SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea staged large-scale military drills Thursday to simulate shooting down drones as a step to bolster its readiness against North Korean provocations, three days after the North flew drones into its territory for the first time in five years.
South Korean warplanes and helicopters failed to bring down any of the five North Korean drones spotted south of the border Monday before they flew back home or vanished from South Korean radars. One of them traveled as far as northern Seoul. That caused security jitters among many people in the South, for which the military offered a rare public apology Tuesday.
Thursday’s training involved land-based anti-air guns, drones playing the role of enemy drones, and a total of 20 fighter jets, attack helicopters and unmanned assets. While there was no actual live-fire, it was still the country’s first set of major anti-drone drills since 2017, according to military authorities.
The drills near Seoul set up diverse scenarios of border infiltrations by small enemy drones, under which the mobilized South Korean military assets practiced how they could detect, track and shoot them down, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
Also on Thursday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol reiterated his push to build a stronger air defense and get tough on North Korean provocations. The North’s drone flights followed its record number of missile tests this year that some experts say is part of an effort to pressure the United States and its allies to make some concessions like sanctions relief.
“Whether they have nukes or whatever weapons of mass destruction they have, we must send a clear message to those who repeat provocations. We must not be frightened of (their nukes) and we must not hesitate,” Yoon said during a visit to a weapons development agency. “To obtain peace, we must prepare for a war that (we can win) overwhelmingly.”
Yoon said Tuesday his government will advance the planned establishment of a military drone unit and introduce high-tech stealth drones.
North Korea’s state media hasn’t commented on South Korea’s announcement of its reported drone flights. But some observers say North Korea likely sent those drones to test South Korean and U.S. readiness. They say North Korea also likely assessed that drones could be a cheap yet effective method to trigger security concerns and an internal divide in South Korea.
In response the North’s drone flying, South Korea said it sent three of its surveillance drones across the border in a rare tit-for-tat measure. North Korea didn’t make any reaction, according to South Korean defense officials.
This week, North Korea is under a key ruling party meeting to review past projects and determine policy objectives for 2023. During its third day Wednesday, leader Kim Jong Un expressed hopes that local Workers’ Party officials would report successes on their jobs and duties to live up to the party’s trust in them, state media reported Thursday, without elaborating what their tasks are.
In an earlier session, state media cited Kim as setting forth new goals to solidify his country’s military power, an indication that he would continue his run of weapons tests.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has bought some 1,400 drones, mostly for reconnaissance, and plans to develop combat models that can attack the exploding drones Russia has used during its invasion of the country, according to the Ukrainian government minister in charge of technology.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov described Russia’s war in Ukraine as the first major war of the internet age. He credited drones and satellite internet systems like Elon Musk’s Starlink with having transformed the conflict.
Ukraine has purchased drones like the Fly Eye, a small used for intelligence, battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance.
“And the next stage, now that we are more or less equipped with reconnaissance drones, is strike drones,” Federov said. “These are both exploding drones and drones that fly up to three to 10 kilometers and hit targets.”
He predicted “more missions with strike drones” in the future, but would not elaborate. “We are talking there about drones, UAVs, UAVs that we are developing in Ukraine. Well, anyway, it will be the next step in the development of technologies,” he said.
Russian authorities have alleged several Ukrainian drone strikes on its military bases in recent weeks, including one on Monday in which they said Russian forces shot down a drone approaching the Engels airbase located more than 600 kilometers (over 370 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
Russia’s military said debris killed three service members but no aircraft were damaged. The base houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers that have been involved in launching strikes on Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities have never formally acknowledged carrying out such drone strikes, but they have made cryptic allusions to how Russia might expect retaliation for its war in Ukraine, including within Russian territory.
Ukraine is carrying out research and development on drones that could fight and down other drones, Federov said. Russia has used Iranian-made Shahed drones for its airstrikes in Ukrainian territory in recent weeks, in addition to rocket, cruise missile and artillery attacks.
“I can say already that the situation regarding drones will change drastically in February or March,” he said.
Federov sat for an interview in his bright and modern office. Located inside a staid ministry building, the room contained a vinyl record player, history books stacked on shelves and a treadmill.
The minister highlighted the importance of mobile communications for both civilian and military purposes during the war and said the most challenging places to maintain service have been in the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa and Kyiv regions in the center and east of the country.
He said there are times when fewer than half of mobile phone towers are functioning in the capital, Kyiv, because Russian airstrikes have destroyed or damaged the infrastructure that power them.
Ukraine has some 30,000 mobile-phone towers, and the government is now trying to link them to generators so they can keep working when airstrikes damage the power grid.
The only alternative, for now, is satellite systems like Starlink, which Ukrainians may rely on more if blackouts start lasting longer.
“We should understand that in this case, the Starlinks and the towers, connected to the generators, will be the basic internet infrastructure,” Federov said.
Many cities and towns are facing power cuts lasting up to 10 hours. Fedorov said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree that instructs mobile phone companies to ensure they can provide signals without electricity for at least three days.
Meanwhile, with support from its European Union partners, his ministry is working to bring 10,000 more Starlink stations to Ukraine, with internet service made available to the public through hundreds of “Points of Invincibility” that offer warm drinks, heated spaces, electricity and shelter for people displaced by fighting or power outages.
Roughly 24,000 Starlink stations already are in operation in Ukraine. Musk’s company, SpaceX, began providing them during the early days of the war after Fedorov tweeted a request to the billionaire.
“I just stood there on my knees, begging them to start working in Ukraine, and promised that we would make a world record,” he recalled.
Federov compared Space X’s donation of the satellite terminals to the U.S.-supplied multiple rocket launchers in terms of significance for Ukraine’s ability to mount a defense to Russia’s invasion.
“Thousands of lives were saved,” he said.
As well as the civilian applications, Starlink has helped front-line reconnaissance drone operators target artillery strikes on Russian assets and positions. Federov said his team is now dedicating 70% of its time to military technologies. The ministry was created only three years ago.
Providing the army with drones is among its main tasks.
“We need to do more than what is expected of us, and progress does not wait,” Federov said, scoffing at Russian skill in the domain of drones. “I don’t believe in their technological potential at all.”
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Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presented unspecified goals to further bolster his military power next year at a meeting of top political officials, state media reported Wednesday, in an indication he’ll continue his provocative run of weapons displays.
Kim’s statement came as animosities with rival South Korea rose sharply this week as the South accused the North of flying drones across the rivals’ border for the first time in five years. This year, North Korea already performed a record number of missile tests in what experts call an attempt to modernize its arsenal and increase its leverage in future dealings with the United States.
During the Tuesday session at the ongoing plenary meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party, Kim analyzed new security challenges in international politics and on the Korean Peninsula and clarified principles and directions to take in external relations and fights against enemies to protect national interests and sovereignty, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
Kim “set forth new key goals for bolstering up the self-reliant defense capability to be pushed ahead with in 2023 under the multilaterally changing situation,” KCNA said, without elaborating.
Some observers say the new goals could be related to Kim’s push to expand his nuclear arsenal and introduce a spate of high-tech weapons systems such as multi-warhead missiles, a more agile long-range weapon, a spy satellite and advanced drones. They say Kim would eventually aim to use his boosted nuclear capability to force its rivals to accept the North as a legitimate nuclear state, a status he would think is essential in getting international sanctions on his country to be lifted.
On Monday, South Korea’s military fired warning shots and launched fighter jets and helicopters, after detecting what it called five North Korean drones that violated the South’s airspace. South Korea also flown its own surveillance assets, in a likely reference to unmanned drones, across the border into North Korea in response.
South Korea’s military said it had failed to shoot down the drones and offered a public apology over causing security concerns. President Yoon Suk Yeol called for strong air defense and high-tech stealth drones to better monitor North Korea.
Some experts say the North Korean drone flights might have been designed to test South Korean and U.S. readiness and neutralize a previous inter-Korean tension-reduction agreement. They say North Korea likely assessed its drones as a cheap yet effective method to cause security jitters and a domestic divide in South Korea.
Yoon, a conservative who took office in May, said Tuesday that South Korea has had little anti-drone trainings since 2017, a year when his liberal predecessor Moon Jae-in was inaugurated. In an apparent effort to blame the alleged lax air defense system to Moon’s engagement policy toward North Korea, Yoon said that “I think our people must have seen well how dangerous a policy relying on the North’s good faith and (peace) agreements would be.”
Yoon’s comments triggered a backlash from Moon’s liberal opposition Democratic Party, which accused the president of trying to shift a responsibility for his government ’s security policy failure to someone else.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s military fired warning shots and scrambled aircraft after North Korean drones entered the South’s airspace on Monday, South Korean officials said, days after the North launched two ballistic missiles in its latest testing activities.
Several North Korean drones crossed the inter-Korean border and were detected in the South’s territory on Monday morning, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said.
South Korea’s military broadcast warnings and fired warning shots before it launched fighter jets and attack helicopters to shoot down the North Korean drones, the Defense Ministry said. It wasn’t immediately known if the drones were shot down.
It’s the first time for North Korean drones to enter South Korean airspace since 2017, when a suspected North Korean drone was found crashed in South Korea. South Korean military officials said at the time that the drone photographed a U.S. missile defense system in South Korea.
North Korea has previously touted its drone program, and South Korean officials said the North has about 300 drones. In 2014, several suspected North Korean drones were found south of the border. Experts said they were low-tech but could be considered a potential security threat.
Last Friday, North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles toward its eastern waters, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The launch was seen as a protest of the South Korean-U.S. joint air drills that North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal.
This year, North Korea has conducted an unprecedented number of missile tests in what some experts call an attempt to improve its weapons and pressure rivals to make concessions such as lifting sanctions in future negotiations. Recently, the North also claimed to have performed major tests needed to acquire its first spy satellite and a more mobile intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
FORT MYERS, Fla., December 23, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Piracy is still an issue in modern times, with criminal groups using advanced equipment and tactics to attack commercial vessels in waters around Africa and Asia. These attacks involving the robbery and ransom of ships cost between $13 and $16 billion annually. The actual number of attacks is unknown due to underreporting by shipping companies, which may be concerned about insurance premiums. While some measures, such as escorts and onboard security, have been taken to protect vessels in high-risk areas, using weapons for self-defense remains controversial due to international treaties.
“Sadly, captains on shipping vessels are typically left alone with little to no support during piracy events; our answer is the FALCON.” – Wil Glaser, Space-Tech CEO
FALCON (Forward Area Long-range reCON)leverages 2023 technology for sensors, processors, and UAV control. FALCON provides advanced scanning and surveillance at an affordable price in an asset that can be launched, operated, and recovered without sophisticated equipment or trained specialists.
With advanced satellite quality optics, images from over 1 kilometer away are broadcast to the Augmented Reality HMD, allowing the user to control the mission with simple voice menu commands, eliminating the joystick controller. A single operator can hold a dozen units remotely, allowing a fleet of Falcon drones to cover an entire theater or fire threat region, creating a real-time map of fire spread or providing radar and visual surveillance over open waters.
Space-Tech SAGS Service (SPACE-TO-GROUND SECURITY) blends its satellite platform & FALCON with a combination of state-of-the-art assets, sensors, and AI Tools.
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A peek inside shows an impressive build of materials like a GPS, Radio, Acoustic, Radar, LIDAR, and vision sensors on board with an AI object or threat recognition tool to report if threats are detected, minimizing operator radio bandwidth and tasking. Communications and video links can be encrypted and broadcast over RF, WiFi6, and 5G communication channels.
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UNITED NATIONS — The United States and its allies clashed with Iran and its ally Russia over Western claims that Tehran is supplying Moscow with drones that have been attacking Ukraine — and the U.S. accused the U.N. secretary-general of “yielding to Russian threats” and failing to launch an investigation.
At a contentious Security Council meeting Monday on the resolution endorsing the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers, the United States and Iran also accused each other of responsibility for stalled negotiations on the Biden administration rejoining the agreement that former President Donald Trump pulled out of in 2018.
Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani insisted Iran’s negotiating team exercised “maximum flexibility” in trying to reach agreement and even introduced an “innovative solution to the remaining issues to break the impasse.” But he claimed the “unrealistic and rigid approach” of the United States led to the current stalled talks on the 2015 agreement, known as the JCPOA.
“Let’s make it clear: pressure, intimidation and confrontation are not solutions and will get nowhere,” Iravani said.
Iran is ready to resume talks and arrange a ministerial meeting “as soon as possible to declare the JCPOA restoration,” Iravani said. “This is achievable if the U.S. demonstrates genuine political will … The U.S. now has the ball in its court.”
Speaking before Iravani, U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood said “the door to negotiations remains open” for a mutual U.S.-Iranian return to full implementation of the JCPOA. But he said, “Iran’s own actions and stances have been responsible for preventing that outcome.”
In September, a deal that all other parties had agreed to was “within reach” and “even Iran prepared to say yes,” Wood said, “until at the last minute, Iran made new demands that were extraneous to the JCPOA and that it knew could not be met.”
He said Iran’s conduct since September — notably its failure to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, and the expansion of its nuclear program “for no legitimate civilian purpose” — has reinforced U.S. skepticism “about Iran’s willingness and capability of reaching a deal, and explains why there have been no active negotiations since then.”
At the end of the council meeting, Wood asked for the floor to refute Iravani, saying it’s “a fact” that Iran’s extraneous demands and rejection of all compromise proposals are the reason why there has not been a return to mutual compliance with the JCPOA.
“So let me just simply say, The ball is not in the U.S. court,” Wood said. “On the contrary, the ball is in Iran’s court.”
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward, whose country remains a party to the JCPOA, told the council Iran’s nuclear escalation is making “progress on a nuclear deal much more difficult.”
“Today, Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile exceeds JCPOA limits by at least 18 times, and it continues to produce highly enriched uranium, which is unprecedented for a state without a nuclear weapons program,” she said.
In addition, Woodward said, “Iranian nuclear breakout time has reduced to a matter of weeks, and the time required for Iran to produce the fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons is decreasing.” She said Iran is also testing technology that could enable intermediate and intercontinental range ballistic missiles to carry a nuclear payload.
U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the council “the space for diplomacy appears to be rapidly shrinking.”
She pointed to an IAEA report that Iran intends to install new centrifuges at its Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant and to produce more uranium enriched up to 60% at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant — a level close to that needed for a nuclear weapon. Iran also removed all IAEA equipment monitoring JCPOA-related activities.
DiCarlo called on Iran to reverse all steps outside JCPOA limits, and on the United States to lift sanctions on Iran outlined in the nuclear deal, and extend waivers on Iranian oil trading.
Iran’s Iravani emphasized that all of Iran’s nuclear activities “are peaceful” and said Iran is ready to engage the IAEA to resolve outstanding issues on nuclear safeguards.
As for what he called the “unfounded allegation” that Iran transferred drones to Russia in violation of the 2015 resolution, Iravani stressed that all restrictions on transferring arms to and from Iran were terminated in October 2020. So he said Western claims that Tehran needed prior approval “has no legal merit.”
Iravani also insisted that drones were not transferred to Russia for use in Ukraine, saying “the misinformation campaign and baseless allegations … serve no purpose other than to divert attention from Western states’ transfer of massive amounts of advanced, sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine in order to prolong the conflict.”
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called allegations of Iranian drone deliveries to his country for use in Ukraine “patently concocted and false.” Russia is well aware that Ukrainian representatives “have been unable to provide Tehran bilaterally any documentation to corroborate the use by Russian military personnel of Iranian-origin drones,” he said.
Wood, the U.S. envoy, told the council that Ukraine’s report of Iranian-origin drones being used by Russia to attack civilian infrastructure has been supported “by ample evidence from multiple public sources” including a statement by Iran’s foreign minister on Nov. 5.
He insisted that Iran is barred from transferring these types of drones without prior Security Council approval under an annex to the 2015 resolution.
For seven years, Wood said, the U.N. has had a mandate to investigate reported violations of the resolution, and he expressed disappointment that the U.N. Secretariat, headed by secretary-general Guterres, has not launched an investigation, “apparently yielding to Russian threats.”
Russia’s Nebenzia reiterated Moscow’s contention that investigations are “an egregious violation” of the resolution and the U.N. Charter “and the U.N. Secretariat should not bow to pressure from Western countries.”
Guterres told a news conference earlier Monday, when asked about criticism that the U.N. hasn’t launched an investigation of Iranian-made drones in Ukraine, that “We are looking into all the aspects of that question and in the broader picture of everything we are doing in the context of the war to determine if and when we should” conduct an investigation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Moscow could launch new strikes over Christmas, hours before Russian missiles killed at least five people in an attack on the southern city of Kherson.
“With the approaching holiday season, Russian terrorists may become active again,” Zelenskyy said late on Friday. “They despise Christian values and any values in general. Therefore, please heed the air raid signals, help each other and always take care of each other.”
The Russian attack on Kherson on Saturday also injured at least 35 people, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, said on Telegram.
Zelenskyy condemned the Kherson assault as an act of terror. “These are not military facilities,” he wrote on Facebook. “This is not a war according to the rules defined. It is terror, it is killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure.”
Zelenskyy sent a stark warning to Russia, according to the transcript of his Friday address.
“Citizens of Russia must clearly understand that terror never goes unanswered,” he said.
The warning comes as Russia is likely to be limiting its strikes on key infrastructure due to a shortage of missiles, the U.K. Defense Ministry said on Saturday.
“Russia has likely limited its long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure to around once a week due to the limited availability of cruise missiles,” the ministry said. A broader shortage of munitions is weighing on Russian military operations, it said, adding that “Russia is unlikely to have increased its stockpile of artillery munitions enough to enable large-scale offensive operations.”
Ukrainian troops killed another 480 Russians soldiers, Kyiv’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday, taking the overall Russian casualties to more than 101,000 since Moscow’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February. The Ukrainian ministry also said that Russia lost another tank and more drones. POLITICO hasn’t independently verified these figures.
Zelenskyy also thanked the Netherlands for its new €2.5 billion support package for Ukraine. While the allocation of the funds will depend on Kyiv’s needs, the Dutch government said on Friday it expects the money to help fund “military aid, support essential repair and reconstruction activities and contribute financially to efforts to combat impunity.”
The Ukrainian president spoke after a meeting with his military commanders, saying that Kyiv is “preparing for different variants of actions of the terrorist state” and “will respond.” The country is also working to step up its diplomatic efforts toward traditional partners and “countries in which our influence is still less than we need,” such as Latin American and African nations, he said.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
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Airspace monitoring innovator designed drone defense system to detect all unmanned aircraft, whether they follow or evade remote identification requirement.
Press Release –
Dec 12, 2022 08:00 EST
SYRACUSE, N.Y., December 12, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Federal Aviation Administration regulations will begin to require all unmanned aircraft to transmit identification and location information. Hidden Level’s Airspace Monitoring Service (AMS) technology is uniquely positioned to track, monitor, and validate drones whether or not they comply with the new FAA rules.
The regulations are in response to the explosive growth of unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, since 2013. The FAA reported over 865,000 registered drones in May 2022 and estimates that number will grow to 1.4 million by 2024.
To prevent collisions with passenger airplanes and other aircraft, the FAA is mandating all drones operating in U.S. airspace have Remote Identification (RID) capability. Remote ID provides agencies like the FAA, law enforcement, and other federal agencies a greater situational awareness to be able to identify when a drone appears to be flying in an unsafe manner or where it is not allowed to fly. Remote ID also lays the foundation of the safety and security groundwork needed for more complex drone operations. The regulations require all drones made or sold in the United States after December 2022 to support RID, and that all drone pilots (including those who fly for fun, business, or public safety) must register and operate their drone in accordance with the final rule on remote ID, beginning Sept. 16, 2023.
Hidden Level’s drone monitoring technology was designed to keep up with the rapid technological advancements to drones such as Remote Identification. In 2019, the company released a white paper identifying potential gaps in RID and published a technology blog identifying additional factors that should be addressed with a comprehensive RID solution.
“When it comes to integrating the FAA’s broadcast Remote Identification in drone tracking systems, Hidden Level is way ahead of the game,” said Jeff Cole, CEO and co-founder of Hidden Level. “Our AMS not only receives RID signaling in its coverage area but also verifies it, addressing two significant gaps in the RID system.”
Those gaps appear when a drone intentionally or unintentionally fails to broadcast RID information, or if it intentionally or unintentionally broadcasts false RID information.
Hidden Level’s AMS technology uses a local network of passive RF sensors installed on buildings, rooftops and cell towers, which detects the movements of drone aircraft in the area. That allows it to track drones even without a RID broadcast, resolving the first gap.
The Hidden Level AMS also checks and validates RID signals by correlating fine angle estimates from its sensors on the received RID broadcast messages with the drone position information included in the messages.
“That allows Hidden Level’s AMS to detect any drones failing to broadcast RID data or transmitting false information, and report it almost instantaneously,” Cole said. “That capability is essential to any organization, whether it’s a city, a stadium or a company facility, that is trying to ensure safety and security.”
The Hidden Level AMS is a cloud-based scalable solution that utilizes a local network of passive RF drone detection sensors, much like a cellular network, that is owned, operated, and maintained by Hidden Level. The sensors, installed on buildings, rooftops and cell towers, provide real-time location data on drone aircraft. Clients receive streaming AMS data that integrates into a variety of common security platforms.
To learn more about Hidden Level and its readiness for the FAA-mandated RID system, visit hiddenlevel.com.
ABOUT HIDDEN LEVEL Founded in 2018, Hidden Level is led by a team of skilled sensor experts with more than a decade of experience building innovative sensor solutions for both military and commercial customers. Hidden Level’s airspace monitoring service delivers the only industry solution that provides secure, accurate low-altitude airspace monitoring at scale. By eliminating the burden of owning, operating and maintaining expensive and rapidly changing sensor technology equipment, Hidden Level provides its customers only what is necessary—real-time, actionable data at a fraction of the cost.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is accusing Russia of moving to provide advanced military assistance to Iran, including air defense systems, helicopters and fighter jets, part of deepening cooperation between the two nations as Tehran provides drones to support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Friday cited U.S. intelligence assessments for the allegations, saying Russia was offering Iran “an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership.”
Kirby said Russia and Iran were considering standing up a drone assembly line in Russia for the Ukraine conflict, while Russia was training Iranian pilots on the Sukhoi Su-35 fighter and Iran could receive deliveries of the plane within the year.
“These fighter planes will significantly strengthen Iran’s air force relative to its regional neighbors,” Kirby said.
The U.S. allegations are part of a deliberate effort by the U.S. to drive global isolation of Russia, in this case targeted at Arab nations who have looked to contain Iran’s regional malevolence and who have not taken a strong stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration accused Saudi Arabia of siding with Russia in the conflict by shepherding cuts by the OPEC+ cartel to boost the price of oil, crucial to funding Moscow’s war effort. Saudi Arabia and Iran have been on opposite sides of a yearslong proxy war in Yemen.
Kirby said the arms transfers were in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and that the U.S. would be “using the tools at our disposal to expose and disrupt these activities.”
Concerns about the “deepening and a burgeoning defense partnership” between Russia and Iran come as the Biden administration has repeatedly accused Iran of assisting Russia with its invasion of Ukraine.
The administration says Iran sold hundreds of attack drones to Russian over the summer. Kirby on Friday reiterated the administration’s belief that Iran is considering the sale of hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia, but acknowledged that the U.S. doesn’t have “perfect visibility into Iranian thinking on why” the deal hasn’t been consummated.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador, Barbara Woodward, on Friday accused Russia of attempting to obtain more weapons from Iran, including hundreds of ballistic missiles, in return for “an unprecedented level of military and technical support” to Tehran.
“We are concerned that Russia intends to provide Iran with more advanced military components, which will allow Iran to strengthen their weapons capability,” she said. “So it is imperative that the truth about Iran’s supply to Russia is exposed, and is investigated by the U.N. as soon as possible.”
At a U.N. Security Council meeting called by Russia to assess the impact of Western weapons pumped into Ukraine, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia again denied that Iran is supplying weapons to Ukraine.
“The military industrial complex in Russia can work perfectly fine and doesn’t need anyone’s assistance, whereas the Ukrainian military industry does not basically exist and is being assisted by the Western industry and Western companies,” he said.
The White House has repeatedly sought to spotlight Russia’s reliance on Iran and North Korea, another broadly isolated nation on the international stage, for support as it prosecutes its war against Ukraine.
U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly called the Iran-Russia collaboration a “desperate alliance.”
“Iran is now one of Russia’s top military backers,” he said. “Their sordid deals have seen the Iranian regime send hundreds of drones to Moscow, which have been used to attack Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and kill civilians.
“In return, Russia is offering military and technical support to the Iranian regime, which will increase the risk it poses to our partners in the Middle East and to international security.”
The Biden administration recently unveiled sanctions against Iranian firms and entities involved in the transfer of Iranian drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. It all comes as the administration has condemned the Islamic republic’s violent squelching of protests that erupted throughout Iran after the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was held by the morality police.
Even as the White House has accused Iran of backing Russia’s war effort, the administration has not abandoned the possibility of reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal — scuttled by the Trump administration in 2018. The pact, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, would provide Tehran with billions in sanctions relief in exchange for the country agreeing to roll back its nuclear program to the limits set by the 2015 deal.
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Lederer reported from the United Nations. AP writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
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BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Though Amazon is preparing to introduce its Prime Air drone delivery service, the retail monolith is looking ahead to 2024, when it plans to use a more capable, quieter drone for urban deliveries.
A report from CNBC stated that Prime Air would launch the 80-pound MK27 drone this year. It will begin making deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Lockeford, California. The drone can’t carry anything heavier than five pounds, and its payload will be about the size of a shoe box.
With 2024 in mind, however, Amazon demonstrated the MK30 drone in Boston on November 11th. The new drone is designed to be more versatile, but it’s also supposed to be quieter. It’s roughly the same size as the MK27, but Axios reports that it “is nimble enough to make deliveries in highly populated areas such as Boston, Atlanta and Seattle.”
The MK30 can fly further than its predecessor and operate in mildly inclement weather. Additionally, Axios reports that it sports “new ‘sense-and-avoid’ safety features that allow it to operate … while skirting other aircraft, people, pets and obstacles.”
With redesigned propellers, the new drone will also be quieter. However, Axios notes that payloads will still need to be less than five pounds altogether.
While drone delivery service still seems like a novel idea, Amazon’s goals are nothing less than ambitious. By the end of the 2020s, the company plans to deliver up to a half-billion packages each year.
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
LVIV, Ukraine — Inna missed her father’s funeral.
The grieving 36-year-old Ukrainian lawyer learned of his death as she and her two young daughters — one aged seven, the other five — boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport in London to Poland.
It was at the mist-shrouded railway station at Przemyśl, 16 kilometers from the Poland-Ukraine border, that her plan to pay her graveside respects unraveled, as salvoes of Russian missiles slammed into Ukraine’s power grid, also impacting Inna’s hometown of Vinnytsia.
The barrage on the country’s energy infrastructure — the worst it’s experienced since October 10 — not only threw major cities and small villages into darkness and cold, but it’s also wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s railways, grinding trains to a halt and leaving them powerless at stations.
Away from the front lines of battle, this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine looks like — a slight, dignified blond-haired woman, with two young children in tow, trying to mourn her father and reach her 72-year-old mother to comfort her.
Knowing the journey back home would be arduous, Inna had tried to persuade her daughters to stay in Clapham, south London, where the three have been living with an English family for the past six months. “They have been very kind to us,” she explained.
Inna’s studying business administration now. Her daughters are in school. “Six months ago, they knew no English; it was hard at first for them,” she told me. Now, the kids chatter away in English, with the elder explaining her favorite thing to do at school is drawing; and the younger chiming in to announce she loves swimming.
But that calm, predictable life they’ve been living in England seemed far away right now.
The girls had insisted on accompanying their mother to Ukraine because they wanted to see their grandparents … and their cats. “When is the train coming?” the oldest demanded several times.
And as the night drew in, and the cold settled along the crowded platform at Przemyśl’s train station, other flagging, bundled-up kids started asking the same question, while parents — mainly mothers — tried to work out how to complete their journeys across the border.
As they did so and debated their options, a Polish policewoman insisted that smoking wasn’t allowed on the platform, and volunteers wearing orange or yellow vests offered hot tea, apples and fruit juice. Still, there was no sign of the scheduled train, and no information about it either.
While we waited on the platform, through the windows of a small apartment block across the road, Polish families could be seen glued to their television sets — no doubt absorbing the news that a missile had hit a grain silo in a Polish village just 100 kilometers north of Przemyśl.
As the news added to the disquiet among the Ukrainians at the station, the worry became palpable up and down the platform. Daryna, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman, was heading to see her 21-year-old son. “I’ve been living in Scotland with my daughter,” she said. “But he’s studying in Kyiv, and I want to make sure he’s OK.”
Some families are attempting to return to Ukraine to visit or mourn with family, but Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure left many asking “When is the train coming?” | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“Going home now is like being transported from the normal to the abnormal,” she added.
Galina, the director of a small clothing company, was impatient to see her 10-year-old daughter, whom she left in the care of her grandmother in Kyiv while making a quick business trip to Poland. She kept texting them to make sure they were safe, but reassuring replies didn’t assuage her, as both she and the others kept scrolling on social media for news about their hometowns — Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Rivne and Lviv, all affected by the nationwide missile bombardment.
My destination, Lviv, was badly impacted by the recent blasts. Several explosions were heard from the city on Tuesday, prompting Mayor Andriy Sadovyi to warn on his Telegram channel that everyone should “stay in shelter!” However, many won’t have received that message, as neither the internet nor the cellular networks were working in parts of the city. Officials said missiles and drones caused severe damage to the power grid and energy infrastructure, despite reports of successful missile interceptions too.
Some 95 kilometers from Przemyśl, Lviv was cold and damp when we arrived shortly after dawn on Wednesday. After giving up on the train, we’d crossed the border by foot and cadged a lift to the city.
As we made our way there, the city was largely without power, the traffic lights weren’t working, and the air raid sirens were clamoring. The only lights we could see were from buildings equipped with generators.
At my hotel, the manager, Andriy, told me it takes 37 gallons of diesel an hour to keep the electricity flowing, but he cautioned the water might not be that hot. “When the all-clear sounds, we will serve breakfast for another hour,” he added helpfully.
By the time I finished breakfast, electric trains were already up and running again in Lviv, less than a day after the city’s generation and transmission infrastructure was hit, and by evening, the lights were on all across the city — yet further testament to Ukrainian resilience, improvisation and refusal to be cowed.
And elsewhere, too, electrical engineers — the new heroes of Ukrainian resistance — managed to patch up the damage to get trains running and homes lit. “We had a blackout yesterday [Tuesday],” friends in Ternopil, a two-hour drive east of Lviv, told me by text. “The whole city was without electricity and water for several hours. But eventually everything returned to normal,” they added.
But with winter approaching and Russia planning to seemingly try to wear down Ukrainian resistance not so much on the battlefield but by targeting its civilian energy and water infrastructure, there are questions about how the country can ride out the pummeling.
In July and August, tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled overseas started returning home. Manned by a colorful variety of NGOs and charities at the border crossings into Poland, the tent camps thus became largely redundant as the refugee flood leaving Ukraine turned to a trickle, and the tents eventually came down. But now they may well be needed again.
“A lot of Ukrainians will leave if there’s no heat and no electricity,” predicted Inna. She’s now in a quandary, torn between planning for a life in England — if she can get her mother a visa — or seeing her future in Ukraine.
“I was a property lawyer in Odesa, I had a good life, and things were going well. But that’s all lost,” she said, trailing off, lost in her thoughts.
LVIV, Ukraine — Russia’s missile barrages on Ukraine are having much less impact than Vladimir Putin might have wanted, thanks to Ukrainian improvisation and ingenuity.
The Russian military targeted Ukraine’s power grid last week, firing an estimated billion-euros worth of missiles at the country’s energy infrastructure — but for all that money the net result was to cause blackouts only for a day.
“We are very well prepared, and we think out of the box to coordinate after missile attacks,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, chairman of Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s state-owned electricity company, told POLITICO in an exclusive interview.
Engineers game-plan possible scenarios to be ready with “re-routing schemes” to compensate for the loss of a transmission station or — even worse — damage to a generating station. “So even with catastrophic damage, even during these hard times, we are still able to reconnect and deliver energy. Of course, we must curtail consumption to maintain the system’s stability,” he added.
Kudrytskyi says: “We can switch on the lights for 80 to 90 percent of Ukrainians within a day of an attack — although you must understand that’s not precise because it largely depends on the nature of the damage. It takes a few more days after restoring basic delivery to fully stabilize the system.”
That’s remarkable considering Ukraine has lost around 50 percent of its electricity capacity, he said, because of the damage caused by the Russian attacks — part of the Kremlin’s strategy to enlist “General Winter” to wear down Ukrainians and break their spirit. “In my humble opinion, we are doing quite well. This kind of assault, the scale of it, on a power grid has never been seen before in the modern world and therefore we must invent solutions. We don’t have anyone else to consult because simply nobody has ever experienced anything even close to this before,” Kudrytskyi said.
Ukrainians now joke that the country’s notoriously poor public services have improved since Russia’s invasion — instead of waiting weeks for electrical or water repairs, things get fixed in a matter of hours, they quip. And while the missile attack is deepening their anger toward Russia, they are also taking some solace and pride in the ingenuity behind the restoration of power and resumption of the water supply, which relies on Ukrenergo energy for pumping purposes, after missile and drone strikes.
The joke is not lost on Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who told POLITICO that improvisation is part of the secret behind switching the lights back on.
“The power system wasn’t built with the idea that it would have to withstand attack,” Sadovyi said with a chuckle.
‘Coded to be ingenious’
He said Ukrainians have shaken off a debilitating Soviet mentality, one that says nothing is possible when a problem emerges. “We have discovered we’re coded to be ingenious, to improvise, to come up with solutions, to use what’s available and what’s at hand,” he said.
Last week, as with previous Russian assaults on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure — notably on October 10 — the country’s electrical engineers swung quickly into action to re-program computer systems to re-route power from undamaged transmission stations. The improvised patch-ups take time; and repairing physical damage — when possible — takes even longer.
Foreign experts working in the country also highlight Ukrainian improvisation — and not just in the energy sector.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. They are doing some amazing things,” says Terry Taylor, a 75-year-old British water engineer who left a comfortable retirement in Oxford to bring his decades of experience working in Asia and Africa to Ukraine.
Taylor’s been overseeing a project for a Danish charity in Mykolaiv, the southern coastal city which has withstood a months-long Russian siege. Thanks to Russia’s sabotaging a pipeline in April, Mykolaiv has been without potable water for half-a-year. “There’s a stunning unity of purpose and passion here; it really is remarkable,” Taylor said. “People just get on with it; clean away debris and repair as best they can,” he told POLITICO.
When it comes to the power grid, the Ukrainians were also prepared — even before Russia’s invasion in February. They had been storing up stocks of spare parts, switches and cabling. “We accumulated significant stock of materials and equipment, probably one of the largest in the world,” Ukrenergo’s Kudrytskyi said.
Until October, when Russian targeting of energy infrastructure started in earnest, Ukraine had even been able to export electricity to the EU, but it is now in need of imports. Kadri Simson, the EU energy commissioner, visited Kyiv on November 1 and expressed the bloc’s readiness to help replenish stocks amid the latest waves of Russian attacks. And it’s a big job.
Strong message
The huge stocks of equipment and material that Ukraine has laid by are running out fast, Kudrytskyi said.
Mayor Sadovyi in Lviv admits that if the attacks continue and the winter is a harsh one, improvisation will have its limits. Sadovyi said that in last week’s attack the Russians managed to cause some damage to the interconnection with neighboring Poland.
“Today my message must be strong. We must be ready to survive without electricity and heating for one, two, maybe three weeks,” he said.
He said Lviv and Ukraine are going to need tens of thousands of diesel- and thermal-power generators.
How many exactly? He pulls a face when asked indicating that it is almost incalculable. Lviv bought three huge diesel generators six months before the war, and they have been used three times to maintain the hot water system for 50 percent of the city’s population, he said.
One of his biggest worries is how to keep Lviv’s main hospital going, which has been expanded enormously to rehabilitate both military and civilian war wounded and to manufacture and fit prosthetics. Sadovyi and other city mayors in Ukraine are in frequent contact to compare notes and to offer each other advice and assistance when they can.
But as the first snows of the season fall and with temperatures already dropping below zero Celsius, he’s in no doubt his city, where he has been mayor for 16 years, could soon be in a perilous position — a sentiment echoed by Kudrytskyi for the whole of Ukraine.
“We are preparing as best we can to build up resilience and we have to be ready for worst-case scenarios,” Kurdrytskyi said. “So, outages may be longer than the standard current five hours, but we are doing everything we can to try to prevent that happening.”
“But our stock is being exhausted,” he said. “We need spare parts, cabling relays for sure, but also some quite large items,” such as transformers and switching equipment. “We need them quickly and we can’t wait for them to be manufactured — we must find them somewhere soon,” Kudrytskyi said.
Aside from that, the energy boss makes a plea — echoed by city mayors like Sadovyi and national Ukrainian political leaders — for the West to supply more air-defense systems to shield the power grid from Russian missiles and air strikes.
“We are fighting on an energy front. More air-defense systems would increase our chances to avoid massive damage to our grid. So the more air-defense systems, the less damage,” he said.
“Because even if you look at the last big onslaught last Tuesday, we managed to knock out 70 or so of the 100 missiles launched at us, giving us a better bet to keep the system integrated, keep it running and to repair [it] than might otherwise have been the case,” Kudrytskyi said.
A medic holds a newborn baby in a city hospital in Mykolaiv, the site of heavy battles with Russian … [+] forces, Ukraine, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/LIBKOS)
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Dispatches from Ukraine. Day 255.
As Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues and the war rages on, reliable sources of information are critical. Forbes gathers information and provides updates on the situation.
By Polina Rasskazova
Recently, American businessman Howard Buffett— son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett— met with the head ofthe Kharkiv Regional State Administration, Oleh Synyehubov. Howard Buffett discussed the financing of funds participating in the de-mining of the region, the restoration of critical infrastructure, and crisis assistance in case of emergency situations during the winter period.
Synyehubov noted that the main task is to speed up the de-mining process, because the Kharkiv region was heavily mined by Russian troops, and local residents of the de-occupied territories suffer from detonations almost every day. “The United States of America and the Buffett Foundation are reliable partners of Ukraine and the Kharkiv region in particular. Howard believes in our victory and constantly supports projects to restore our country. Appreciate this help,” said Synyehubov.
Iran’s foreign minister acknowledged that his country has supplied Russia with drones before Moscow’s war on Ukraine, the Associated Press reports. “We gave a limited number of drones to Russia months before the Ukraine war,” Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, told reporters after a meeting in Tehran on Saturday. As he acknowledged the shipment, Amirabdollahian claimed that Iran was oblivious to the use of its drones in Ukraine. He added that the Iranian side agreed with the Ukrainian foreign minister that Ukraine would provide any evidence about Russia’s use of Iranian drones in Ukraine. There has been direct evidence in recent weeks of Iranian drone technology being used by Russian forces against Ukrainian military and civilian targets.
Russia has already lost twice as many planes in Ukraine than in it did during its 10-year war in Afghanistan. “During the full-scale aggression, defenders of Ukraine destroyed twice as many Russian aircraft as the Soviet Union lost during the 10-year war in Afghanistan — 278 russian aircraft in Ukraine against 118 Soviet aircraft in Afghanistan,” reported the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. “This war is the same shame for the Russian Federation and will cause its destruction!” he added.
Residents of the temporarily occupied city of Mariupol, in eastern Ukraine, put up posters to draw attention to the fact that they are freezing in their homes. “The children are frozen! Where are the windows?” “We are frozen. Help!”
Such banners and signs appear in occupied Mariupol. Mariupol City Council reports that people are driven to despair and forced to cry for help. Mariupol’s occupied authorities have not started the heating season despite the fact that at night the temperature outside is below freezing. People are waiting for action from the authorities with dying batteries and broken windows, although the Russian media talk about the distribution of new apartments and the beginning of the heating season in Mariupol.
Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, Andriy Yermak, held a briefing with the US President’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan. At the briefing, they discussed the issue of providing Ukraine with air defense equipment as soon as possible and about the exchange of prisoners and the involvement of international organizations in this process.
Ukraine received confirmation of unwavering support from the United States until it gains victory over the aggressor. “The United States is a very important partner of ours, which provides tremendous support. And today, once again, we received confirmation of unwavering support for Ukraine. Our friends and partners are with us until our victory,” said Yermak.
On The Culture Front.
Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer, and his colleague,Mstyslav Chernov, will show photos and videos from Mariupol, Ukraine—the southern city destroyed by Russian forces, currently occupied by Russia — from November 9th through the 20th, at Howl! Arts!, 250 Bowery Street, New York. Maloletka and Chernov were the two journalists in Mariupol whose photos were on news pages all over the world and they received numerous awards. One of the most noticeable photos is the image of a women in labor during Russian bombing in a maternity ward in March, 2022.
New York’s Ukrainian Institute of America celebrates Solomea Krushelnytska, one of the greatest opera singers from Ukraine, who sang lead roles for early 20th century operas (such as Puccini’s Madame Butterfly) and toured in the most famous venues all over the world. Krushelnytska suffered directly from the Nazi and Soviet regimes which greatly affected her life in Ukraine. A music concert, including songs from Krushelnytska’s repertoire, and an art show will be held on November 18th.
Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, known for his role as Luke Skywalker, sent 500 drones to Ukraine to combat Russian aggression earlier this fall. He serves as an ambassador for Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” project.
The Ukrainian navy for months has been hunting the Russian navy frigate Admiral Makarov. It seems the Ukrainians finally got a shot at the 409-foot, missile-armed vessel in her home port of Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.
The Ukrainian government on Saturday released dramatic videos apparently depicting a successful nighttime strike on Makarov or her sister ship Admiral Essen by at least one unmanned surface vessel.
The speedboat-size USV, possibly packing hundreds of pounds of explosives, dodged Russian helicopters and small boats and drove directly at the frigate, approaching to within a few feet before the video feed went dead.
There aren’t yet any photos or videos circulating online that can confirm whether the frigate suffered any damage. In the best case, her crew blew up the drone boat before the drone boat blew up them. In the worst case, Makarov or Essen suffered the kind of waterline damage that quickly can sink a ship. To say nothing of any fires that might have resulted from the blast.
The daring robotic raid is history repeating itself. Makarov became the flagship of the depleted Russian Black Sea Fleet in April after Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles and shore-based missile crews worked together to sink the previous flagship, the 612-foot cruiser Moskva.
Even if Makarov remains afloat—and that’s a distinct possibility—the Ukrainians still can count the nighttime strike as a win. There are reports of other Black Sea Fleet ships suffering damage in the raid. And to avoid future USV attacks, the Russians either will have to devote significantly more resources to protecting Sevastopol, or pull the Black Sea Fleet’s three dozen or so surviving vessels from Crimea.
The Ukrainian navy has been shockingly successful, considering it no longer has any big ships. In the early hours of the initial Russian bombardment on Feb. 23, the crew of Hetman Sahaidachny, the Ukrainian navy’s flagship and only large surface combatant, scuttled the frigate at its moorings in Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the western Black Sea.
For the first two months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Russians dominated the Black Sea. Sailing and flying with impunity, they captured tiny Snake Island, 80 miles south of Odesa, and—using the island plus some gas platforms they’d captured from Ukraine as bases for air-defenses and surveillance gear—enforced a blockade of Odesa that effectively cut off Ukraine’s vital grain exports.
The Black Sea Fleet was poised to attempt an amphibious landing around Odesa. Capturing the port would complete Russia’s conquest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and cut off the country from the sea, permanently strangling its economy.
Russian forces meanwhile captured or scattered the rest of the Ukrainian navy’s ships, including one landing ship and a clutch of armored patrol boats. When the Ukrainians struck back, they did so with land-based missiles, UAVs and USVs.
The tide began to turn on March 23, when a Ukrainian Tochka ballistic missile hit the Black Sea Fleet landing ship Saratov while she was pierside in the occupied port of Berdyansk. The explosion sank Saratov, damaged at least one other landing ship and underscored the danger Russian ships might face in a direct assault on Odesa.
Then, on April 13, a Ukrainian navy anti-ship battery put two Neptune missiles into the side of the Russian cruiser Moskva, eventually sinking the 612-foot vessel.
In a single strike, the Ukrainians deprived the Black Sea Fleet of its main air-defense ship with her S-300 long-range surface-to-air missiles. Desperate to preserve their surviving large warships—in particular, the two Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates including Makarov—fleet commanders pulled back the bigger ships 80 miles from the Ukrainian coast.
That exposed the rest of the Black Sea Fleet—in particular, support ships that can’t effectively defend themselves—to attack by Ukraine’s missiles and drones. “Russia’s resupply vessels have minimum protection in the western Black Sea,” the U.K. Defense Ministry stated.
Ukraine meanwhile reinforced its Neptune battery with U.S.-made Harpoon missiles, compounding the risk to Russian ships in the western Black Sea. The missileers coordinated with drone operators flying Turkish-made TB-2 drones to hunt down and sink several of the Black Sea Fleet’s Raptor patrol boats and landing craft.
In early May there were rumors a Ukrainian missile had struck Makarov. That turned out to be untrue. But a Harpoon did hit and sink the support ship Vsevolod Bobrov while she made a supply run to Snake Island on May 12.
Ukrainian missiles also struck at least one of the gas platforms the Russians were using for observation. Ukrainian drones, fighters and artillery bombarded Snake Island, rendering the treeless rock uninhabitable.
The Russian garrison fled the island on May 31. A week later, Ukrainian commandos hoisted a Ukrainian flag. Snake Island’s liberation signaled to the Ukrainian merchant marine that the western Black Sea was safe for commerce.
Odesa was still under blockade—and would remain so until Turkey brokered an end to the port blockage in late July—but ships now could get grain out of Ukraine via canals connecting small river ports near the Romanian border to the western Black Sea.
The river route might regain its previous significance in the wake of last night’s Sevastopol raid. The Kremlin announced it was ending its agreement with Kyiv to allow big grain ships to sail from Odesa.
The Russians aren’t acting from a position of strength. Unable to replace the Black Sea Fleet’s losses as long as Turkey controls the Bosphorous Strait joining the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, Russian commanders have focused on protecting what remains of the fleet. Ships hug the Crimean coast, staying inside the range of land-based aircraft and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.
But the Ukrainian drone boats struck the Black Sea Fleet well inside that protective umbrella. Between the ballistic and anti-ship missiles and airborne and seaborne drones, the Ukrainian armed forces have plenty of ways of sinking Russian ships.
The Black Sea Fleet isn’t safe in the western Black Sea. It isn’t safe in Sevastopol. The only place it might be safe is the only place where it’s totally irrelevant to the wider war: in ports in Russia proper, tied up pierside and closely guarded around the clock.
Perspective of USV approaching Russian Navy frigate Admiral Makarov on morning of October 29.
Video capture from Ukrainian military video
On the morning of October 29, warships of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet based at Sevastopol found themselves assailed by sixteen kamikaze robots. By Russia’s own account, extensive cannon and missile air defenses on land and Russian warships shot down nine Ukrainian drones.
Russia initially claimed it had defeated the attack without damage, much as it had denied the successful strike on its flagship missile cruiser Moskva right up until after it sank. Never mind the smoke seen rising from Sevastopol’s harbor.
But Ukrainian sources then released black and white video feed footage recorded by kamikaze boats that clearly managed to smash into Russian ships: the Black Sea’s new flagship, the multi-role frigate Admiral Makarov, and the minesweeper Ivan Golubets.
Indeed, internal Russian reports indicate both were damaged, with the Makarov’s radar knocked out and the Ivan’s hull holed.
The Makarov may have been singled out for launching Kalibr land-attack cruise missiles to bombard Ukrainian cities, though the Black Sea Fleet still has many other ships that can mount Kalibr missiles. You can read more about Admiral Makarov’s history dodging prior Ukrainian attacks, as well as its current condition in a forthcoming Forbes article by my colleague David Axe.
The Ivan Golubets is a Project 266M Aqumarine-type minesweeper displacing 873 tons, with a crew of 68. Equipped with multiple mine-sweeping trawls, it also has defensive armament including anti-submarine rockets, portable Strela anti-air missiles, and two each 30-millimeter gatling cannons, 25-millimeter autocannons, and 12.7-millimeter heavy machine guns.
Between that and its multiple radar and sonar sensors, it theoretically should have had the means to detect and destroy the incoming small USVs. Russia officially admits minor damage to the vessel, while an anonymous Ukrainian official told the New York Times NYT it had sustained severe damage, possibly crippling it.
Ukrainian journalist Andriy Sapliyenko posted another video showing the perspective of additional USVs racing towards Russian warships. This recording uses a color camera, possibly implying Ukraine used more than one type of USV.
Unlike the black-and-white recording, the color-camera USVs have clearly been detected, with helicopters, ships and boats spraying machinegun and cannon fire at them. Given how the video is edited (ie. none are close enough to ram a ship), it seems likely Russian defensive fire managed to destroy these USVs. At one point, the USV either intentionally or inadvertently narrowly avoids colliding with a Russian boat.
Sapliyenko claims at least three Russian warships capable of carrying Kalibr missiles were hit by the attack, adding “There is a good chance that several ships are not just damaged, but sunk.”
The simultaneous air-and-sea attack is clearly a deliberate strategy intended to over-saturate and distract the theoretically extensive multi-layered defenses around these warships. Thus, while the air attack and most of the USVs may have been destroyed before they could hit anything, they almost certainly created the conditions allowing at least two USVs to evade notice and strike Russian ships.
It’s unclear for now how serious the damage from the attack is, and a repeat of the Moskva’s dramatic sinking seems unlikely given the proximity of nearby repair facilities. However, the attack will undoubtedly disrupt Russian surface naval operations, which were already heavily geographically curtailed following the sinking of the Moskva by Ukrainian land-based missiles.
Russia has retaliated by suspending its participation in a Turkey-brokered initiative with Ukraine guaranteeing safe passage through the Black Sea for Ukrainian grain ships, a move again threatening global starvation. This deal would otherwise have expired November 19. Moscow justified its withdrawal by claiming the attack on its warships violated an arrangement for safe passage of civilian grain shipping. The Kremlin was already threatening to withdraw, however, due to complaints over sanctions-related difficulties it had selling grain abroad.
ISTANBUL, TURKEY – OCTOBER 14: Ships, including those carrying grain from Ukraine and awaiting … [+] inspections are seen anchored off the Istanbul coastline on October 14, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey. Under the terms of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which paved the way for Ukraine to safely ship grain from three key ports, vessels must be inspected by a team of officials from Turkey, Ukraine, Russia and the United Nations the lengthy inspection process has caused a shipping traffic jam, with some ships waiting days at anchor off the Istanbul coast for inspection teams. The Joint Coordination Center (JCC) has increased the number of inspection teams to try to speed up the process and clear the backlog. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Re-imposing a Russian blockade on Ukrainian grain shipping could be difficult without deploying ships far beyond Sevastopol and thereby exposing them to attack. However, Russia could turn to submarines, naval attack aircraft, or long-range Bastion-P land-based anti-ship missiles to harry grain shipments departing from Odessa.
Russia has blamed British “specialists” for the attack, as well as for sabotage of the Nordstream I undersea pipeline generally believed to have been perpetrated by Russia itself. The UK is known to have transferred drone submarine minehunters (launched in turn from uncrewed drone boats) for demining activities near the mouth of the Danube, but not offensive kamikazes as far as is known.
In a bid to preserve dignity, Moscow often claims its shocking military setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine are the result of covert NATO forces in Ukraine. However, there’s also no denying that NATO surveillance assets operating outside of Ukraine have provided intelligence which has been hugely beneficial for planning Ukrainian strikes.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s government hasn’t claimed responsibility for the attack, though Ukrainian journalist Yuri Butusov reports the attack was jointly executed by Ukraine’s military and the SBU intelligence agency. Ukrainian hackers also posted a taunting message on Russian military websites this morning implying an attack would take place.
Ukraine’s Mysterious Maritime Robots
Back in September a curious robotic boat was found run aground near to the shoreline of Sevastopol, the main base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. After photographing the mysterious boat, the Russian Navy towed it back into the water and blew it up—a disposal method certainly reinforcing theories that this USV had been built in Ukraine to mount kamikaze attacks on Russia’s Navy.
One analysis calculated the boat may have had a radar cross section of just .6 square meters—smaller than that of a submarine periscope, though still detectable from miles away if actively searching.
Theoretically, the crashed USV should have warned Russia’s Navy of the possible threat of kamikaze attacks from Ukraine’s purely coastal Navy. After all, the Black Sea Fleet has numerous small boats, and even a unit of trained killer dolphins, specifically designed to guard against sabotage attacks from NATO naval special operations forces, including frogmen and small watercraft. Clearly that foreknowledge did not result in sufficient countermeasures.
It was also then unclear whether Ukraine had many more of the heretofore unknown robot USVs beyond the one lost in September, or whether that represented an unsuccessful, one-off ploy. Maintaining long-distance radio control links with drone surface vehicles is much more difficult than with aerial drones, and the crash of the USV in Sevastopol might suggest the Ukrainian design was technically immature.
However, the coordinated attack on October 29 implies Ukraine produced at a minimum eight of the USVs—and leaves a question mark on how many more it may have in reserve, or can quickly produce.
Uncertainty as to whether Ukraine can repeat such a strike will complicate Russian naval planning going forward, even as maintaining maritime supply lines to Crimea rises in importance due to the crippling of the railroad bridge connecting mainland Russia to Crimea over the Kerch Strait earlier in October.
Ukraine’s at least partially successful USV assault also marks an unprecedented breakthrough for uncrewed surface vessels. During World War II, harbor attacks were undertaken by frogmen, commandos in launches and mini-submarines. These high-risk/high-reward ops sometimes resulted in massive damage to target ships, but also often ended with the capture or death of the commandoes—even when successful! Japan furthermore employed kamikaze torpedoes and motor boats at the end of World War II.
Uncrewed USVs now emerge as a viable method to launch such attacks without exposing human crew to likely death or capture. Admittedly, Ukraine’s kamikaze USVs in some ways seem comparable to a torpedo—but they likely traversed much greater distances from their launch point to target and can be employed more flexibly.
Once again, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the innovation and combat-testing of a robotic weapons formerly confined to theoretical wargames and exercises.
The Russian government said it suspended indefinitely a months-old deal allowing grain shipments to leave Ukraine’s ports, citing an attack on a base in occupied Crimea as the reason.
According to a statement issued Saturday by Russia’s foreign ministry, Moscow “suspends participation” for an “indefinite period” in a deal brokered by the U.N. to make sure agricultural products made in Ukraine can reach global markets.
The deal is considered critical to global food security given Ukraine’s role as a major producer of grain, which is then normally shipped via the Black Sea to markets worldwide, especially in Africa and the Middle East.
“The Russian side cannot guarantee the safety of civilian dry cargo ships,” the foreign ministry said, citing an alleged drone attack by Ukraine on the port at Sevastopol in Crimea in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a tweet that Moscow was using a “false pretext to block the grain corridor.”
The Russian ministry statement repeated claims made earlier in the day that British experts had supported Ukraine in the attack on Crimea, with Moscow also accusing U.K. forces of being behind explosions that critically damaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline without providing supporting evidence. London denied the claims.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, accused Russia of “blackmail” and “fictitious terror attacks.”
The export deal, dubbed the Black Sea Grain Initiative, was supposed to run until November 19 when all sides would have needed to agree to extend it. The agreement enabled Ukraine to restart exports of grain and fertilizer via the Black Sea, which had been stalled when Russia invaded the country in late February.
Since the U.N.-backed grain deal was signed in Turkey on July 22, several million tons of wheat, corn, sunflower products and other grains have been shipped out of Ukraine.
The U.N. said it was “in touch with the Russian authorities” regarding the suspension of the agreement.
“It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said in a statement.
Nahal Toosi contributed reporting from Washington.
The British Navy stands accused by the Russian government, without evidence, of blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, a claim the U.K. rejected as “false.”
“According to available information, representatives … of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year — blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday, according to media reports.
The accusation did not include any further information or evidence to support claims of state sabotage. The Russian government also said that U.K. operatives helped plan a drone attack on its fleet at the Black Sea port of Sevastopol in Crimea on Saturday.
The U.K. Defense Ministry quickly denied Moscow’s claim.
“To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale,” the British ministry said in a tweet. “This invented story says more about arguments going on inside the Russian government than it does about the West.”
Russia had already blamed the West in general terms for undersea explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipes last month. Those blasts have likely rendered the energy infrastructure unusable, according to the German government.
An investigation by Danish and Swedish authorities is ongoing into the explosions, which took place inside the two countries’ exclusive economic zones close to the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm.
Russia had already stopped gas transit through the pipeline sparking concerns earlier this year that it would use gas supply to blackmail Europe as its brutal war on Ukraine continues.
While the first phase of Nord Stream had been operating for nearly 11 years, the second phase of the project — dubbed Nord Stream 2 — had not yet been brought into commercial operation.
