• Drones are big in the Ukraine war, and technology and tactics are rapidly evolving.
• NATO is taking note, realizing it desperately needs drones, too.
• A defense minister said the Ukraine war made his country realize it must "invest significantly."

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a conflict dominated by drones, and NATO's been taking notes, learning how to move faster.

Uncrewed systems are being used more in this war than in any other conflict in history. They are expendable intelligence-gathering and surveillance platforms, bombers, minelayers, and even precision-strike options for attacks on troops, vehicles, and fixed positions like trenches, bases, and oil refineries.

Drones come in different designs and sizes, from smaller off-the-shelf drones that are available to civilians all over the world to larger, military-grade ones. They're versatile and expected to play a significant role in future fights.

One Ukrainian soldier who works with drones and unmanned systems told Business Insider that "what we're doing in Ukraine will define warfare for the next decade."

And Western countries are paying attention.

Learning from the war in Ukraine

Pål Jonson, Sweden's defense minister, said one of the key lessons identified by Sweden from war was the need for more autonomous capabilities. At war, Ukraine has been developing artificial intelligence-driven drones and other autonomous systems. There's tremendous innovation underway in the drone space.

"The scale and volume and also how quick technological developments have been taking place inside Ukraine: That made us cognizant that this is an area where we need to invest significantly," he said.

Sweden said last month it had developed drone swarm technology that allows many different-sized drones to work together. This is something many other Western nations are working on as well with industry partners.

Sweden, like other NATO countries, is also investing in counter-drone technology and armed drones, Jonson said. "This is something we've been laser-focusing on."

Jonson said swarm drones took less than a year when it would typically take five. He said "we were laser-focused on developing this capability quickly to get this in the hands of the warfighter as quickly as possible."

The speed was possible because Sweden used a "slightly unconventional" process, including close collaboration between Sweden's military, its procurement agency, and other bodies.

Sweden joined NATO in March 2024, abandoning decades of neutrality in direct response to Russia's invasion.

It is among the members that exceed the 2% of GDP defense spending guideline set by NATO, and its military was designed to counter Russia. It has repeatedly warned the alliance needs to be prepared for a possible Russian attack. Jonson said last year that Russia "poses a threat to Sweden, as it does to the rest of NATO," adding that "we cannot rule out a Russian attack on our country."

Sweden's betting big on drones, and it isn't the only NATO ally doing so. The UK and Latvia founded a "drone coalition" last year to procure drones for Ukraine. It has 17 members, including France, Germany, Italy, and Canada, with support from members reaching around $1.8 billion last year.

Those lessons are being used at home as well to boost defense. Latvia is building a "drone army" for its own military. Andris Sprūds, Latvia's defense minister, told BI that the country is strengthening its drone capabilities "at all levels of the National Armed Forces."

He said working so hard on the coalition isn't helping just Ukraine. Because Latvian companies are making some of those drones, and because drone technology is developing and being adapted so quickly, that work has been hugely helpful for Latvia's own defense.

He said the coalition has "made a significant contribution to the development of Latvia's drone industry."

And in Ukraine, he said, drones have "proven themselves to be critical in modern warfare."

Getting ready for a drone fight

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said last month that drones are changing the way war is fought, identifying this shift as a key observation from the war in Ukraine.

He said NATO is using drone tech in its operations in the Baltic Sea to defend against Russian hybrid attacks alongside "more traditional technology" like ships and aircraft.

He also told NATO allies in December to be ready for a drone fight, noting that the "Ukrainians are fighting against Russian swarms of drones. That's what we need to be prepared for."

There is a danger of moving too fast. Drone and counter-drone technology and tactics are rapidly evolving in Ukraine. Building too many drones too early without the ability to make improvements could see some systems become obsolete.

But Warfare experts say the key is to be ready, to have an industry that is monitoring, learning, and evolving too and ready to produce on a large scale, as well as a military that's trained and ready to incorporate and use drones when needed.

Jonson said he advised all allies to invest in drone and counter-drone technology "because this is an aspect of contemporary warfare that has become very clear, has a very significant role on the battlefield in Ukraine."

European defense spending has soared, and many European countries say they'll spend much more, noting it is necessary. The timing is key for Europe, not just with Russia threatening the continent but with US President Donald Trump stepping back from European defense.

Sprūds said: '"We have to invest in our defense already today — this means increasing defense funding, ramping up production, boosting our resilience, and supporting Ukraine as it fights for all of us."

• The West has long focused on producing expensive, powerful military equipment.
• But defense ministers warn that Russia has shown why more of the cheaper weaponry is needed.
• Denmark's defense minister told BI it was "one of the lessons learned coming out from Ukraine."

The Ukraine war has shown that fighting major, protracted conflicts demands more than exquisite weapons. It demands cheap weaponry in bulk.

The West has long prioritized developing and fielding the most expensive, sophisticated weaponry, but to confront near-peer rivals like Russia or China, it also needs cheap, throwaway weapons it can rapidly build a lot of, current and former NATO officials said.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, who until late last year was the foreign minister of Lithuania, a NATO ally next to Russia, described the war in Ukraine as one of "high quantities." And there are important lessons in that.

He told Business Insider that while the West has focused on new weapons that are expensive and time-consuming to manufacture, the Russians are "building something that's cheap, that's expendable, that's fast."

Pål Jonson, Sweden's defense minister, told BI that the US and Europe "are grappling with" the cost. He said that part of the problem is decades of underinvestment in weapons.

Insufficient and inconsistent demand often results in inefficient production, straining defense industries and triggering cost increases. Over time, industrial capacity is hollowed out, causing backlogs and shortages.

By ordering more, "we also expect a per unit price to fall," Jonson said.

There's a balance to all of this, as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte suggested last month. He said that "speed is of the essence, not perfection." Rutte said it's about "getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction."

High-intensity conflicts chew up men and matériel, demanding quantity, not just quality, from armies. Cheaper weaponry has played a big role in Ukraine, where low-cost drones have destroyed pieces of weaponry worth millions. Russia has also turned to weapons like cheap drones and loitering munitions and glide bombs, reserving the more sophisticated precision-guided munitions for higher-value targets.

That's not to say there isn't value in the sophisticated systems. Ukraine has praised the American-made Patriot for its ability to stop weapons no other air-defense system can, but these weapons are few, take up to two years to make, and the interceptors cost around $4 million.

This isn't the weapon for shooting down cheap drones.

Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, told BI the West needs far greater quantities of inexpensive weaponry to meet the threats posed by Russia and China. He said this is "one of the lessons" from Ukraine, which can produce cost-effective weapons and even achieve capabilities comparable to expensive Western systems.

The Russian defense ministry leadership has previously bragged that "our weapons are hundreds of times cheaper than the systems deployed to be used against us."

China, likewise, has a large arsenal of cheap weaponry. A single missile barrage against the US Navy or key outposts in the Pacific could demand tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in interceptors to repel.

War experts have warned that the US could quickly exhaust its supply of essential weapons in a war, which is why the US has been exploring how to build mass with cheaper drones, but it's still a work in progress.

Lessons for the West

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has much to teach Western countries that have spent decades fighting terrorists and insurgencies about what it's like to fight a modern great-power war.

"We haven't prepared for this," Landsbergis said, adding that "we have been preparing for a different kind of war with high precision, high technology, very good aim, but also very expensive."

These conflicts were less demanding. Russia, he said, changed that, and the Ukrainians are seeing it in real time.

The war in Ukraine is a grinding, attritional fight that is tearing through ammunition and weaponry. Russia, like China, has a lot of manpower and machinery to throw into the fight, which is very different from the US and NATO's Global War on Terror.

An American military veteran who fought in Ukraine previously told BI the war is so different from other fights that some Western soldiers have been killed because they expected it to be easy and did not realize their training had not prepared them for this war.

Watching Ukraine, Western militaries are changing some of their priorities, reviving old tactics, like putting a greater emphasis on trench warfare, and exploring new ones, such as looking at the value of low-cost attritable systems like drones to augment their armed forces for future fights.

European leaders have pushed for more spending on defense as the Russians threaten to attack deeper into the continent and launch hybrid warfare attacks against NATO.

Landsbergis said Russia is "probably more dangerous than it has ever been. So if there was ever a time not to be complacent, it is now." He said Europe needs to prepare because "the most dangerous times are up ahead."

Lithuania's defense spending is among the highest in NATO as a proportion of its GDP, and it, along with Estonia, has pledged to take that figure to 5%, a figure US President Donald Trump has advocated for while proposing stepping back from European defense.

Warfare experts and strategists previously told BI that how Russia is fighting shows that Europe and the US need to invest in a higher quantity of weapons instead of focusing solely on a smaller number of high-quality weapons.

Retired Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, a warfare strategist, said that "we just have not been stockpiling weapons" for a major, protracted conflict like the war in Ukraine, but "to be frank, Russia and China have been.'"

European defense spending has soared, though European leaders, as well as the head of NATO, stressed at the recent Munich Security Conference that more needs to be done.

The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, warned at the conference that European production issues urgently need to be addressed, telling gathered leaders that Ukraine was able to produce weaponry "faster and cheaper" than anywhere else in Europe even though it's at war.

"We have a problem, friends, if a country at war can produce faster than the rest of us," she said.

• Ukraine can make weaponry "faster and cheaper" than elsewhere in Europe, Denmark's prime minister said.
• "We have a problem, friends, if a country at war can produce faster than the rest of us," Mette Frederiksen said at the Munich Security Conference.
• Europe's defense spending has soared in recent years, but problems remain.

Denmark's prime minister has said Ukraine is able to produce weaponry "faster and cheaper" than anywhere else in Europe despite being at war, something she said should alarm the West.

Speaking on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, attended by Business Insider, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that Europe must ramp up production efforts going forward, working with the US to do so.

"We have a problem, friends, if a country at war can produce faster than the rest of us," she said. "I'm not saying we are at wartime, but we cannot say we are at peacetime anymore. So, we need to change our mindset."

Frederiksen added that Europe needed "a sense of urgency" and must reduce legislation and bureaucracy to ensure Ukraine "will get what they need, but also to ensure that we are able to protect ourselves."

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine has ramped up domestic arms production, producing increasing numbers of homemade products such as missiles, howitzers, and drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy previously said that 30% of the military equipment Ukraine used in 2024 was domestically made.

Denmark has spearheaded a major project to make more weaponry in Ukraine, giving Frederiksen a particular insight into Ukraine's production efforts.

While Frederiksen did not point to specific figures, Ukraine's defense industry has boomed, matching or even outpacing Europe in some areas.

The widespread use of drones on the battlefield has seen Ukraine become a leader in drone production, with Kyiv saying the country produced more than 1.5 million first-person-view drones in 2024.

Ukraine also said it made 2.5 million mortar and artillery shells from January to November 2024, while the EU said it would make around 2 million artillery shells in 2025.

Europe has significantly increased defense spending and production in recent years, but some officials say much more needs to be done.

Dovilė Šakalienė, the Lithuanian defense minister, told Business Insider in Munich that "Europe needs to up our defense spending very fast and very significantly to be able to stand on equal footing with the United States."

Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorius, also addressed the issue over the weekend, saying, "The critics are right that we have to do more and that we did too little in the years before, much too little."

Mark Rutte, NATO's Secretary General, has also frequently called on European members of the alliance to boost military spending.

Speaking in Munich, he said the US was "right" to think "we have to step up, we have to spend more."

He added that both the US and Europe were "not producing nearly enough" and that Russia produces more ammunition in three months than NATO does in a year.

But Vice President JD Vance, also appearing in Munich, seemed unmoved by Europe's pledges, and used his speech to attack what he called free speech violations in Europe. Vance said it was "great" that Europe was planning to boost defense spending but that he was more worried about the threat to Europe from "within" rather than Russia.

For his part, Trump has long called for Europe to spend more on defense, threatening to leave NATO if that did not happen and even suggesting before he was re-elected that he would allow Russia to attack NATO members that don't spend enough on defense.

Some countries have already taken big steps toward boosting spending. In 2024, Poland led the alliance in defense spending as a percentage of GDP, with Warsaw investing more than 4% of its economic output in defense.

Lithuania and Estonia have also both pledged to increase their own defense spending to 5% of GDP, saying that while they agreed with Trump's demands, they were not taking that step solely because of the president but because of Russia's threat.

But the future of the US-Europe alliance appears at risk over more than just defense spending. Trump's team in recent days suggested Europe could be sidelined in negotiations between Russia and the US on Ukraine and that it was "unrealistic" that Ukraine could get back all territory occupied by Russia.

Despite rising tensions, many leaders said in Munich that there were still opportunities to keep working with the US to combat Moscow.

Kristrún Mjöll Frostadóttir, the prime minister of Iceland, said that "it's easy to become very negative" about the US-Europe relationship and called the situation "uncomfortable" as Ukraine's sovereignty is at stake. But "that doesn't mean relations with the US have to be bad," she continued.

Šakalienė added that while Trump had "unique" and "unexpected" negotiating tactics, that wasn't necessarily a negative thing as "playing by the rules does not work with Russia."

As many other European officials said over the weekend, the US also needs Europe and its capabilities as an ally, she went on.

• One of the Baltic nations on the border with Russia supports Trump's call for members to spend 5% of GDP on defense.
• Estonia's foreign minister told BI his country would meet that target, but not because of Trump.
• Estonia has been pioneering in supporting Ukraine and urging other members to boost defense spending.

A NATO ally sharing a border with Russia is glad to see US President Donald Trump pushing alliance members to spend more on defense. The country's foreign minister says this is a significant need, considering the threats from Moscow.

Estonia, an EU member nation and one of Ukraine's staunchest supporters, is going to be boosting its own spending, but not simply to satisfy Trump. Margus Tsahkna, the Estonian foreign minister, told Business Insider that his country would start spending 5% of its GDP on defense because of "real needs."

Trump announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month that he wants NATO allies to dramatically increase defense spending from the previous goal of 2% to 5% of their GDP. There have been reports he would accept 3.5%, which is close to what the US spends now. Some nations, however, are still below original expectations.

Estonia and Lithuania, both Baltic states, told the Financial Times after the event that they would increase spending.

Tsahkna told BI that Estonia has "been increasing our defense spending over the years." He added that Trump is "asking the right thing" and that he has long agreed with the US president that more NATO members should spend more on defense.

Kęstutis Budrys, Lithuania's foreign minister, told the Financial Times last month that Trump was applying "good and constructive pressure from our strategic and biggest ally in NATO" but said Trump's pressure on the alliance wasn't the only reason his country was making changes.

"It's not the sole reason," the minister said, explaining that "it is existential for us to have real war-fighting capabilities here."

NATO nations near Russia tend to spend more on their defense. For instance, Poland, the highest spender on defense in NATO as a proportion of GDP, said last year, before Trump's comments, that it would spend 5% of GDP on defense in 2025.

Estonia hadn't previously committed to this goal, but the head of the Estonian Defense Forces and its defense minister both floated the possibility last year. The country's defense spending has soared over the years. In 2024, it spent around 3.4% of its GDP on defense, a bit higher than the US. It has been a pioneer in asking other allies to pay more, pushing for the 2% guideline to be raised higher.

Some NATO allies, including Italy, Canada, and Spain, spend less than 2%. That has long been a frequent source of criticism for Trump, who suggested on the campaign trail he would abandon nations that didn't pay their fair share to Russia.

Realities of the Russian threat

Many NATO allies have notably increased their defense spending in recent years, but Russian aggression rather than Trump's pressuring of allies appears to be the driving factor, as experts and officials previously told BI.

Estonia's spending boost "all comes from the real needs," Tsahkna said.

"We face them," he said of the Russians, adding that his country won't allow itself to be defenseless. He said that Estonia does not plan to cede "any meter of NATO territory" to Russia and must build the strongest deterrence while also being "ready to act from the first second."

Estonia, along with neighbors Latvia and Lithuania, have long warned Russia threatens the West, even before Ukraine launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. By that point, Russia had invaded neighboring Georgia and Ukraine already.

Where Tsahkna and Trump diverge is on Ukraine. Estonia is one of Ukraine's biggest supporters, giving Ukraine more aid as a proportion of its GDP than any other country and advocating that partner nations give it all the weaponry and support they can.

Former President Joe Biden supported Ukraine but held back on providing certain types of equipment. Trump, however, has signaled he simply wants an end to the war and has previously been critical of US support for Ukraine. Trump has also questioned US support for NATO.

But Tsahkna sees Trump's NATO spending push as a positive.

"The border states cannot only carry the burden," he said, referring to his country and its neighbors. He said many NATO members' spending is not presently rooted in "reality."

More work to do

Tsahkna said it is fair to ask countries to spend as a percentage of their GDP, calling it an "honest figure." The figure "measures how much your economy, society, your people are paying," he said. "It doesn't matter that you're a smaller or bigger country."

Estonia has a population of just 1.4 million people — roughly 257 times smaller than the US and 60 times smaller than Germany. While it spends proportionately on defense, the impact on NATO's abilities is smaller. But it makes a big impact in its warnings on what NATO is facing from Russia.

Spending money on defense, Tsahkna said, "is something we have to face." Countries should not make excuses, he said, adding that everyone's budget is tight.

To meet its objectives, Estonia has cut public spending and raised taxes. Last month, its parliament adopted a new defense tax that will last until December 2028. He said the people are willing to pay because they remember life under the Soviet Union.

"We still remember how it was to live without freedom," he said.

Russia has repeatedly threatened to attack the West, and many countries have warned that an attack could come. As is, some already see war underway. Russia has been accused of carrying out hybrid attacks, like arson and assassination attempts, in Europe.

Tsahkna said that he has observed a "change of mentality" in Europe over the last few years. "They're taking the Russian threat very seriously and also understand as well that Russia will remain a threat in the future as well," he said, but the continent needs to bolster its industries and strengthen its defenses.

• Russia's military has been hammered in its invasion of Ukraine.
• But that doesn't mean it wouldn't attack the West, officials and warfare experts warned.
• Estonia's ex-foreign minister said Russia was "probably more dangerous than it has ever been."

Russia's military has suffered severe losses in Ukraine, and nearly three years since it launched its full-scale invasion, its soldiers remain locked in a brutal slog. But the West can't rest easy.

Moscow has repeatedly threatened the NATO alliance, and Russia is on a war footing, rebuilding and reconstituting its army, manufacturing more weapons, and even joining forces with nations hostile to the West.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, who served until late last year as the foreign minister of Lithuania, a European Union and NATO member bordering Russia, spoke with Business Insider about how Russia has been investing heavily in its war machine.

The Russians are "not just repairing the tanks from the battlefield, but they're also building ones," he said. "They're building drones" and have had years to test and experiment. They have experienced large-scale modern combat while the West has focused more on counterterrorism than on preparing for a major war with a near-peer adversary, letting some skills needed for the former atrophy.

"I would probably say that Russia is probably more dangerous than it has ever been," Landsbergis said.

Don't ignore Russia

Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia Programme, told BI that Russia's struggles in Ukraine didn't preclude the possibility of a Russian attack elsewhere.

Giles said that assuming Russia's setbacks in Ukraine meant it wouldn't launch an attack elsewhere "ignores Russia's habit of convincing itself wrongly that it's capable of doing something and then launching the attack anyway."

Regardless of whether Moscow gets it right or wrong, "the consequences are devastating," he said.

He also noted that heavy troops losses, which Russia sees as cheap assets, had not deterred Russia from continuing its attack on Ukraine.

Many of the professional soldiers whom Russia started this war with are now gone, along with tremendous amounts of equipment.

The UK's minister for the Armed Forces said in December that the UK thought more than 750,000 Russian military personnel had been killed or wounded since it began its full-scale invasion in late February 2022. Ukrainian estimates are even higher. Russia often relies on expendable forces and decades-old equipment pulled from storage to plug holes in its army.

But Russia's military is far from hollowed out.

Its economy and industry are on a war footing and working overtime to rebuild and rearm, and Russia, as the top US general in Europe said in the fall, has forces, such as strategic aviation assets and submarine forces, that "have been barely touched" by the war. That general, Christopher Cavoli, the commander of US European Command, also said the Russian army had grown.

"The narrative that Russia has depleted is the most dangerous one," Landbergis said. "Honestly, I think that Russia is not just not depleted. I think that it's clearly on the warpath."

He said Russia had "way more personnel than" it had before the war, and while those newer service members have much less training than the soldiers Russia had at the beginning, they are still getting invaluable experience.

George Barros, a warfare expert at the Institute for the Study of War, said Russia "has the readiness and the capability to be able to posture and potentially attack members of NATO's eastern flank," which includes Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Andris Sprūds, Latvia's defense minister, told BI "this war has taught us that even a weakened Russia is still a dangerous Russia."

"Although Russia's efforts are currently focused on the war in Ukraine, this is not the time to relax and let our guard down," he said, adding that "we estimate that Russia will reconstitute its military capacity within the next five years' time; therefore, we must do everything to prepare against a potential attack."

On a war footing

Many European countries are sounding the alarm that Russia may act against them.

Sweden started giving citizens a booklet advising them how to prepare for war, and its defense minister recently warned that while Russia's forces were "tied up in Ukraine," Russia "poses a threat to Sweden, as it does to the rest of NATO," adding: "We cannot rule out a Russian attack on our country."

Poland's foreign minister also said last year that he would not be surprised if Russia attacked his country.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a defense expert and a former commander for the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear forces, told BI that Russia, after being "hammered" in Ukraine, was most likely not in a position to attack conventionally.

But "the Russian war machine is spun up at the moment," he said, so Russia could be a more serious threat in five to 10 years. He said NATO had "overwhelming power" to meet an attack, but Russia could still cause significant damage.

Attacks have already started

European officials say Russian attacks have started, reporting hybrid attacks like cyberattacks, arson, assassination efforts, and attacks on infrastructure linked to Russia.

"Putin is already waging attacks in Europe and testing us and pushing the red lines," Margus Tsahkna, the Estonian foreign minister, told BI.

Barros said the Russian hybrid attacks were "acts of war that we decide not to respond to."

If the West does not send a strong signal to Russia to stop, Landsbergis said, Russia will escalate. "With no clear repercussions for the actions, they're incentivized to go even further."

Landsbergis said his country was preparing for a time when Russia would look elsewhere in Europe. Estonia is doing the same and is, Tsahkna explained, now targeting spending 5% of its GDP, proportionately more than the US, on defense because of "real needs."

That share of GDP, now targeted by both Estonia and Lithuania, would be the highest of any NATO ally.

Some European leaders and warfare experts warn the continent is not producing enough ammunition and weaponry to deter or counter Russia, despite increasing production rates. Tsahkna said Europe needed "to invest in our defense industry, our capabilities."

Sprūds, Latvia's defense minister, said that "we have to invest in our defense" by "increasing defense funding, ramping up production, boosting our resilience, and supporting Ukraine as it fights for all of us."

The Baltic states have been on the forefront of the effort. Ultimately, Landsbergis said, "we need to prepare, and the most dangerous times are up ahead."

• Now is the "worst possible time" for the West to stop supporting Ukraine, a former top US general said.
• Russia's fight in Ukraine is hurting its military and economy.
• "Russia is in very bad shape, not just from their military, but also their economy," Mark Hertling said.

Given the state of Russia's military and economy, now would be a bad time for the West to stop supporting Ukraine and reduce the pressure, a former top US general told Business Insider.

"It's the worst possible time right now," said Mark Hertling, a retired US Army lieutenant general and a former commander of United States Army Europe. "Let me emphasize that," he said, "I really believe that Russia is in very bad shape, not just from their military, but also their economy."

The reelection of former President Donald Trump has raised the possibility that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could, at least temporarily, end, as he has repeatedly pledged to resolve the conflict quickly through negotiations. He has threatened Russia with new economic penalties, but he has also been very critical of US aid to Ukraine. Some assistance has already been cut.

Supporting Ukraine is considered by many Western countries as a way to weaken Russia's military and to stop it from attacking elsewhere in Europe or NATO, as it has threatened to do.

Hertling said that, given Russia's situation at the moment, "this is by far the worst time to take away support from the Ukrainians." He explained that he supported efforts to end the conflict but not by ending support for Ukraine.

"This is the time right now to continue to put pressure on the Russian government and Mr. Putin specifically and end this thing," he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Time for a show of strength

Many world leaders have said that unrelenting support for Ukraine and strength are needed to end the conflict, to signal to Putin that he cannot win by grinding down Ukraine's military or tiring its international partners.

Margus Tsahkna, the foreign minister of Estonia, a European Union and NATO member that borders Russia, told BI that, indeed, the condition of Russia's military and economy made this a terrible time to stop supporting Ukraine.

He added that the West should support Ukraine, at least in part, because it is fighting Russia on behalf of the West. "Ukrainians are not fighting only for themselves and for us, but instead of us," Tsahkna said, sharing that Estonia has given Ukraine more support as a percentage of its GDP than any other international partner.

He said the West needs to stop Putin or change his goals, "and the cheapest and more efficient way is doing in Ukraine because Ukraine is not asking our troops to come there and fight."

Russia has repeatedly threatened to attack elsewhere in Europe, and it has held back some combat capabilities that warfare experts said it could use in another conflict.

Tsahkna said that putting additional sanctions on Russia and targeting oil prices while preserving support for Ukraine would be a way to erode Russia's position ahead of any peace talks, "to push Ukraine into a strong position and weaken Putin to change the goal. All the opportunities, they're there."

"The peace must come through strength," he said, repeating a phrase from the Reagan era of which Trump is fond: peace through strength.

A weakened Russia

Russia's economy has suffered since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Inflation has risen, the labor supply has shrunk, and the value of its currency, the ruble, has fallen. Sources told Reuters this month that Puin is increasingly worried about his country's economy, which is on a stressed wartime footing.

Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist and former fellow at the Atlantic Council, said this month Russia's financial reserves could run out before the end of the year.

Russia has published positive economic data, but analysis by economists in Sweden found issues, reporting that Russia's data did not stand up to scrutiny. Some economists have said, however, that Russia doesn't appear to be moving toward any sort of collapse like the Soviet Union experienced. They say parts of its economy actually appear to be encouraging.

But there's been a negative impact, and Russia's military has suffered, too.

While it has increased its weapons production, it is still not producing enough for the war and has taken decades-old equipment, like early Cold War tanks, out of storage.

It has suffered tremendous troop losses. Ukraine, casualty estimates from which tend to run higher than others, said this month that Russia had lost 833,000 troops in Ukraine since it began its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Lower estimates are still high.

The trained, professional army that Russia started the war with is gone. Though it has, by some observations, reconstituted, losses are reaching a point where they outpace replacement. Russia has consistently been sending newer recruits with little to no training straight into a grinder.

Those losses don't seem to phase it, though. And it is also receiving help from Iran and North Korea to maintain its war machine. Ukraine is standing between it and Europe.

Many Western leaders and analysts have warned that the West is not sufficiently preparing for the possibility that Russia will follow through on its threats.

Hertling said of Russia's threat that the West "definitely needs to take it seriously" and that the West needs to increase its arsenals, just in case it needs them.

What Trump will do about Russia is unclear. This month, he told Putin to "STOP this ridiculous War" and threatened to put new sanctions on goods sold by Russia. But he has repeatedly criticized US assistance to Ukraine, and this week he froze foreign aid, including to Ukraine, for 90 days.

He may also struggle to bring both sides to any sort of agreement that could even pause the fighting. Ukraine wants security guarantees that Russia may not agree to, and Russia has said it is uninterested in negotiations.

• Russia is experiencing repeated struggles with its new intercontinental ballistic missile.
• Russia used to use Ukrainian expertise to work on that type of missile.
• But Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2014 and its 2022 invasion isolated it from that expertise.

Russia's intercontinental ballistic missile program is in trouble, facing persistent struggles with its new Sarmat missile. And it doesn't help that the country has cut off expertise it once depended on by waging war on its neighbor.

"Historically, a lot of the ICBM manufacturing plants and personnel were based in Ukraine," Timothy Wright, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Business Insider.

Ukrainian expertise

Ukraine became independent when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but its defense industry continued to be intertwined with Russia's. Ukraine has expertise in nuclear and missile technology, as well as manufacturing knowledge.

Russia had been decreasing its reliance but hadn't yet severed critical ties when it attacked Ukraine in 2014, leaving it with gaps that could affect development projects.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has developed capable solid-fueled ICBMs. But with Sarmat, it decided to use a liquid-fueled system.

The problem with that "is that the Russians haven't done this in about 30-plus years," Wright said. "They haven't got any recent experience doing this sort of stuff with land-based ICBMs."

Fabian Hoffmann, a missile expert at the Oslo Nuclear Project, told BI that it was "a bit of a question of 'Have they retained the expertise?' because all the people who built their previous missile have retired or are dead."

"Some of them are in Ukraine, which had a big part in the Russian ICBM program," he said. "So that's a major issue."

Wright described Russia's choice to use liquid-fuel technology as "a really weird choice that they made" because it was "something the Ukrainians previously did for them." He said that was "one of the reasons why they're having lots of problems."

The Sarmat is designed to replace the Soviet-era R-36, which NATO calls the SS-18 "Satan." Its earliest version first entered service in the 1970s and has been modified since.

The company that designed and maintained it, Pivdenmash, known as Yuzhmash in Russia, was in what is now modern-day Ukraine. (Russia appeared to target the Pivdenmash plant in an attack with a new missile type in November.)

Ukraine cut ties

Russia wanted to develop more of this kind of expertise and capability itself. "After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia found itself in a position where essentially it was having to rely on external countries to maintain its existing forces and also then contribute to the development of other ones," Wright said.

But doing so was a challenge that took time. "So they continued working with Ukrainians up until 2014," he said.

In March 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region, claiming it as part of Russia despite international outcry, and ignited conflict in Ukraine's east that continued until Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In response to Russia's actions in Crimea, "the Ukrainians pretty much terminated all contracts around the maintenance of ICBMs at that point — so that's where the big cutoff happens," Wright said.

The collapse in cooperation between Ukraine and Russia "accelerated" Russia's efforts to replace the R-36 so it wouldn't rely on Ukraine as much, Maxim Starchak, an expert on Russian nuclear policy and weaponry, wrote in a 2023 analysis.

"All cooperation with Ukrainian contractors ceased," and the responsibility for maintaining the R-36s went to Russia's Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau, Starchak said, adding: "But this was a stopgap solution. Launches ceased, with missiles and warheads simply undergoing annual checks."

Ukraine banned military cooperation with Russia and stopped supplying Russia with any military components in June 2014. That left Russia without much of the expertise it wanted for Sarmat.

Neither of the two strategic-missile developers in Russia — the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau nor the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology — have recent experience developing a liquid-fueled ICBM, Wright said.

Ukraine also made other ICBM components, such as guidance systems and security protocols to prevent the unauthorized detonation of a nuclear device.

Russian military experts had predicted that Ukraine pulling its cooperation with Russia would completely collapse Ukraine's defense industry. And while it did suffer, that industry is now thriving, with homegrown defense companies and major Western manufacturers all working in the country in response to Russia's invasion.

Russia still has many missiles that are hitting Ukraine and pose a big threat to Europe, and it has recently ramped up its missile production. But Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine appear to have continued to harm its missile program. Roscosmos, a Russian space agency that also makes missiles, said last year that canceled international contracts had cost it almost $2.1 billion.

Many countries have put sanctions on Russia in response to the invasion, and the sustained military effort is also hammering Russia's economy. Hoffmann described Russia as having "really restricted monetary means" to fix its missile problems.

Sarmat's problems

Russia's RS-28 Sarmat ICBM seemed to have suffered a catastrophic failure during a September test, appearing to have blown up. Satellite pictures showed a massive crater around the launchpad at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a spaceport in northwestern Russia.

That apparent failure followed what missile experts said were multiple other problems. The powerful missile's ejection tests and its flight testing have both been repeatedly delayed, and it previously had at least two canceled flight tests and at least one other flight test failure, according to the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London.

Russia has poured a lot of money and propaganda into the Sarmat missiles. President Vladimir Putin in 2018 bragged that "missile defense systems are useless against them, absolutely pointless" and that "no other country has developed anything like this."

But it doesn't work right. With the setbacks facing the Sarmat and no other replacement, the R-36 keeps having its life extended. Wright said the missile was "already really, really past its service life." And sooner or later, things are going to fall apart.

Hoffmann said Sarmat's struggle "obviously is proof of the fact that whatever expertise there is in Russia right now, it's not enough to complete this program in a satisfactory way."

• Ukraine took a huge risk attacking into Russia and taking territory last year.
• It has had positives and negatives for both countries.
• But if it still holds enough of the territory as Trump pushes for negotiations it could pay off.

Ukraine's risky gamble to seize Russian territory could ultimately pay off, if for no other reason than the timing.

Ukrainian forces rolled the dice on a gamble and advanced into the Russian region of Kursk in August. They opted to use precious manpower and weaponry in a bold play to divert Russian resources, create a buffer zone, seize the momentum, and take land and prisoners that could be exchanged in future negotiations. The move into Kursk was a shocking development in the Ukraine war, the front lines of which had been static for months.

But the results of the surprise incursion have been mixed. While war experts have said it was a reasonable call given the morale and momentum wins, as well as the upsetting of Russia's war plans, the move hasn't significantly relieved pressure on the front lines in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have struggled to hold a lot of what they captured.

Despite the setbacks, the timing of this thing could make it worthwhile. Right now, Ukraine is holding Russian territory amid a new push to end the war through negotiations.

Whoever holds territory in Kursk "is going to be in the box seat for any ceasefire negotiations," Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a defense expert and a former commander for the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear forces, told Business Insider.

New talk of negotiations

Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a conflict resolution expert at King's College London and a former British diplomat, said this month that for Ukraine, the Kursk operation was "quite deliberate" because it was "trying to take some territory which could lead to bargaining."

And now Trump's re-election has created new talk of efforts to revolve the war through negotiations.

Trump has repeatedly said that he would end the war through negotiations. This week, he said he would put more economic pressure on Russia to get it to make a deal.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also signaled an increased willingness to enter talks.

Zelenskyy said in November the parts of Ukraine still under its own control could be taken "under the NATO umbrella" as part of an agreement that still holds Ukraine's borders as its internationally recognized borders. He said Ukraine could then negotiate the return of its own territory that was still under Russian control "in a diplomatic way."

De Bretton-Gordon said Zelenskyy's comments reinforce that "Kursk is absolutely key."

A "victory plan" Zelenskyy unveiled in October also called for the continuation of Ukraine's work in Kursk, hinting at its value. De Bretton-Gordon said it shows Zelenskyy may be seeing Kursk as "a key bargaining chip."

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI that given Trump is "almost certain" to push negotiations, "it's good to have this bargaining chip." Plus, he said, negotiations are likely to take place sooner than they would have under a Kamala Harris presidency, making it more likely that Ukraine could hold on to a significant chunk of Kursk.

"It could work out well" for Ukraine, he said.

Kursk holds significance for the Russians, as it was a key battle and turning point in World War II. Holding Kursk gives Ukraine, which has often been on its back foot, something it can use in negotations.

Russia may want to fight over Kursk

There's no guarantee it gets to negotiations, though. Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesperson said last month that Russia sees "no grounds for negotiations yet." Putin has signaled that he doesn't want to slow down and take his foot off the gas.

George Barros, a conflict expert at the Institute for the Study of War, told BI Kursk "certainly can" play a role in negotiations, but he suspects that Russian President Vladimir Putin would rather fight rather than negotiate for Kursk.

Negotiating over his own territory would be a "massive humiliation for Putin," he said.

Russia hasn't pushed as hard as it could in Kursk. Barros said "it's quite clear to me that Kursk has not been a primary objective." Were that to change, it could have significant effects.

There are limits to what Russia can do. Focusing on Kursk could mean taking more troops out of Ukraine — something Ukraine wants as it takes the pressure off its forces. That might open the door for Ukraine to take back more of its own territory. It's hard to know.

Negotiations might still be a long way off

If there are negotiations, they may not be immediate, and Ukraine will need to be holding a good-sized chunk to use Kursk as a bargaining chip.

Ukraine has lost much of what it held, though warfare experts said it likely gave some of that up willingly to strategically defend other parts. Some experts are still bullish about what Ukraine is holding. De Bretton-Gordon, for instance, said "Ukraine's still holding a significant amount."

And Ukraine also executed a new offensive push in Kursk this month. The move was "likely to grant Kyiv diplomatic leverage," Can Kasapoğlu, a political-military expert at the Hudson Institute, wrote recently.

But for the gamble to pay off for Ukraine in terms of timing, Ukraine still needs to be holding ground if negotiations turn real — something Trump advisors said could take months more. That could be a tall order, but with the possibility of talks being openly discussed, that makes Kursk even more important.

• Putin is repeating a Soviet-era mistake, which is ruining Russia's economy, Poland's foreign minister said.
• Speaking at Davos, Radoslaw Sikorski said Putin was overspending on the military and bankrupting Russia.
• "He was very insistent that this mistake should not be repeated. And he's doing exactly that," he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is copying Soviet-era approaches that bankrupted the USSR and that he used to criticize, according to Poland's foreign minister.

Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Radoslaw Sikorski said "Putin is repeating the mistakes of Soviet leadership" in regards to his invasion of Ukraine.

"The Soviet Union took on the West and lost," he said.

Sikorski said that Putin "is on the record saying that under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union overspent on the military and bankrupted the country."

He said Putin was "very insistent that this mistake should not be repeated. And he's doing exactly that."

Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union from the 1960s until his death in 1982, is credited with failing to reform the USSR and leading it into a period of stagnation, with increasing global tensions due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Putin has, in the past, lamented the economic state of the USSR.

In February 2024, Putin pledged to avoid a similar economic situation and said the West was trying to drag Russia into an arms race. He said it was the same tactic the West "successfully" used against the Soviet Union and that between 1981 and 1988, "the Soviet Union's military spending amounted to 13 percent of GDP."

In 2025, Russia plans to spend 6.3% of its GDP on national defense, its highest level since the Cold War. Meanwhile, defense spending will make up 32.5% of its federal budget, up from 28.3% in 2024.

Sikorski said Russia under Putin "has taken on all of Europe, has antagonized countries that were previously friendly or neutral," mirroring its Soviet-era isolation.

Sikorski pointed to the Nordics as an example, which include Sweden and Finland, both of which joined NATO as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's invasion has been condemned across the West, and resulted in sanctions levied on Russia and Western companies pulling out of the country.

Since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has restructured its economy to prioritize its war efforts and is spending huge amounts on its military.

Inflation in Russia has risen while its labor supply has shrunk, and the value of the ruble has fallen.

Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist and former fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Russia's financial reserves could run out before the end of the year.

The Soviet Union's economy collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it finally dissolved in 1991.

Sikorski's comments echoed a warning by the managing director of the International Monetary Fund in February 2024, who said that Russia's economy was "pretty much what the Soviet Union used to look like."

Alexander Kolyandr, a financial analyst and non-resident senior scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis, also told BI in December that for Russia's economy "the overall trend is pretty grim."

"I would say it's overall stagnation akin to what the Soviet Union had at the beginning of the 1980s."

However, other economists say Russia doesn't appear to be moving toward a Soviet-style collapse, and that some parts of its economy appear encouraging.

Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine's economy minister, also said at Davos that Ukraine's economy had fared better than Russia's, but that sanctions on Russia needed to be strengthened to weaken the country ahead of any peace negotiations.

• Ukrainian pilots are using skills that Western pilots have let atrophy, a former F-16 pilot said.
• The West might need to use these skills again in a great-power war, he said.
• Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion is giving the West a slew of lessons.

Ukrainian pilots fighting against Russia's invasion are using flying techniques the West has not really used since the Cold War but might need to revive, a former US F-16 pilot told Business Insider.

Ukraine's fight has offered the West a wide range of lessons that it might need to apply in a great-power conflict. Retired US Air Force Col. John Venable, a former F-16 pilot and defense expert at the Mitchell Institute, told BI that one of those lessons is that old techniques — specifically low-altitude flying — might need to be brought back.

In Europe during the Cold War, "we flew low altitude all of the time," Venable said, adding they "were practicing against high-threat situations where you have surface-to-air missiles that can take you down."

Venable retired in 2007 after a 25-year career in the US Air Force, where he flew the F-16 in the US, Europe, the Pacific, and the Middle East. He had more than more than 300 hours of combat time in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

He said low-altitude flying to evade surface-to-air threats can be particularly challenging.

"Your ability to actually fly really low until you actually need to expose yourself in order to deliver ordinance or shoot another aircraft down, that skillset is no small thing to grab ahold of. It takes a while to do that. And in the process, you lose a lot of aircraft, you lose a lot of pilots because of collision with the ground," he said.

The Ukrainians are having to fly this way because of the prolific threats to anything in the air.

Ukrainian pilots "come in really, really low, and then they pop up" to either hit an air or ground target, "and then after they're done dropping their munitions or shooting their missiles, then they have to get right back down into the low-altitude environment."

But "that skillset is no longer a part of the Western way of doing business," he said.

He said the US Air Force "continued to practice low altitude tactics all the way up to Desert Storm" in 1991. Several US aircraft were lost in the early days, so the US Air Force moved to employ medium-altitude tactics. "That was when the service began to move away low-level tactics," Venable said.

The West hasn't had to fly its fourth-gen fighter jets into contested airspace in decades, and stealth platforms like the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter allow pilots to fly at higher altitudes without worrying as much about surface-to-air missiles. But that capability could be eroded.

"There will come a point in the not-too-distant future where even stealth platforms have to incorporate some of these tactics into their engagements," he said, referring to low-altitude flying. "That is something that the United States could actually lean into and start understanding a bit better."

The West hasn't phased out all of its older airframes. In a high-end conflict, those older aircraft would likely need to employ tactics similar to those Ukraine's air force is employing now with its Soviet-era fighter jets and its US-made F-16s.

This alone could justify bringing the tactics back with greater emphasis, but these could be brought back for the stealth platforms, too, Venable said. "Eventually, even our stealth fighters will likely need to go low, at least for portions of their sorties, because of advancements in surface-to-air missile threats."

That point isn't one being completely missed in the West.

A US Air Force fact sheet says "in a world of increasingly sophisticated air defenses, the United States needs to maintain a first-class air force. In combat, many aircraft will operate at altitudes as low as 100 feet and at high airspeeds to defeat ground missile radars and avoid sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, and enemy fighters." It says realistic training is a key priority, but low-altitude flying isn't as common as it was.

The West is learning from Ukraine

The Ukraine war has heavily featured air defense and missiles, which have prevented both sides from freely flying their aircraft.

Warfare experts warn the West needs to boost its own stocks of air defenses in case of a war with Russia, a possibility for which Western leaders say NATO needs to be prepared given Russia's repeated threats.

This conflict resembles one that the West has not faced in a long time. It's a grinding, brutal, and artillery-heavy war with huge losses of troops and equipment and new components the West doesn't appear entirely ready for, like drones.

Russia, despite failures, is a far more formidable opponent in the air, on land, and at sea than the adversaries that most Western countries have faced over recent decades.

A US veteran who has fought in Ukraine previously told BI that some Western fighters who joined the war were killed because they assumed the fight would be easy, as they were used to fighting at an advantage and did not adjust to the realities in Ukraine.

The West is looking toward Ukraine for lessons about how to face Russia if necessary, including what it needs in the air and how much more military equipment is needed.

Ukrainian soldiers who are getting training from Western militaries are also feeding back information to those militaries about Russian tactics and what works well against them and what doesn't.

Even though it's not a one-for-one comparison, Venable said that "we could learn a lot" from Ukraine about fighting Russia in the air. It would be valuable to "pick these pilot's brains and get an idea of what they're facing and how they're going about countering the threats that they're facing," he said.

• Russia is struggling to get its new intercontinental ballistic missile working properly.
• Moscow has put a lot of money and propaganda behind the ICBM.
• Failures leave Russia reliant on older missiles that won't last forever, experts warn.

Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, but it's having trouble getting its newest intercontinental ballistic missile to work. The debacle leaves it dependent on capable but inferior missiles at a time when other major powers are modernizing their nuclear forces.

Russia's new RS-28 Sarmat ICBM appeared to suffer a catastrophic failure during testing in September, with satellite imagery showing a big crater around the launchpad at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

That apparent failure followed what missile experts have described as a host of other issues. Ejection tests and its flight testing were repeatedly delayed, according to the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, and it had at least two canceled flight tests and at least one other flight test failure.

The Sarmat is meant to replace the Soviet-era R-36, which first entered service in 1988. NATO calls the long-range missile, which has been modified over the years, the SS-18 "Satan." Without the new Sarmat, Russia has to rely on older missiles, extending their lives, but that can't go on indefinitely.

Stuck with inferior missiles

Delays to the Sarmat, or even its cancellation, would mean Russia has to keep using older systems as nations like China field new DF-41 ICBMs and the US pushes forward with upgrades for its ICBM force as part of the Sentinel program.

The R-36 is "already really, really past its service life," said Timothy Wright, a missile technology expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, yet the Russians keep having to extend it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the turn of the century they were going to be out of service by 2007, but here they are, still in operation nearly two decades later.

"There's only so much they can do," Wright said. "Parts will start failing at some point." He said the R-36s "will eventually start failing because their parts just will need replacement, and they don't make the parts anymore." If Moscow tried to launch 40 R-36s, he said, "you might not get all 40 out the ground, frankly."

Fabian Hoffmann, a missile expert at the Oslo Nuclear Project, said the R-36 has been "sitting there for a really long time."

Russia was required to reduce the size of its arsenal of missiles under the New START treaty with the US. Hoffman said that Russia could use old parts from those missiles to keep its usable ones running. But the supply is not infinite, he said. "Who knows how much these missiles can still take, how many years?"

There's the possibility Russia would "have to start cannibalizing existing missiles, taking them out of service or retiring them or taking them off what they call combat duty alert, which is where the missile is literally ready to go," Wright said.

Russia has other ICBMs, but the R-36 carries the largest and most strategically significant payload. The Sarmat, as its replacement, will likewise carry a substantial payload.

Big missiles with lots of warheads

The purpose of the Sarmat was "to constitute a big bulk of their warheads in the future," Wright said. The ICBM is a large, long-range weapon able to carry a heavy MIRV payload, meaning multiple independent re-entry vehicles.

The Sarmat has an estimated maximum range of 18,000 miles. It has a ten-ton payload and can carry 10 large warheads or 16 smaller ones, per a Missile Threat fact sheet from the Center of Strategic and International Studies. The R-36 it is meant to replace has a shorter range but similar payload, able to carry 10 multiple independent re-entry vehicles.

Other Russian ICBMs are "much smaller," Wright said. They can't carry the same heavy MIRV payload. Russia's RS-24 Yars ICBM, for example, can only carry three MIRV warheads.

As of May 2023, Russia had 1,674 warheads deployed, with a total stockpile of 4,489, per the CSIS. Many of these are deployed on other missiles and elements of the Russian nuclear triad, which provide it with deterrence, but Russia wants the big missile with the tremendous destructive capacity.

Russia was understood to have 46 R-36s in April 2016. Wright said that "if they then took that missile out of service, then they have a bit of a gap."

"And for Russia, it's important to ensure they have warhead parity with the Americans," he said. "Whatever number the Americans have, the Russians want it as well."

Russia appears to be keeping its warheads limited in accordance with the New START treaty. But if that changes, and it may as Russia has suspended its involvement with the treaty, Russia may want to deploy more warheads. Without the Sarmat, Russia will need to find other places for its warheads.

The Sarmat's problems

Hoffman said the most recent Sarmat test was "catastrophic." He said that "it's not even like the missile failed to hit its target and you can say, 'Oh, the guidance system didn't really work.' No, the whole thing blew up."

That means it was either a freak accident, or "there's something fundamentally wrong with the propulsion system, which is of course catastrophic," he said. "And so if I was Russia, I think at this point I would be concerned about that."

Some experts have warned that Russia's struggles could make it desperate, making problems more likely.

Wright said he can't see Russia deciding to cancel the Sarmat program. He said Putin "has invested a lot of propaganda into the system. When he unveiled it in 2018, it was all these fantastic reasons why it's so good."

Putin bragged in 2018 that "missile defense systems are useless against them, absolutely pointless" and that "no other country has developed anything like this."

The Russians have also dumped a lot of money into this project, making cancellation unpalatable.

Hoffman agreed, saying Russia had little choice given the state of its older missiles. It wants Sarmat for propaganda reasons, and "it's also just desperation in terms of: 'What else would there be?'"

But big delays in getting Sarmat operational would likely cause problems for Russia, with nothing in line to replace the Sarmat.

"Sarmat's designed to fulfill a very specific purpose, which is to essentially have lots of warheads on top of it," Wright said, and there is no direct replacement in Russia's arsenal or in the works.

• Ukraine said one of its F-16 pilots downed a record-breaking six cruise missiles in one mission.
• That shows how much Ukraine's air force has developed, a former US F-16 pilot told BI.
• All of its systems had to work well, and it showed how Ukraine is fighting more like the West.

A Ukrainian pilot's record-breaking shootdown of six missiles with an F-16 offers insight into how much its air force has developed as it fights back against Russia's invasion.

Throughout much of the war, Ukraine's air force faced one of the world's biggest air forces with a fleet of older, Soviet-designed combat aircraft while begging the West for F-16s readily available in NATO arsenals.

The US, however, refused to allow the transfer, even as other allies pushed to give Ukraine the aircraft. Washington felt they would arrive too late, that training would take too long, and the jets could prompt Russian escalation. But it eventually relented.

Early usage of the aircraft in combat saw the loss of an airframe and the Ukrainian pilot, raising questions about how much of an impact the jets could make.

But Ukraine's assertion that one of its F-16 pilots downed six Russian cruise missiles in one mission — which it said is a record for the American-made fighter jet — shows how much Ukraine's air force has developed, a former American F-16 pilot told Business Insider.

Responding to missile threats requires coordination and quick reaction. Ret. Col. John Venable, a 25-year veteran of the US Air Force and a former F-16 pilot, told BI the pilot being alert, able to get a notification, and get out in time to intercept all of those missiles "says a lot" about "the capabilities are of the Ukrainian Air Force."

The reported intercept spoke to "their ability to actually detect" cruise missiles and "then scramble fighters in order to successfully intercept them." he said. Cruise missiles do not fire back like a Russian jet would, but it was a very impressive showing of Ukraine's air force.

Responding like this was "no simple task," Venable said, which required all of Ukraine's command and control systems, as well as its sensors and radars, to work together. He said that to "actually find, fix and engage threats that are inbound to your nation, that says a lot about their command and control."

Fighting like the West

Venable said the event shows how much Ukraine has been fighting like the West does.

He said Russia's "command and control apparatus is basically scripted," which means they have an issue letting pilots "go out and actually do what you are required to do without someone doing a puppeteer thing over the top of you."

The Ukrainian F-16 pilot pulling off what Ukraine says they did "says a lot about how far the Ukrainians have come" from their Soviet start and that "scheme of close control."

Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and a former Royal Australian Air Force officer, told BI the intercept showed the pilot had "good training" since he was "able to react quickly to a changing situation."

"Russian pilots have a reputation of needing to receive orders from their ground controllers,'" he said. This event demonstrates Ukrainian pilots "have adopted Western methods of operating both independently and aggressively when the situation is right."

For instance, Ukraine said the pilot, who said he was out of missiles and short on fuel, made a quick decision to keep fighting, pursuing two more of the Russian missiles with guns, a riskier engagement requiring control of the plane and confidence a safe airfield was nearby.

Ukraine, generally, has adopted a more Western style of fighting, with individuals and leaders making quick decisions away from the central command. But Russia, though it has been learning, has been hampered by not delegating such responsibility, making it slower to respond to battlefield developments and even losing commanders as a result.

Ukraine's F-16 pilots have received training from a coalition of countries, including the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, the US, and Romania.

The exchange is not one-sided. While many of Ukraine's soldiers have received training from Western allies, those allies say Ukraine is teaching them about tactics and how to fight Russia, too.

Western officials and warfare experts say Ukraine's tactics and successes reveal lessons that the West should learn for fighting Russia.

These lessons have been something of a trade-off as the West provides more gear and as Ukraine signs agreements with countries like the UK, Denmark, and France, with the war showing vulnerabilities in systems and tactics.

The Westernization of Ukraine's army aids its ambition to join NATO, an uncertainty while the country is at war with Russia and a question in the aftermath.

A small air force

Before Russia's full-scale invasion, some expected Ukraine's air force would be immediately destroyed in a war with Russia.

Russia attempted to wipe out Ukraine's air force at the start but failed, with Ukraine able to disperse many jets and keep them intact. Those surviving aircraft have played key roles in its defense, even as the skies remain heavily contested.

Ukraine's air force is expanding and becoming more Western with the arrival of F-16s and a pledge from France to send Mirage aircraft.

Warfare experts say Ukraine has nowhere near enough F-16s to make a difference against Russia, and the few it does have are older versions, less powerful than what many allies have and Russia's best jets. Ukraine appears to be using its few F-16s primarily to help its air defenses battle missile threats rather than sending them on risky missions against Russian jets or critical ground targets.

The Ukrainian jets, 50-year-old aircraft made by Lockheed Martin, typically fly with a loadout of four air-to-air missiles and are equipped with bolt-on self-defense pylons for detecting incoming missiles.

Venable said the air-defense mission has met his expectations for how Ukraine would use them.

Ukraine, Venable said, does not have enough F-16s, nor does it have the support systems or upgrades, to be able to use them aggressively to change the shape of the war.

Ukraine's air force is not perfect, Venable said. But the progress so far is clear. "As far as being able to intercept inbound missiles and being able to engage them, this says a lot about their capabilities."

• Ukraine launched a risky attack on Russia last year, seizing swathes of territory in Kursk.
• Ukraine was able to go on offense and seize the initiative, but the impact hasn't been felt at home.
• Warfare experts said the move was likely worthwhile, but it remains to be seen if that holds true.

Ukraine's ambitious advance into Russia's Kursk region last summer was a tremendous risk.

Whether the gamble was ultimately worth it is something that military historians are likely to long debate. For Ukraine, there have been some signs it could double down with a new offensive.

There have been costs, but the Kursk assault offered the Ukrainians a chance to break from the slow, brutal, and grinding defensive situation at home and go on offense, as well as divert Russian resources. And there is still the possibility this helps Kyiv in potential peace talks.

"It's hard to say until everything plays out, but I would still say it was a good move," Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of Ukraine's actions in Kursk in recent months.

Ukraine's Kursk operation was a chance to change the status quo

Ukraine's Kursk operation was a surprise to war watchers, Ukraine's international partners, the Russian soldiers defending the country's borders, and even many of Kyiv's own troops.

Ukraine said that it was trying to create a buffer zone, strain Russian combat resources, and secure land and prisoners for negotiations with Moscow.

Ukraine was also likely aiming to boost the morale of its tired forces, as well as signal strength to Western nations that may have been growing weary of providing support.

The advance also gave it a shot at seizing the initiative and taking the fight onto Russian soil. Seizing the initiative has long been understood to be key to winning wars.

Without it, like in chess, "you're constantly on the defensive, your adversary boxing you into a corner," George Barros, a warfare expert at the Institute for the Study of War, said.

There's a risk of sooner or later being left with "a series of bad decisions that you'd rather not make," he said. Letting your adversary hold the initiative in a war is "how you end up losing."

Ukraine also proved it had more cards to play in this war.

Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander for the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear forces, highlighted Ukraine's use of drones and effective Ukrainian employment of armored maneuver warfare.

But those maneuvers were costly.

Reported tank losses suggest fighting in Kursk "has chewed up a fairly large portion" of Ukrainian armor assets from Western partner nations, said Matthew Savill, a former intelligence analyst at the UK Ministry of Defence who is now a military-strategy expert at the Royal United Services Institute.

That limits Ukraine's flexibility and the ability to surge forces elsewhere.

There's no guarantee, though, Ukraine would have been able to effectively employ the tanks back on its own soil, where the intense fighting and dense drone coverage have limited their use. Michael Bohnert, a warfare expert at the RAND Corporation, said that taking the tanks to Kursk may have been the most optimal way to use them.

The Ukrainian army was trying to relieve pressure on the front

Russian President Vladimir Putin's initial response was slow, and he didn't turn to the military for a fix, instead relying on a mix of other security groups. As Russia eventually stepped up its efforts to dislodge the assaulting Ukrainian troops, thousands of North Korean troops arrived to fight for Russia.

Russia's delayed, and irregular, reaction meant Ukraine could seize more territory and prepare better defenses, but it also meant that hopes of drawing a significant number of Russian troops away from the Ukrainian front lines were not fully realized.

Russia did not have to dramatically soften its efforts in Ukraine in response to Kursk, and its army has been grinding forward, advancing throughout the fall.

And Ukraine had to pull troops from the front lines at home for Kursk, potentially complicating its own defense. It remains unclear whether it was better for Ukraine to move its forces into Kursk or defend the lines at home.

But there were some good effects for Ukraine on its own soil.

"Ukrainian moves "fundamentally disrupted the Russian combat plans," Barros said, "because the forces and the plans that presuppose their availability were then consumed and taken by the newly imposed requirement for defending Kursk and repelling the Ukrainians from Kursk."

The head of Ukraine's armed forces said in December he had "no choice" but to assault Kursk, arguing he needed to reduce pressure on the fronts in Ukraine and stop Russia from opening a new front in Ukraine's Sumy region.

He said that it reduced the intensity of Russia's attacks across Ukraine, except at Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, areas where the Russians are advancing.

It's been a tough fight for Ukraine to hold ground inside Russia

Much less information is coming out of Kursk than from the fighting inside Ukraine, but Russia's losses have soared since August, per UK intelligence citing the Ukrainian military. Ukraine says that Russia has lost over 38,000 troops and more than 1,000 pieces of equipment in Kursk.

Bohnert said Kursk had been "very costly from the Russian perspective." He said that the losses Russia appears to be accepting there are surprising.

But Russia has been increasingly demonstrating it's willing to tolerate high losses, grinding away at Ukraine with its larger army in a war of attrition.

Ukraine, at the peak of the incursion into Russia, held about 500 square miles of territory in Kursk. But Russia appears to have taken back around half of that, and it's not clear what Ukraine's latest actions there may achieve.

Warfare experts told BI that the Ukrainians may have given up at least some of that willingly, less chained to holding every inch of territory than in their own country. De Bretton-Gordon said Ukraine still holds significant territory, which could prove helpful for the country if the war's end depends on negotiations — something for which president-elect Donald Trump has pushed.

"Whoever holds Kursk probably come the new year is going to be in the box seat for any ceasefire negotiations," said de Bretton-Gordon, adding that he largely views Ukraine's decision to advance into Russia's Kurks to be a "positive."

Beyond serving as a bargaining chip, Kursk also helped to dispel the idea the war was hopelessly stalemated. It also showed that surprise and big gains were possible for Ukraine.

"If enough Western officials and politicians believe that it's hopelessly stalemated, it can't change, then their appetite to continue supporting Ukraine will be destroyed over time. That is the Russian strategy in its entirety," Barros said.

Though some Western nations eventually gave Kyiv new permissions to use their weapons to strike into Russia, supporting Ukrainian operations, Kursk did not result in a huge boost in aid from Ukraine's partners, and it's unclear if it had any significant effects on their long-term thinking.

The push into Russia was a shocking moment and a morale booster, but it hasn't yielded the results Kyiv had hoped for and might not.

Assessing Ukraine's gamble in Kursk

So was Ukraine's Kursk operation worth it? That question's still up for debate.

Based on Ukraine's knowledge at the time of the attack, and what has happened since, Cancian said he would say, "Yes, it was the right thing to do."

Barros said that without Kursk, "you would have the Russians leaning into this attritional style of warfare where they get to keep conducting attacks." And Ukraine would have been leaning into the way Russia wanted to fight.

Savill said that he was "wary of criticizing it from a thousand miles away when they're fighting the existential fight and I'm not."

"The choice to do it was bold," he said. "It did put the Russians on the back foot temporarily. It did show something about what well-resourced Ukrainian forces could do if they identified a weak point." But he also said the decision to hold on to so much of Kursk after that first big advance "might turn out to have been the mistake."

Barros said the question of Kursk being worth it is a "complex question," as "we're looking at a live patient." But ultimately, he said, "it's a good thing that the Ukrainians sought to contest the initiative and impose problems on the Russians."

• Ukraine said one of its pilots downed a record-breaking six cruise missiles in a single mission.
• The pilot said he downed two of them with his gun, something experts said took great skill and risk.
• Getting close enough to shoot down missiles requires skill to avoid getting hit with dangerous debris.

The Ukrainian F-16 pilot said to have shot down half a dozen Russian cruise missiles in a single mission showed remarkable skill, particularly during a risky gun battle, a former US Air Force pilot told Business Insider.

Ukraine's air force command said that an F-16 pilot took out six Russian cruise missiles during a single flight in December, calling it a first for the jet. It said that during the historic engagement, the pilot shot down two missiles with the F-16's M61A1 six-barrel 20 mm cannon.

Ret. Col. John Venable, a 25-year veteran of the US Air Force and a former F-16 pilot, told BI that the pilot's ability to gun down the Russian missiles without putting his own aircraft at risk required a lot of skill.

He said "the fact that he did that without fragging himself" says "a lot about his skill set."

Switching to guns raises risks

Ukraine's F-16s have been repeatedly seen flying with an air-defense loadout of two AIM-9 Sidewinders and two AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles. The country's air force said the pilot had used up all of his missiles and was low on fuel after destroying four Russian missiles, but he then saw another Russian missile going toward Kyiv, Ukraine's capital.

He moved to intercept it, firing his gun at the missile that was traveling over 400 miles an hour, the air force said. There was more than one explosion, and the pilot realized that he had actually eliminated two Russian missiles.

The Ukrainian F-16 pilot, per a translation by RBC-Ukraine, said that there was a danger in doing that because "shooting down cruise missiles with a cannon is very risky because of the high speed of the target and the danger of detonation. But I did what the instructors in the US taught me, and I managed to hit it."

Venable said the risk of debris makes this kind of engagement more dangerous for the pilot. He said that pilots must get close to missiles to get a good shot.

He said that if the intercepting aircraft is behind the target and it explodes when hit, "you're going to be what we call fragged," meaning that the aircraft absorbs some of the explosive debris. Pilots have to come in at an angle. Venable said that there being two missiles meant the situation required greater skill.

Tim Robinson, a military aviation specialist at the UK's Royal Aeronautical Society, likewise said that fighter pilots using guns must get "pretty close" to their target. That brings danger, with cruise missiles "packed with explosives."

"If you're firing at something and it's at close range and that thing goes off — you've got to be pretty aggressive and pretty brave to be doing that," he said.

It takes skill to fly this mission

Retired US Army Maj. Gen. Gordon "Skip" Davis, the former deputy assistant secretary-general for NATO's defense-investment division, told BI "shooting two cruise missiles with aircraft guns is quite impressive."

Venable said that pilots who are shooting at a missile but want to protect their aircraft must approach the missile like they are coming onto a highway from an off-ramp, "where you're at 90 degrees out, and then you start to actually align your car with the highway as that on-ramp turns onto the road."

"That's where you want to take the shot, not when you are right behind the aircraft." And doing that "takes skill," he said.

Ukraine has not commented on the aircraft's state but said the pilot landed at an airfield, indicating it was intact.

Ukraine's air force command said pilots learned to shoot missiles with aircraft cannons in US simulators but never tried it before in combat, the Kyiv Post reported.

Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and a former Royal Australian Air Force officer, told BI the gun kill was "good flying."

He said that it's "easier now with modern radars in fighters than in World War II, but the fighter still needs to close with the cruise missile and fire very accurately."

The jets are likely to continue to fight as missile shields

Battling Russian aircraft would be the better test because they shoot back, but Venable said the reported achievement, which he said was "more than plausible," says a lot "about how far Ukraine's air force has come" and the Ukrainian air force's capabilities.

Kyiv's new F-16s provide added air defense as Russia batters Ukraine with barrages of missiles, hitting major cities and energy infrastructure and killing civilians. The jets support already-strained ground-based air defenses.

This mission carries risks, and Ukraine has already lost at least one of its F-16s and one of its trained pilots.

Mark Cancian, a senior adviser on the International Security Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told BI that Ukraine is facing threats Western pilots haven't.

"None have faced the numbers of simultaneous incoming missiles that the Ukrainians have," he said. "US and Western pilots have faced one or two incoming missiles at a time."

Ukraine has a limited F-16 fleet that arrived later than desired. Partner nations have pledged more than 85, far fewer than what the Ukrainians likely need. Many of the jets, older versions of what Western nations fly, still haven't been delivered.

Ukraine probably won't receive enough fighters to use them the way the West does, but it can use them to strengthen its air defenses.

Venable said Ukraine does not have enough aircraft, stealth platforms, and other assets to be able to really use its jets to press against Russia. He said partners had to be conscious of leaving enough jets in their own fleets.

Col. Yuriy Ihnat, the head of the Ukrainian air force command's public relations service, said Ukraine wants more powerful modifications and missiles for its F-16s to compete with Russia, but said the headline-making intercept showed the skill of Ukrainian pilots and how formidable Ukraine's air force could be with more powerful jets.

• A US think tank estimates Russia lost about 40 troops per square mile seized in Ukraine in 2024.
• Russia's losses in its invasion of Ukraine are thought to have soared toward the end of the year.
• A former Russian president's remarks suggest Russia added just enough troops to replace its losses.

A US think tank on Tuesday estimated that Russia lost about 40 troops per square mile seized in Ukraine in 2024.

The Institute for the Study of War, which has been tracking Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said it had seen geolocated evidence indicating that Russian forces advanced 4,168 square kilometers, or about 1,609 square miles, last year.

In calculating Russia's rate of losses, it used a recent estimate from the Ukrainian military's commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, that 427,000 Russian troops had been killed or injured in 2024.

The slowness of Russia's advance this year — its estimated territory seized is slightly less than the land area of Delaware — has been compared with the rapid gains Ukraine was able to make when it launched an offensive into the Russian region of Kursk in August. Russia, though, has since retaken much of that territory.

While Russia has made steady progress in recent months, taking numerous towns and villages in eastern Ukraine, it has achieved no major symbolic or strategic gains.

The ISW said Moscow made 56.5% of its territorial gains in 2024 from September to November.

Those gains have come at a high cost, with Russian losses thought to have soared in recent months.

The UK Ministry of Defence last month noted estimates from the Ukrainian military that November was a record for Russian losses in the war, with 45,680 casualties — a daily average of about 1,523.

George Barros, a Russia analyst at the ISW, told Business Insider that Russian losses were mounting as they "have been running a very high tempo of operations" since about October 2023.

"The Russians have been, I think, at the expense of high casualties and exhaustion, continuing with a very high tempo of operations, which haven't ceased," Barros said.

Russia's tactics in its invasion have included using its larger military to try to overwhelm Ukrainian positions, often using "meat wave" assaults.

That means Russia may not slow down or stop its efforts even in the face of big losses.

The ISW on Tuesday noted that Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now the deputy chairperson of the Russian Security Council, said in December that almost 440,000 recruits had signed military service contracts with Russia's defense ministry in 2024.

The ISW said this suggested Russia was "likely recruiting just enough military personnel to replace its recently high casualty rates one for one."

• Zelenskyy said 30% of the military equipment Ukraine used in 2024 was domestically made.
• Ukraine is manufacturing more and more of its own weapons to fight back against Russia.
• Western weapons companies have also opened facilities in the country to feed its war efforts.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 30% of the military equipment Ukraine used in 2024 was domestically made, with Western nations' support not enough to push back against Russia's invasion.

Zelenskyy said in a speech on New Year's Eve that "30% of everything our guys had on the battlefield this year – all this was made in Ukraine."

He added that the minds and efforts of people who work in the country's defense industry "have made us stronger."

Ukraine's military industry has soared since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Ukraine is making more and more of its own weaponry, like naval drones, howitzers, and glide bombs. It also manufactures its own missiles and successfully tested its first homemade ballistic missile in August.

An increasing number of Western manufacturers are also setting up operations in Ukraine. These include AeroVironment, an American defense contractor headquartered in Virginia, German arms maker Rheinmetall, and BAE, a major British defense firm.

In his speech, Zelenskyy said that at one facility, he asked a young engineer, "How did you manage to achieve so much? How were these people able to do all of this?"

He said the man joked: "They're not just people, they're missiles."

Ukraine's allies have given the country billions of dollars worth of military support. But Ukraine is facing off against a far larger Russian military, and the war's grinding, brutal nature is seeing both sides expend vast amounts of equipment.

Ukraine has, at times, run critically low on key weaponry and ammunition.

It's currently running short on US-made long-range ATACMS missiles which can hit targets inside Russia, The New York Times reported last week.

Ukraine has repeatedly said that it needs more weaponry and defensive gear in order to protect itself, and warfare experts have accused the West of drip-feeding aid to Ukraine rather than giving it enough to make a major difference on the battlefield.

Soldiers fighting in Ukraine have said that the way military aid arrives can make long-term planning and strategizing a challenge.

President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House could also lead to Ukraine needing to rely more on its own supplies, with Trump previously criticizing the scale of US aid to Ukraine.

• Authorities say a driver deliberately plowed into a crowd of people in New Orleans early Wednesday.
• 15 people were killed, and at least 35 more were injured.
• The suspect is a 42-year-old named Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, the FBI now says.

The man accused of plowing into a crowd in the heart of New Orleans in an ISIS-inspired attack that killed 15 people acted alone, an FBI official said Thursday.

Law enforcement officials identified the suspect in the attack as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a 42-year-old US Army veteran, and have described it as a premeditated act of terrorism.

Officials say he killed 14 people and injured at least 35 more others after driving into the crowd with a rented truck early on New Year's Day and started shooting before being killed in a shootout with police.

At a press conference Thursday, Christopher Raia, an FBI counterterrorism official involved in the investigation, walked back earlier claims that other people may have assisted Jabbar with the attack.

He said officials have since reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance footage and other records, and believe Jabbar acted alone.

"We do not assess, at this point, that anyone else has been involved in this attack except for Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar," Raia said at the New Orleans press conference.

Raia also said investigators have not found any links between the New Orleans attack and a Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas outside a Trump hotel, while cautioning the investigations into each event were still in their early stages. Both trucks were rented through the vehicle-sharing app Turo, and officials say the perpetrator in the Las Vegas attack was an active-duty Army soldier.

"At this point, there's is no definitive link between the attack here in New Orleans and the one in Las Vegas," Raia said.

The truck slammed through Bourbon Street

New Orleans was still reeling Thursday after the driver, later identified as Jabbar, drove a rented Ford pickup truck through the crowd on Bourbon Street at about 3:15 a.m. on New Year's Day.

Several improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were also found near the scene of the attack. An ISIS flag was found in the vehicle's trunk, according to Raia.

Raia said that authorities initially believed other people may have been involved in the attack because of witnesses who said they saw people setting down coolers containing the IEDs.

But surveillance footage showed that Jabbar set down coolers containing two IEDs himself, Raia said. According to Raia, footage showed other people later "checking out" the coolers, but they did not seem to have any role in the attack. Reports of additional IEDs could not be substantiated, Raia said.

Officials had also earlier said that a fire in a New Orleans house, which was rented from Airbnb, may have been where the IEDs were assembled. But authorities said at Thursday's press conference that they now believe the fire is likely unrelated to the attack.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said "information changes" as the investigation continues.

"No one dumps a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and solves it in five seconds," he said at the press conference Thursday.

Jabbar's criminal record, obtained from the Texas Department of Public Safety and viewed by Business Insider, shows two prior arrests in 2002 and 2005. The first was for theft, while the other was for driving with an invalid license. Both were classified as misdemeanors.

Support for ISIS posted on Facebook

At Thursday's press conference, Raia said Jabbar rented the Ford truck in Houston on December 30 and headed to New Orleans on December 31.

He said Jabbar made a series of Facebook posts during his journey expressing support for ISIS and posting a last will and testament.

Raia also said that investigators believe Jabbar joined ISIS before this past summer.

In a statement to Business Insider, the car-sharing app Turo said Jabbar used its service to rent the truck.

"We are heartbroken to learn that one of our host's vehicles was involved in this awful incident," the statement reads. "We are actively partnering with the FBI. We are not currently aware of anything in this guest's background that would have identified him as a trust and safety threat to us at the time of the reservation."

Starting Wednesday evening, Texas authorities performed a search of a location in Houston believed to be linked to Jabbar, the FBI said.

At Thursday's press conference, officials said they had obtained two laptops and three phones connected to Jabbar, which they have been examining.

The agency said it's made no arrests but had deployed specialized personnel, including a SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a bomb squad, to the Houston location.

The search finished early Thursday, with the agency saying that it could not release more information, but that "there is no threat to residents in that area."

Superintendent Anne E. Kirkpatrick of the New Orleans Police Department said during an earlier press conference that a man drove a pickup truck down Bourbon Street "at a very fast pace." Kirkpatrick said the man drove into the crowd intentionally.

She also said the driver shot two police officers, who she said were in stable condition.

Kirkpatrick said it appeared that most of those injured were locals rather than tourists.

Eyewitness accounts

NOLA Ready, the city's emergency preparedness campaign, had initially said there was "a mass casualty incident involving a vehicle that drove into a large crowd on Canal and Bourbon Street."

Kevin Garcia, a 22-year-old who was present at the time, told CNN, "All I seen was a truck slamming into everyone on the left side of Bourbon sidewalk."

He said that "a body came flying at me," and that he heard gunshots.

One witness told CBS that a driver plowed into the crowd on Bourbon Street at high speed and that the driver got out and started firing a weapon, with the police firing back.

Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana said on X on Wednesday that a "horrific act of violence took place on Bourbon Street earlier this morning."

"Please join Sharon and I in praying for all the victims and first responders on scene," he wrote, referring to his wife. "I urge all near the scene to avoid the area."

Bourbon Street, in the city's French Quarter, is a famous party destination.

Some streets in and around the French Quarter were due to be closed for New Year's celebrations, with Canal Street expected to stay open unless traffic got too bad, the local outlet Fox 8 WVUE-TV reported.

As a result of the attack, the Sugar Bowl football game between the University of Georgia and the University of Notre Dame was postponed from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoon.

Local officials tried to assure the public that the city was now safe, with additional law enforcement deployed everywhere.

"The city of New Orleans is not only ready for game day today but also to host large-scale events," New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Thursday.

• There are so many drones in Ukraine that operators sometimes accidentally pick up other feeds.
• Those moments can provide incoming attack warnings and intelligence.
• It is an emerging element within the constantly evolving drone war.

There are so many drones in the sky in Ukraine that drone operators are occasionally stumbling onto drone feeds and picking up unexpected intel. Neither side can be sure though when they are going to luck into this or when the enemy will suddenly get insight into their own activities.

Drones are being used more in Russia's war against Ukraine than in any other conflict in history, including cheap first-person-view drones. They are being used to attack troops and vehicles, complicating battlefield maneuvers, and they're so prolific that ground troops often struggle to sort out which ones are their drones and which belong to the enemy.

Ukrainian drone operators told Business Insider that extensive drone warfare has resulted in unintentional feed switching.

When this occurs, operators on one side of the battlefield can see the feed of the other side's drone — typically airborne devices that can target soldiers and gather intelligence to direct fires. A drone operator in Ukraine said being able to see Russian drone feeds is "useful because you see where the enemy drone that wants to destroy you is flying."

That gives the unit a chance to take defensive action.

Samuel Bendett, a drone expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, described it as the wartime version of a common civilian occurrence. When you drive in your car and have your radio at a certain frequency, your radio can flip between different stations that use the same frequency. That is what is happening right now in Ukraine, Bendett said.

Fight for the spectrum

Jackie, a US veteran fighting in Ukraine, said: "Right now, there are two fights when we're fighting with drones. There's one that you can see on video. And there's one that's completely invisible." That invisible fight is the fight in the electromagnetic spectrum or "fight for the spectrum."

The electromagnetic spectrum can get "full" and get "crowded," he explained. When there are enough drones in an area, you'll have "a lot of the feeds between those drones transferring, basically switching between operators without intent."

When that situation happens, it means "the drone guy would just suddenly see some other drones feed," Jackie said. So when enough drones are in the sky, everyone is "constantly switching feeds between some other drone that they're not flying."

Bendett said it was possible to do this deliberately if you know the frequency your adversary is operating on, but most of the time, he said, it's accidental.

He said this sort of thing happens "because technologies for both sides are similar, and there's only so many operating frequencies you can hop on to actually pilot your drones."

Advantages and disadvantages

As neither side has dominated the electromagnetic spectrum through electronic warfare, both sides are experiencing all the advantages and disadvantages of these developments. Sometimes Ukraine is collecting intel, and sometimes it's Russia.

The feed can help operators helplessly realize an attack is incoming, and "it also can be very informative for drone crews, experienced ones to kind of determine the tactic of the adversary, how far the drone flies, how fast it flies, what's the drone route, what the drone is looking for, and so on and so forth," Bendett said.

But it's a hard thing to plan for given the chaotic nature of these occurrences.

Jackie shared that Ukraine has attempted to "play games with the signals," but Gregory Falso, an autonomous systems and cybersecurity expert at Cornell University, said that "it's probably not predictable when you'd be able to get these capabilities." It's more about seizing the advantage when the opportunity arises.

Switching signals

Falco said it would be difficult to tell if the enemy has access to a feed because "you don't have absolute certainty of where your band is at a given time and where you're projecting."

There are questions about whether this could be taken further, though, going from accidental insight to deliberately pirated drones. Right now, that's more theory than practice.

Whether any Ukrainian or Russian operators could actually get control of the other side's drone, rather than just being able to see through its eyes, probably depends on the drone, Falco said.

He explained that the spectral bands used to see drone feeds are likely very different from the ones that control it. And the bands used to receive signals — that let the operator see what the drone can see — are typically less protected than the ones that send the signals, which is how operators tell drones what to do.

He said the feed switching is "bound to happen" with so many drones in the sky and with different types of electronic warfare in play.

Solutions, Falco said, could involve something like added encryptions for drone feeds. But given the fast-moving, chaotic, and desperate nature of a lot of the fighting and the fact that drone operators can go through multiple drones a day and Ukraine, it may not be worth it. And if that's the case, this kind of thing will keep happening.

He said it was the type of thing civilians would frequently see if there was less regulation. "If we didn't have rules," and the likes of the United Nations body that allocates the radio spectrum didn't exist, "and companies didn't bother playing by the rules, then this would be a normal occurrence," Falco said.

Then, it would just be "a total shit show of hearing and seeing everything that you're not supposed to see."

Ukraine, often short on other weaponry as it faces off against Russia's larger military, has been relying on drones, including to replace ammunition amid its shortages. And even the cheap drones have let Ukraine destroy Russian equipment worth millions.

Ukraine's drones are critical assets in the war and are said to account for at least 80% of Russia's frontline losses. Drones are super vital. They're one of our more clever casualty-producing weapons," Jackie said.

• Ukraine said it destroyed a Russian helicopter with a seaborne drone for the first time.
• Footage appeared to show a missile launched from the sea and a helicopter falling from the sky.
• Ukraine's sea drones have proved a pivotal technology, helping it combat Russia's vast navy.

New video footage shows what Ukriane said it a world-first: one of its seaborne drones destroying a flying target.

The clip purports to show a Ukrainian Magura V5 sea drone destroying a Russian Mi-8 helicopter.

It was shared by Ukraine's defence-intelligence agency, commonly known as the GUR.

The footage, which appears to show thermal imagery taken from the drone, shows a helicopter in the sky and a bright object heading towards the helicopter.

The helicopter then appears to fall, and an object is seen crashing into the water. The video shows the same incident from multiple angles.

It finishes with the English text: "Happy new 2025 year."

You can watch the footage here:

The GUR said that soldiers took the shot on Tuesday, destroying the helicopter with a drone-launched missile.

It said it was the first-ever example of such a strike.

The exchange took place in the Black Sea, near Cape Tarkhankut in Crimea, the Ukrainian region that Russia annexed in 2014.

The sea drone used R-73 "SeeDragon" missiles, the GUR said. Those are short-range air-to-air missiles that have infrared homing technology.

The GUR said another, similar Russian helicopter was hit too but managed to make it back to an airfield. It's not clear if it was hit by drones, or other weaponry.

The operation was credited to Ukraine's Group 13, which operates the sea drones and has claimed responsibility for other daring strikes.

Helicopters — which fly slower than most planes — have been targeted by different types of drones before.

Ukraine appeared to take down another Mi-8 with an aerial drone earlier this year.

The Magura V5 is a multi-use uncrewed surface vessel that's made by Ukraine.

Drones have been used in Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than in any other conflict in history.

That includes large, military-grade, and small, civilian-style drones in the air, as well as naval drones.

Its naval drones have targeted, damaged, and destroyed some Russian ships, helping Ukraine in its lopsided fight against Russia's Black Sea Fleet.

Ukraine had sunk, destroyed, or damaged at least 24 Russian vessels in the Black Sea as of June, according to the US, and Russia moved many of its remaining vessels further away from Ukraine.

Ukraine's drones have allowed it to largely neutralize Russia's navy, without Ukraine having any warships of its own.

The drones have also laid mines to target Russian ships and attacked Russian oil platforms.

Ukraine typically loads its naval drones with explosives and drives them directly into targets to detonate on impact. Ukraine has also added missiles to some, like some of its Magura V5s.

The drones have also had firefights with Russian helicopters, aircraft, and patrol boats.

Ukraine makes its own sea drones, which, alongside the Magura V5, include the powerful Sea Baby drone.

• Tens of thousands of passengers are reportedly canceling flights with Jeju Air, South Korean media said.
• That's after one of its jets crashed on Sunday.
• 179 people — almost everyone on board — died in the crash, officials said. The cause is being investigated.

Passengers with the South Korean airline Jeju Air are canceling tickets after one of its aircraft crashed, killing 179 people.

The airline said that 68,000 flight reservations had been canceled as of 1 p.m. on Monday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

Most of the cancellations happened after Flight 7C2216 crashed on Sunday.

Some 33,000 of the cancellations were for domestic flights, and 34,000 for international flights, the report said. Jeju is South Korea's biggest low-cost airline.

The Boeing 737-800 crashed while trying to land at South Korea's Muan International Airport at 9:03 a.m. 179 of the 181 people on board were killed, local authorities said.

Footage showed the plane slide on the runway before it came off, hit a barrier, and burst into flames.

The CEO of the airline, Kim E-bae, issued a public apology: "Above all, we express our deepest condolences and apologies to the families of the passengers who lost their lives in this accident.

"At present, the cause of the accident is difficult to determine, and we must await the official investigation results from the relevant government agencies. Regardless of the cause, as CEO, I feel profound responsibility for this incident," he said, according to The Guardian's translation.

On Monday, most of the homepage of the airline's website had been cleared. A black banner on its English-language version said: "We deeply apologize to all those affected by the incident. We will make every effort to resolve the situation. We sincerely regret the distress caused."

Mass cancelations have happened before after major accidents. This includes customers canceling bookings with Malaysia Airlines after two deadly incidents in 2014.

Investigations into the South Korean crash are underway and no cause has been concluded yet.

A bird strike is one possible factor, with an official in South Korea's transport ministry reportedly saying the airport's control tower issued a bird strike warning before the crash.

But experts are skeptical that it would likely be the only reason, as planes are designed with fail safes and with bird strikes in mind.

Video footage showed the plane landing without its landing gear deployed.

Why that was the case is not yet clear.