A Ukrainian air force Lockheed Martin F-16 crashed while on a combat air patrol on July 29. “According to preliminary data, an emergency situation occurred on board the aircraft,” the air force stated. “The pilot was forced to eject.”

It was Ukraine’s fifth F-16 loss since the type began flying combat sorties over Ukraine in August 2024. Three pilots have died.

In Ukrainian service, the supersonic F-16s fly defensive and offensive air patrols, jam Russian radars and drop precision glide bombs. Ukrainian F-16s recently scored their first confirmed air-to-air kill against a Russian fighter.

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On Feb. 1, 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted naval warfare against all shipping supplying it enemies, whether shipping flew under an enemy’s flag or the flag of some other country. All ships were targets.

“This new unrestricted submarine warfare campaign was partially responsible for bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side in April 1917,” the Canadian War Museum noted.

“The Germans had gambled that unrestricted submarine warfare would win the war by strangling Britain before the full might of the United States would turn the tide,” the museum added. “It almost succeeded.”

But it didn’t succeed. Instead, it only escalated World War I in a way that led to Germany’s defeat.

This history looms over the decision by Ukrainian leaders to conduct unrestricted naval warfare in the Black Sea starting on July 6. In a heady four weeks, Ukrainian drones struck around 200 tankers, cargo ships and supporting auxiliaries mostly belonging to Russia’s unregistered “shadow fleet.”

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The Russian army’s 90th Tank Division and a pair of supporting combined arms armies spent months planning a powerful mechanized assault toward Kramatorsk, one of just two big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

It’s not for no reason that the attack apparently failed on July 22. A clutch of Ukrainian air assault brigades meticulously spoiled the attack in a complex operation beginning in April. Counterattacking through gaps in Russian defenses around the village of Komar, 60 miles southwest of Kramatorsk, the paratroopers pinned down half of the 90th Tank Division’s forces.

So when the division attack in July, it attacked weakly. Ukrainian drones made quick work of the advancing T-72B3A tanks and other vehicles.

Mapper and analyst Clément Molin reverse-engineered the Ukrainian operation from the scant evidence that appeared online through a surprisingly thick veil of information security. Molin’s post is worth a close read.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Sometime late last year, some enterprising Ukrainian volunteers mounted a 7.62-millimeter minigun to the port fuselage hatch of an Antonov An-28 turboprop transport—and went hunting for Russian Shahed attack drones.

Months later, in April, the same crew added much heavier armament to their Shahed-killing gunship—in the form of inexpensive interceptor drones hanging from the old transport’s wings. Interceptor drones normally launch from the ground before slamming into their Russian targets. But low clouds can blind them. Launching from an airborne An-28 means the interceptors can get above the clouds—and continue their hunt in all but the worst weather.

It’s such a good idea that Russian forces have copied it. A new video that circulated online depicts Russian aircrew arming an Antonov An-2 biplane and a Yakovlev Yak-52 turboprop training plane with underwing interceptor drones. The Ukrainians also use Yak-52s for air defense against drones, albeit with a gun-armed shooter in the back seat.

The An-2 was designed in the 1940s. It cruises at barely 250 km/hr. The 1970s-vintage Yak-52 is slightly faster at 285 km/hr. But both types are stable and maneuverable and cheap to operate. They may not be able to take down the highest and fastest aerial targets, but they don’t have to. They’re for the lower, slower targets.

In other words, the An-2s and Yak-52s complement surface-to-air missiles and missile-armed fighters. They don’t replace them. “This is the low-cost way if providing area air defense,” wrote Michael Bohnert, an analyst with the California think tank RAND.

The interceptor drones hanging under the An-2 and Yak-52’s wings function as inexpensive air-to-air missiles, helping the old planes hit Ukrainian drones from potentially 10 km away or farther. The concept is simple. The biplane or trainer takes off, maneuvers between incoming Ukrainian drones and their target and launches its underwing interceptors, most likely one at a time.

A crew member in the cabin of the An-2 or the back seat of the Yak-52 sees what the interceptor sees on a handheld console, and steers the interceptor to a collision with a Ukrainian drone. Some interceptors drones have a small explosive payload, but they don’t normally need it: the impact alone should take down a drone.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

For months, the Russian 8th and 41st Combined Arms Armies and 90th Tank Division meticulously planned a bold but risky operation. At a time when most Russian attacks are led by small teams of infantry infiltrators moving out on foot to avoid Ukraine’s drones, the 8th and 41st CAAs and 90th Tank Division planned to attack with tanks and other armored vehicles.

And they even introduced a new tank type: the 47-ton, three-person T-72B3A, which boasts the Arena-M radar-cued active protection system that fires tiny projectiles to intercept incoming enemy rockets, missiles and drones.

“This was an interesting and well-planned operation,” observed Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Russian drones and glide bombs rained down. And then, on July 22, the tanks and other vehicles rolled out. Dozens of them. Traveling along the road between occupied Shakove and free Drujkivka, just west of the ruins of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

The ultimate aim: to force the road to Drujkivka, 13 miles from Shakove, in order to set conditions for the capture of that town. Once in control of Drujkivka, the Russians would have a straight shot at the free city of Kramatorsk, just five miles away.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

The Ukrainian navy’s tiny fleet of donated Westland Sea King helicopters appears to have a new mission: hunting Russian Geran drones.

Aviation reporter H.I. Sutton was the first to note the new mission, when he spotted a specially equipped Sea King on the ground at the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom this week.

The 1970s-vintage Sea King had new equipment: an under-fuselage railing for small interceptor drones. Ukrainian forces use the inexpensive interceptors to chase down and take down Russia’s Geran one-way attack drones. Some of the remote-controlled interceptors feature A.I.-assisted targeting and pack tiny explosive charges. Others are strictly manually controlled and knock down their targets through the sheer force of impact.

Regardless of the details of their designs, interceptors costing just a few thousand dollars apiece have helped Ukrainian air defenders blunt the impact of the thousands of Gerans, drones modeled after Iranian-made Shaheds, that Russia launches at Ukrainian cities every month. Air defenders typically take out around 90% of incoming Gerans.

But interceptor drones come with limitations. They’re powered by batteries that exhaust themselves after just a few minutes of flight. And they are prone to being blinded by bad weather and low clouds. To prolong the interceptors’ flights and get them above the rain and clouds, Ukrainian forces have begun using manned aircraft to loft the interceptors into the air before launching them.

The Sea King, it seems, is Ukraine’s latest interceptor drone carrier. While the helicopter Sutton spotted at Farnborough was unmarked, it’s likely one of six Sea Kings Germany has donated to the Ukrainian war effort. The United Kingdom previously donated three surplus Sea Kings to Ukraine. The Ukrainian navy’s sole helicopter unit, the 10th Naval Aviation Brigade, reportedly operates the Ukrainian Sea Kings.

Before now, it seems the Ukrainian Sea Kings strictly flew coastal search and rescue flights in support of Ukrainian ground and naval forces. But there’s an obvious need for more air defenses over the Ukrainian coast. Sea Kings hauling interceptor drones under their bellies, and the drones’ operators in their cabins, could be just the thing.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Overeager to break through Ukrainian defenses and march on the city of Kramatorsk from the south, the Russian Center Group of Forces got desperate and sloppy this week. They paid for their desperation and sloppiness in lives and metal. The tanks were carrying a brand-new anti-drone shield, and they had left the welded scrap metal at home.

That combination is the news. For more than a year, Russian commanders have kept their armor off the roads because Ukrainian drones kill tanks faster than factories can rebuild them. The Arena-M active protection system is the fix that was supposed to let the tanks come back—reliable enough, the Kremlin’s own press said 10 days ago, to make the improvised cages unnecessary. This week it went out on a road in Donetsk Oblast without them.

On and around July 23, the Russians rolled tanks along the road through the village of Pankivka, roughly 36 km southwest of Kramatorsk and its twin free city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian drones spotted the tanks coming, and attacked.

When the smoke and dust cleared, the Russians had lost at least 9 tanks. Ukrainian tank kills were already running hot: the general staff in Kyiv claimed Ukrainian forces took out 28 Russian tanks across the 1,200-km gray zone in the two days before, July 21-22. “It was a good day,” wrote Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier with the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ 413th Regiment.

The mechanized assault was unusual for its rarity. For more than a year now, the Russian army of occupation in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles, and instead attacked on foot or on motorcycles or other light vehicles. The pause in mechanized assaults has bought time for the Kremlin to ramp up vehicle production and bring battered regiments and brigades back to up to their full allotment of tanks and other armored vehicles.

But those vehicles aren’t necessarily being used in Ukraine. Ukrainian drones are everywhere all the time, and Russian forces have few ways of reliably defeating them. Russian commanders correctly concluded that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of slipping past Ukraine’s undermanned defenses than big, easy-to-detect tanks do.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by Europe’s Edge. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

On July 12, three explosives-laden Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) motored into an enemy port, maneuvered past whatever defenses may have been in place, and blew up a drydock cradling a submarine undergoing maintenance.

If the USVs had been Ukrainian and the target had been Russian, the robot raid would have been old news.

But the 8-meter (26 ft) Saronic Technologies Corsair USVs belonged to U.S. Central Command. And the target was a naval base in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. It was “the first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations,” CENTCOM stated.

In the same way, more countries, including the United States, are adopting the Shahed-style one-way aerial attack drones that both Russia and Ukraine fling at each other by the hundreds; more countries are also adopting the kinds of one-way USVs that Ukrainian forces have built their sea denial strategy around.

USVs are cheap and hard-hitting. But they’re no naval panacea. In rushing explosive robot boats into service, countries risk using them the wrong way. For all their many benefits, strike USVs aren’t one-for-one replacements for pricier anti-ship munitions. They’re complementary, not supplementary.

Read the rest at Europe’s Edge.

For six months between late 2024 and early 2025, Slovak volunteer Jakub Jajcay served with a Ukrainian first-person-view drone team in eastern Ukraine. “When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool,” Jajcay wrote in an essay published by War On The Rocks. “By the end of my deployment, I was a bit disillusioned,” he added.

Standard FPV drones are “highly susceptible to electronic-warfare jamming,” Jajcay wrote. Electronic warfare, in the form of radio noise that can interfere with a drone’s connection to its operator, throwing it off course.

At the time, Jajcay was right to be disillusioned. But times have changed.

In the months following Jajcay’s tour of duty, a technological paradigm shift largely solved the problem Jacjay considered existential to Ukraine’s drone campaign. The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence for terminal guidance is helping Ukrainian drone units fly and strike even when Russian jamming scrambles vital frequencies.

A.I. can steer an explosive drone to a precision hit even when the human operator loses contact with the drone.

Short-range explosive FPV quadcopters were the first to get A.I. targeting on a large scale, beginning in 2025. Fixed-wing “middle strike” drones were next, in 2026. A.I. FPVs were a helpful development for the Ukrainians. A.I.-assisted middle-strike drones, by contrast, may prove to be a decisive development. Ukrainian industry churns out millions of FPVs and tens of thousands of middle-strike drones every year.

Ranging across the crucial logistical zone stretching around 150 miles from the wide, disputed “gray zone” that threads 700 miles across eastern and southern Ukraine, middle-strike drones with A.I. targeting began relentlessly striking Russian supply convoys starting in the spring of 2026.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Just days after landing robots on an enemy shore in the first all-robot amphibious assault, Ukrainian forces flew one into battle. This week, a Russian video circulated depicting a Ukrainian heavy bomber drone airlifting an explosives-laden unmanned ground vehicle into action.

What happened next is unclear. Did the exploding UGV successfully strike its target?

Regardless of the outcome, however, the unmanned air assault is notable. If Ukrainian forces can use an unmanned aerial vehicle to airlift one unmanned ground vehicle, they can do it a second time. And a third. And fourth. So on until these kinds of all-robot operations become routine.

And that’s indeed the aim in Kyiv. To make robotic combat operations an everyday occurrence in order to help alleviate a deep and persistent manpower shortage. This spring, recently sacked Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov claimed Ukraine would acquire 25,000 UGVs in just the first six months of 2026.

That’s twice as many UGVs as Kyiv bought in all of 2025. The rapid mass acquisition would allow more Ukrainian brigades to shift to robotic resupply missions, removing potentially thousands of precious human logisticians from dangerous roads.

But UGVs perform combat missions, too. Armed with guns, they help counterattack Russian infiltrators and also patrol roads inside the disputed gray zone. In November, one gun-armed UGV belonging to the Ukrainian 5th Assault Brigade, fighting north of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, inadvertently advanced UGV tactics in an accidental encounter with an up-armored Russian MT-LB infantry transport.

The UGV, equipped with thermal night vision and armed with a remotely operated M2 .50-caliber machine gun, was reportedly on a combat trial—crawling around the battlefield at nighttime for testing purposes—when an MT-LB rolled toward it on the same road.

Connected via radio, the UGV operators opened fire, peppering the tracked MT-LB with rounds until the Russian vehicle passed by—and escaped in the opposite direction.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

On July 8, the Ukrainian air force shot down a Russian air force Sukhoi Su-35 fighter over eastern Ukraine. In the heady hours following the shoot-down, Russian channels described an elaborate ambush.

The channels claimed three Ukrainian air force Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters drew the Su-35 into an ambush also involving a Ukrainian air force Patriot surface-to-air missile battery on the ground.

The Ukrainians “actually put up a decent fight today,” Russian channel The Voivode Reports conceded. The Russian pilot reportedly ejected and was rescued.

At the time, it was unclear from the Russian claims whether the F-16s or the Patriot ultimately shot down the Su-35. Now we know: it was an F-16 that delivered the killing blow, apparently by way of a radar-guided AIM-120 missile.

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Unrestricted naval warfare rages across the Black Sea as Russian forces retaliate for Ukrainian forces’ strikes on Russia’s unregistered commercial shadow fleet of tankers, dry cargo ships and auxiliaries.

For more than a week, Russian drones and missiles have been pummeling Ukraine’s Black Sea ports—and also striking grain ships sailing to and from these ports.

On Sunday, three Russian Kh-59/69 cruise missiles struck the dry cargo ship Golden Leo near Snake Island in the western Black Sea, killing at least five crew.

The following day, Monday, the Russians took aim at Odesa and nearby Ukrainian ports. AMK Mapping tallied the following strikes:

• Four Tupolev Tu-22M bombers launched four Kh-22/32 cruise missiles

• Four Sukhoi Su-34s and a Sukhoi Su-57 launched eight Kh-59/69

• A Sukhoi Su-34 fired two Kh-31 anti-radar missiles

• Nine Orion drones fired nine Banderol cruise missiles

• Several Geran one-way attack drones also struck

Since launching the first drone strikes against the Russian shadow fleet on July 6, the Ukrainians have struck nearly 160 ships: potentially a third of all Russian shipping in the Black Sea and adjacent Sea of Azov. Daily strikes have decreased in recent days as the surviving vessels retreat to protected ports.

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Seven months after capturing the city of Siversk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces are inching toward their next objective on the hard road to the ultimate prize: Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk.

The Russians’ advance around the city of Lyman, 20 km northeast of Siversk, is both bad news and good news for Ukraine. Yes, the Russians are closer to Lyman and thus closer to Sloviansk. But it’s taken them far longer than anyone anticipated to close that gap. And time isn’t necessarily on the Russians’ side as Ukrainian drones strike deeper and harder.

Since marching through the ruins of Siversk in mid-December, Russian attacks have nudged the disputed gray zone halfway toward Lyman, 20 km to the west. “The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction,” mapper Clément Molin noted. Having captured Siversk and, earlier, Soledar and Bakhmut, Russian commanders “have a very good accumulation possibility,” Molin pointed out.

That is, they have plenty of urban bases where they can hide troops and equipment. It helps that the Russians have also captured disused mine complexes that can function as secure, largely drone-proof bases. “It is therefore easier to have troops ready for assault at any moment,” Molin explained.

The Russians’ goal, Molin concluded, is to march through or around Lyman, consolidate control over the town of Mykolaivka and nearby Rai Oleksandrivka, and begin heavily bombarding Ukrainian supply lines no later than the end of the year. That could position the Russians to assault Sloviansk in 2027.

The attacks on Ukrainian supply lines around Lyman are already intensifying, forcing the Ukrainian garrison to rely on unmanned ground vehicles for much of its resupply. Recall that the Russian bombardment of supply lines into Kostiantynivka forced that city’s garrison to switch to robotic resupply, too. The switch was a harbinger of the eventual Ukrainian retreat from Kostiantynivka in recent weeks.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Ukraine’s drone force is walking a fine line as it escalates its attacks on Russia’s unregistered commercial “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and eastern Black Sea. The drone operators are trying to immobilize the ships without breaching their hulls and spilling fuel or crude oil into the water.

That fleet is a big piece of how Moscow keeps its war funded—the aging tankers move Russian oil around Western sanctions—which is why Ukraine’s drones have spent the past two weeks hunting it across the Azov and Black seas at better than a dozen ships a day.

“The goal is not to pollute the sea with oil spills; therefore, there must be no hull breaches,” wrote Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s independent Unmanned Systems Forces.

Instead, Brovdi stressed, the objective is “irreversible paralysis of oil, fuel and cargo logistics operating around sanctions. Turn every self-propelled vessel into a drifting barge, blind and deaf.”

To immobilize a ship without breaching its hull requires accuracy: the drone must strike the ship’s superstructure or screws, and only its superstructure or screws. Hitting a ship, but hitting it along its biggest part—its hull—risks polluting the already fragile Black Sea ecosystem.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

The Russian force in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles and shifted to infantry-led assaults across the drone-patrolled gray zone.

Which is why what happened on or just before July 8 is so bewildering. Despite Russian commanders concluding that vehicles are too easy for Ukraine’s tiny first-person-view drones to find and strike, and despite a reported ban on Russian vehicular traffic on eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Ring Road, the Russian Center Group of Forces massed no fewer than 50 vehicles 12 km south of the gray zone stretching between Kostiantynivka and Toretske in Donetsk Oblast.

The outcome was predictable. Drones from the Ukrainian State Security Service’s Ivan Franko Group detected and attacked the column of trucks, vans, cars, all-terrain vehicles, and motorcycles just south of the ring road near the village of Malynivka, an important base for Russian forces fighting in Donetsk Oblast. When the smoke and dust cleared, more than 50 vehicles had been hit and immobilized if not destroyed.

“Despite the ban on movement of cargo and military transport on the Donetsk Ring Road, IFG with a firm hand and drones that you donated ‘detained’ several violators,” the Ivan Franko Group quipped.

It’s unclear how many Russians were killed or wounded. But the Center Group of Forces clearly failed at whatever it was trying to achieve—and the assembly of the column, in daylight, within drone reach, is the puzzle. Russian commanders knew what the sky over the gray zone does to vehicles. They sent the column anyway.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

On July 15, Ukrainian drones motored 500 miles to strike Engels-2 air base in western Russia. (See video below.) At the time, there were reportedly five bombers on the ground at the base: four Tupolev Tu-22Ms and a single Tupolev Tu-95.

The drones reportedly struck the four-engine, propeller-driven Tu-95. “According to preliminary data, the plane suffered critical damage,” the Ukrainian state security service—the vaunted SBU—claimed. “It completely torn off the tail part.”

A 2022 drone raid badly damaged a Tu-95 at Engels-2 back in 2022, potentially leaving no more than 51 intact Tu-95s in the Russian air force inventory. Smuggling tiny drones across Russia in trucks on June 1, 2025, the SBU hit at least seven more Tu-95s as well as four Tu-22Ms, among other aircraft.

After the July 15 raid, the Russians may be down to 43 Tu-95s, only a dozen of which are usually active at any given time.

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On Jan. 14, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky tapped Mykhailo Fedorov, then 34 and the country’s minister of digital transformation, to head the ministry of defense.

Six months later on July 15, Zelensky fired Fedorov and appointed Yevhenii Khmara, the head of the state security agency, to replace Federov in an acting capacity.

The move dismayed many Ukrainians and allies. Thousands gathered in Kyiv to protest the decision. In six short months, Federov had reshaped Ukraine’s war effort, primarily by cracking down on corruption inside the defense ministry and expanding the Ukrainian drone force.

At the same time, Federov had correctly identified one of the main sources of dysfunction inside the armed forces: commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi.

The CIC has been rightly accused of cronyism. Syrskyi has funneled weapons and scarce manpower into the assault forces, a branch of the ground forces that he personally controls, and which is notorious for brutality and blunt tactics that tend to waste precious manpower.

Syrskyi has also encouraged the formation of “empty” new brigades that lack manpower or equipment but create new command billets that senior officers can dole out to loyal subordinates as a kind of reward for complicity.

At some point in the last few months, Federov pushed for Zelensky to fire Syrskyi. But Zelensky, apparently fearful of replacing a fiercely loyal CIC with a fiercely independent one, refused. “President Zelensky chose the comfort of the old, incompetent guard over change and a new vision,” wrote Tatarigami, the founder of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group. “Meanwhile, General Syrskyi remains untouchable.”

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This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Ukrainian drones are wreaking havoc on Russian ships sailing the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But the Russians are waging their own war on shipping, sortieing the latest Geran drones to strike grain ships in Ukrainian ports.

The Geran-4 Seeker drones pummeling Ukrainian ports combine jet propulsion, mesh radio control and machine-vision targeting run off a Raspberry Pi—the same $50-class hobbyist computer that schoolchildren use to build robots. They’re the best one-way attack drones in the Russian inventory, and cause for concern in Kyiv as the dueling Ukrainian and Russian countershipping campaigns escalate.

On or just before July 12, Geran-4s penetrated Ukrainian air defenses and targeted ships in the port of Chornomorsk, 20 km south of the larger port in Odesa in southern Ukraine.

Chornomorsk is one of three ports carrying the bulk of Ukraine’s grain to market. This grain is vital to the Ukrainian economy and to the populations of food-poor countries. It’s also a top target in Russia’s ongoing terror campaign. The Geran-4s that reached Chornomorsk in recent days struck at least two grain ships with warheads weighing as much as 90 kg.

It’s unclear how much damage the Geran-4s inflicted. What is clear is the difference in scale between the two campaigns. Since July 6, Ukrainian one-way attack drones have struck 105 vessels belonging to Russia’s unregistered “shadow fleet” on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

The Ukrainian armed forces are in the throes of a desperate manpower crisis. They recruit far too few new troops every month to make good losses and allow for a healthy pace of rotations off the front line while also staffing the new brigades that the corrupt ground forces insist on standing up in order to create new command billets.

On the defense, the Ukrainians compensate for troops shortages by digging extensive earthworks, laying a lot of razor wire and deploying mines and drones. Lots of mines and drones.

But for the offense, there are few good replacements for old-fashioned human infantry. And while Russian forces in Ukraine are reeling amid intensifying drone strikes on their supply line, Ukrainian forces can’t always exploit every gap in the Russian line. Ukrainian commanders must pick and choose where they counterattack.

And that’s why it’s wise to be skeptical of reports of a Ukrainian counteroffensive near Pokrovs’ke in southeastern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

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The first-ever all-robot D-Day was probably more an experiment than a serious military operation. And it played out on advantageous terrain for the forces behind the robots.

But that doesn’t make it any less impressive.

On June 25, the Ukrainian 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade sailed several unmanned surface vessels across the western Black Sea and landed gun-armed unmanned ground vehicles on the Kinburn Spit, at the westernmost edge of the Russian occupation zone in southern Ukraine.

The 123rd Territorial Defense Brigade released a video montage—shot by a USV, a UGV and an escorting UAV—depicting the UGV firing on a Russian installation with its suppressed .50-caliber machine gun.

It was an all-robot amphibious assault. “An impressive feat,” RAND analyst Michael Bohnert wrote.

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