Russia's deadly drone industry upgraded with Iran's help, report says
The partnership between Iran and Russia to produce Iranian-designed drones on Russian soil has deepened military ties between the two heavily sanctioned states and substantially boosted Russia's domestic drone industry, according to a report released Thursday.
In the two years since Moscow struck a deal with Tehran to exchange technology and set up production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Russia's Tatarstan region, Russia has been able to vastly increase its capability for domestic drone production and has used it to pummel Ukrainian cities with hundreds of UAVs a day.
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Forbes
20 minutes ago
- Forbes
Is Your Business Ready? How Strategic Reinvention Beats Disruption
As leaders, we are all facing an accelerating cascade of disruptions. We had barely recovered from the pandemic when Russia's invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe back into war, further disrupting global supply chains in the process. At the same time, the emergence of generative AI is transforming whole industries and impacting virtually every aspect of your business. If all that was not enough to contend with, we now must deal with tariffs, trade wars, and the upending of the global rules-based order. That is why the most urgent task for every company is what I call strategic reinvention. Don't wait to become a victim of disruption – take control of your future by beginning the process ... More of strategic reinvention today so your company doesn't just survive change, but thrives by leading it. According to PwC's latest annual survey of CEOs, 42 percent say their companies will not make it another 10 years if they continue on their current path – and that was before the current trade war began. PwC found that 63 percent of CEOs have tried to change course, but most of those efforts are insufficient to meet the challenges those companies face. 'Will these moves be enough to power reinvention? For many CEOs, the honest answer will be no,' PwC concluded. 'Barriers to reinvention include weak decision-making processes, low levels of resource reallocation from year to year, and a mismatch between the short expected tenure of many CEOs and powerful long-term forces, or megatrends, at work.' I believe companies can overcome these deficiencies through a simple, four-phases strategic reinvention process. It starts with radical clarity – taking a hard, unflinching look at your company's situation, both internally and externally, and the challenges and opportunities created by this current era of disruption. You need to identify the assumptions you are making and challenge each of those in a structured and deliberate manner. You also need to look at not only the macroeconomy, but other external forces and factors that are impacting your business, or which could impact your business in the future. Once you have that clarity, you need to develop a strategic reinvention plan. If you are a successful company, this will be an evolution of your current business strategy informed by the insights you gleaned from the first phase. If you are already struggling or facing an existential crisis, then a more radical reinvention may be in order. In any event, this should be a collaborative, iterative process that includes your entire leadership team. Don't pay others to do this for you; developing and implementing a winning strategy is why you and your executive team get the big bucks. Don't outsource thinking to a high-priced consulting company that you know will turn that work over to a bunch of recent business school grads or dust off the same plan they developed for one of your competitors last year. The next step is resiliency testing. That means stress-testing your strategic reinvention plan to ensure that it is strong enough and flexible enough to stand up to whatever tomorrow throws at you. The best way to do this is by conducting a Pre-Mortem Analysis. This is a powerful technique developed by my friend and colleague Dr. Gary Klein that is designed to uncover the causes of failure so that you can modify your plan to prevent those from occurring or develop mitigating actions if they do. Other tools, such as my own Swan Dive method can help as well. The final phase is unified execution. This not only means working together effectively as one team to implement your strategic reinvention plan but also communicating your plan simply and clearly so that every single man and woman in your organization understands it and knows where to put their shoulder to get the flywheel moving in the right direction. Unified execution also means effectively managing the implementation of your new plan, and that requires transparency and accountability. The best way to create both is the Business Plan Review Process developed by my mentor, legendary CEO Alan Mulally. He used the BPR Process to save two of the largest, most iconic companies in the world from bankruptcy: Boeing and Ford. It will work for your company, too. By working through these four simple phases together with your leadership team, you will gain a better understanding of where you stand as a company and how to navigate the current maelstrom to help ensure your future success in an increasingly volatile marketplace. This will enable you, as a leader, to move forward with confidence. How does this work in practice? Imagine a large multinational semiconductor corporation facing escalating trade wars and geopolitical tensions. Initially, the leadership team would assess how tariffs, sanctions, and shifting alliances affect their global operations and supply chains. Challenging existing assumptions, they might discover vulnerabilities in raw material sourcing and market dependencies. Next, they would collaboratively develop a strategic reinvention plan to diversify their supply chain, invest in regional manufacturing capabilities, and pivot product portfolios toward markets less exposed to geopolitical disruptions. They then apply resiliency testing, conducting a pre-mortem to anticipate potential failures like sudden sanctions or export controls, adjusting their strategy accordingly. Finally, the entire organization aligns through unified execution, clearly communicating the new strategy to all employees and adopting a transparent management process such as the weekly BPR to maintain agility and swiftly respond to emerging geopolitical shifts. This proactive, internally driven approach positions the corporation not merely to survive disruptions but to thrive amidst uncertainty. 'If CEOs need further encouragement to double down on reinvention, they should note that we see a strong association in the data between the number of reinvention actions companies have taken and the profit margins they achieve,' PwC noted in its annual report. This reveals a powerful truth that highest-performing companies already know: Strategic reinvention is the secret to long-term success, even in more stable operating environments. The best businesses are the ones that disrupt themselves before they are disrupted. I witnessed a great example of this back in 2004 when Toyota Motor Corp. Chairman Fujio Cho delivered one of the most amazing keynotes I have ever witnessed at the global automobile industry's annual confab in Traverse City, Michigan. This was hostile territory for Toyota. The auditorium was packed with executives from all the world's automakers, but it was dominated by the three home teams: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. Many of them scowled at Cho or rolled their eyes as he went through a detailed presentation showing how Toyota was meeting or exceeding its strategic targets for every market in the world. When he was finished, Cho took off his glasses, folded them, looked out over the room and said this was why Toyota needed to change its strategy. 'Any company not willing to take the risk of reinventing itself is doomed,' he said. 'The world today is changing much too fast.' Four years later, Toyota passed GM to become the largest automaker in the world. By the end of 2021, it was number one in the United States as well. Like Toyota's Cho, the best leaders in the world know that change is the only constant in the world – and that change requires strategic disruption. This is true in business, and it is true in government and the military as well. Those still fighting the last war always lose. So, don't wait to become a victim of disruption – take control of your future by beginning the process of strategic reinvention today so your company doesn't just survive change, but thrives by leading it.
Yahoo
41 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How Ukraine smuggled drones into Russia to destroy prized nuclear bombers
It hardly seemed credible. Drone after drone, emerging from the top of a shipping container parked by the side of an unremarkable road somewhere deep inside Russia. Each tiny device buzzed as it rose laden with explosives on its kamikaze mission to destroy some of the Russian military's most prized assets. As they flew overhead, filming their progress, their targets came into view: rows of strategic bombers, some capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Ukraine's domestic intelligence agency, the SBU, said it was responsible for the attacks on four bases, and a security official said a total of 41 Russian warplanes worth some $7 billion were hit. The attack comes at a critical juncture in the war, with Donald Trump's peace plan hanging by a thread. But the extraordinary story of how the drones were deployed to launch their attack started many months earlier. Over a period of weeks, they were smuggled into Russia under the supervision of the SBU, which presumably had to alter its targeting plans after Russia relocated the bulk of its strategic bomber fleet. The drones were then concealed inside special containers placed inside commercial cargo lorries whose roof panels had been modified to retract at the touch of a remote control button. By all accounts, the drivers had no idea about the nature of the dangerous cargo they carried. Credit: Telegram / russianocontext Local residents near the Olenya base in Russia's far north described watching a driver running around in panic as FPV drones repeatedly launched from the back of his lorry. He later told police that he had been instructed to park his vehicle in a lay-by near the town of Olenegorsk where somebody would meet him. Footage from elsewhere in Russia showed drones rising from the back of another lorry as passers-by stood by helplessly. It was not the first time that lorries had been used by the Ukrainians in the war. A truck carrying explosives was remotely detonated to help bring down part of the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland in 2020. But this was rather more sophisticated, with reports that the drones had been trained using artificial intelligence to hit the weakest points of the bombers parked along the aprons of the airbases. Fearing Ukraine's growing strike capacity, Russia had only weeks earlier moved many of its strategic bombers to bases like Olenya and Belaya, 1,000km and 2,500km from the front line, where it was assumed they would be well beyond the enemy's reach. Other bases in Ryazan and Ivanovo were also targeted, both of which are within 600 miles of the Ukrainian border. For the Russian air force, the planes targeted were prize assets: the iconic Tupolev Tu-95 'Bear', a long-range strategic bomber capable of carrying both nuclear and conventional warheads; the Tu-160 'Blackjack', the largest combat aircraft in the world, and the Tu-22M3 'Backfire', the supersonic strike workhorse of the fleet. The Russians, however, had not counted on Ukraine's Mossad-like ingenuity nor their desperation to strike at the long-range bombers that had inflicted so much destruction and bloodshed on its cities and people. For the most part, Operation Spiderweb, as it has been designated, did not rely on long-range drones or missiles, but instead on small, hand-held first-person view drones of the kind that has proved so effective on the battlefield. Russian military bloggers were quick to liken it to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 An exaggeration, clearly — yet in terms of chutzpah, in terms of scope and quite possibly in terms of damage, Ukraine's near-simultaneous attacks on four airfields deep inside Russia marks an unprecedented moment in the war. If Ukrainian officials are to be believed, as many as 40 of Russia's most sophisticated, expensive and destructive strategic bombers were eliminated in little more than a couple of hours. Such claims await the confirmation of an independent battle damage assessment, yet whatever the real number is there can be little doubt what a humiliating blow Ukraine has inflicted on Russia – or what a powerful message Kyiv has sent its allies in the West. For night after night before the surprise assault, Ukraine's cities had reeled under some of the most intense Russian bombardment of the war. Dozens had died, children among them, yet there was no sign of the Kremlin relenting. As his envoys prepared to present his peace terms at a second round of negotiations in Istanbul, Vladimir Putin seemed determined to project Russia's total military dominance. So confident does he remain that his forces will prevail on the battlefield that the Russian president contemptuously ignored requests to share his proposals with Kyiv in advance. Yet hours before the talks were due to begin, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, had a pointed message of his own to deliver. He had been involved in Operation Spiderweb from its conceptualisation 18 months ago. There had been coordinated attacks on Russian airfields before. On the night of August 13 last year, Ukraine unleashed what was then its largest drone assault of the war on Russian territory, striking four airbases in Kursk, Voronezh and Nizhny Novgorod. Yet these bases were all within a few hundred miles of the Ukrainian border. Operation Spiderweb was conceived on a much, much grander scale. On the night before it was initiated, Ukraine had suffered perhaps its most intense airstrikes of a bloody week, with officials in Kyiv saying that 472 drones and seven ballistic and cruise missiles had struck targets across the country, including the capital. By Sunday morning, Ukraine appeared to have exacted a measure of revenge after two transport bridges were blown up in the neighbouring regions of Bryans and Kursk just as trains were passing. Seven people were killed, Russians officials said, blaming Ukraine. Yet these attacks were but a prelude. Among the planes destroyed, Ukrainian intelligence officials said, were not just Tu-95 and TU-22M3 bombers but also an A-50 'Mainstay', one of just a handful of Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft Russia has left in its arsenal. The A-50, worth an estimated £230 million, is a flying radar and command post that is vital for coordinating fighter jets and air defences as well as for situational awareness. They are thought to be irreplaceable. According to Ukrainian intelligence officials, all those knowingly involved in the operation have returned safely home, their mission accomplished in the most astonishing way. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Zelensky announces updated Ukrainian delegation list, ahead of planned peace talks with Russia
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on June 1 an updated 14-member Ukrainian delegation for upcoming peace talks with Russia in Istanbul, expanding the original group of 12. Defense Minister Rustem Umerov will again lead the delegation, which will include several new figures from Ukraine's military, human rights, and legal sectors. Three officials – Andrii Fomin, Yurii Kovbasa, and Yevhenii Ostrianskyi – are participating for the first time, while Oleksii Malovatskyi, involved in the May 16 talks, will not join. The meeting is scheduled to take place on June 2, with both Russian and Ukrainian delegations expected to attend. Also, security advisors from the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany plan to attend, according to U.S. President Donald Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. Russia has not officially submitted its memorandum outlining peace terms, but Ukraine plans to present a detailed roadmap aimed at securing a lasting settlement. According to the proposal, the process would begin with a minimum 30-day ceasefire, followed by a full exchange of prisoners and the return of Ukrainian children taken to Russian-held areas, ultimately leading to a potential meeting between Zelensky and Putin. The plan was reported on June 1 by Reuters, which reviewed a copy of the document. While the U.S. and Ukraine have pushed for an unconditional ceasefire, the Kremlin has rejected it. Instead, Moscow has regularly voiced maximalist demands that are unlikely to be accepted by Kyiv, such as recognition of Russia's illegal annexation of Ukrainian regions and withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the parts of these regions remaining under Kyiv's control. Trump has expressed frustration with Russia's reluctance to make concessions and its intensifying and deadly attacks on Ukraine. However, he has so far refused to sanction Russia. The talks are tentatively still set to continue on June 2, though Russia has not officially commented yet, following Ukraine's Security Service's (SBU) major intelligence drone operation earlier today. The drones destroyed 41 Russian bombers at four airfields across Russia, in what Kyiv called a long-planned blow to Moscow's strike capabilities. Read also: Officials from US, UK, France, Germany to attend Ukraine-Russia peace talks, Kellogg says We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
