Connexion
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.
As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.
“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”
Four years ago, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry painted a bullseye on commercial satellite networks that assist Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian military forces.
On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.
There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing—taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts.
The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.
“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade's unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”
A Russian military satellite maneuvered in "extreme proximity" of a commercial Earth-imaging satellite in recent days in the first known example an unsanctioned rendezvous in low-Earth orbit, according to orbital intelligence company LeoLabs.
The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs said. "Kosmos 2612 closed from hundreds of kilometers away to extreme proximity to ICEYE-X36. It then maneuvered around ICEYE-X36, remained nearby for an extended period, and then began moving away."
US military officials and independent analysts have tracked Kosmos 2612 since its April launch on a Soyuz rocket from a spaceport in northern Russia. Within weeks, it became apparent that at least four of the six satellites from that launch were stalking ICEYE-X36 after they adjusted orbits to line up with the orbit of the ICEYE spacecraft.
Russian drones are suspected of sinking a cargo ship and leaving chemical tankers ablaze near the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania, respectively. The latest attacks mean that at least seven ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—and even within Romania's territorial waters if Russian involvement is confirmed in the case of the chemical tankers.
Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.
The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Despite the expansion of Starlink and other communications satellite services, most of the world’s Internet traffic still travels through subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean floors. Those fiber-optic cables coexist with a network of oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables—and all these crucial links connecting countries and continents now face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread.
The rising risks to the world’s invisible infrastructure beneath the waves are the main subject of a new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative. Her book, titled Undersea War, explores the modern rise in suspicious incidents in which ships dragging their anchors for unusually long periods have cut or damaged undersea cables and pipelines, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
Braw acknowledges that about 60 percent of undersea cable damage is primarily due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, when weighted nets or anchors drag across the seabed. Natural hazards like storms and undersea landslides also account for a smaller proportion of such incidents. In total, between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly.
Over the weekend, the World Health Organization released a disease outbreak report on the events surrounding the death of a Russian infectious disease researcher earlier this month, highlighting that Russia has yet to report a confirmed cause of death. With that "key uncertainty," the United Nations health agency said it remains impossible to assess the risk of the event or whether the public health measures Russia took were adequate to prevent spread of the unknown disease.
The WHO reported that, so far, it has seen no evidence of ongoing transmission of the mystery disease. "However, confidence in the assessment remains limited by the absence of a confirmed etiological diagnosis, and the remaining uncertainty regarding the source and mode of exposure," the agency wrote in its report.
The agency laid out the order of events as information trickled out from Russian authorities, noting that it only became aware of the death via media reports on October 2. The WHO subsequently made contact with Russian authorities and requested information on October 3, 6, 7, and 8.
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
Drones sank two cargo ships and damaged a third in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries for the first time, killing at least two sailors. The attacks represent a notable escalation as Black Sea commercial shipping has increasingly come under attack during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russia also being accused of carrying out “hybrid warfare” incidents across Europe.
The Togo-flagged cargo ship Alfa Watan sank, and the Palau-flagged cargo ship Able was set ablaze after being attacked by multiple sea and aerial drones about 80 miles (128 kilometers) off the coast of Bulgaria on October 6, according to the Associated Press. In an interview, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev described the incidents as “an unacceptable attack in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone” and “a blatant violation of international law and maritime law.”
A Bulgarian ferry managed to evacuate the 18 crew members of the Able, with two severely injured mariners being flown to a hospital in the city of Varna.
A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoing resistance to Russia’s invasion.
The Russian attacks on Ukrainian telecommunication infrastructure have focused on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv since September 23, according to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders. Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry reported that 100,000 households in the Kyiv region were temporarily experiencing Internet outages from those initial strikes—and Russia has only intensified its strike campaign against major Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in recent weeks.
“Russian attacks on Ukraine’s telecommunication infrastructure are not new, with strikes and shelling previously damaging fiber optic lines, cell towers, and facilities belonging to mobile network companies,” said Tetiana Gaviuk, analyst for Europe at ACLED, in a post on October 1. “However, the recent concentrated attacks on Kyiv’s data centers and telecom networks stand out because multiple providers and facilities were hit within days, indicating Russia’s increased pressure on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.”
Roughly 200 people are under medical observation, several hospitals are under quarantine, and dozens are in isolation in Russia following the unexplained death of an infectious disease researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia, in the town of Shelekhov, according to early reports of the situation on Sunday and Monday.
Researcher Darya Shipilova reportedly died last week from pneumonia of "unknown" cause, according to Rospotrebnadzor, a Russian public health agency.
Unconfirmed information regarding her death has swirled. Some reports have claimed she accidentally broke a test tube containing the plague pathogen, Yersinia pestis, on September 25. She subsequently fell ill, was admitted to a hospital September 29 with severe pneumonia and died overnight between October 1 and October 2. The head of the Russian region that neighbors Irkutsk, Alexey Tsydenov, initially reported that she had died of plague but later altered his statement to say she "possibly" died of the disease.
In what seems like an alternate universe in hindsight, Russia and the European Space Agency began discussing collaboration on next-generation crewed spacecraft two decades ago. Under the agreement, Europe would have provided a service module to power a crew capsule carrying up to six passengers.
Europe ultimately decided not to pursue a crewed spacecraft project at the time, and Russia's state-backed space corporation, Roscosmos, chose to move ahead with a crewed spacecraft on its own. This project—always seemingly more of a Potemkin village than an effort encompassing real hardware—has gone under various guises over the years:
Beyond the name changes and a flood of renderings, after nearly 20 years of work, then, is anything actually happening with the Eagle spacecraft?
In the world’s first clash of the drone boats, a Ukrainian naval drone destroyed a Russian explosive drone boat using a remote-controlled machine gun turret. This comes as the war in Ukraine has already seen widespread deployment of such uncrewed surface vessels in combat, along with swarms of flying attack drones and ground robots.
The lopsided battle took place on September 12 when members of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence detected the Russian uncrewed surface vessel (USV) in the Black Sea and directed a Ukrainian Navy drone boat to intercept. The Russian vessel was “positively identified” as an Orcan surface drone with a “jet ski type steerable water jet” designed to ram targets and explode, according to naval analyst HI Sutton in Naval News.
Such Orcan drones have already been used to attack Ukrainian ports and ships. These often work in coordination with flying drones, like Russian Geran drones that provide aerial reconnaissance and can boost communication between drone operators and drone boats, Sutton explained.
Russia's attempt to replicate SpaceX's Starlink satellite network seems to be moving as slowly as the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
The Rassvet program, often billed as Russia's answer to Starlink, started launching its first operational satellites earlier this year. Two launches, one in March and a second in July, have delivered 32 Rassvet satellites to low-Earth orbit, some 10 percent of the roughly 300 Rassvet spacecraft Russia aims to put into orbit by the end of next year to provide connectivity for military and civilian users. The company in charge of Rassvet, Bureau 1440, wants to deploy 924 satellites by 2035.
But none of the 32 satellites launched so far have reached the 500-mile (800-kilometer) orbit they were designed to operate in. The rockets that launched the first two batches of Rassvets released the satellites much closer to Earth, and the satellites were expected to use their own plasma engines to raise their orbits over the next few months.
This week, Romania accused Russia of sending a drone boat loaded with explosives to a vital European natural gas platform in the Black Sea. A Romanian F-16 fighter jet used its cannons to disable the surface drone so that explosive ordnance experts could blow it up safely.
On August 20, the Romanian Coast Guard first spotted the maritime drone a few hundred meters away from the Neptun Deep project’s main drilling platform, where several hundred workers were busy with the platform’s ongoing installation, Defense Minister Radu Miruță said in a Facebook post. The offshore gas project would make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union once it starts full production in 2027.
To protect the lives of the workers and the offshore gas infrastructure, the Romanian military scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to stop the drone with cannon fire, Miruță said. Army specialists later carried out a controlled detonation, as seen in a Facebook video shared by the defense minister.
Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report! China's workhorse Long March rocket family appears to be rebounding quickly from a rare launch failure August 10. Chinese officials have not publicly released any information on what may have caused the Long March 7A rocket to break apart less than 90 seconds after liftoff, but the rocket's use of YF-100 engines initially raised questions about the failure's impact on other Chinese rockets that use the same type of engines. But no biggie. YF-100 engines returned to flight six days later with the successful flight of a Long March 12 rocket, and the heavy-lift Long March 5—also with YF-100 engines—is set to launch in a few days with one of China's most important space missions of the decade: the Chang'e 7 lunar lander en route to the Moon's south pole.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's Central News Agency reports. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from the rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.
Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers.
The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took place when Russian forces launched a company-size assault with tanks and other armored vehicles in the Donetsk Oblast region of eastern Ukraine on July 22. The Ukrainian defenders repelled the attack and posted video footage of their kamikaze drone strikes destroying at least seven T-72B3A tanks, including some that carried the Arena-M system, according to Euromaidan Press.
However, Ukrainian soldiers also described the Russian Arena-M system successfully shooting down some incoming drones, according to the journalists Dmytro Putiata and Rob Lee. The Ukrainians reported requiring between 15 and 20 drones to finish off each tank.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday that his country struck the Progress Rocket Space Center deep within Russia using ground-launched cruise missiles.
"In Russia’s Samara region, one of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production–was hit," Zelenskyy said on the social media site X. "Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement."
The largest city in the Samara Oblast, about 900 km from the Ukrainian border, Samara is home to Russia's most important manufacturer of rockets. The Progress Center assembles the workhorse vehicle for Russia, the Soyuz-2 vehicle, as well as the newer Soyuz-5 rocket. The facility also builds military satellites.
German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.
The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.
Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.
Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed many Russian armored vehicles on the ground and even military helicopters in midair using $400 Shrike drones with explosive payloads. Now thousands of such drones are getting upgraded with an AI system capable of autonomously tracking and homing in on moving targets.
In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.
That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away, and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.
In the latest twist on battlefield innovations, Ukraine has used both flying drone carriers and drone boats to send ground robots armed with weapons or explosives into battle.
The drone-assisted deployments have enabled slower wheeled robots to bypass tough terrain and Russian defenses, and to carry out an unusual robotic amphibious assault on a contested position. Such tactics also showcase the Ukrainian military’s ongoing experimentation with using drones and robots to offset a Russian military advantage in manpower while also sparing Ukrainian soldiers from making dangerous assaults.
On July 19, a Russian military Telegram channel posted a video showing a Ukrainian hexacopter drone carrying a ground robot suspended below by a cable, according to the Ukrainian government-run news platform United24. The Russian Telegram channel described the Ukrainian heavy bomber drone as deploying a four-wheeled ARK-1 robot armed with explosive anti-tank mines on the ground where it continued toward Russian military positions—and apparently generated plenty of outraged comments from pro-Kremlin social media users.
A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy.
According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University, one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex.
The largely unregulated advertising industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart—despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
Ukrainian drone strikes have forced Russia to completely halt shipping in the Sea of Azov in less than a week, showing once again how a country without traditional naval power can still effectively blockade maritime corridors.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have flown one-way attack drones to target and strike more than 100 Russian tankers and other ships in total, along with posting video evidence showing such drone strikes occurring every night between July 6 and July 14. The campaign has forced Russia to completely shut down the shipping route that flows from Russia’s Don River into the Sea of Azov, and to halt all Kerch Strait shipping transits from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea, according to Reuters reporting.
The shutdown of such maritime lanes has further isolated the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula by cutting off seaborne delivery of fuel in particular. Crimea had already been experiencing severe fuel rationing and power outages as Ukraine stepped up its mid- and long-range drone strike campaign on Russian energy infrastructure and supply lines, leaving behind damaged oil refineries with billowing black smoke and burned-out trucks littering highways.
Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian state cyber group that has compromised thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to investigative reporters and US government employees.
The operation has been active since at least March, when the FBI published an advisory warning of ongoing phishing campaigns targeting high-value targets by attackers associated with Russian intelligence services. Messages masquerading as automated support communications ask that users click a link or provide verification codes or account passcodes. In the event the user complies, they unknowingly link the attacker's device to their account or have their account completely taken over and are locked out.
South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms. That ambitious goal was announced as the South Korean military seeks to maintain a technological edge in its 70-year border standoff with the larger military of a hostile North Korea.
The goal is to make drones a “universal combat tool” for all troops by training them to use drones like a “second personal weapon,” said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea’s minister of national defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies.
According to Apple's 2025 App Store Transparency Report, Russia is the runaway world leader in one category: Demanding that Apple remove apps from its App Store.
In 2025, Russia asked that Apple remove 1,213 apps—many of these VPN apps were designed to thwart the country's draconian Internet censorship. (Vietnam was No. 2, requesting that 335 apps be blocked.)
Russia is essentially trying to build a closed, spy-friendly domestic version of the Internet. While the Russian government loves demanding app bans from Apple, it only wants bad, degenerate apps banned. It does not want good, strong Russian apps banned, such as VKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) or the Max messaging app (state-mandated communications software so creepy that one exile publication described it with the insanely long headline, "You already know Russia’s Max messenger spies on users. You probably don’t know just how many surveillance tools it hides, including even a neural network for eavesdropping.")
Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.
With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.
Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev.
Credit:
Roscosmos
"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.
Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.
At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.
Fully autonomous drones killed Russian soldiers during a battlefield test two years ago, according to a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. If true, the incident would represent another milestone in a war that has spurred unprecedented developments in military drones, robots, and AI-guided weaponry.
The one-time test was revealed by Alexander Kokhanovskyy, CEO of the Ukrainian drone maker Aero Center, during an interview with New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy in London. Kokhanovskyy described the test—which did not involve his current company Aero Center—using quadcopter drones that were preprogrammed to fly to a front-line area before activating an AI-powered “Terminator mode” that would seek out and attack any target in the given area.
There was apparently no video feed or anything else to show what the “Terminator” drones targeted and attacked. But Kokhanovskyy told New Scientist that human-piloted drones sent to check out the aftermath found “a couple” of dead Russian soldiers, which led to the conclusion that the fully autonomous drones had killed them.
Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future.
The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Kriezis at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.
By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries.
Five of the seven crew members on the International Space Station briefly sought refuge inside a SpaceX return capsule Friday morning as two Russian cosmonauts worked on an air leak on the other end of the complex.
NASA ordered US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev into SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft around 9 am EST (14:00 UTC) on Friday. The foursome launched aboard the SpaceX crew capsule on the Crew-12 mission in February, and the ship serves as their lifeboat until the crew's scheduled return to Earth in September.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the station in a Russian Soyuz ferry ship, joined the Crew-12 astronauts inside the Dragon spacecraft.
As more people rely on large language models to provide pat answers to complex questions, state governments are understandably worried about those LLMs spouting what they see as dangerous propaganda promoted by foreign adversaries. To help combat this problem, the government-sponsored Estonian Language Institute (ELI) has released a new "Propaganda Resistance" benchmark ranking dozens of LLMs on their ability to avoid "tak[ing] positions on topics that the Russian Federation uses in its strategic narratives."
As a former member of the Soviet Union that has been independent for just a few decades, many Estonians are particularly alert to what they see as false narratives being promoted from their large and often belligerent neighbor to the east. Alongside volunteer-run Estonian defense collective Propastop, the ELI identified 14 broad categories in which it sees Russian influence operations trying to sway public discussion. These range from narratives on the current status of Crimea and justifications for the war in Ukraine to the history of NATO and justification for Russia's annexation of Baltic states during World War II.
For each category of propaganda, the researchers developed separate questions phrased to be neutral, biased with "false assumptions" based on Russian propaganda, or to maliciously attempt to elicit explicit misinformation from the LLM. Questions were provided to the models in English, Estonian, and Russian, and judged by a separate AI model (calibrated to align with Propastop experts) based on the models' ability to "push back on propaganda narratives, without external help" from web search or other external tools.
At least four Russian military satellites changed their orbits to match that of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite in the last week, raising questions about Russia's intentions amid an ever-expanding standoff high above Earth.
The maneuvers were identified through open source orbital tracking data. Greg Gillinger, a retired Air Force space intelligence officer, revealed the orbit changes Friday in a special edition of his Integrity Flash newsletter, published by Integrity ISR, a private business that provides "combat-proven operational support and elite training that enhances mission success across ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), cyber, space, and targeting domains."
The Russian satellites in question, designated Kosmos 2610 through 2613, launched together on April 16 on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Over the last week or so, the four satellites adjusted their inclinations—the angles of their orbits to the equator—by less than a degree.
It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great.
This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine. Inflation is also high, and international sanctions have cost Russia $450 billion since the onset of the war in February 2022. Russia's economy is currently smaller than that of Texas, Stenergard said.
By most measures, then, the economy is not in tip-top shape. Moreover, the war is draining a large amount of the country's financial resources, with defense spending reaching a post-Soviet record of about 7 percent of government spending.
Russian universities are promising free tuition and up to $70,000 to students who are willing to serve as drone pilots in the Russian military for a year—all while claiming students can avoid the risk of frontline combat duty in Ukraine. But there has already been one confirmed battlefield death and possibly more among the new cadre of student drone pilots.
That specific recruitment offer appeared on pamphlets distributed at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, according to Bloomberg. Other universities have dangled incentives such as tax holidays, loan forgiveness, and sometimes free land. The independent magazine Groza counted at least 270 Russian academic institutions promoting military contracts to their students in the fifth year of the war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
This new wave of recruitment is targeting a population of approximately 2 million men attending Russian universities, including gamers and students with technical skills that could make them suitable trainees as drone pilots, according to Bloomberg. Russia’s Defense Ministry has specifically called for drone pilot recruits with expertise in flying drones, model aircraft, electronics, and radio engineering, with computer skills also being desirable, NBC News reported.
The world's leading space powers desperately want to know what the others are up to high above the equator. For more than a decade, the US military has operated a fleet of "inspector" satellites designed to sidle up to other spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit and take pictures. China started launching its satellites for a similar mission in 2018.
Ars has written about these activities in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) before, but the last few months have seen a couple of interesting developments. First, Russia has now joined the fray with the recent arrival of its own suspected inspector (or attack) satellite in GEO. Second, the US Space Force is poised to order more—perhaps many more—reconnaissance satellites of its own to send into the geosynchronous belt.
GEO is special. The laws of orbital mechanics mean a satellite in this type of orbit, some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator, moves around the Earth at the same rate as the planet's rotation, causing it to hover over the same location. Commercial and military-owned geosynchronous satellites typically spend years in the same location, or slot, to provide communications services to users.
If you believe official Russian reports, the country's northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months.
The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX's Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine's military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia's Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow.
The Russian space agency's first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.
After several tests of unusual "nesting doll" satellites in low-Earth orbit, Russia is now fielding operational anti-satellite weapons with valuable US government satellites in their crosshairs, the four-star general leading US Space Command said this week.
Gen. Stephen Whiting didn't name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.
US officials have compared the Nivelir architecture to a Matryoshka doll, or a Russian nesting doll, with an outer shell concealing smaller, unknown figures inside.
Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers.
Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses, about 16 more than Grinex reported. Neither TRM nor fellow blockchain research firm Elliptic has said how the attackers slipped past Grinex’s defenses. Grinex said it has been under almost constant attack attempts since incorporating 16 months ago. The latest attacks, it said, targeted Russian users of the exchange.
“The digital footprints and nature of the attack indicate an unprecedented level of resources and technology available exclusively to the structures of unfriendly states,” Grinex said. “According to preliminary data, the attack was coordinated with the aim of causing direct damage to Russia's financial sovereignty.”
It's been seven long years now since Metro Exodus wowed us with its early RTX-powered ray tracing in a chilling post-apocalyptic setting. A lot has changed in the intervening years, both in the game industry and for many Ukraine-based developers working on the upcoming Metro 2039 at developer 4A Studios.
"Everything we had planned for the next chapter of Metro changed in 2020 and more significantly in 2022," the developers said in a first look presentation of the game released today. "The war has shaped us, and we have changed the story to be even more about choices, actions, consequences, and what you have to pay to have a future."
While 4A is officially based in Malta, the studio was founded in Kyiv in 2006. And while 4A says the team working on Metro 2039 spans across 25 countries, the majority of those working on the game are Ukrainian.
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