Putin Is Waging War Against Russia Too

As a direct consequence of their country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, over 300,000 Russians have been killed or wounded, and tens of millions more are economically worse off than they were on February 23, 2022. Although over 70% of Russian respondents continue to tell pollsters that they "personally support the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine," Kremlin-controlled propaganda has largely succeeded in preventing its audience from learning the truth about Russian forces butchering Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, or about the Russian military's use of Russian convicts as cannon fodder, or the ongoing Russian shelling of civilian neighborhoods in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Kherson.

There is every reason to believe that, if Russians were aware of why their armed forces were sent into Ukraine and what it has done in the nearly two years since openly attacking, they would be opposed. As late as December 2021, polling showed that only 8% of Russians supported "send[ing] Russian armed forces to participate in battles in Ukraine."

As a likely result of this fact, the Kremlin's domestic propaganda campaign in the weeks leading up to the invasion did not focus on concepts of patriotism, imperialism, or history, nor did it claim that Kyiv would fall "in three days." Instead, Russia's rulers prepared their population for war by claiming right up until the very end that there was no Russian invasion force positioned on Ukraine's borders and that war was anything but "imminent."

The lie worked. In September 2021, only 47% of Russians said that they "would like to see Vladimir Putin in the post of president after the end of his current term in 2024." Yet despite the sanctions, isolation, death, and destruction that Vladimir Putin has brought on his own country in the years since, in December 2023 an all-time high 78% of Russians answered that they hoped to see their president-for-life continue in office following the elections that are slated to be held this coming March.

Contrary to Kremlin officials' increasingly outlandish words, Putin and those around him do not act as if they are involved in an existential struggle against the "Collective West." Their invasion of Ukraine has left Russia's western border—the one with NATO–significantly less physically protected than it was. Instead, the Kremlin acts as if it understands that the real threat to the current regime's continuing rule is domestic. While its forward progress on the battlefield in Ukraine has stalled, its war against Russia itself has—thus far—proven to be a paradoxical success.

NATO is drawing up new plans that may help the 75-year-old alliance sidestep the resurgent "America First" foreign policy of former President Donald Trump, who could secure a second presidential term in November, reports say. The Financial Times and Politico reported that the 32 alliance members were mulling taking collective responsibility for the U.S.-led Ramstein military aid support group—which, in the event of Trump's reelection, could fall victim to the kind of Republican Ukraine-skepticism that has stranded a major funding bill for several months. Here's what could happen next.

By Ellie Cook

In the spiraling race to develop new, better and more drones, artificial intelligence is one of the new frontiers Ukraine is hoping to dominate before Russia gets the chance to edge ahead.

But with the demands of a grinding war, there are pressing concerns over how quickly AI is taking to the skies and how reliable the nascent merging of drones and AI will be in the coming months.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's drone tsar and digital transformation minister, has suggested that AI drone prototypes will appear along the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine before the year is over.

The technology appears to be already there. A Ukrainian drone attack on the Tatarstan region, more than 1,000 kilometers into Russian territory, refocused attention earlier this week on just how far Ukraine's drone reach has extended.

Some of Kyiv's drones, used to zero in on Russia's energy infrastructure, have started using a basic form of AI to tone down the impact of jamming and aid navigation, CNN reported on Tuesday.

"Accuracy under jamming is enabled through the use of artificial intelligence. Each aircraft has a terminal computer with satellite and terrain data," an unidentified source, described as being close to Ukraine's drone program, told the network.

As drones have developed, so have counter-drone technologies. Jamming is a cornerstone of Kyiv's, and Moscow's, attempts to pull down and knock off course enemy drones before they can complete their missions. AI, particularly machine vision, is one tool intended to fight off these effects.

With machine vision, the objective is for the drone to find its way independently to its target, having learned to distinguish where it is in a given terrain.

"The main goal is to sever the dependence on communication between the drone and the operator, and the drone with a satellite for navigation," Samuel Bendett of the U.S. think tank CNA told Newsweek.

Using a drone that can strike a target without any guidance from an operator, completing a mission even with jamming, has obvious battlefield advantages when counter-drone technology is everywhere.

"There are even systems that can look at the ground beneath and puzzle out where it is, to sidestep GPS jamming," U.K.-based drone expert Steve Wright told Newsweek.

With the pressures of war, Kyiv and Moscow are hoping to integrate new, experimental AI in much shorter time frames than many countries in the West have to develop and discuss the technology.

In Ukraine, it is "used rapidly and without significant obstacles or guardrails in order to quickly gain advantage over the adversary," Bendett said.

With AI, it is impossible to be totally sure that the computer will not "do something completely unexpected and unsafe," Wright said. "In the West, we are spending huge efforts wrestling with that problem, but of course the Ukrainians do not have that luxury."

Russia, too, has said it is putting AI into its drones. Moscow's military, along with volunteer groups, is developing AI "in contrast to the United States' cautious and responsible, if under-resourced, approach," Bendett and analyst Jane Pinelis wrote in a commentary piece for the War on the Rocks website in January.

Both Russia and Ukraine will "attempt to copy each other's AI successes in the shortest time possible, and this AI race is the current tip of the spear in the global AI tech race," Bendett said.

Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in mid-February that several nations backing Kyiv were working to send to Ukraine AI-enabled drones that can attack Russian positions in swarms.