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How Ukraine Plans to Paralyze Moscow Airports With AI-Guided Drones, According to The Atlantic
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Ukrainian drone operations have forced Moscow airports to cancel hundreds of flights, with Kyiv preparing a larger AI-powered campaign to disrupt Russian aviation, according to The Atlantic on October 15.
The campaign, linked to Operation M&Ms , aims to disrupt Russian air traffic and impose economic costs without relying on US technology or intelligence.
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Last week, Moscow airports canceled 345 flights due to Ukrainian drone activity. On October 9, all four Moscow airports were temporarily closed as Russian leader Vladimir Putin returned from Turkmenistan. His aircraft reportedly circled above Moscow while awaiting permission to land.
According to The Atlantic, the operation's original proposal envisioned deploying up to 1,000 AI-guided drones daily to disrupt Moscow's airports. The drones would use map-matching technology to navigate despite interference from Russian electronic warfare.
"Ukraine does not threaten civilian aviation as such—not a single civilian aircraft," President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated on September 1, explaining that Russian airspace would become increasingly dangerous due to drone activity.
Zelenskyy has not authorized a more aggressive version of the operation, citing civilian safety concerns. Ukrainian manufacturers are nevertheless developing specialized drones that have not yet been deployed against Russian airports at scale.
On October 12, it was reported that automated internet traffic from Yandex's network had fallen sharply following Ukrainian drone strikes on the company's data centers in Russia.
Cloudflare Radar data showed automated requests approaching zero on October 11, prompting speculation about disruptions to Russian online propaganda operations. However, the figures do not establish whether propaganda bots were affected, as the traffic also includes legitimate automated services such as search engine crawlers.
The decline followed reported strikes on Yandex facilities in Russia's Ryazan, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions between October 8 and 11, which disrupted cloud services and exposed vulnerabilities in Russia's digital infrastructure.
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