks — the Americans — are now busy with other things,” a senior European diplomat told Military Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security assessments.

And they took the interceptors with them. The U.S. military burned through more than 800 Patriot missiles in the Middle East in three days — more than Ukraine has received in the entire war — while the production line makes roughly 600 a year.

The White House has since suspended Patriot export sales globally because of supply constraints, according to The Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the administration rolled back Russian oil sanctions — the same restrictions that had been slowly strangling Moscow’s ability to finance the war — just as the Iran conflict sent crude past $100 a barrel, opening a window for Russia to sell at wartime prices with no cap and no consequences.

“Just this easing by America could provide Russia with around $10 billion for the war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. “This certainly does not help peace,” according to Al Jazeera.

The sanctions rollback did not just weaken Ukraine’s position at the table — it actively financed the war Ukraine was supposed to be negotiating its way out of.

“This is throwing a massive lifeline to Putin,” the senior diplomat said.

Kyiv has fought harder anyway.

Its forces have recaptured more than 480 square kilometers in the southeast since January, pushing the ballistic missile interception rate toward 95%, and sent long-range strikes deeper inside Russia than at any point in the war — and for every short- to medium-range missile Russia fired in, Ukraine was sending more out.

Its forces achieved a drone advantage over Russia in what the Institute for the Study of War called a possible first in combat history, striking oil ports from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

But the Iran war has made those capabilities impossible to ignore. As Tehran launched waves of drones and missiles across the Middle East, nations scrambling to respond found themselves watching Ukrainian-developed systems do what their own could not — handing Zelenskyy leverage overnight that years of diplomacy never had.

Ukraine’s long-range drones have knocked out an estimated 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity, around 2 million barrels per day offline, in one of the most severe oil supply disruptions in the modern history of Russia, according to Reuters.

Washington did not celebrate any of it. The administration told Kyiv to stop striking, and the same week, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán — Putin’s closest partner in the EU — while accusing European allies of election interference.

Zelenskyy confirmed that allies had sent Ukraine “signals” about scaling back strikes on Russia’s oil sector, per Reuters. The State Department formally warned Kyiv’s ambassador to quit the attacks.

“Having severed most support to Ukraine, undermined the trust of its allies and made clear that it will avoid applying any serious pressure on Russia, Washington is rapidly bleeding leverage,” Arnold wrote in a recent RUSI analysis.

But the Iran war may have had the opposite effect on Ukraine’s standing, Arnold told Military Times. The country Washington is pressuring to stop fighting has just demonstrated that its technology works and America’s deterrence does not.

In the space of weeks, Washington has eased the sanctions squeezing Russia’s war budget, told Kyiv to stop the strikes crippling its oil exports and conditioned security guarantees on surrendering territory Ukrainian soldiers are still holding — a sequence that, to the allies watching it unfold, has looked less like negotiation than an attempt to dismantle Ukraine’s leverage piece by piece.

The war in Iran, the peace deal in Ukraine, stability in the Far East — all of it seems to run through one man in the White House, the senior diplomat said, who does not seem to worry about the long-term consequences of his global actions.

“You’ve pushed a domino in the dark,” he said.

“You have no idea which other dominos are lined up, who’s in the line of fall, what you’re going to face as a consequence — because you looked at this problem in complete isolation.”

“Expertise is not a drone, but a skill, a strategy, a system where a drone is one part of the defense,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Reuters on Monday.

Ukraine now produces roughly 1,000 interceptor drones a day through hundreds of vetted manufacturers, deliberately dispersed so that no single strike can cripple the supply chain, Zelenskyy reported last month. The country has the technical capacity to double that figure, he said, but lacks the budget to do so.

While Ukraine has built that infrastructure gradually over the last few years, most countries now trying to integrate interceptors into the air defense have not invested in building the necessary logistical framework needed to effectively build, arm or deploy the cheap flyers.

Some countries have already learned this lesson the hard way.

After some Ukrainian companies built interceptor drone factories abroad without state approval, multiple buyers complained because the drones were sold without the warheads or expertise needed to operate them properly, Zelenskyy said on Friday, per Ukrainska Pravda.

“They had also been sold a certain number of interceptors — again without explosives,” Zelenskyy said about a European country he visited recently. “And they asked me whether we could send more operators. I said no.”

The bottleneck isn’t the interceptor itself, but the logistics infrastructure to produce and sustain them at scale, officials said.

“It seems there is still a misconception,” Artem Moroz, head of investor relations at Brave1, wrote on LinkedIn last month.

Brave1, Ukraine’s defense-tech accelerator, has worked with more than 500 defense startups since 2023 and now serves as the primary gateway for foreign governments seeking access to Ukrainian drone technology and production partnerships.

“Many believe Ukraine could simply send a few hundred interceptor drones to the Middle East and stop the Shahed drones currently hitting critical infrastructure,” Moroz said. “Drone warfare is far more complex than that.

“Yes, hardware matters. And Ukraine knows how to build drones at scale. But the real advantage lies in the infrastructure behind them.”

Companies launch drone-production innovations

The gap between buying a drone and building the system to sustain it is the market several defense companies are now racing to fill.

A handful of defense companies from Helsinki to San Francisco are offering the production line, the detection system and the supply infrastructure compressed into a portable unit that can be shipped anywhere to produce up to dozens of drones a day.

Sensofusion, a Finnish defense company founded in 2016, sells a full-cycle drone production chain as one of the latest innovators in this arena.

The company’s $2.4 million (€2.1 million Euros) Tactical Drone Factory is a standard 20-foot shipping container equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station and enough spares to run around the clock with a crew of three, producing up to 50 interceptor drones a day, according to the company.

What sets the Finnish system apart from its competitors is that it’s not just a factory: It ships as a package with Sensofusion’s Airfence radio-frequency detection and tracking platform, designed to detect a hostile drone, cue an interceptor and guide it to the kill — a full sensor-to-effector chain in a box.

The company says each interceptor costs less than $580 (€500) and is built to chase targets at speeds up to 310 mph (500 km/h).

Although Sensofusion boasts some of the highest production numbers on the market, it’s not the first company to market the concept of a portable all-in-one drone production hub.

Firestorm Labs' xCell system, the most tested U.S. equivalent to Sensofusion, uses two containers and works at a significantly slower pace by producing roughly 50 drones per month. Its newly announced SQUALL airframe is the first drone purpose-built to come off a mobile factory line, according to the company.

Founded in 2022, Firestorm’s biggest selling point is its testing and validation. The company holds a $100 million U.S. Air Force contract, has run field exercises with Air Force Special Operations Command and the Air National Guard and raised $47 million in Series A funding.

Per Se Systems, a French firm, operates in a middle ground by building micro drone factories on trailers — instead of shipping containers — that produce up to ten drones per hour on a generator with 19 hours of autonomous operation.

Per Se has been field-tested with 12 French Army regiments and is embedded in four active development projects with the French military, according to Army Recognition.

The drawbacks of production containers

Some logistics and strategy specialists say the all-in-one package wrapped into the portable factory concept ignores some critical battlefield questions that could render the projects useless.

A container full of printers, raw materials, sensitive electronics and proprietary design files concentrates exactly the kind of capability an adversary would want to destroy or capture, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis that identified several strategic vulnerabilities in frontline drone production.

And the problems compound from there.

Airframes can be printed, but the motors, batteries, electronic speed controllers, radios and sensors that make a drone combat-capable cannot, and those components must be trucked to the container through the same supply chains the factory is supposed to bypass.

Quality control under field conditions remains untested. Vibration, temperature swings, dust and intermittent power degrade the dimensional tolerances that 3D-printed parts require, and no company has demonstrated sustained production outside a controlled environment.

“Industrial resilience is combat power,” the CSIS experts concluded. “The next war will not be won by who initially fields the most drones, but by who sustains building them at scale.”

Several countries are catching on to the growing need to invest in drone production logistics.

Five NATO nations — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Poland — launched a joint initiative in February to develop affordable interceptor drones within a year under a program called LEAP, explicitly drawing on Ukrainian battlefield know-how to do it.

Ukraine’s experts say they are ready and willing to share their hard-earned lessons with allies, including the strategies to build a new layer of defense alongside the new weapons themselves.

“What Ukraine has built is a deep operational ecosystem across multiple domains, designed for conflicts where entirely new types of threats appear,” Brave1’s Moroz said.

“And ecosystems like this are extremely hard to copy,” he explained. “Even investing hundreds of billions or a trillion today would not easily replicate the experience, integration, and speed of iteration built over years of real combat.”

His final words of advice to allies?

“Drones are the tool. The infrastructure is the weapon.”

As the same one-way attack drones ripple across the Middle East, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Ukraine has deployed 228 counter-drone specialists across five regional partners — Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — to help intercept incoming threats, an expansion up from roughly 201 personnel a week earlier.

Zelenskyy has framed Ukraine’s pitch in explicitly transactional terms: If partners can spare the high-end interceptors Ukraine can’t get in sufficient quantity — Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles — Kyiv can help fill the gap with what it can scale faster and cheaper: interceptor drones, plus the crews and tactics that make them work.

“If they give them to us, we will give them interceptors,” Zelenskyy told reporters earlier this month, describing a PAC-3-for-interceptor swap.

He argued Ukraine’s industry could produce around 2,000 interceptor drones per day — a volume that, if it can be sustained, dwarfs the annual output of many premium missile-defense lines, he later said in a speech to the British parliament, per Ukrainska Pravda.

In the first three days of the Iran war, the United States and its Gulf partners burned through more than 800 Patriot interceptors — more than Ukraine got all winter — even as U.S. forces simultaneously struck over 2,000 targets across Iran.

That dual consumption rate is why Kyiv is trying to trade a cheap layer of defense for a scarce one, Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Military Times.

Ukraine is offering what it has learned to do at scale — stop drones — while still scrambling for what it cannot manufacture fast enough: the interceptors that matter when the threat is ballistic. Kyiv is trying to turn one shortage into leverage for the other.

PAC-3 interceptors can cost millions of dollars per shot, and production is limited.

The result is triage: Air-defense inventories are being stretched across U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific planning, European requirements and Ukraine — leaving Kyiv stuck at the back of the line for the missiles it needs most.

“Interceptors like Patriot, forget it,” Arnold told Military Times earlier this month.

“The Ukrainians aren’t getting any more now because they’re all going to go to the U.S. military — either Middle East or Taiwan," he said.

“Out of those priorities, Ukraine is at the bottom if you’re the U.S.”

Ukraine’s alternative has become mass producing cheap, expendable drones engineered to last just a single season before replacement by a more advanced iteration for roughly the cost of a used car.

This price curve is why Ukraine’s drone ecosystem has become a strategic commodity just as the Iran conflict has expanded demand for air defense.

Kyiv says it has been fielding dozens of requests from allies for help with interceptor drones specifically, as the Middle East conflict intensifies with drones at its center.

Kyiv’s bet is that being indispensable in the Gulf also exposes it to retaliation from an enemy that has, so far, only helped Russia secondarily.

An Iranian member of parliament said March 14 that Ukraine’s support to Gulf states made it Iran’s “legitimate war target.”

For Kyiv, that kind of warning doesn’t change the logic — it underlines it: The same Shaheds that hit Ukrainian cities are now hitting partners across the Gulf, and Ukraine is betting that helping contain the threat abroad can translate into more protection at home.

The Iran war has also delivered another indirect hit to Ukraine through the disruption in energy markets that has bolstered Russian oil sales — especially after the White House suspended economic sanctions against the Kremlin to ease the crisis.

Brent crude oil has shot above $100 per barrel in recent weeks, up sharply since the war began, and analysts say higher prices expand Russia’s fiscal room to sustain a long war.

A senior official in Kyiv, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, described the price spike as handing leverage back to Russia, right when the country appeared to have started feeling the economic strain of over four years of all-out war.

“This is throwing a massive lifeline to Putin. He can’t take full advantage yet, but within a couple of months we will see the effect hit Ukraine — and I’m worried it will be negative.”

There are other hurdles to overcome, too.

Although Kyiv may already be producing a surplus of killer flyers, there is still a bureaucratic catch that has plagued the country for years: Ukraine’s wartime export restrictions have not fully kept pace with demand.

Manufacturers are still not permitted to sell abroad without official approval, even as they field inquiries for purchases from dozens of countries.

The deployment of specialists is one way to export capability without exporting hardware — at least until permits and contracts catch up.

Kyiv says neither it nor its partners can afford a symbolic partnership any longer — not as adversaries rearm and air-defense inventories thin.

“Russia is preparing for a broader attack against the alliance in the coming years,” Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, said during a recent visit to Kyiv.

He argued that NATO needs to accelerate how fast it turns battlefield lessons into real capability while upping weapons production across the board.

“We are in a moment where we are in a hurry. We need to ramp up this production, and it’s a complex weapon. So it will take some time,” Vandier said.

The problem is not just capability — it is consumption: High-end interceptors are being burned faster than they can be replaced by the West.

That reality is why Arnold argues Washington should treat Ukraine’s defense industry less like a stopgap and more like a capacity it can build up.

“If the U.S. [is] going to not be able to provide any long-range strike in the future, then actually invest in Ukrainian organic production,” he said.

The weapons that could be redirected include air defense interceptor missiles purchased through a NATO initiative launched last year, under which partner countries buy U.S. arms for Kyiv, the report said.

The consideration comes as U.S. operations in the region intensify. Adm. Brad Cooper, the Central Command chief leading U.S. forces in the Middle East, on Wednesday said the U.S. had hit over 10,000 targets inside Iran and was on track to limit Iran’s ability to project power outside its borders.

A Pentagon spokesperson told the newspaper that the Defense Department would “ensure that U.S. forces and those of our allies and partners have what they need to fight and win.”

In response to a query about the report, a NATO official said members of the alliance and its partners continue to contribute to its Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) program that funds the supply of U.S. arms for Kyiv.

“Equipment is continuously flowing into Ukraine,” the official added. “The amount pledged to PURL so far is of several billion U.S. dollars and we expect more contributions to follow.”

The Pentagon and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said teams had been sent to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan, states that have come under fire during the Iran war.

He said that local air defense units were dealing with ballistic missiles, while Ukrainian specialists were focused on the waves of Iran’s Shahed drones.

“I believe no one has experience comparable to ours,” Zelenskyy told journalists in audio messages on a WhatsApp chat, adding that 228 Ukrainian specialists were now in the region.

“We are working with the Middle East — with leaders, at the technical level, and with ministries of defense. In general, we are preparing serious arrangements and agreements,” he said.

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His security council secretary Rustem Umerov has visited all five of those countries this week, and said earlier on Friday that further steps for “long-term security cooperation” had been outlined with each, without giving details.

Kyiv has said nearly a dozen countries have sought its help and advice in defending against cheap kamikaze drones, which Iran is using against its Gulf neighbors. Russia has launched similar drones at Ukraine since its 2022 invasion, and Kyiv has developed its own advanced interceptor drone capabilities.

Although Gulf states operate sophisticated U.S.-made air defense systems, the missiles they use are in short supply and they cost much more than Iran’s Shahed drones.

Moscow has bombarded Ukraine with nearly 60,000 Shaheds and similar systems. It initially bought thousands of them from Iran, before establishing its own production facilities to make them under license. Ukraine has also launched drone attacks at Russia, although on a smaller scale.

Umerov said on Friday that drone interception units were initially protecting civilian and critical infrastructure, and work was under way to expand their coverage areas.

The teams were using Ukrainian technology to counter drone attacks and partners were consulting with them, he said.

Ukraine wants money and technology in return

Zelenskyy has said Kyiv wanted money and technology in return for its help in the Middle East, adding that the United States was among nations that sought Kyiv’s help, and that Ukrainian specialists had been sent to a U.S. military base in Jordan.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has a rocky relationship with Zelenskyy, has denied Washington needs Kyiv’s help in downing drones.

Zelenskyy said on Friday that teams from Kyiv and Washington would hold talks in the U.S. on the weekend, where they would discuss a wide-ranging drone deal and work on bilateral documents.

He did not specify which documents would be discussed, but Kyiv wants post-war security guarantees from Washington, and to agree a “prosperity plan” for economic revival after fighting ends.

Ukraine has spent a year trying to finalize a drone-cooperation package with Washington worth up to $50 billion. The proposal would see Ukraine share the innovative drone technologies it developed during the war in exchange for U.S. investment

“First and foremost, it includes naval drones and our long-range drones that have already been proven in the war,” Zelenskyy said.

He said that Ukraine was already jointly producing drones with Germany, Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, and that it was starting to do so with Norway.

“It is important that Ukraine’s global significance in ensuring security and the quality of Ukrainian security expertise in safeguarding lives are recognised by all partners,” he wrote on Telegram.

“While Russia has enhanced its ability to operate in the Arctic by focusing on combat readiness and using dual-use technologies and facilities for defense, its war with Ukraine has limited its ability to fully achieve its Arctic ambitions,” according to the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released Wednesday.

Nonetheless, Russia still views the Arctic as vital to its security for a variety of political, economic and military reasons. “Russia has the largest Arctic coastline and views itself as part of the neighborhood,” the report noted. “Russia is our primary challenge in the Arctic as it aims to further its interests in the region as part of broader global balance-of-power competition.”

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With control of about half the Arctic coastline, Russia wants to develop the region’s oil and gas reserves, as well as benefit from more maritime trade as receding polar ice creates new shipping routes.

The Arctic is also sensitive for another reason: It is seen as a safe zone for Russia’s nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

Much of Russia’s Arctic military forces are located in the Kola Peninsula, which hosts about two-thirds of the country’s second-strike nuclear capabilities, said the report, noting that the area is home to Russia’s Northern Fleet, including seven nuclear-armed ballistic missile strategic submarines.

Russia has reinforced the Northern Fleet with long-range missiles, as well as aerial and underwater drones. The Kola Peninsula also has at least three airbases that host fighters, surveillance and transport aircraft.

Another indicator of Moscow’s Arctic ambitions is Russia’s fleet of icebreakers, which is already the world’s largest, with eight nuclear-powered and 34 diesel-electric vessels. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in January that the first nuclear-powered Leader-class icebreaker will be launched by 2030. These 70,000-ton vessels can cut through 4.3 meters of ice, according to Russian news agency TASS.

Meanwhile, the increasing U.S. focus on the Arctic has caught the Kremlin’s attention in an area that Russia views as its backyard.

“[Russia’s] activity is aimed at countering a perceived growing U.S. emphasis on expanding its influence and presence in the Arctic as a key national security strategic objective,” the report said.

A fallen superpower, Russia wants to reshape the global balance of power. The country, viewing itself as a geostrategic competitor of the U.S., “seeks a multipolar world order in which Russia reaches and maintains a privileged position, equal to that of the U.S. and other great powers, including China,” according to the report.

As for China, it also has Arctic ambitions.

“China describes itself as a polar power and is seeking to expand its presence in the Arctic including plans to incorporate the ‘Polar Silk Road’ into its Belt and Road Initiative as shipping lanes become more accessible and economically viable,” said the report.

“Beijing seeks to expand its Arctic presence using scientific research, investments, and commercial ventures along the Northern Sea Route,” according to the report, which notes that Russia and China have conducted joint patrols in the region.

Officials approved a resolution this week launching a new cooperation framework between the state, domestic defense companies and foreign partners, the Ministry of Defense announced Thursday.

“The future of warfare belongs to autonomous systems,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote in a release announcing the program.

“Our objective is to increase the level of autonomy in drones and other combat platforms so they can detect targets faster, analyze battlefield conditions, and support real-time decision-making.”

The resolution comes as over a dozen countries are enmeshed in the war that started in Iran late last month, and as militaries globally accelerate investment in autonomous defense systems.

For companies building autonomous systems or target recognition software, the value is straightforward: Validated, real-world training data compresses development timelines and improves model performance in ways no laboratory environment can replicate.

For allied governments, it offers a faster path to fielding AI-enabled defense capabilities — without having to generate their own combat datasets from scratch.

Fedorov framed it as a “win-win” — partners get better training data, and Ukraine gets faster development of autonomous capabilities for its own front lines.

At the center of Ukraine’s new program is a dedicated AI platform built inside Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies.

The platform allows partners to train AI models on real battlefield data without gaining direct access to other sensitive military databases linked to the country’s digital control system, DELTA — a significant security safeguard.

Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko told Military Times last month that the platform’s security is built on the American National Institute of Standards and Technology standards and audited annually by Big Four consulting firms.

Ukraine’s datasets already power the DELTA battlefield management system, which uses neural networks to automatically detect ground and aerial targets in real time.

That kind of data backbone is essential in a war increasingly defined by scale, speed and AI.

“You can control only with data,” Myronenko said. “Otherwise, I don’t even know how you can control such a number of drones, people, front lines and such a number of resources. And so fast.”

Through the platform, partners can work with large volumes of labeled photo and video data collected during active combat operations, and draw from datasets that are continuously updated in almost real time as Russia’s full-scale invasion moves into its fifth year.

As a result, the country’s data may be the most operationally rich in the world right now — no other country has ever been able to offer this volume of labeled, real-world combat imagery delivered directly from the soldiers fighting an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war.

“We have built our system in such a way that the data is brought in directly by the people who are fighting,” Myronenko said. “They bring the data there, and this data is aggregated in certain forms, then centralized for us.”

Ukraine currently holds millions of annotated frames and databases gathered across tens of thousands of missions using hundreds of different types of weapons, unit formations and combinations and targeting techniques.

“We have more than 5 million drones,” the deputy minister explained. “And it’s a very difficult job to coordinate everything on such a big front line.”

Under the new framework, partners can conduct joint analytics, train their own AI models and codevelop new technological solutions using live, granular operational data.

The central challenge in military AI is not creating algorithms but testing them against real operational conditions and mission outcomes to prove they can improve decision-making in combat, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That’s the gap Ukraine’s new data-sharing program fills — and international defense companies and allied governments have already asked for access, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The timing also lands as nations across the world grapple with how to integrate artificial intelligence into defense networks securely and quickly — before their enemies do.

The United States is still working out its own rules of the road for military AI.

In January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo calling for widespread AI integration across the military and demanding that AI companies make their technology available for unrestricted use, according to The Associated Press.

The high-profile battle over the use of AI in military operations and analysis is just getting started, Myronenko predicted, as warfare becomes more and more a battle of technology over all else.

“The highest risk is the absence of information,” he said.

The negotiations in Switzerland were the third round of direct talks organized by the U.S., after meetings earlier this year in Abu Dhabi that officials described as constructive but which also made no major headway. Expectations for significant progress in Geneva were low.

“The negotiations were not easy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after the talks broke up and he spoke briefly by phone from Kyiv with his negotiating team.

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He earlier accused Russia of “trying to drag out negotiations” while it presses on with its invasion — an accusation he and European leaders have repeatedly made in the past.

Despite that, some progress was made on military issues although political differences remain deep, including over the future of land in eastern Ukraine that is occupied by the Russian army and that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to keep, Zelenskyy said.

The head of the Russian delegation, Putin adviser Vladimir Medinsky, told reporters that the two days of talks in Geneva “were difficult but businesslike.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that it’s “too early” to speak about the outcome of the talks. Putin has been receiving reports about progress in Geneva, he said.

Both sides said a new round of talks is set to take place.

US will help monitor any ceasefire

Zelenskyy described the military discussions as “constructive,” adding that the armed forces of both countries considered how any future ceasefire might be monitored.

“Monitoring will definitely be carried out with participation of the American side,” he said in a voice message shared in a media group chat on WhatsApp.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, said on social media that Washington’s push for peace in Ukraine over the past year has “brought about meaningful progress,” without elaborating.

The two armies remain locked in battle on the roughly 1,250-kilometer (750-mile) front line, while Russia bombards civilian areas of Ukraine daily.

Hours after the first day of talks ended on Tuesday, Russian drones killed a woman and injured a 6-year-old girl and 18-month-old toddler in the southern Ukraine city of Zaporizhzhia, officials said.

Overnight, Russia launched one ballistic missile and 126 long-range drones at Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian air force.

Europe is involved

Zelenskyy said that the Ukrainian and American envoys in Geneva met with representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Europe’s participation in the process is “indispensable,” Zelenskyy said.

European leaders, mindful of Putin’s wider ambitions, say their own security is at stake in Ukraine and have insisted on being consulted in peace efforts.

Russia and Ukraine appear to still be far apart on their demands for a settlement.

Zelenskyy has offered a ceasefire and a face-to-face meeting with Putin. But Moscow wants a comprehensive agreement before committing to a truce.

Putin’s key goals remain what he declared when Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022: Ukraine must renounce joining NATO, sharply reduce the size of its army and protect Russian language and culture to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.

Additionally, Putin wants Kyiv to withdraw its forces from the four eastern regions Moscow has occupied but doesn’t fully control.

Zelenskyy says Ukraine won’t surrender land to Russia.

Novikov reported from Kyiv, Ukraine.