Yurii Marchenko

In May 2025, Ukraine’s AI-powered Sky Sentinel turret was still in the early stages of combat testing. Just 17 months later, it was shooting Russia’s jet-powered drones out of the sky.

What do hunting Russian tanks and saving a soldier on the operating table have in common? In Ukraine, the answer is a battlefield management system—Delta—that now lets surgeons hundreds of miles away help guide lifesaving operations.

Russia is increasingly fabricating not only the scale of its battlefield successes, but also the evidence supposedly proving them. Russian flags appear where there are no Russian troops. Where there are no soldiers, artificial intelligence adds them in. And sometimes the results are so convincing that Russian soldiers grow to five meters tall and simply dissolve on camera.

The lifting of sanctions on Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman is more than just the story of two Russian billionaires. It sets a precedent showing how individual sanctions can become part of broader political bargaining.

“Lithuania will disappear.” “We will destroy you.” “On your knees.” Over the past few weeks, Russian officials and state propagandists have unleashed a barrage of threats against European countries as drones, suspected sabotage and airspace violations put NATO increasingly on edge.

Russia has voted in its Duma election, and the result is nearly 58% for Putin’s ruling United Russia party. How did the Kremlin get those numbers? Pressure, statistical anomalies, and illegal voting.