Russian troops surrendered to robots. Drones and ground bots took a Russian position without infantry and without losses on Ukraine’s side — Telegraph.
Zelenskyy: For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned systems. 1/
Ground robots now carry out assault, evacuation, mine-clearing, logistics, supply runs and reconnaissance.
Zelenskyy: they completed 22,000+ missions in the last three months. Syrskyi says robotic systems handled 50% more tasks in March than in Feb. 2/
Ukraine now has 280+ companies building ground robots. Kyiv aims to produce 20,000+ this year, with 99% made in Ukraine.
Front-line models can operate up to 31 miles away, and many cost £7,500-£22,000. Some brigades already created dedicated UGV units. 3/
Hodges: Crimea is still the decisive terrain of the war. For Putin it is symbolic, because the whole war started with seizing it.
It also anchors Russia’s ports and its ability to project power across the Black Sea. 1/
Hodges: If Russia can no longer use Crimea’s ports, bridge, and ferries safely, the peninsula loses real value.
The Black Sea Fleet has already been pushed out of Sevastopol, and isolating Crimea further would strip Moscow of a key military asset. 2/
Hodges: Ukraine does not need a frontal assault on Crimea right now.
It should keep isolating it, keep hitting airfields and air defenses, and make the Kerch bridge unusable. Crimea is still on Zelenskyy, Syrskyi, and Budanov’s objective list. 3X
For decades, Germany blocked every attempt to build European defense without America. Merz reversed course after concluding Trump was ready to abandon Ukraine.
Germany leads a coalition planning to run NATO without the US. The project has a name: "European NATO" — WSJ. 1/
Germany, France, the UK, Poland, the Nordics, and Canada are planning to fill US command roles, run air-and-missile defenses, and secure reinforcement corridors into Poland and the Baltics.
The planning runs through side meetings and dinners inside NATO. 2/
Pistorius, German Defense Minister: "NATO must become more European in order to remain trans-Atlantic."
The plans accelerated after Trump threatened to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark. The Iran war standoff gave them fresh urgency. 3/
NATO’s eastern flank is getting much harder for Russia. Europe fields roughly 8,000+ tanks across NATO members.
Russia has 3,460 active plus 2,100 in storage — but most are T-55s, T-62s, and Soviet-built T-72s. NATO is pulling ahead on quality, writes United24. 1/
Turkey has the most tanks in Europe — 2,381. But Poland is becoming NATO’s most dangerous armored power. Because of what it is building. 2/
Poland today fields 180 South Korean K2 Black Panthers, 233 American Abrams, 202 Leopard 2s, and 251 older PT-91 and T-72s.
Total: 897 tanks. Not the biggest fleet. But the most modern mix on NATO’s eastern flank. 3/
Fukuyama: Hungary’s election was an extraordinarily important victory for liberal democracy.
Orban built “illiberal democracy”: no guardrails, no rule of law, no constitutional checks. JD Vance went to help him, and that seems to have hurt Orban. 1/
Fukuyama: Peter Magyar and Tisza won a supermajority and can now reverse many of the constitutional changes Orban put in place to keep himself in power.
That is a real chance to stop the slide toward authoritarian government and populism. 2X
Sup. Com. of Sweden, Claesson: Russia is not 10ft tall. It’s their favorite tool to make us believe that they are. If Russia would make a true military assessment, they know they would lose [to NATO]. That leads to a hybrid warfare to exploit vulnerabilities in our societies. 1/
Claesson: With the means available to the Ukrainians, it is very compelling to see how they bring multi-domain situation awareness together, how they do targeting and make the command & control arrangements work throughout the whole structure. 2/
Claesson: One aspect of the Ukrainian success — they work incrementally, they try, they test, they take risks. With the back against the wall they must not be risk avert. It is important to learn from them and be less risk avert to apply those lessons. 3/