The exercise comes as U.S., Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are set to meet in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 10 and 11, special envoy Steve Witkoff said Monday. The meeting caps a tumultuous year for Ukraine’s peace talks, which stalled after the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran in February and revived only in September, when Witkoff and fellow envoy Jared Kushner met Putin in Moscow before traveling to Kyiv for their first visit as negotiators.

Britain and France will jointly lead KOALICJA 26.2 from Nov. 9 to 22, bringing together 2,800 troops from 11 nations for coordinated activities in Poland, France and Turkey under the coalition’s military arm, the Multinational Force-Ukraine (MNF-U). American troops will not participate.

The drills will combine air, land and sea forces to “test how to move, protect and supply a force that would help rebuild Ukraine’s Armed Forces once the fighting ends,” according to a British Ministry of Defence statement.

Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Britain are also taking part.

The training will prepare troops for the force’s eventual missions, which could include securing critical infrastructure, training Ukraine’s military, helping protect the skies and clearing mines from the Black Sea, as part of a broader package of security guarantees for Ukraine, according to the French ministry’s statement.

“This exercise shows the UK is stepping up, alongside France and our allies, to prepare for the day peace comes to Ukraine. This isn’t a hypothetical plan; it’s a real force, ready to help Ukraine once the fighting stops,” British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said in the ministry’s release. 

The MNF-U will reportedly not have a peacekeeping or ceasefire-monitoring mandate or operate under NATO command. It would move into Ukraine only after a ceasefire and at Kyiv’s request. 

Ceasefire monitoring “would be a different task from that of the multinational force, whose aim is different in nature because it is meant to support the Ukrainian army in its ability to be beefed up,” former French Ambassador to Ukraine Gaël Veyssière told Military Times in April.

The drills will also test “command-and-control arrangements for the force” and assess “how different components can integrate and operate effectively as one multinational force,” according to the British release. 

Britain is sending 300 personnel, including soldiers from the British Army’s 7th Light Mechanised Brigade, known as the “Desert Rats,” to rehearse logistical movements. Warsaw will manage the movement of MNF-U troops after the war but will not send its own soldiers into Ukraine. Nearly 2,000 Polish soldiers will take part in addition to the foreign forces, the Polish ministry said.

France is sending “hundreds” of troops, including a unit equipped with about 50 “contact drones,” the second of its kind after one deployed to Romania, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Jacques de Montgros’s told lawmakers last month. 

Turkey will not send troops to Poland, the French ministry said, but will stand up the MNF-U’s maritime element in Istanbul, “testing arrangements for maritime mine clearance to allow commercial shipping to safely return to Ukraine’s ports,” according to the British release.

“This exercise will show that the Multinational Force-Ukraine is a real, capable, readily deployable force that represents a serious commitment from Coalition of the Willing nations to Ukraine’s long-term stability and security,” said the commander of MNF-U, British Lt. Gen. Tom Bateman. 

The exercise announcements do not specify the final size of a force that could deploy to Ukraine, but Britain and France said earlier this year that they were prepared to contribute roughly 5,000 troops each.

Even a minimal “tripwire” presence would require 10,000 to 25,000 troops, the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed last year. Because only a third of any force is frontline-ready at a given time, rotations push that number far higher, Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a former British military officer, told Military Times.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected allowing a foreign troop presence in Ukraine, and he warned in September 2025 that Western forces deployed there would be legitimate targets. 

Although the MNF-U is not a peacekeeping force, Polish defense officials said its presence is meant to ease Ukrainian fears of a renewed Russian attack once the war ends.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pressed allies on Wednesday to move quickly, pointing out that Russian forces continue to batter Ukraine’s power grid and other critical infrastructure as the country braces for its fifth winter of full-scale war. 

“Peace has no alternative, and postwar security guarantees must be truly cast-iron,” he said.

Diesel averaged $6.35 a gallon on Monday, just below the record $6.53 set in September, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The economy is the top issue heading into the Nov. 3 midterms, with 84% of registered voters calling it “very important” to their vote and 54% saying the same of energy policy, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 28 to Oct. 4.

“The president decided to pin this problem not on Putin, but on me. Explaining to his people that because of this, diesel prices in America are going up. That is completely untrue,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of Trump’s recent claims that Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries were to blame for the price increases.

Trends in federal data back up the Ukrainian president, showing that the steep initial rise in diesel prices followed the start of the Iran war — not Ukrainian strikes on Russian production infrastructure.

U.S. diesel stayed below $3.90 a gallon from August 2025 until the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began Feb. 28, then jumped nearly 25% in a week to $4.86, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“This crisis has its roots in the Middle East. Everyone understands that perfectly well. Everyone knows how to do the math,” Zelenskyy said on Oct. 12, quoting his remarks to the Warsaw Security Forum. “If Russia accounts for 2.2% of global diesel supplies, what impact can it have on the price? That’s how negligible it is.”

Even Moscow’s senior officials agree.

“The key guarantee of full stabilization of this market is the speediest normalization of the situation around the Persian Gulf, overcoming the conflict around Iran,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Borisenko told reporters Oct. 12.

The International Energy Agency confirmed in an Oct. 14 report that easing Russia’s diesel export ban is unlikely to materially change global supplies because Russia lacks the working refinery capacity.

Critics of the deal

The diesel sales will barely move American prices before the vote, but the deal would benefit Russia disproportionately and cost Kyiv one of its few levers against the Kremlin, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

The current situation gives Moscow deeper diplomatic ties with Washington — economic cooperation that continues despite Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s more vulnerable energy grid — as well as more money for its war chest and the prospect that U.S. pressure will halt Ukraine’s strikes on its refineries that help fund the war, experts at both institutions said.

“The diesel agreement gives Putin an opportunity to advance economic cooperation with Washington before any settlement in Ukraine,” Carnegie senior fellow Tatiana Stanovaya wrote on Oct. 14. “Economic agreements can coexist with unchanged demands on Ukraine and continued military pressure.”

The Kremlin is also using the deal to win U.S. support for its negotiating position with Ukraine, part of a recurring effort to offer Washington economic incentives it claims are unrelated to the war “in order to extract concessions from the U.S. regarding the war,” ISW said.

Critics in Kyiv and Washington, including members of Trump’s own party, warn the deal will put more oil money in Russian hands and disproportionately impact Ukraine. Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that the country has “just one oil refinery,” while Russia has 32 major refineries, according to the International Energy Agency.

Four Republican and three Democratic senators urged the Trump administration Oct. 11 to “immediately reverse course,” saying in a joint statement that “the United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Two days later, 12 senators from both parties, including Republicans Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote to Trump in a letter that the deal will have “a negligible impact on fuel prices” and “is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.”

“Putin is looking for a way to get the United States to pressure Ukraine to stop striking those refineries,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., wrote the day the deal was announced.

Not enough to offset losses

Ukraine’s strikes have taken some Russian diesel off the market.

Russian diesel production fell by nearly 30% as attacks on refineries intensified, the International Energy Agency said in a Sept. 17 analysis.

The estimated gross value of Russia’s seaborne crude shipments hit a wartime high of $2.76 billion this week, up roughly $430 million from the week before, Bloomberg reported. 

No strikes on Russian refineries were reported last week, and the lull has allowed Moscow to boost processing rates, likely diverting crude that would otherwise have been exported, the outlet reported.

But the Gulf’s losses are far larger. Diesel exports from the region dropped to 390,000 barrels a day in August, just over a quarter of prewar levels, according to International Energy Agency figures.

Russia’s promised deliveries won’t close that gap.

The first shipment equals just about 2% of U.S. diesel demand over a month, CNBC reported. Goldman Sachs estimated the first two months of deliveries would cut wholesale prices on the U.S. Gulf Coast by just $1 to $2 a barrel, or roughly 2 to 5 cents a gallon.

“Now we can see how cash will start flowing back into Russia through the diesel deal,” Zelenskyy told reporters at a European Union summit in Brussels on Oct. 16, according to Reuters.

“This diesel deal will never be enough to offset the impact of the Strait of Hormuz on global markets. But it will put more money straight into Putin’s pocket to fund this war.”

Trump eased sanctions on Russian diesel after an Oct. 9 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying in a Truth Social post that Russia would supply hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel fuel “immediately” and that diesel prices would come down “IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”

The same day, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner told Ukrainian negotiators in Miami that the White House hoped the diesel deal would soften Moscow’s stance on peace talks. Witkoff met Putin for in-person negotiations last week for the ninth time since February 2025.

Kyiv offered to refrain from striking Russian refineries if Moscow stopped hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said Oct. 11.

Ukraine paused refinery strikes at Trump’s request, but Russia kept hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, prompting Kyiv to resume its own counterattacks, Zelenskyy told the Financial Times on Oct. 15.

“We’re done,” he said.

Within days of Trump’s sanction announcement, Ukrainian officials accused Washington of pressuring Kyiv to capitulate by withholding missile warnings and throttling the military’s essential Starlink connectivity, intelligence that Zelenskyy said “helps save people’s lives.”

Trump denied any interruption in missile warnings or Starlink service, but Ukrainian officials have stood by their account, prompting Zelenskyy to say he felt betrayed by the U.S.

Both have since been restored, Zelenskyy said Saturday, but Russia’s attacks have not let up.

Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles and more than 280 drones at Ukraine overnight Monday into Tuesday, targeting “energy, logistics and ordinary urban infrastructure” almost everywhere, Zelenskyy said.

The barrage came as the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian authorities had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity through attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

The extent of the drone war is underestimated, with Ukraine and Russia each using roughly 10,000 drones a day, the former CIA director and onetime commander of U.S. Central Command said, speaking at an American Primary Aluminum Association event in Washington.

“This is an unmanned systems war,” Petraeus said. “Tanks aren’t survivable there anymore.”

For Ukraine, drones and unmanned weapons have become central to how the country has leveraged a smaller, outgunned force against a much larger, better-financed adversary for almost five years.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordered the creation of a new Unmanned Systems Forces military branch in 2024, and the Defense Ministry has said time and again that developing more autonomous weapons is a top priority.

But for the rest of the world, Petraeus said, the fighting in Ukraine is a window into the future and a warning about the dangers of being underprepared for the battles to come.

“Really, no NATO country and not even the United States is undertaking yet the urgent revolutionary institutional change that should be taken based on what we see in Ukraine, which is the future of war,” he said.

The U.S. needs a new concept of warfare that runs through force structure, training, procurement, personnel policy and bases, the general said, replacing much of the legacy, heavily manned equipment with unmanned systems that are cheaper and far more numerous.

“What’s going to happen is we’ll see the introduction of autonomous systems really for the first time in warfare,” Petraeus said.

Washington is making “some commendable steps” toward developing these weapons, according to Petraeus, including establishing a new Autonomous Warfare Command that requires each military branch to stand up its own component command.

“But my hope is that they will not just create an unmanned systems force in terms of force structure, but that they will also spur the initiation of true institutional change,” Petraeus said.

That includes how the U.S. buys weapons, Petraeus said, calling for “very, very substantial manufacturing capacity but not necessarily producing all the time.”

“You want it to be able to make software changes every week, hardware changes every few weeks, which is what’s going on in Ukraine because the enemy continues to evolve and Russia’s been innovating very substantially as well,” he said.

Ukraine will produce as many as 20 million unmanned systems this year, Zelenskyy said in a July speech, with a shortage of trained operators and the acquisition of some weapons components — including optics, gimbals, brushless motors and fiber-optic cable — becoming the domestic industry’s production bottleneck.

The general also rejected the idea that the U.S. war with Iran has hurt Washington’s ability to help Kyiv, though he acknowledged the U.S. has used “a fair number of missile interceptors,” which “makes it more difficult to share those with others around the world.”

The war has consumed between one-half and two-thirds of the U.S. inventory of certain missile-defense interceptors, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate released in September.

“We can help the Ukrainians in any way in which we decide to assist them,” Petraeus said. “These are policy decisions.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has so far denied that there had been any interruption in Starlink connectivity or incoming missile warnings — the two forms of American intelligence that Ukrainian officials say are no longer flowing freely to Kyiv.

The crisis comes just days after Trump told allies that the U.S. would ease sanctions on Russian diesel last week during peace talks in Miami. He then reportedly threatened to cut off intelligence and weapons sales to Kyiv if it kept striking Russia’s oil infrastructure, according to CNN.

“Ukraine did not strike Russian oil refining and the energy sector in general for two days after the American President announced a ceasefire in the energy sector. But Russia did not listen,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday.

“Unfortunately, there was a ballistic missile strike on Kyiv yesterday, and there was no warning from our partners regarding this attack. Usually, such a warning is provided, and it is a crucial factor that aids our defense.”

Partner intelligence is an indispensable asset for Kyiv, which relies on NATO and especially U.S. information for both offensive and defensive operations. Curtailing that relationship could cost civilian lives along with the virtual stalemate Ukraine has managed to establish along the frontline, according to Ukrainian officials.

“Intelligence data on the launch of Russian ballistic missiles helps save people’s lives, and this is one of the most critical issues. This is what helps prevent people being killed when there is a warning about ballistics,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram.

On Sunday, Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow — without the confirmation of either party, officials from both countries said.

Ukraine initially resisted Trump’s push to spare Russia’s oil network, repeating that it would stop hitting refineries only if Moscow stopped striking Ukrainian power plants. After Trump declared an “energy ceasefire” that Moscow never accepted, Kyiv held its fire for three days. Russia, however, did not.

Kyiv residents heard at least five powerful explosions Sunday night before air-raid sirens sounded.

Rumors immediately circulated that the missing alert stemmed from a disruption in partner intelligence, but officials initially urged people not to jump to conclusions.

“You can call me an optimist, but I don’t believe (I don’t want to believe) that the United States will leave us without this information,” presidential adviser and communications expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov wrote Monday on Telegram, noting that Ukraine still relies on partners for reports of ballistic missile launches.

“Because it’s about the survival of civilians,” he wrote.

But when more missiles and drones struck Kyiv the following day, mainly targeting energy infrastructure and the power grid, reports began surfacing across the country that strike drones, interceptors and frontline vehicles were losing connection above roughly 100 mph (160 km/h), units across the country reported.

By Wednesday, multiple officials confirmed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had restricted Starshield, the military version of its Starlink service, without notice, just as Kyiv struggles against faster Russian jet drones, larger ballistic and cruise missile barrages and a global shortage of missile interceptors.

“This complicates UAV missions, particularly those involving interceptors and mid-range strike drones, and hampers capabilities for frontline logistics, reconnaissance, and signal relay,” the Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Wednesday.

Zelenskyy ended the pause on hitting Russian energy facilities on Wednesday after Kremlin forces kept striking Ukraine’s grid days after Trump declared a ceasefire.

“We’re done,” he told the Financial Times after making the decision.

Space Systems Command awarded the prototype contracts to Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly under the Geosynchronous High-Resolution Optical Space-Based Tactical Reconnaissance program, or GHOST-R, on Sept. 18.

The deal pairs a veteran American defense prime with a four-year-old space tech company – both of which are already under contract with the Space Force to develop space-based interceptors for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense initiative.

“To be able to negate threats in space, we must be able to find, fix, track, and target those threats,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said Sept. 16 at the AMOS Conference in Maui, Hawaii, just days before the announcement.

“Targeting in the space domain is maturing, but it still has a long way to go.”

GHOST-R is meant to address some of these problems by using “commercially developed space vehicles, buses, and electro-optical payloads to deliver high-resolution, space-to-space imagery for characterizing resident space objects in [geostationary Earth orbit] GEO,” according to the command announcement.

The new contracts are the latest major development in the RG-XX program, the Space Force’s next-generation orbital tracking initiative aiming to field a fleet of agile, low-cost reconnaissance satellites in geosynchronous orbit to help build out U.S. defense capacity in space by the end of the decade.

“Collaborating with DIU on GHOST-R is a true force multiplier. We are leveraging rapid prototyping to push the envelope of what commercial tech can deliver to the RG-XX program,” Col. Bryon McClain, acting Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) for Space Combat Power, said in the release.

Northrop will deliver a prototype the size of a “small suitcase” built on its ESPASat-L spacecraft, using a commercial optical sensor, and produced on “an accelerated 24-month timeline.”

“Space is becoming more congested and contested every day, and our joint forces depend on clear, timely insight into what’s happening on orbit,” Ryan Tintner, Northrop’s vice president, said in a company announcement about the deal.

True Anomaly will deliver its Jackal autonomous orbital vehicle and Mosaic command-and-control system, a dynamic operations sensor suite, through the initiative, according to the company’s release.

“As agile, maneuverable adversary platforms become more capable, the reconnaissance architecture can no longer rely on a handful of exquisite assets,” company CEO and co-founder Even Rogers said in the announcement.

Neither the Pentagon nor the companies have so far disclosed the value of the contracts or the source of their funding – although the money did not come from Andromeda, the Space Force’s up to $6.2 billion contract pool for RG-XX, an SSC spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

The new GHOST-R prototypes are set to launch directly to geosynchronous orbit by 2028 and fly government-owned and operated missions by 2029, officials said.

Then he played an AI-generated clip of what he meant: a robopunk mix of humanoid and crab-like ground robots skittering across a barren front line, doing work that is still too complicated for the robots Ukraine fields today.

The video laid out Fedorov’s vision for an Army of Robots, a force of two-legged upright and other ground robots that would take over many of the front line’s most dangerous but necessary jobs from soldiers.

“Our idea is to combine engineers, startups and capital into one ecosystem so we can launch humanoid-like robots on the battlefield,” Fedorov told Defense News in an exclusive interview after his presentation.

“We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots.”

To get there, Fedorov is calling on specialists in robotics, AI, sensors and autonomous systems to pool their talent in the kind of concentrated wartime push that built the first atomic bomb, and to focus it on the machines he says will one day replace Ukraine’s infantry.

The 35-year-old aims for the group to have its first confirmed battlefield result from a humanoid-like robot within six months and, within a year, an assault in which robots take on the most dangerous parts of a mission with no infantry alongside them.

To hit the six-month mark, there isn’t time to spend on research and development, he said, so he will begin by investing in companies with weapons that have already been tested and shown some market viability.

Fedorov wants Ukraine to seize the initiative in the war’s next technological cycle before Russia – whose far larger army and industrial base let it scale new weapons quickly – gets there first.

“Russia always thinks about new strategies, how to hack our frontlines,” he said. “We need to be the first side to hack our frontlines.”

Robots are only one of the defense tech areas that the former minister plans to develop within the new project.

“It could be robots, it could be autonomous systems,” he said. “We will have three key directions: sensors and robots, cheaper anti-jet-Shahed missiles, and AI strike drones and missiles.”

Under Fedorov’s plan, members of the Army of Robots will identify a battlefield problem, find a technical solution and a team, provide resources for development, test the product with troops in real conditions and scale what works.

It is the same model he used for the Army of Drones, which he started in 2022 as Ukraine’s digital transformation minister and which opened the market to Ukrainian drone makers, launched government procurement and operator training and helped form the first strike drone units.

“The Army of Drones … changed everything in our country and in the world and, I think, in the future of the world,” he said. “Now we are trying to build the same ecosystem for robots.”

Ukrainian troops already lean heavily on ground robots for assaults and basic tasks, carrying out more than 25,000 logistics and evacuation missions in August – 3.3 times more than in January, according to the Defense Ministry.

But most of the futuristic robot designs featured in Fedorov’s video, humanoids included, are not yet used in combat in Ukraine today, and the ground robots that are in use almost always have a human operator at the controls, usually over Starlink.

Fedorov said the ambitious effort will involve multiple companies working on different stages of the product lifecycle, with some making components, some assembling complete robots and others developing software to run them.

“We have some funds for these first companies,” Fedorov said, declining to name names. “It means that we have two or three companies that will be our partners in these directions.”

The Army of Robots will include a venture fund to invest in technology teams, its own defense-tech companies and a research and development arm, according to a press statement issued after the announcement.

The initiative comes weeks after Fedorov announced that he was starting a new defense company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first investor.

Fedorov told Defense News the company will start with a corporate fund and may later launch its own venture fund.

The biggest challenge facing the development and deployment of these next-gen robots is the necessary speed of innovation, Fedorov said.

Ukraine has to field these robots fast enough to save its infantry and stay ahead of Russia, which he said has learned to copy Ukraine’s battlefield innovations and scale them rapidly.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is heading into another winter of Russian strikes with air-defense interceptors in short supply.

The weekend Fedorov made his announcement, Russian drones hit kindergartens and university buildings in Kyiv, struck a large civilian hospital and destroyed a food market and multiple gas stations outside the city, killing at least three people and injuring dozens in a combined aerial attack that lasted days.

“We don’t have enough time,” he said. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”

The possibility of nuclear war in space mostly sat in think-tank territory until recently, when the Pentagon confirmed it keeps weapons above the sky. Moscow demanded the demilitarization of space and Ukrainian intelligence published stolen documents on Russia’s next-generation military space platform all within the span of a few weeks.

But U.S. decision-makers still lack clear guidance, legal clarity and operational plans for a space-based nuclear crisis, according to an April 2026 report published by the American Foreign Policy Council that analyzed the outcome of a pair of 2025 war games that tested possible responses to such a crisis. The report found the U.S. unprepared in each case.

The war games were conducted during two workshops in May 2025 with former officials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the Space Force, U.S. Space Command and the commercial satellite industry, using three draft contingency plans: one for a suspected nuclear device in orbit; a confirmed weapon used for coercion; and a detonation.

The plans were applied to four scenarios using a fictional Russian satellite modeled on a real Russian platform along with a Chinese adversary as stand-ins.

The first found U.S. detection and attribution tools too weak to confirm a suspected payload, with a high risk of premature escalation.

In the second scenario, Russia announced it had a nuclear weapon in orbit and warned the U.S. that it must comply with its demands or lose its military and commercial satellites — a threat the workshop judged credible and one against which the U.S. “appears to lack response options.”

The third and fourth detonated a weapon outright, first in low orbit and then in geostationary orbit as a Chinese demonstration during a Taiwan crisis, with strategists finding no capability in existence to recover from either.

Across all four scenarios, the report concluded that the U.S. can defend its own satellites against an adversary’s direct action, but it has no tested plan for detecting, managing or recovering from an adversary’s nuclear weapon in orbit.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink confirmed on Monday that the United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” the first public acknowledgment by any American official that the U.S. military has put weapons in orbit.

Although U.S. officials have said there was a “serious national security threat” tied to Russian space activity, including a nuclear-capable anti-satellite weapon since mid-2024, Meink’s confirmation this week prompted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to declare on Tuesday that “We believe that space must be free of any weapon,” according to AFP.

And last week, Ukrainian military intelligence said it breached the network of Russia’s Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the corporation behind the Yars and Bulava nuclear missiles, and came away with documents on a Russian orbital program — including “a scalable, unified space platform called ‘Tiporyad,’ aimed at enhancing the reconnaissance, communication, and command capabilities of the Russian army,” the directorate said.

U.S. Space Command said in April it was aware of Russia’s recent orbital upgrades and the dangers they pose to American interests.

“Russia remains a very historic and sophisticated space power… they continue to invest in counter-space weapons, with the most concerning reports being that they are potentially thinking about placing on orbit a nuclear ASAT weapon,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, told Fox News on April 16.

Such a weapon “would hold at risk everyone’s satellites in low Earth orbit, and that would be an outcome that we just couldn’t tolerate,” he said.

Tehran and Moscow have been deepening their military relationship since the 1990s, but the partnership accelerated sharply after 2022 when Iran first began supplying Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has since negotiated a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory and has rapidly learned to replace and often upgrade most of the weapon’s components with locally sourced and Chinese parts.

Now, as Iran wages its own war against the United States and Israel since the spring, Russia’s upgraded technology is flowing back into Tehran, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

“If confirmed, this would represent a complete technological feedback loop in which Iranian‑designed drones supplied to Russia were enhanced through extensive wartime use before being returned to Iran in a significantly more capable configuration,” ISW analysts found.

That exchange marks a shift toward a more interdependent military partnership between Russia and Iran that is already endangering American forces deployed throughout the Middle East and beyond, according to American and Ukrainian officials – including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said he had given evidence of the alliance to the White House in March.

“There’s definitely some action there,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told a Senate hearing in April when asked whether Russia was actively supporting Iran’s war effort against U.S. forces.

Iran shipped its first Shahed‑136 and Shahed‑131 drones to Russia in mid‑August 2022, six months into the full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

About two months later, a Russian defense‑industry delegation traveled to Iran to finalize a $1.75 billion deal authorizing production of the drone on Russian soil at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan – initially assembling Iranian‑supplied kits, then increasingly substituting Russian and Chinese components.

Over the next four years, Russian engineers turned the imported design into a seemingly different weapon, swapping the original Iranian engine for Chinese turbojets, adding mesh-network radios and air-to-air missiles, and ultimately introducing entirely new jet-powered airframes (on the Geran-4 and Geran-5) so that the drone no longer resembles its original propeller-driven design.

“The country that has most thoroughly mastered the Shahed is not the one that built it,” CSIS researchers found. “Russia has used its license‑built variant, designated the ‘Geran,’ as a base platform for unprecedented wartime iteration.”

Russian missile specialists have been helping Iran develop ramjet propulsion systems for supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles since 2023 through a covert program codenamed C430L, according to a Financial Times investigation published Sept. 1.

The two countries formalized their partnership by signing a 20-year strategic treaty in 2025 covering joint military exercises, intelligence-sharing and defense-industrial cooperation, according to Reuters.

Russian-provided targeting intelligence “raises concerns that future Iranian drone attacks could become substantially more sophisticated than previous campaigns,” according to ISW.

Satellite imagery from early September shows the construction of at least ten new facilities at Alabuga, according to ISW, and Ukrainian intelligence says Russia plans to produce thousands of additional Geran drones and decoy munitions in September alone – with jet-powered models on track to make up roughly 80% of all drone attacks by November, according to RBC-Ukraine.

Those production figures would give Russia ample capacity to continue supplying both its own war in Ukraine and Iran’s long‑range strike campaign against American aircraft carriers and warships in the Middle East for several more months.

“Iran’s development and operationalization of this technology would likely improve its ability to threaten US land and naval assets in the region,” ISW concluded, warning of threats to U.S. bases, command centers, logistics hubs, ammunition depots and naval infrastructure.

“We will keep supporting Ukraine, including with European air defence and PAC-3 Patriot systems,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X on Sept. 2, confirming the request alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “We will work closer than ever with NATO. And deter anyone who attacks our freedom and security.”

The statement comes a day after Ukraine’s defense minister, Yevhenii Khmara, pressed allies for more aid. Russia is continuing a second week of launching near-nonstop aerial strikes on Kyiv, Odesa and other cities as Ukraine faces a dire antiballistics interceptor shortage.

“Ukraine calls on partners to allocate national budget funds for the procurement of Ukrainian drones, expedite the provision of the EU loan, and resume discussions on the use of frozen Russian assets,” Khmara said in a statement.

He said Ukraine currently faces a $27 billion defense budget deficit, but emphasized that supporting Kyiv is a “win-win” for Europe.

“Every euro invested in Ukraine’s defence is an investment in European security,” he said.

The €90 billion loan Kyiv hopes to tap into — finalized by the Council of the EU in April after months of delay — sets aside roughly €60 billion for defense procurement and €30 billion for budget support.

But the loan’s rules were written to prioritize European and Ukrainian-made weapons, capping non-EU/Ukrainian content at 35% of a given purchase’s value.

Because PAC-3s are built in the U.S., Kyiv’s request needs to receive a formal exemption to access the funds.

Ukraine already secured a similar carve-out in April for Chinese-made drone components, a precedent officials are pointing to as EU member states weigh the latest request.

Von der Leyen said in her Sept. 2 statement that the exemption review “is moving in the right direction,” and that EU representatives were due to decide on the exemption on Monday.

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.