by DAVID AXE

Starting in May, Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps began exploiting gaps in Russian lines just north of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. Five months later, the corps and its supporting drone units had cleared Russian troops from 277 sq km of northern Donetsk, inflicting what the corps says were 8,000 Russian casualties and pushing the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies back across a key terrain feature: the Zherebets River.

On Oct. 14, the 3rd Army Corps declared victory in its Operation Vivaldi. “Four seasons of Vivaldi are over. But the music plays on,” the corps wrote on Telegram.

It was unclear at the time what the corps meant. Its commander, Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi, has since been seconded to lead Ukraine’s new Center Group of Forces. But it’s clearer now. According to at least two observers, Ukrainian troops have continued attacking along the Zherebets River—and have even crossed the river at several points.

If true and confirmed, the crossings could ratchet up the pressure on the battered Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies following their hasty and chaotic retreat from their former salient north of Sloviansk. The Zherebets should have been a natural defensive barrier for the Russians.

Sheltering on the river’s eastern bank, the Russians could have rested, reset, and reinforced in preparation for a renewed offensive next year. But if the Ukrainians keep attacking, rest might be impossible. And that could force the Russians to rethink any plans for a fresh push toward Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk.

But an extension of Operation Vivaldi isn’t without risk for the 3rd Army Corps. If the corps pushes too far, too fast across a difficult obstacle, it could expose itself to counterattack.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

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by ELLIOT CARTER

On Sept. 14, 1954, 45,000 soldiers from the Soviet Army’s 270th Rifle Division and other units took shelter in trenches and bunkers as they waited for the order to advance.

The 270th Rifles had fought at Stalingrad in 1942 and at Kursk in ’43. On this day, just north of the Russian-Kazakhstan border, it was about to become the first Soviet formation to train for nuclear war.

Administrators had selected this hilly, forested region of the Orenberg Steppes for the Totskoye atomic test, owing to the area’s topographic similarity to Western Europe, where Moscow planned to wage atomic combat.

Soldiers had been arriving for three months. There was a lot of work to do. Three miles from the planned nuclear epicenter, they built bunkers and pillboxes. Seven miles out, there were the trenches. Planners scattered old tanks and other vehicles across the landscape so they could judge the effects of the atomic blast.

Planners tethered cows, horses and other animals at various distances from the blast site. Along with the soldiers, they were test subjects in the Soviets’ efforts to understand how flesh and blood might respond to nuclear explosions.

And then there were the civilians. “At the time [of the exercise], about a million people lived within 100 miles of the test site,” The New York Times reported in 1993.

These civilians were going to be in for a shock when the 20-kiloton nuclear warhead went off, as the government had failed to notify many of them that this was anything other than a conventional military training exercise.

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by DAVID AXE

At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had so many hundreds of deadly submarines at sea that Western war planners willing to try almost any possible countermeasure, however goofy sounding.

Some seemingly crazy ideas proved actually worthwhile, such as the underwater Sound Surveillance System—a vast chain of seafloor microphones that patiently listened for Soviet subs … and remains in use today.

Other less elegant anti-submarine tools survive only as anecdotes. In his book Hunter Killers, naval writer Iain Ballantyne recalls one of the zanier ideas—air-dropped “floppy-magnets” meant to foul up Soviet undersea boats, making them noisier and easier to detect.

From the late 1940s on, captured German technology boosted Soviet postwar submarine design. Soviet shipyards delivered subs good enough—and numerous enough—to pose a huge danger to Western shipping.

By the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the USSR controlled the largest submarine force in the world—some 300 diesel-electric submarines and a handful of nuclear-propelled models. NATO navies couldn’t keep up. “We simply do not have enough forces,” Vice Adm. R.M. Smeeton stated.

NATO war planners feared only nuclear escalation could check the Soviet submarine wolf packs—that is, atomic strikes on sub bases along the Russian coast.

But the nuclear solution was worse than the problem. “We can take steps to make sure the enemy is fully aware of where his course of action is leading him without nuclear weapons,” Smeeton said, “but we cannot go to war that way.”

Desperate planners sought ways of making Soviet subs easier to hunt. Any technology that could speed up an undersea search was worth considering. “A submarine’s best defense is of course stealth, remaining quiet and undetected in the ocean deep,” Ballantyne notes. “Something that could rob the Soviets of that cloak of silence must have seemed irresistible and, at least initially, a stroke of genius.”

A Canadian scientist figured some kind of sticky undersea noisemaker would make a Soviet sub more detectable. He designed a simple hinged cluster of magnets that could attach to a submarine’s metal hull.

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by PAUL HUARD

The barrage of artillery fire was supposed to keep the Germans in their trenches while soldiers of the Somerset Light Infantry staged a counter-attack near the French town of Riez du Vinage on April 15, 1918.

It was all part of the Spring Offensive, a massive redeployment of German soldiers to the Western Front after Russia withdrew from the Great War.

Like so many grand plans of the war, the offensive was supposed to break the stalemate on the front and provide some kind of pathway to victory—whatever that would be.

Soon, the German artillery returned fire. Creeping forward with his company was 2nd Lt. Clive Staples Lewis, an Irishman who could have avoided serving in the British Army but who never even considered sitting out the war.

A shell exploded—whether it was German or British is a matter of debate—instantly killing a nearby sergeant and peppering Lewis with shrapnel. He was severely wounded when the metal shards lodged in his left wrist, left leg and upper left ribs, the third piece puncturing his left lung.

“Just after I was hit, I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death,” Lewis later wrote. “I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either.”

The Lewis who crawled away from the carnage was not yet the C.S. Lewis of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. Then, he was like so many others who fought in World War I—just another wounded soldier desperate not to bleed to death.

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by DAVID AXE

On Oct. 23, the Ukrainian air force sortied some of its Sukhoi Su-24 bombers to launch Storm Shadow cruise missiles at the Proton electronics plant in Oryol, 100 miles from Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Several of the two-ton missiles slammed into the factory, which produces components for Russian munitions including the Iskander ballistic missile. Iskanders have been wreaking havoc in Ukrainian cities as Ukraine’s air defenses struggle with a deep shortage of their best surface-to-air missiles. In particular, American-made Patriots.

The damage the Storm Shadows apparently inflicted is a healthy reminder that, despite building its own one-way attack drones and the Flamingo ground-launched cruise missile, the air-launched Storm Shadow is still uniquely useful. It flies low enough to avoid detection and interception, and strikes hard enough with its tandem warhead to inflict lasting damage.

The timing of the strike is no coincidence. Just two weeks ago, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky asked U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham for more Storm Shadows. Burnham agreed.

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by DAVID AXE

When Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy met a Lockheed Martin team led by Orlando Sanchez Jr., head of its aeronautics division, in Kyiv on Oct. 19, the talk was of Patriot interceptors and of repairing the Ukrainian air force’s small but growing fleet of ex-European F-16 fighters inside the country. Lockheed designed the F-16 and still builds it.

But the Lockheed officials may have had other things on their minds. They gave Zelenskyy a scale model of a new and improved F-16 variant in Ukrainian livery, according to a photo posted by the MilitaryNewsUA account.

In late September, Ukraine’s air force commander, Lt. Gen. Anatolii Kryvonozhko, and Lockheed discussed a possible move to newer F-16s. Now we have a clearer idea what those F-16s might look like—and what they might be capable of. The model Lockheed officials gave to Zelenskyy appears to be based on the Block 70/72 version of the classic supersonic fighter that Lockheed manufactures at its factory in Greenville, South Carolina.

It’s a world-class jet. But a pricey batch of factory-fresh Block 70/72s isn’t actually at the top of the Ukrainian air force’s wish list. Not as long as the air force’s existing warplanes lack munitions.

The Block 70/72 boasts a better radar, more fuel capacity and a tougher airframe compared to older F-16 models, which have been flying since the late 1970s. The F-16 is still one of the most numerous fighter types in U.S. Air Force service. Surplus 1980s-vintage F-16s from Denmark and The Netherlands make up the bulk of the Ukrainian air force’s front-line fleet. Norway’s six are still being refurbished, and Belgium’s are coming.

Whether Ukraine ever gets new F-16s is anyone’s guess. Kyiv would need to pay around $100 million per copy, or find an ally to finance the purchase. Either could be a heavy lift. And to be sure, Ukraine has options as it rebuilds its battered air force. Sweden is donating 16 older Saab Gripens, the first due early next year, and Kyiv plans to buy 20 newer ones. Kyiv has negotiated to buy 16 Dassault Rafales from France, which may not arrive until 2028. Belgium has promised as many as 53 older F-16s, the last of them perhaps not until 2029.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by DAVID AXE

As recently as the summer of 2026, hundreds of Russian tankers and dry cargo ships plied the Sea of Azov and the adjacent Black Sea, hauling fuel and bulk supplies between Russian ports and Russian-occupied ports in southern Ukraine and Crimea.

Most of the Russian ships were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.

The Black Sea shadow fleet has, or had, a more limited remit. It helped supply Russian forces in southern Ukraine—in particular, the Crimean Peninsula, which functions as a kind of unsinkable aircraft carrier for Russian air power.

On July 7, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the Russian ships—starting with the tankers that represented the bulk of the shadow fleet. By day five of the counter-shipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit and damaged no fewer than 76 tankers and even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.

“To be clear, 76 tankers comprise a massive fraction of Russia’s shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, RAND analyst Michael Bohnert explained. “At this rate, in two weeks, there will be next to no Russian tankers in the Black Sea,” Bohnert predicted.

In fact, it took a bit longer for Ukrainian drones to effectively erase Russian shipping from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But they did do so—mostly with propeller-driven Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s. After four weeks, the drones had struck more than 200 Russian ships: the majority of the regional shadow fleet.

The basic, $50,000 FP-1 carries a 130-pound warhead 600 miles under satellite, 5G and mesh radio control. Trading range for firepower, the FP-2 carries a 440-pound warhead out to a distance of around 120 miles.

Upgraded versions of both the FP-1 and FP-2 extended the range of each and also added A.I.-assisted targeting that helped the drones strike ships’ bridges and machinery without also penetrating their hulls and risking environmentally damaging oil spills.

Absent a strong Russian response, the Black Sea countershipping campaign could have ended in a decisive victory for Ukraine. The problem for the Ukrainians is that the Russians also have drones—and, equally importantly, a substantial inventory of cruise and ballistic missiles.

Just a few days after Ukraine launched its countershipping campaign, Russia launched a retaliatory campaign targeting Ukraine’s Black Sea grain ports as well as the ships, both Ukrainian- and foreign-flagged, that haul grain through Turkey’s Bosporus Strait out to the Mediterranean Sea and onward to foreign ports.

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by DAVID AXE

Ever since retiring its last Grumman F-14 fighter in 2006, the U.S. Navy has been at a range disadvantage in the air.

Without the F-14’s long legs (a 500-mile unrefueled combat radius) and long reach (AIM-54 air-to-air missile ranging 90 miles) the U.S. fleet’s aircraft carriers could struggle to engage Russian and Chinese bombers and their long range anti-ship cruise missiles at an acceptable distance from the carriers. The fleet’s Boeing F/A-18 Hornets (350-mile combat radius) and their AIM-120 missiles (75-mile range) simply lack the range.

Twenty years later, that’s set to change. In September, the Pentagon belatedly—after a long delay—announced that Boeing will build the U.S. fleet’s new F/A-XX fighter, a manned successor to the company F/A-18 that, armed with a bevy of new long-range air-to-air missiles, promises to restore the air defense reach the fleet lost along with the F-14, the only operational fighter that was ever compatible with the bulky AIM-54.

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by DAVID AXE

The Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps’ Operation Vivaldi—its secretive counteroffensive east of Sloviansk in northern Donetsk Oblast—started earlier than first reported, and by the time it ended on Oct. 14 it had cost the Russians more than 8,000 troops, by the 3rd Army Corps’ count.

It was a major Ukrainian victory in one of the most important sectors of Russia’s 56-month wider war on Ukraine. But it could prove to be a temporary win, one the Russians may be able to partially reverse, if the administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump continues to throttle Starshield, the military version of Starlink that Ukraine’s drones and commanders rely on.

The Ukrainians’ former command and control advantage, largely attributable to once-reliable Starlink and Starshield access, was pivotal as Operation Vivaldi played out in the Donbas region in stages starting in March. That advantage shrank practically overnight on 14 October, when a new speed cap began cutting off Ukraine’s Starshield terminals whenever they moved faster than about 160 km/h (100 mph).

The 3rd Army Corps attacked east of Sloviansk and north of Lyman as early as March, analyst and mapper Clément Molin concluded after scrutinizing official videos and interviews the Ukrainian defense ministry recently released. “The operation began much earlier than initially thought,” Molin wrote.

The timing was probably no accident.

In early February, SpaceX, working from a Ukrainian defense ministry whitelist, switched off the thousands of stolen and smuggled Starlink terminals the Russians had been using.

That had the effect of grounding many Russian drones and blinding many Russian commanders. Taking advantage of the Russians’ confusion, Ukrainian troops attacked in several key sectors: in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts in the southeast, and east of Sloviansk in northern Donetsk.

The Donetsk attack expanded into a full-blown counteroffensive under conditions of strict secrecy as the 3rd Army Corps probed for weaknesses along the flanks of the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies, then overextended along the axis between the Zherebets River in the east and the outskirts of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban conglomeration in the west.

The Russians had been threatening to lay siege to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk Oblast, from two directions: the north and the south. Operation Vivaldi eliminated the northern threat—and at great cost to the Russian 20th and 25th CAAs.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by DAVID AXE

Russia’s latest jet-propelled Geran-4 and Geran-5 one-way attack drones fly at 500 km/h or faster, nearly three times as fast as an older, propeller-driven Geran-2.

That’s too fast for many of Ukraine’s air defenses. In particular, the inexpensive interceptor drones that Ukrainian forces deploy by the thousand.

Russia launched more than 2,700 jet Gerans at Ukraine in September, and Ukraine is shooting down only about 55% of them, according to Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky. The speed disparity is a big part of the problem.

Ukrainian forces are scrambling for new defenses against the speedy Gerans. Among the best is actually a Ukrainian take on the Geran-4 and Geran-5: a fast, jet-propelled one-way attack drone that the Ukrainians have modified for air-to-air use.

Against jet drones, the air-to-air Bars have a hit rate of around 30%, Zelensky said during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Kyiv on Oct. 4. “The Bars have shown positive results,” Zelensky said. “They currently have the highest percentage. Others are also catching up.”

In July, Ukraine and Germany agreed to jointly produce Bars, with Germany financing the first phase. Ukraine has reportedly been launching Bars at targets on the ground since at least the summer of 2025. But it was only recently that clear photos and videos of the drones have circulated.

Over the weekend, Ukraine’s 1021st Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Brigade released footage of one jet drone hunting another. Observers identified the interceptor as a Bars and its target as a Geran-5. After launching from an elevated ramp with help from a rocket booster, the drone’s operator—seeing what the drone saw through a front-facing infrared camera—steered the drone toward the Russian drone, possibly destroying it.

Exactly how the operator controlled the Bars—whether by satellite or mesh radio or some other command and control system—is unclear. Equally unclear: what kind of warhead a Bars would employ in the air-to-air role. Many smaller interceptor drones lack warheads. Instead, they simply slam directly into their targets, wrecking them in the collision.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by STEVE WEINTZ

The Cold War was full of crazy ideas. No nuclear weapon was too big. No munition was too small. They were even used as warheads for anti-aircraft missiles.

Beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force developed nuclear anti-air missiles that would be built by the thousands. The result—the MB-1/AIR-2 Genie—was the most powerful air-to-air missile ever made in America.

Less than 10 feet long, 18 inches in diameter and only 900 pounds in weight, the Genie—also called the “Ding-Dong,” a tag probably derived from its rather phallic appearance—was a stubby, plump rocket. The Genie’s bulging tip held one of the smallest atomic bombs produced at that point: the W-25.

At the time, one of the most serious national security concerns for the United States was the threat of an attack by nuclear-armed Soviet bombers. In 1955, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by MIT president James Killian concluded that only nuclear anti-aircraft weapons could counter the high-flying bombers—and recommended immediate development.

The main reason was that old-school machine guns and cannons were no match for high-flying bombers lumbering over the North Pole at 500 miles per hour. The Air Force wanted the Genie.

In a coincidence, Walt Disney was about to produce the television program Our Friend the Atom, all about the benefits of nuclear technology. In the program, the atom is presented in the form of a mighty djinn.

Since the warheads would explode at high altitudes, it was assumed the blasts would pose no danger to civilians. “[T]he radioactivity which would be added to the atmosphere by the use of the warheads,” stated the panelists, “is of no consequence at all.”

Douglas Aircraft had already begun designing a new air-to-air missile for the Air Force’s Northrop F-89, McDonnell F-101 and Convair F-106 interceptors. To power the missile, contractors Aerojet and Thiokol created short, thick solid-rocket motors packing nearly 18 tons of thrust.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, already shrinking the size and weight of nuclear weapons for the burgeoning ICBM program, came up with a nuclear warhead small enough to fit.

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by JAMES SIMPSON

In the corner of the Enmei Buddhist Temple grounds in the coastal city of Zushi in Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture, stands a stone cenotaph that reads “Monument to the Protection of Animals.”

The inscription dates back to 1958, but before that time there was another memorial here called the Monument to the Loyal Dogs. Although the incense still burns for the ashes of three dogs interred here more than 80 years ago, few of Zushi’s residents could tell you what the stone actually stands in memory of.

Inside the granite memorial lie the remains of three German Shepherds, all of whom were military working dogs who served in Manchuria in 1931 under the loving care of their Zushi-born handler, Maj. Itaru Itakura.

Their story is one of a family tragedy twisted into military propaganda—of truth distorted into drama as Japan marched into the Second Sino-Japanese War.

It all began in Manchuria in September 1931.

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by STEVE WEINTZ

On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a CIA Lockheed U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It was an international crisis for America’s intelligence agencies.

A planned summit between Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was scuttled, much to Eisenhower’s embarrassment and to the fury of the Pakistanis, from whose territory the flight had been launched.

First flown in 1957, the 63-foot-long, jet-powered U-2—capable of flying as high as 70,000 feet—is still used by the U.S. Air Force. But after the Powers incident, basing the plane in foreign countries became problematic. Their mere presence caused heartburn in diplomatic circles. Time-sensitive targets could be lost to prolonged negotiations over basing rights.

One solution was to put the U-2, nicknamed “Dragon Lady,” on aircraft carriers. After all, as the U.S. Navy often puts it, an aircraft carrier is four acres of sovereign American territory anywhere in the world it sails.

In fact, the idea of deploying U-2s from carriers was brought up as early as May 1957, only a year after the aircraft’s secret debut. However, U-2 development and operations were joint efforts by the CIA and the Air Force, and the idea was shot down by the flying branch on grounds that adequate land bases were available.

It’s not clear why three years passed between Powers’ shoot-down and the revival of the U-2 carrier-launch concept. During that time, the U-2s were kept busy spying on the Soviet Union, China and Cuba.

Documents declassified in the last decade allow us some insight into the project. On May 25, 1963, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, the deputy director of the CIA, received a memo he’d requested from James Cunningham, the deputy assistant director for the CIA’s covert Special Activities Division, regarding U-2 carrier operations.

While the advantages of such operations—no foreign entanglements and timely stealthy deployment—were salient, the problems were notable.

First, was it even possible to launch and recover such a broad-winged from a windy, heaving carrier deck? Second, how easily could the big planes be integrated into existing Navy operations? Third, could such secret planes and their missions be kept secure from the carrier’s busy crew?

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by DAVID AXE

Belgium has announced it will accelerate the delivery of surplus Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to Ukraine. Instead of delivering three F-16s before the end of the year, Brussels will ship 10.

It’s unclear how many will be flyable. Previously, Belgian officials explained the first seven secondhand F-16s would include just three airworthy examples. The other four would be broken down for spare parts.

It’s good news for Ukraine, but hardly cause for nationwide celebration. The handful of flyable F-16s that should arrive in the coming two months could make good recent F-16 losses. But those shipping-soon Belgian F-16s won’t actually grow Ukraine’s F-16 fleet by much, if at all.

The dozens of supersonic F-16s in action in Ukraine fly often and fight hard. They shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles, tangle with Russian warplanes, and lob precision glide bombs at Russian forces on the ground.

Russia launched about 2,000 jet-powered drones at Ukraine in September, up from some 350 in June, and F-16s are among the few systems fast enough to catch them. Every 300 flying hours, each jet must go abroad for a lengthy inspection.

The main constraint on the pace of F-16 sorties, besides maintenance demands and the availability of trained pilots, is munitions: running low or out of air-to-air missiles and glide bombs, the F-16s routinely aim their 20-mm guns at Russian targets. But even 20-mm ammunition sometimes runs low.

The busy F-16s and their equally busy pilots need reinforcement. But reinforcements are slow coming. Belgium is only slightly accelerating its F-16 shipments amid reports it will eventually give Ukraine all 53 F-16s it’s gradually retiring as new Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters arrive to re-equip the Belgian air force.

Further complicating the picture, Norway’s six F-16s, promised in 2023, were still being refurbished in Belgium this spring. Some arrived there in pieces.

Yes, Ukraine got 24 fight-ready F-16s from the Netherlands and most of the 19 Denmark promised. But it’s lost five of those jets since 2024. And others are so worn out from relentless flying that they’re badly in need of maintenance.

The Belgian firm Sabena, which services Ukrainian F-16s, has struggled to keep up, and President Volodymyr Zelensky has said about half of the jets spend long stretches abroad for repairs. That slows the return of repaired planes and further squeezes the front-line force.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by MATTHEW GAULT

In 1981, an American writer sneaked into Afghanistan following a dream. He survived—barely—and wrote a play that eventually became a movie. The Beast, which debuted in 1988, is about a Soviet tank crew that finds itself all alone in hostile Afghanistan.

It’s a masterpiece—one inspired by a terrible, terrible war.

The Soviet Union invaded landlocked Afghanistan in 1979. The campaign would last eight years and kill nearly 15,000 Russians … and more than 80,000 Afghans.

At the time of the invasion, New Jersey native William Mastrosimone was 34 years old and a playwright. He had graduated from Rutgers University a few years before. He didn’t know much about Afghanistan.

In 1980, a New York City theater staged his first play. The Woolgatherer is a dark comedy about two desperate people searching for love in South Philadelphia. Critics and audiences loved it.

“It was the first time I made a living as a writer,” Mastrosimone said.

One day during rehearsal, Mastrosimone grew restless. “I got to walking around and reading The New York Times,” he said. He noticed a picture of an Afghan tribal leader and read the accompanying interview.

“‘We’re going to fight to the last man, to the last bullet,’” Mastrisomine quoted from the interview. “‘Right now, my men are eating tree bark to stay alive.’”

The playwright saw something in the mujaheddin leader. “It just reminded me so much, of the men who followed [George] Washington,” he explained. “I was really keyed into the psyche of that leader.”

His interest became an obsession. “It wasn’t too long after that that I became less interested in [The Woolgatherer] and rehearsal than I became in Afghanistan.”

The obsession affected his sleep. “When I’m really hooked on something—on an idea or a script or a story—I dream about it,” he said.

One night, he awoke from a dream and scribbled a drawing on the back of a yellow legal pad.

“In the center of it was a very simple tank,” he said. “It’s surrounded by stick figures throwing spears and shooting arrows at it. I woke up in the morning and I had no memory of doing this.”

“And I just knew I was going [to Afghanistan]. I felt like I had to witness this fight between a superpower and a 12th-century power.”

One problem, Mastrosimone had no idea how to get there.

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by DAVID AXE

Overnight on Oct. 14 and 15, the Ukrainian navy fired a clutch of Long Neptune cruise missiles at Borisoglebsk air base in Voronezh, in western Russia some 260 km from the border with Ukraine.

The results were devastating. The ground-launched Neptunes struck the tarmac where six Russian air force Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers were parked nearly wingtip to wingtip in uncovered positions.

Satellite imagery from the morning of Oct. 15 depicted piles of smoldering wreckage. The navy said it hit all six jets. Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky said four Su-34s were destroyed and a further two were damaged. “I thank the warriors of the Ukrainian navy for their precision!” he wrote.

The jets, he said, were loaded with aerial bombs and ready for new strikes on Ukraine. An analyst reading the imagery counted wreckage of two to four aircraft and two empty spots where damaged jets had been moved.

An Airbus Pléiades satellite image from Oct. 11, four days before the strike, showed the six Su-34s on open aprons. Next to them were structures that the Russian independent outlet Istories said looked like anti-drone nets or their frames. Nets can snag a small drone. A cruise missile goes through.

At roughly $50 million apiece, by the Ukrainian air force’s estimate, the four destroyed jets alone cost Russia some $200 million. The twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34 is the Russian air force’s best fighter-bomber. Almost every day, Su-34s lob KAB precision glide bombs at Ukrainian troops and civilians.

In nearly 56 months of hard fighting in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Russians have now lost no fewer than 37 Su-34s destroyed, with several more damaged, by open-source counts. Sukhoi continues to deliver new Su-34s in small batches, the latest handed over on Oct. 7, helping the Russians sustain their overall inventory despite heavy losses.

They’ve still got plenty of Su-34s, but that doesn’t mean the Russians shouldn’t worry. As long as they’re parking warplanes out in the open within range of Ukraine’s best deep strike munitions, those planes are vulnerable to attack. Russia’s air defenses are spread too thin to intercept every Ukrainian munition.

The strike may also hit the Russian air force’s training pipeline. Borisoglebsk air base is home to the 160th Aviation Training Regiment. The regiment operates Yakovlev Yak-130 trainers for more basic flight training plus—for more advanced training—front-line combat aircraft including Su-34s, Sukhoi Su-35s and Sukhoi Su-30s.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by DAVID AXE

In late 2024, the Ukrainian army began breaking up and reorganizing its five tanks brigades. Acknowledging that tank brigades almost never fought as brigades, but instead chopped their battalions to fight alongside various infantry formations, the army reduced the number of tanks in each tank brigade, gave those tanks to infantry units and redesignated the now lighter tank brigades as “heavy mechanized brigades.”

The new heavy mechanized brigades are, like other units, struggling to source vehicles. That’s the main takeaway when observer Stevius scrutinized official photos from the new 29th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, which has been slowly forming since last year.

The photos depict some of the vehicles in service with the brigade, which supports the 14th Army Corps defending Ukraine’s northern border in Kharkiv Oblast.

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by DAVID AXE

On or just before Wednesday, Oct. 14, Russian Geran-4 one-way attack drones struck two more cargo ships—one in the Buh River Estuary near Mykolaiv and another in Chornomorsk, 20 km south of Odesa.

They’re the latest strikes in competing Russian and Ukrainian countershipping campaigns that have, since this summer, throttled Black Sea grain exports.

The jet-propelled Geran-4s are Russia’s weapons of choice for these ship strikes. The drones haul warheads of up to 90 kg at up to 500 km/h and can fly more than 700 km. They already had A.I.-assisted targeting, and the Russians recently added terrain-matching navigation to make them less reliant on satellites and harder to jam with signal-scrambling electronic warfare.

For months, the Geran-4s and other Russian munitions have pummeled Ukrainian ports and the ships hauling grain from them. But Ukrainian forces were actually the first to escalate the shipping fight in an effort to squeeze Russian logistics.

As recently as early this summer, hundreds of Russian tankers and dry cargo ships plied the Black Sea and adjacent Sea of Azov, hauling fuel and bulk supplies between ports in Russia and Russian-occupied ports in southern Ukraine.

Most of the Russian vessels were unregistered and sailed without transponders, making them a kind of regional adjunct of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil and other goods to the global market in defiance of international sanctions.

Ukrainian drones had already hit ships hauling stolen Ukrainian grain out of occupied ports in June.

On July 6, Ukraine’s deep strike drone force finally started hunting the rest of the Russian ships. By day eight of the countershipping effort, the Ukrainians had hit 105 vessels. By day 12, drones including A.I.-assisted Fire Point FP-1/2s had struck 159, even a few tugboats sent to assist the damaged tankers.

Just a few days after Ukraine launched its countershipping campaign, Russia launched a retaliatory campaign targeting Ukraine’s Black Sea grain ports as well as the ships, many of them foreign-flagged, that haul grain through Türkiye’s Bosporus Strait out to the Mediterranean Sea and onward to foreign ports.

Soon, the Russian shadow fleet’s hundreds of ships were either drifting, disabled, or sheltering in Russian ports. On the other side of the Black Sea, Ukraine’s lucrative grain trade was in a state of collapse. Ports were under constant attack. International shippers were increasingly reluctant to send their vessels into the Black Sea.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.

by DAVID AXE

The Russians are pouring troops into a key sector just southeast of the town of Dobropillia in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, threatening to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses and march one settlement closer to Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two big free cities in Donetsk.

But the Russians’ push toward Dobropillia isn’t without cost. Russian losses in this sector are “colossal,” according to the mapper Playfra. And every soldier the Kremlin deploys along the Dobropillia axis is a soldier it can’t deploy elsewhere.

And that may help explain why the Russians are falling back in two other key sectors, in northern Donetsk Oblast and in neighboring Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The Dobropillia axis is the Russians’ clear priority. For the Ukrainians, that’s an opportunity to attack elsewhere.

Dobropillia, a former mining town with a pre-war population of around 28,000, is now a fortress. It anchors Ukrainian positions along the highway that threads northeast to Kramatorsk.

Russia has attacked here before. In August 2025, Russian troops pushed a salient toward the Dobropillia–Kramatorsk highway, and Ukrainian counterattacks cut it apart. By October that year, Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky put Russian losses on the Dobropillia front at about 13,000.

Ukrainian military analyst Kostiantyn Mashovets describes the push on Dobropillia as the southern flank of a Russian operation to envelop the whole Sloviansk–Kramatorsk urban area. The other approaches are harder going. From the southeast, the Russians are blocked by stubborn Ukrainian forces still clinging to positions in the ruins of Kostiantynivka. From the north, starting this spring, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps rolled back 18 months of Russian gains.

For an army that’s been struggling to complete its conquest of Donetsk, to say nothing of breaking through in other front-line oblasts, Dobropillia has become the priority.

And that’s why the Russians are channeling fresh forces into the Dobropillia sector. Part of the 41st Combined Arms Army and units of its 90th Guards Tank Division are now fighting there, Mashovets wrote on Oct. 9, and the Russian command keeps feeding fresh assault infantry into the sector through the village of Nove Shakhove despite heavy losses. The open-source account Unit Observer tracked the buildup as early as September.

Potentially tens of thousands of troops from those formations join the main forces of the 2nd and 51st Combined Arms Armies, according to Mashovets, as well as elements of the Russian naval infantry, facing the Ukrainian 1st Azov Corps and 19th Army Corps around Dobropillia.

The reinforcements give Russian commanders more options. Mashovets expects the 51st CAA to push south and southwest of Dobropillia and the 2nd CAA toward Raksha and Sviatohorivka, enveloping the town and cutting its supply routes from Bilozerske before any direct assault. The neighboring 8th CAA is fighting around Kostiantynivka. The Russians’ immediate goal is “to maintain this offensive pressure from summer into the fall,” Unit Observer wrote, setting conditions for a possible siege of Kramatorsk next year.

The outlook for the Ukrainian defenders of Dobropillia is “worsening,” Playfra warned on Oct. 13:

The Ukrainians aren’t without options, Playfra explained. They should double down on their current strategy of saturating the fields around Dobropillia with drones in a ring at least 2 to 3 km deep, forestalling large-scale Russian movements until the winter strips the leaves off the trees, depriving the Russians of their best cover from overhead surveillance. This could buy Dobropillia “much more time,” Playfra predicted.

Mashovets puts a date on how long Dobropillia has to hold. If it and Druzhkivka, the town just south of Kramatorsk, hold until mid-to-late December, he wrote, the whole Russian plan for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk would collapse and have to be rewritten almost from scratch.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.