Sometimes, you just need an icebreaker and some classical music to make your day better.German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.
The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.
Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.
© Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.
The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.
Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.
© Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
Russia’s anti-monopoly watchdog has opened a formal case against Apple after the U.S. technology company failed to comply with an earlier warning requiring the pre-installation of Russian applications on its devices, state news agency RIA reported on Monday.
All mobile phones and tablets in Russia must have the state-backed MAX messenger app pre-installed, the Russian government announced in August 2025.
The case centers on Apple’s alleged non-compliance regarding the mandatory pre-installation of Russia’s MAX messaging app and a domestic Russian app store. The move follows a warning issued by the regulator that the company did not fully address.
The development marks the latest escalation in Moscow’s efforts to enforce rules aimed at promoting local digital services on foreign devices sold in the country. No further details on potential penalties or next steps were immediately available.
Reuters
MacDailyNews Take: MAX is criticized for potentially enabling user tracking which aligns with Moscow’s push for tighter internet control amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.
As Glenn Greenwald said, “The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals.”
But, the Russian government obviously fears its population, hence its diktats.
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The post Russia opens antitrust case against Apple over failure to pre-install domestic apps appeared first on MacDailyNews.
Após anos de ameaças, a Rússia iniciou oficialmente uma investigação contra a Apple por não ter pré-instalado aplicativos apoiados pelo governo em dispositivos no país. Os aplicativos em questão são o MAX, serviço de mensagens apoiado pelo Kremlin, e a RuStore, loja de aplicativos nacional.
O caso representa o mais recente embate entre a Apple e as autoridades russas, que buscam ampliar o controle estatal sobre o mercado digital do país e exigir que empresas de tecnologia estrangeiras concedam aos serviços nacionais maior acesso às suas plataformas.
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O Serviço Federal Antimonopólio (FAS, na sigla em inglês) afirmou ter alertado anteriormente a Apple para que removesse o que descreveu como “condições discriminatórias que afetavam mecanismos de busca russos” e para que cumprisse as exigências de pré-instalação de softwares nacionais em seus dispositivos.
A Apple atendeu parcialmente à advertência ao permitir a pré-instalação de um mecanismo de busca russo; no entanto, o FAS alega que a empresa ignorou a exigência referente ao mensageiro nacional e à loja de aplicativos doméstica — referindo-se ao MAX e à RuStore.
A Apple poderá ser alvo de uma multa de até 4 bilhões de rublos (cerca de US$50 milhões) caso seja constatada a violação da legislação russa de concorrência.
via AppleInsider
One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning.
Clickfix has emerged as an effective attack technique that attackers, primarily financially motivated criminals, began using in the last year or so. Websites under the control of the attackers display a CAPTCHA that requires the visitor to copy a jumble of text and paste it into the terminal. The text contains scripts that, once entered, perform malicious actions, typically by installing malware or exfiltrating sensitive data. Ukraine’s CERT said Wednesday that Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit inside the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, is now using the technique.
The Clickfix attacks began in the spring and have continued through the summer. The campaign has resulted in the network compromise of at least one organization when a connected device was found to be infected by FreakyPoll, the name of one of Sandworm’s custom malware packages. Ukrainian authorities discovered 10 compromised websites that displayed a PowerShell command as part of a fake CAPTCHA that said it had to be passed to ensure a real human was behind the visiting device’s keyboard.
© Getty Images
One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
© SpaceX
One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
© SpaceX
Mysterious drone flights that disrupted major European airports and flew over NATO member military bases hosting US nuclear weapons may be the work of a coordinated Kremlin campaign launched from Russian-linked commercial ships.
That recent assessment from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies used automatic identification system (AIS) maritime tracking data and other publicly available data to show how Russian-linked ships and “shadow fleet” vessels that transport sanctioned Russian oil were often located nearby during various drone incidents. The report suggests that the drone incidents—which impacted a dozen NATO member countries and Ireland between August 2024 and February 2026—also revealed the vulnerability of European air defenses against surveillance and harassment incursions by low-cost drones.
The IISS report identified 144 drone sightings over Europe during that time period that were unlikely to involve hobbyist recreational drones or drone activity related to the war in Ukraine. About 48 percent of the sightings took place over military bases, 26 percent happened over critical infrastructure such as ports and energy or industrial facilities, and 18 percent occurred over civilian airports. Most occurred at night or in the early morning hours before sunrise, and the drones themselves were typically described in media reports as resembling “professional” or “military-style” drones.
© DAMIEN MEYER/AFP via Getty Images
By any historical measure, the human cost of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entered unprecedented territory. Now, a new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that Russia has suffered roughly 1.4 million battlefield casualties, including as many as 450,000 deaths, since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
If accurate, those losses not only dwarf those sustained by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Russia’s wars in Chechnya—they exceed the combined military fatalities Russia and the Soviet Union suffered in every conflict since the end of the Second World War.
More striking, researchers estimate that Russia’s battlefield losses have become increasingly lopsided relative to Ukraine’s, with the casualty ratio climbing from roughly two or three Russian casualties for every Ukrainian casualty during much of the war to nearly eight-to-one during the first half of 2026.
CSIS estimates Ukraine has suffered between 525,000 and 625,000 battlefield casualties, including between 125,000 and 150,000 fatalities, since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Combined, the report finds, Russian and Ukrainian battlefield casualties have now exceeded 2 million.
The evidence shows that while Moscow continues to push offensive operations, it is doing so at an increasingly staggering human cost.
The report, Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War, examines battlefield casualties, fatalities, territorial gains, rates of advance, and more than 20,000 documented Ukrainian strikes against Russian targets.
Rather than relying on anecdotal assessments, the researchers compiled numerous datasets to evaluate how Russia’s military campaign has evolved over more than four years of fighting. Their conclusion: although Russia continues to wage war, its battlefield performance has deteriorated while the costs in manpower have reached historic levels.
“Russian battlefield costs continue to mount, with as many as 450,000 battlefield deaths and 1.4 million casualties between February 2022 and June 2026,” researchers write. “These rates are astounding.”
Those numbers place the war in a category unlike virtually any other conflict fought by a major military power since 1945.
According to the report, Russia’s estimated fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all U.S. military deaths in every war combined since World War II, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf War.
The report estimates that the United States has suffered approximately 102,000 combat fatalities across every major conflict fought over the past 80 years since World War II. Russia, by comparison, is estimated to have suffered as many as 450,000 battlefield deaths in Ukraine alone in just over four years.
The comparison is even more extraordinary when viewed through Russia’s own military history. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 14,000 to 16,000 troops during its decade-long war in Afghanistan. Russia’s First and Second Chechen Wars claimed between 12,000 and 25,000 military fatalities.
Even when combined with every other Soviet and Russian military intervention since 1950—including Georgia, Syria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and earlier fighting in Ukraine before 2022—the total remains dramatically below the losses estimated in the current war.
According to the CSIS analysis, Russian battlefield deaths in Ukraine are now more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian military fatalities in other conflicts since World War II combined.
Significantly, the casualty imbalance between Russia and Ukraine continues to widen.
For much of the conflict, researchers estimate Russia suffered between two and three casualties for every Ukrainian casualty. However, by early 2026, that ratio had nearly quadrupled to approximately 8:1, reflecting mounting Russian losses while Ukraine increasingly leveraged defensive positions and new technologies to inflict disproportionate damage.
Combined, both sides have now endured more than two million casualties, underscoring the extraordinary scale of Europe’s largest land war since World War II.
The report identifies several reasons for Russia’s escalating losses. Russian commanders have increasingly relied on attritional tactics that send small, often poorly trained infantry squads forward to probe Ukrainian positions, supported by artillery, glide bombs, first-person-view drones, and armored vehicles.
If Ukrainian defenders reveal their positions by opening fire, those locations are identified, mapped, and then targeted with artillery, FPV drones, and glide bombs before additional Russian forces press the attack.
According to the report, the strategy has inflicted staggering casualties while producing only incremental territorial gains.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has spent years constructing dense defensive belts consisting of trenches, minefields, anti-tank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth,” artillery positions, and increasingly sophisticated drone networks.
According to the report, the battlefield has effectively become a vast “kill zone” stretching roughly 12 to 25 miles from the front, where soldiers and vehicles are under near-constant surveillance from drones capable of detecting and directing attacks against almost any movement.
Estimates cited in the report suggest that more than 90 percent of Russian casualties may now result from drone attacks rather than traditional infantry engagements, showing how unmanned systems have radically changed the battlefield.
AI-enabled drones capable of autonomous target identification and terminal guidance provide further increased Ukraine’s defensive advantages while reducing the effectiveness of Russian electronic warfare.
Critically, this tremendous human cost has not translated into rapid military gains.
CSIS found that Russian offensives around key cities such as Kostiantynivka, Pokrovsk, and Sloviansk have advanced at average rates of only about 55 to 100 yards per day—roughly half the length of a football field on a good day and among the slowest offensive rates recorded in modern warfare.
The researchers compare these advances to the infamous Battle of the Somme during World War I, one of history’s most attritional campaigns, while noting that Russia’s early invasion advances in 2022 moved between 30 and 100 times faster than current operations.
Perhaps even more telling, the report notes that Russia’s territorial gains have begun moving in the opposite direction. After years of incremental advances, Russian-controlled territory actually shrank during April and May 2026, marking the first monthly net territorial losses since 2024. Ukrainian counteroffensives reclaimed roughly 155 square miles during the spring, suggesting Russia’s immense expenditure of manpower is producing diminishing strategic returns.
The staggering casualty figures raise questions about Russia’s ability to sustain its current strategy indefinitely.
Researchers estimate Russia is currently suffering between 30,000 and 34,000 battlefield casualties each month, while recruiting roughly 27,000 new soldiers monthly. If those estimates are accurate, Moscow may now be losing personnel faster than it can replace them, continuing to strain an already strained wartime economy.
Despite these staggering losses, the report concludes that neither side appears close to military collapse. Russia retains considerable manpower reserves and continues operating a wartime economy capable of sustaining prolonged combat.
In a June 28 speech to the ruling United Russia Party Congress, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to project strength, insisting that Russia had the resources, political will, and national unity needed to pursue the war. He also rejected the idea that Western pressure could force a strategic defeat, claiming Ukrainian forces were retreating across the front, and framing Russian victory as equally inevitable and essential to the country’s core interests.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has demonstrated an ability to impose disproportionate costs through defensive tactics, long-range strikes, and rapidly evolving drone technologies that continue to reshape modern warfare.
Ultimately, this suggests the war remains locked in a brutal contest of attrition with no clear military end in sight. Although both sides continue adapting their tactics and technologies, neither has demonstrated the ability to achieve a decisive breakthrough.
As long as the conflict continues under these conditions, the report suggests the human toll—already unprecedented in post-World War II Europe—is likely to continue climbing, with both Russia and Ukraine facing the prospect of hundreds of thousands more casualties before the fighting ultimately ends.
“The war in Ukraine heavily favors the defender, a dynamic that has frustrated Russian offensives but also constrained Ukrainian counterattacks,” researchers write. “As the data in this analysis shows, Russia’s progress on the battlefield has been historically poor, with Russian casualties, fatalities, and average rates of advance among the worst of any major power in any war since World War II.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Some of these places look like dream destinations until you learn the disasters hiding underneathTen days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.
At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.
© NASA via Getty Images
Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future.
The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Kriezis at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.
By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries.
© European Space Agency
“America is at risk of high impact GPS jamming and spoofing from space” was the title of my SpaceNews opinion article in October 2024. Little did I know that its […]
The post Russia is jamming GPS from space appeared first on SpaceNews.
© Jes Aznar for The New York Times
O FSB afirma ter descoberto um esquema sofisticado de ciberespionagem que terá utilizado spyware para recolher dados, monitorizar conversas e espiar o ambiente em redor dos dispositivos móveis de altos responsáveis do Estado, com a captura de áudio e vídeo. No entanto, não apresenta provas de tal alegação.
The post Serviços secretos russos alegam ter desmantelado esquema de espionagem que transformava smartphones em dispositivos de vigilância appeared first on Tek Notícias.
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