A major military festival in Moscow has been canceled four days before it was due to start. The event, which began in 2007 at President Vladimir Putin’s orders, is one of Russia’s most prominent military-themed events, alongside the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow and the Navy Day show in St. Petersburg. The move comes amid an increase in Ukrainian drone attacks on the Russian capital.
Ukraine's bombing of a major Russian space rocket assembly center is the latest in a growing barrage of missile and drone strikes on the Kremlin’s aerospace labs. “While Russia is targeting purely civilian infrastructure and sites” across Ukraine, killing citizens and children in the process, “Ukraine is restricting its strikes to military or dual-purpose targets.” Ukraine’s attack on the Progress Rocket and Space Center, in western Russia, triggered a major setback for the Russian space program. The center produces the Soyuz rockets, for decades the main Russian boosters to launch space capsules destined for the International Space Station and imaging satellites that track U.S. defense worldwide and the movement of Moscow’s own tanks and missile brigades around occupied Ukraine.
The main activity is planning - a new kind of detailed forethought required by drone warfare. A trio of screens dominates a corner -16 flickering feeds from friendly UAVs in the area. This isn’t a drone command center—the feeds have become essential to planning- intel that guides the dangerous slog to and from the trenches, supply runs, and battlefield ops. Robots haven’t replaced soldiers. “Drones or no drones, infantryman is still the hardest job in the army.” Two recent innovations - heavy multicopter bomber drones and those piloted by fiber optic cables - demand the biggest adjustments on the ground. The steepest new challenge is distance - the vast, growing gray zone between the rear and the line of contact. Recruits are guaranteed 14 weeks of training or more. Every significant battlefield operation is followed by an after-action review to identify mistakes and improve planning. “We used to be afraid of Russian artillery. Now we don’t even think about it.”
The real “trap” of Pokrovsk was never a dramatic physical encirclement. It was that Russia would spend an extraordinary amount of combat power taking the city, only to discover that the battlefield beyond it remained just as difficult. Russian forces seized Pokrovsk but failed to turn the capture into operationally significant advances. Despite the capture of the city, Russian troops achieved modest gains around the perimeter. On August 7, there were 192 combats across the front, with the Pokrovsk sector having the most. On 12 August, 237 clashes were reported on the front, many again in Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka. Months after the city fell, Russian troops were still fighting through the surrounding sector. Collapse had not followed. Ukrainian forces continued contesting attacks, disrupting infrastructure, and forcing Moscow to commit substantial combat power. Pokrovsk had fallen. The battle for what came after Pokrovsk had not.
AI models are being trained on videogames and simulations, rather than literature, code and images. They have reached a point where they can navigate in three-dimensional space and even manipulate objects autonomously with just a set of instructions. World-model startups want to create a control system that’s as versatile when piloting robots as today’s LLMs are when crafting text, from sonnets to software. The bet is a model can pilot a robot in the real world as if it were a character in a videogame. One caveat: It has to send a live video feed to a user, and can be controlled with a videogame controller, or mouse and keyboard. This is typical criteria for mainstream robots, but it excludes most two-legged humanoid robots.
On July 16, Ukrainian drones traveled 800 kilometers inside Russia and reached Engels-2 air base, one of the country’s most important strategic bomber facilities. Satellite imagery showed a Tu-95MS strategic bomber with its tail section completely torn away. n the summer of 2023, China tightened its export controls on civilian drones. The Ukrainians accepted an offer for pilot training instead and used their time on the factory floor to quietly document everything they could see. “In parallel with the training, we photographed everything that was there,”. They flew home with eight actual drones and a phone full of pictures of the Chinese production line. China wouldn’t sell them the recipe, so the Ukrainians spent their training time photographing every shelf and cabinet in the kitchen. Once home, Ukraine took the eight aircraft apart and started building its own version. It's now building and firing 6,000 a year
Ukrainian officials want to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital. Ukraine would warn civilian airlines to avoid Russian airports and evacuate their planes before the swarm of Ukrainian drones arrived. “If they say to themselves, You know what, it’s getting too risky. Why even continue flying there?” the source said. “That would already have quite an impact on the Russian elites. Those are their main connections to the outside world." world.” Airports across the country were forced to close 114 times from June 28 to July 28, usually due to the threat of Ukrainian drones. Moscow was affected by the highest number of shutdowns—17 in total at its four main airports. The Russian association of travel agents reported more than 290 of these incidents nationwide in the first quarter of this year.
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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
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