Tag: russia

Ukraine’s battlefield data is being used as LEVERAGE to train the future of military AI

Imagine a drone, no larger than a dinner plate, humming through the skeletal remains of a bombed-out village. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t feel. It simply knows — its artificial brain trained on millions of hours of combat footage, every pixel of destruction meticulously logged, every human movement analyzed like a chessboard. This isn’t science fiction. It’s the future Ukraine is quietly shopping to the highest bidder. Data obtained from the Ukraine-Russia war will soon be used to train military AI to make future war time missions more efficient, more cold and calculated.

For over three and a half years, Ukraine has been more than a battleground — it’s been a lab. A brutal, real-world experiment in how machines learn to kill. Now, as the war grinds on, Kyiv isn’t just fighting for survival. It’s negotiating with its Western allies, dangling something far more valuable than territory or political loyalty: data. Terabytes of it. Footage from first-person-view drones that have stalked Russian tanks like predators. Reconnaissance feeds that map every explosion, every ambush, every death in excruciating detail. And Ukraine’s digital minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has made one thing clear — this isn’t charity. It’s a transaction. “I think this is one of the ‘cards,’ as our colleagues and partners say, to build win-win relations,” he told Reuters, his words carrying the cold precision of a man who understands leverage. The question isn’t whether this data will be sold. It’s who will wield it — and what happens when they do.

Key points:

  • Ukraine has amassed an unprecedented trove of battlefield data, including drone footage and combat statistics, which is now being positioned as a negotiating tool with Western allies.
  • The data is critical for training military AI, particularly for autonomous drone swarms and target recognition systems, making it a prized asset for defense contractors and governments.
  • Ukraine’s “points system” for confirmed kills has gamified war, incentivizing troops to destroy more Russian targets in exchange for drones and weapons — further feeding the data machine.
  • Experts warn that AI-trained weapons systems could soon operate with full autonomy, raising ethical and existential questions about machine-driven warfare and the risk of uncontrollable kill chains.
  • Historical patterns suggest that warfare technology often escapes its original intent, with civilian casualties rising as automation increases — yet global powers are racing to deploy it.
  • The long-term implications extend beyond Ukraine: this data could accelerate a new arms race, where AI-driven weapons decide who lives and who dies — without human oversight.

The black box of modern war

Fedorov didn’t minced words when he called the data “priceless.” And he’s right. In the hands of defense firms like Palantir — which already works with Ukraine to analyze Russian strikes and disinformation — this isn’t just intelligence. It’s the raw material for the next generation of war. Imagine an AI that doesn’t just assist pilots but replaces them. Drones that don’t just follow orders but make them. Systems that can identify, track, and eliminate targets faster than a human can blink.

Ukraine has already dipped its toes into this future. Fedorov admitted that Kyiv uses AI to scan reconnaissance imagery for targets that would take humans “dozens of hours” to find. They’re testing fully autonomous drones — machines that could soon hunt in swarms, coordinating attacks without a single soldier pulling the trigger. And they’re not alone. The U.S., China, and Russia are all pouring billions into AI-driven warfare, each racing to outpace the others. But Ukraine’s data is different. It’s not simulated. It’s not theoretical. It’s real death, digitized and weaponized.

The problem? We’ve seen this movie before. Every major leap in military technology — from machine guns to atomic bombs — has been sold as a way to end war faster. Instead, it’s made war more efficient, more distant, and more devastating. When the first autonomous drone swarm is unleashed, will it distinguish between a soldier and a civilian? Will it care? Or will it simply follow the patterns it’s been trained on — patterns built on Ukraine’s kill zones, where the line between combatant and bystander has already blurred?

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How Ukraine Lost Its Future

As the endgame looms over the proxy war in Ukraine, the catastrophic costs of the unwarranted conflict continue to soar. There was an alternative future for Ukraine, based on development. But it was purposely denied.

Since the onset of hostilities in Ukraine three years ago, I have argued that, whatever its stated rationales, the war would “penalize severely Ukraine, Russia, the US and the NATO, Europe, developing economies and the global economy.”

The war in Ukraine was not only avoidable but there was an alternative and more peaceful future. It was purposely collapsed because it did not fit the neoconservatives’ plans for Ukraine. 

Zelensky’s Dream of Ukraine as China’s Bridge to Europe          

Even as Ukraine-Russian tensions began to escalate a decade ago, trade ties between Ukraine and China expanded after President Viktor Yanukovych’s state visit to Beijing in 2013. Four years later, Ukraine, now under President Poroshenko, joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And in 2019, China bypassed Russia as Ukraine’s biggest single trading partner.Together, China, Ukraine’s new economic partner, and Russia, its historical trade partner, absorbed a fourth of Ukraine’s exports. That figure was over six times the share of the US.

In June 2021, China and Ukraine signed a deal to strengthen cooperation in multiple areas, particularly in infrastructure financing and construction. In 2021, overall trade boomed to $19 billion, having soared 80% since 2013. To Ukraine’s President Zelensky, the BRI meant an alternative future that would be more stable and prosperous. And so, in a phone conversation with President Xi Jinping, he called China “Ukraine’s No. 1 trade and economic partner in the world.” expressing hope that Ukraine could become “a bridge to Europe for Chinese business.”

In just a year, major Chinese companies started operations in construction, food and telecoms. New contracts signed by Chinese companies in the Ukrainian engineering market exceeded $2 billion for two consecutive years.

But this was not the future that was planned for Ukraine in the White House. 

Hammering Ukraine Into a Military-Industrial Hub              

From 1991 to 2014, the US flooded Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance , even though it wasn’t a NATO member. By 2021, over $2.7 billion was added to the figure, plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund.

To Erik Prince, it heralded a great money-making opportunity, Iraq déjà vu. As the founder of the private US military contractor, then known as Blackwater, Prince had long supplied mercenaries to the CIA, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations, including torture and assassinations. In early 2020, Prince outlined a roadmap for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues.

Prince desperately needed the Motor Sich factory, which already had a deal with Beijing Skyrizon Aviation. The Chinese company had bought its 41% stake already in 2017. However, Biden’s election win undermined Prince’s plan. Moreover, his Ukrainian partners got under criminal investigation for alleged efforts to sway the 2020 presidential election and the investigation included President Biden’s son and his stakes in Ukraine. Washington blacklisted the Chinese firms involved, then Ukrainian court froze their holdings for reasons of “national security” and Chinese companies and dealmakers were sanctioned.

Nonetheless, the idea of a Ukrainian military-industrial complex remained attractive to the US and Ukraine, where the state-controlled defense sector employed more than 1 million people and had been moving, with rising US influence, toward military procurement since 2014. To the Biden administration, it offered a massive military-logistical hub that could serve both the US and NATO.

Yet, by late fall 2022, even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged Ukraine’s losses in the war with Russia amounted to 100,000 soldiers and 20,000 civilians.

Today, three years later, the total cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine is estimated at $524 billion over the next decade – almost three times Ukraine’s GDP 2024.

The military aid has brought neither peace nor security. But it has prolonged Ukrainians’ suffering. To date, the US alone has provided $67 billion in military assistance since February 2022 and $70 billion in military assistance since 2014. These have been coupled with military assistance via the presidential emergency authority by up to $32 billion from Pentagon’s stockpiles.

That’s a total of $167 billion – in wasted lives, economic prospects and global prospects.

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Putin Says Curbing NATO Enlargement Crucial to Ukraine Peace Deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sept. 1 that the issue of NATO’s eastward enlargement has to be tackled for there to be a sustainable peace deal in Ukraine.

Putin was speaking after talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tianjin, China.

Putin said the crisis in Ukraine was partly due to “the West’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into NATO,” which he said “poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.”

He said that the 2014 revolution in Ukraine was a “coup” in which “the country’s political leadership that opposed NATO membership was removed from power.”

“In order for a Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, the root causes of the crisis, which I have just mentioned and which I have repeatedly mentioned before, must be eliminated,” he said.

Putin Calls for ‘Fair Balance’

Putin also called for “a fair balance in the security sphere” to be restored.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine—which has expressed interest in joining NATO—and its forces now control a fifth of the country, including Crimea and large swathes of the south and east of Ukraine.

Just days before the invasion, Putin delivered a speech describing the potential accession of Ukraine to NATO as “a direct threat to the security of Russia.”

In the wake of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden both waived policies of neutrality they had held for decades and joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

NATO now has 32 members, including a string of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union—such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—or were part of the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact alliance during the Cold War—such as Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Apart from Ukraine, two other countries—Georgia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—have applied for NATO membership.

The alliance’s website states, “NATO’s door remains open to any European country in a position to undertake the commitments and obligations of membership, and contribute to security in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

During NATO’s 2008 summit in Bucharest, alliance leaders said in a declaration: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

But after NATO’s summit in The Hague in June, there was no mention of Ukrainian membership in the declaration issued, which stated simply, “Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.”

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A Dark Theory: Russian Strategy In Ukraine

Let’s talk about Russian strategy in Ukraine…

Looking at developments lately, specifically:

(1) the Ukrainian casualty leak showing an astronomical 1.7M KIA/MIA; and

(2) the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk

I thought should revisit a dark thought I had a while ago, namely that, “maybe the killing itself is the point of all of this.”

I’ve said before that the Russians have fought an extraordinarily clean war in Ukraine, but it should be understood that there is a very legalistic shade on that assessment.

They’ve killed very few civilians, and Ukrainian propagandists are perpetually beclowning themselves trying to pretend that the usual single-digit handful of injured civilians that accompany the latest attack using hundreds of standoff weapons fired into city centers (producing secondary explosions visible from outer space as military targets hidden among civilian infrastructure are destroyed with surgical precision) somehow constitute gEnOCiDe rather than some of the most well-controlled warfighting in the history of the business.

There is another and far darker side to Russia’s “clean” war, however.

Let us consider the fate of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – legal combatants all, whom the Russians can and do target and kill without limit. I mentioned the casualty leak earlier, but I feel this needs to have a line drawn under it – one point seven million personnel killed or missing in action in the AFU, over the course of the war. 1.7 MILLION. Seven or eight percent of Ukraine’s prewar population, probably something like a quarter of the entire national cohort of military-aged males, dead or missing. Casualties on the scale of a genocide, sufficient to permanently cripple any postwar Ukrainian nation.

Casualties multiple times that which I assessed two years ago as sufficient to shatter the AFU based on the experience of Nazi Germany.

This brings me to the Ukrainian collapse north of Pokrovsk two weeks ago, in which a run-of-the-mill Russian attack walked through twenty kilometers of Ukrainian defensive belts and into open country.

The Ukrainian propagandists coped by whining about how the single most important front sector for the AFU had somehow “run out of infantry.”

But did the Russians throw in a mobile reserve to collapse the front and chase the AFU back to the Dniper, despite doubtless knowing full well what was going on? No, they did not – they consolidated in the breach and awaited the inevitable, panicked Ukrainian counterattack, in which they would have the opportunity to destroy Ukraine’s remaining elite troops.

Which brings me to my conclusion.

The Russians have had countless opportunities to make large advances in this war, especially recently – the Ukrainian front line is an absolute shambles and their “drone wall” tactic will falter against any serious attack. So ineffectual is the AFU that very few Russian moves at the front even face serious opposition these days, with most geolocations of Russian advances showing them already established in place and dealing with harassment by kill drones after having seized positions bloodlessly. The Russians have in fact consistently foregone breaking the front and taking swathes of ground in favor of killing the largest possible number of Ukrainian soldiers on the existing front line under the existing attritional combat dynamic.

This “tactical directive” held true even during the Battle of Sudzha-Korenevo, fought in prewar Russia. Rather than counterattacking aggressively to evict the AFU, the Russians saw the opportunity to kill gigantic numbers of Ukrainians in a trap the enemy wouldn’t be able to extract themselves from for ideological reasons, and they took it. That battle ended up being nine months of hideously lopsided butchery that broke the back of the AFU.

All of this makes observing the war more than a little maddening, but it’s a consistent pattern of behavior that begs for explanation.

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Director Woody Allen and Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Included in Ukraine’s Mirotvorets ‘Kill List’

Hersh and Allen are now targeted by Zelensky and his goons.

It seems that Americans have become fair game to the extremists embedded in or allied to Kiev regime.

The Mirotvorets ‘kill list’ has long been controversial, and at one point, Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have once been careful not to antagonize the US administration – but no more.

Over the years, many US citizens have been included, such as Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Henry Kissinger, Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey Sachs…

The Mirotvorets website lists individuals deemed ‘enemies of Ukraine’, and it’s often labeled a ‘kill list’ due to its publication of personal information and instances where listed individuals were later assassinated.

This week, even as Ukraine’s defenses are crumbling on the frontlines, the goons at the Kiev regime are still including new names, such as Hollywood director Woody Allen and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

“American filmmaker and screenwriter Woody Allen has been added to the database of Ukraine’s Mirotvorets extremist website, TASS has learnt.”

Allen was reportedly included in the list for appearing via video link in the Moscow film festival.

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JD Vance Accuses Politico of ‘Journalistic Malpractice’ Over New Report: ‘It’s a Foreign Influence Operation’

Vice President JD Vance has taken a blistering shot at one of the White House’s most notorious rivals: the media.

On Friday, Politico released a critical report that took aim at one key member of President Donald Trump’s administration — and Vance wasn’t standing for it.

Alongside the blaring headline of “‘His inexperience shines through’: Steve Witkoff struggles to manage Russia as Trump peace envoy,” Politico spilled quite a bit of digital ink calling out the alleged inefficacy of Trump’s special envoy for Peace Missions.

Specifically, Politico’s Felicia Schwartz chronicled the struggles that Witkoff was purportedly having while trying to bring about an amicable end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Some frustrated U.S., Ukrainian and European officials say part of the problem is the go-it-alone style of Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for peace missions and go-to negotiator on Ukraine,” Schwartz reports. “He has refused to consult with experts and allies, leaving him uninformed at times and unprepared at others, according to seven people familiar with internal discussions.”

The report added, “Two said he misses the mark by viewing the conflict through a real estate lens, like a land dispute.”

Enter: Vance.

The vice president took to X shortly after the report’s publication and did not mince words when it came to what he thought of the Washington, D.C.-based outlet — and Schwartz.

“This story from Politico is journalistic malpractice,” Vance posted Friday. “But it’s more than that: it’s a foreign influence operation meant to hurt the administration and one of our most effective members.

“Notice how all of the people attacking Steve are on background? That means it’s two or three deep staters who are angry that Witkoff has succeeded where they’ve failed.

“You know what this ‘reporter’ left out to make room for anonymous quotes? The full quote from the sitting vice president, on the record. A quote from the secretary of the state, on the record. A quote from Jared Kushner, on the record.

“The full quote from the UK’s Jonathan Powell, one of the most respected national security people in the Western World, who defended Steve vigorously from these malicious smears.”

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Prominent Ukrainian Politician Assassinated In Broad Daylight On Streets Of Lviv

Former Ukrainian parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy – a prominent voice on the hardline Ukrainian right – was shot and killed in the western city of Lviv on Saturday, grabbing headlines in Ukraine and internationally, and resulting in an urgent manhunt for the assailant. He had been walking casually near his home on a sidewalk when he was executed in the street.

The country’s Prosecutor General’s Office described Parubiy was fatally shot multiple times by an unidentified gunman who quickly fled the scene. It appeared to be a professional hit or assassination, given authorities described a gunman dressed as a courier on an e-bike as the killer. The assassin never removes his helmet during the attack from behind.

The 54-year old Parubiy served as speaker of Ukraine’s parliament from April 2016 to August 2019 and was a prominent figure and organizer of 2014 Euromaidan protests (or Maidan coup) and anti-Russian/pro-EU coup events which ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, and in many ways led to the current Russia-Ukraine war.

He had also held the position of secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in early 2014, during the events of the civil/proxy war in the Donbass, as well as when Russia declared full sovereignty over Crimea.

President Volodymyr Zelensky within hours after confirmed the assassination and condemned it as a “horrific murder” and said “all necessary forces and means” would be used to uncover the plot and assailant. 

“Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko and Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko have just reported on the first known circumstances of a horrific murder in Lviv. Andriy Parubiy has been killed,” Zelensky solemnly announced on social media. The shooting happened at around noon local time.

Parubiy is already being hailed as a national hero and “patriot” – including by Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, who said he “belongs in the history books”. According to more:

National police said the shooting in Lviv was reported at around noon. Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said finding the killer and establishing the circumstances of the attack was of outmost importance.

“This is a matter of security in a country at war, where, as we can see, there are no completely safe places,” he wrote on Telegram.

Tributes poured in from colleagues in parliament and the government, praising Parubiy’s contribution to Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty and independence as one of the leaders of what became known as the Euromaidan protests in 2013-14.

CCTV footage was quickly released of the killing, in hopes of finding a suspect…

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Russia Launches Mass Drone and Missile Strike on Southern Ukraine

Russia launched a mass attack on southern Ukraine, local officials said, two days after a rare airstrike on central Kyiv killed 23 and damaged European Union diplomatic offices as U.S.-led efforts to end Moscow’s three-year war on its neighbor staggered.

The assault overnight into Saturday killed at least one civilian and wounded 28 people, including children, in the Zaporizhzhia region, Gov. Ivan Fedorov reported, where a five-storey residential building was struck.

Russia launched 537 strike drones and decoys, as well as 45 missiles, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. Ukrainian forces shot down or neutralized 510 drones and decoys, and 38 missiles, the force reported.

The Kremlin on Thursday said Russia remained interested in continuing peace talks, despite the air attack on Kyiv that day that was one of the largest and deadliest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

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EU Trying for Regime Change in Hungary Using Zelensky

Viktor Orbán has been a thorn in the paw of the European dictatorship masquerading as a democracy when the people have no right to vote for any leader, and the Parliament, which they do vote for, has no complete democratic control over other EU institutions, especially the European Commission. It can hold hearings, ask questions, and set up committees of inquiry. Most dramatically, it has the power to pass a motion of censure and force the entire European Commission to resign.  It cannot pass laws alone. It can reject proposed legislation entirely, killing the bill. It has done this on numerous occasions, forcing the Commission to go back to the drawing board. However, it has the power to reject the entire annual EU budget. It has no power to alter laws or the budget. It is always an all-or-nothing role.

The European Union has not stripped Hungary of its voting rights over issues related to migrants or Ukraine, but is dying to do so and is now behind closed doors telling Zelensky to create a confrontation with Orban to force Hungary to exit the EU and enter war with Ukraine. On Ukraine’s Independence Day, Zelensky gave Hungary an ultimatum: “You must make a choice.” 

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US Announces Plan To Arm Ukraine With Thousands of Long-Range Cruise Missiles

The Trump administration has announced that it approved an $825 million weapons deal that will arm Ukraine with thousands of Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) air-launched missiles, which can hit targets up to 280 miles away, a significantly further range than other missiles that the US has sent into the proxy war.

The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said the deal will provide Ukraine with 3,350 ERAM missiles, 3,350 Embedded Global Positioning System (GPS)/Inertial Navigation Systems, and other related equipment.

The arms sale will be funded in part by Foreign Military Financing (FMF), a State Department program that provides foreign governments with money to buy US-made weapons. Other funding for the deal will come from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Saturday that the Trump administration had approved the deal and that the missiles would start arriving in Ukraine within six weeks. The report also said that the administration had been quietly blocking Ukraine from using US-provided missiles in attacks on Russian territory, but the provision of the ERAMs suggests that might change.

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