Ukraine says it struck a Russian air base as Moscow sent hundreds of drones into Kyiv
Ukraine's military General Staff said that Ukrainian forces had struck the Borisoglebsk air base in Russia's Voronezh region, describing it as the home base of Russia's Su-34, Su-35S and Su-30SM fighter jets.
Writing on Facebook, the General Staff said it hit a depot containing glide bombs, a training aircraft and 'possibly other aircraft.'
Russian officials did not immediately comment on the attack.
Such attacks on Russian air bases aim to dent Russia's military capability and demonstrate Ukraine's capability to hit high-value targets in Russia. Last month, Ukraine said it destroyed more than 40 Russian planes stationed at several airfields deep in Russia's territory in a surprise drone attack.
Russia fired 322 drones and decoys into Ukraine overnight into Saturday, Ukraine's air force said. Of these, 157 were shot down and 135 were lost, likely having been electronically jammed.
According to the air force, Ukraine's western Khmelnytskyi region was the main target of the attack. Regional Gov. Serhii Tyurin said Saturday that no damage, injuries or deaths had been reported.
Russia has been stepping up its long-range attacks on Ukraine. Waves of drones and missiles targeted Kyiv overnight into Friday in the largest aerial assault since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began. On Saturday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the number of people killed in the assault had increased to two. A further 31 people were wounded.
The fresh wave of attacks came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that he had a 'very important and productive' phone call with US President Donald Trump.
The two leaders discussed how Ukrainian air defenses might be strengthened, possible joint weapons production between the US and Ukraine, and broader US-led efforts to end the war with Russia, according to a statement by Zelensky.
Asked Friday night by reporters about the call, Trump said, 'We had a very good call, I think.'
When asked about finding a way to end the fighting, Trump said: 'I don't know. I can't tell you whether or not that's going to happen.'
The US has paused some shipments of military aid to Ukraine, including crucial air defense missiles. Ukraine's main European backers are considering how they can help pick up the slack. Zelensky says plans are afoot to build up Ukraine's domestic arms industry, but scaling up will take time.
Russia's Defense Ministry said it shot down 94 Ukrainian drones overnight into Saturday, along with 45 further drones Saturday morning and early afternoon. No casualties were reported, but local officials in the Saratov region said 25 apartments were damaged by Ukrainian drones in the city of Engels.
Four Ukrainian drones were shot down while approaching Moscow on Saturday, according to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Air traffic was briefly halted as a precaution at one of Moscow's airports, Sheremetyevo, Russia's aviation authority Rosaviatsiya said.
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New York Times
10 minutes ago
- New York Times
Russia Makes a Swift Battlefield Advance, Seeking an Edge in Trump Talks
Russian forces are striving to shape the battlefield to their advantage before a high-stakes summit between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin, making a swift advance in eastern Ukraine after months of grinding battle. In recent days, Russia's troops broke through a segment of Ukraine's defensive line near the city of Pokrovsk, a longtime stronghold. They have advanced several miles into Ukrainian-held territory, threatening to outflank Ukraine's positions. 'The situation is quite chaotic, as the enemy, having found gaps in the defense, is infiltrating deep inside, trying to quickly establish a foothold and accumulate forces for further advancement,' said DeepState, a Ukrainian group with ties to the military that maps the battlefield. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his evening address on Monday that the Russians 'are redeploying their troops and forces in ways that suggest preparations for new offensive operations' and that they are 'not preparing for a cease-fire or an end to the war.' Ukraine, too, is seeking an edge before the Russian-American peace talks on Friday in Alaska. Kyiv has ramped up attacks on Russian oil refineries, doubling down on its strategy of pressuring Russia into making concessions during negotiations by targeting the Kremlin's main revenue source to fund the war. Pressing their advantage as peace talks gather pace has been a recurring tactic of both sides throughout the current war and the one that preceded it starting in 2014. Ukraine's bold June drone attacks deep inside Russia, which destroyed many strategic bombers, came just a day before negotiations in Istanbul. In 2015, Russia intensified fighting during cease-fire talks, surrounding the eastern town of Debaltseve, to force political concessions from Kyiv. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
WIRED
10 minutes ago
- WIRED
The Rise of the US Military's Clandestine Foreign War Apparatus
Aug 12, 2025 7:00 AM Seth Harp's new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel , goes deep into the forming of the Joint Special Operations Command and its origins in the aftermath of 9/11. Photo-Illustration:The 2020s are shaping up to be one of the most violent decades in modern history, with American-sponsored proxy conflicts and shadow wars smoldering all over the world, from Ukraine to Yemen to Gaza. The United States enables and prolongs these wars not by sending troops to fight in them, but by trafficking arms to the belligerents, providing intelligence to its favored proxies, and using covert operations, especially assassinations, to shape geopolitical conditions. At the forefront of these clandestine US military machinations is the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, which despite its relative invisibility to the public is far and away the most powerful organization in the military, and one of the most influential institutions in the US government. But it was not always this way. As I discuss in my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel , the rise of JSOC does not date back to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or the wars that the United States waged in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. Rather, the origins of JSOC's takeover from within are traceable to the darkest days of the Iraq War, about five years after 9/11, when things were going considerably worse for American war planners and foreign policy officials, and—in a backlash that would lead to the election of President Barack Obama—the public was turning sharply against US involvement in foreign wars. This excerpt tells part of that story. On just one day in June 2006, the Associated Press reported that shootings and bombings killed 12 people in Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed four and wounded 27 at the funeral of a Shiite soldier, seven bullet-riddled bodies were pulled from the Tigris River, two who had been tortured to death were fished out of the Euphrates, and police found the body of a teenage girl who had been raped and murdered in Kirkuk. Amid this horrible paroxysm of revenge killings, auguring Iraq's descent into outright civil war split along sectarian lines, President George W. Bush and his national security council pulled together a host of new advisors in an attempt to revise their failing strategy. It was at this juncture that a number of ambitious officials in the special operations community stepped up to offer a new path forward. The plan of action that they developed, which Bush's successor would adopt and expand in Afghanistan, forever transformed the American way of making war, and goes a long way toward explaining how Fort Bragg, North Carolina, even more than the CIA's headquarters at Langley, Virginia, came to be the United States' national nerve center of invisible imperial power. Courtesy of Penguin Group Buy This Book At: Amazon Target Viking If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Stanley McChrystal, then a two-star major general, was the most important figure in this revolution in military affairs. McChrystal, a West Point graduate and the son of a distinguished general, had risen through the ranks in the 75th Ranger Regiment and was groomed for some of the Army's most sensitive missions. Smart, shrewd, charismatic, and press-savvy, McChrystal first came to prominence as a Pentagon spokesman, and in 2003, was tapped to lead black ops JSOC, which until then had been relegated to important but limited roles. Consistent with the emphasis laid on psychological operations in the Special Forces, the most important warfighting innovation that McChrystal developed while serving in this position was not primarily tactical or strategic but ideological and mediatic. Although there were relatively few foreign fighters in Iraq and most came from neighboring Syria, McChrystal was the primary proponent of the view, quick to spread among Washington policymakers, that the enemy was not a nationalist rebellion against outside occupation, but one node of a global conspiracy of America-hating terrorists. To describe this nebulous and inherently malignant foe, McChrystal and his staff invented the term 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' or AQI. At the top of this dubious organization, which they themselves had done more than anyone else to conjure into being, JSOC analysts placed the dopey Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a mysterious Bedouin bogeyman, much hyped by deceitful Pentagon spooks in the runup to the war, who may not have even been in Iraq at the time. To explain away the paucity of tangible contacts between insurgents in Iraq and Osama bin Laden's organization, the remnants of which were now scattered around Pakistan and Yemen, McChrystal and his aides redefined al-Qaeda as a concentric grouping of decentralized 'franchises' operating on a 'blind cell model.' In his memoir, McChrystal admits with remarkable if belated frankness that JSOC produced intelligence assessments 'that inflated al-Qaeda's role,' and 'problematically used 'AQI' as a catchall designation for any Sunni group that attacked Americans.' This narrative, he acknowledges, was a way to 'sidestep the reality' that most Iraqi insurgents were primarily motivated by 'earthly grievances,' not Islamist ideology. There's no indication, however, that he shared these important caveats with President Bush, who seized upon the imaginary influx of foreign jihadists into Iraq as an after-the-fact vindication of his discredited case for war. By grossly exaggerating Zarqawi's importance, McChrystal and his deputy, Vice Admiral William McRaven, convinced the Bush administration that it was possible for the United States to kill its way to victory in Iraq through a massively stepped-up campaign of targeted assassinations. This was an essential precondition for the rise of JSOC. Another of the advisors whom Bush called upon to reformulate the war effort in late 2006 was Michael Vickers, the top Pentagon official in charge of the larger umbrella organization over JSOC, the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, known by the comically unwieldy acronym 'ASD SO/LIC & IC,' for Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities. In his memoir, Vickers recalls how the Bush administration scrapped its existing playbook and instituted a new policy that put JSOC firmly in charge of the fight in Iraq. The plan involved a two-pronged approach, the public-facing aspect of which was a temporary buildup or 'surge' of conventional forces. But the real escalation took place behind the scenes, as JSOC was quietly tasked with implementing a radically expanded campaign of mass assassinations very similar to the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, which in spite of the repugnance it had elicited in the public, was considered a success by the Washington-dwelling national-security set. Once limited to former regime officials and leaders of the insurgency, JSOC's hit list, euphemistically known as the 'disposition matrix' or 'joint prioritized effects list,' grew exponentially to include anyone, however youthful or peripheral, suspected of taking up arms against American occupiers. Vickers calls this covert war the 'hidden surge.' From now on, Iraq would be a war of targeted killings carried out clandestinely, almost always at night. Swollen with new infusions of money, personnel, equipment, and aircraft, JSOC became 'JSOC on steroids,' a 'counterterrorism killing machine' capable of slaying recalcitrant Iraqis on a scale that both Vickers and McChrystal describe as 'industrial.' From about 10 a month at the start of the war, the number of night raids that JSOC carried out increased to 10 per day at the height of the surge. McChrystal called this relentless tempo the 'continuous targeting cycle.' Fluent in McKinsey-style jargon like 'decision cycle,' 'dynamic process,' and 'nodal analysis,' he was adept at spitting out pithy truisms such as 'it takes a network to defeat a network,' and a prolific coiner of acronyms like F3EAD, which stood for Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate. Despite the ungainly initialism, the F3EAD cycle was not a complicated concept. It typically meant tracking down a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found on their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list, and then killing them too, sometimes just a few hours later. The hidden surge, in which the Army component of JSOC, known as Delta Force, played the leading role, was greatly enabled by the widespread adoption of cell phones in Iraq, a technological development that coincided with the first few years of American occupation. JSOC's screen-filled headquarters at Camp Anaconda received an influx of personnel from the National Security Agency, who found it trivial to intercept unencrypted calls on Iraq's burgeoning mobile networks, and could easily transform cell phones into listening devices. Television and film depictions of the Global War on Terrorism often portray American operators and spies as able to speak the local languages, suavely lobbing savvy quotations from the Koran at their truculent Islamist antagonists. But in a startling admission with sobering implications, McChrystal states in his memoir that JSOC in Iraq was 'hindered by an almost complete lack of Arabic skills within our force,' suggesting that nearly all of those whom Delta Force killed were targeted not on the basis of the content of telephonic intercepts, but on pseudoscientific 'nodal analysis,' tips from paid informants, and arbitrary guesswork. 'We were not death squads,' McChrystal writes. But armed with NSA intercepts, backed by newly developed Reaper drones, and joined by fierce Kurdish mercenaries called Mohawks, that's exactly what JSOC became during the covert surge in Iraq, which lasted into 2008. The body count from Delta Force's killing spree, and the proportion of Iraq's hundreds of thousands of war dead who were gunned down in JSOC night raids, will never be known because it wasn't recorded in the first place. That these events are lost to the historical and photographic record was by design. What Vickers dubs the 'hidden surge' was a side of the Iraq war never intended to be seen by the public, who were fed images of conventional, uniformed troops on patrol, but never any footage of the plainclothes men who did nearly all of the nighttime wet work. 'From 2006 on, 90 percent or higher of insurgent deaths were from targeted, offensive SOF operations,' said a former Delta Force sergeant major who served in Iraq during the surge, using an acronym that refers to special operations forces in general. 'Going out night after night, on purpose, and getting in firefights with bad guys—that job fell to us.' Instead of mounting patrols and reacting to fire like conventional infantry, Delta Force operators identified their targets from a distance, in advance, and took them by surprise, often making use of perfidious techniques such as disguising themselves as Iraqis, using wigs, brownface, and prosthetics. They posed as Red Cross personnel, United Nations inspectors, western businessmen, or European diplomats. With the help of female support soldiers, they passed themselves off as husband-and-wife pairs, masquerading, for instance, as married schoolteachers who'd come to teach English to Iraqi kids. They even copied the enemy's tactics and blew up targets with roadside bombs. Among themselves, the bearded, long-haired operators called each other by their first names, eschewed divisions of rank, and dressed in a mishmash of civilian attire. When they did wear uniforms, the unit patches they sported were purely fictitious: hometown police badges, the seals of various states, Spartan helmets, Crusader shields, the Confederate battle flag, or jokey tabs that said things like 'HATCHET FORCE' or 'FUCK AL QAEDA.' No camera crews ever went on night raids with Delta Force. Their operations were not the subject of news documentaries, nor do we possess any oral histories, because silence is the unit's chief point of pride. But over time, these strictures inevitably loosen, if only a little. In recent years, many former special operators have gone on podcasts to discuss their military careers in a certain Army 'special mission unit' or 'compartmented element.' And once-rare photos of JSOC operations have found their way onto social media, including images of Delta Force in Iraq under McCrystal's leadership. 'Several of my rotations to Iraq [were] composed of just my team and a small HQ element,' a former Delta Force troop sergeant major named Jesse Boettcher wrote in an Instagram post dated February 28, 2022. 'While I had the full force of the US government just a radio call away, there were very few of us on the ground getting dirty. Our small element was able to execute and refine the entire F3EAD cycle almost daily, with very little outside assistance.' In the photo accompanying the post, Boettcher, then in his mid-thirties, sits at a table dressed in soiled civilian clothes. In back of him is a whiteboard. Much of the writing on it has been blacked out, but you can still read random words, including 'meeting,' 'explosives,' 'liaison,' 'interrogation,' and 'safehouse.' Taped on the wall behind the whiteboard is a grid of 55 mugshots of brown-skinned men. Almost all of them have been crossed out with an X. Another picture, posted January 19, 2022, shows the rest of Boettcher's team, a group of seven unkempt white men. 'It might look like a ragtag bunch of ruffians, but this crew were straight-up Pipe-Hitters,' Boettcher wrote, using an obscure term considered a high compliment in the special operations community that derives from the concept of a soldier who is so fearless, daring, and addicted to war that he can be likened to a smoker of crack cocaine. 'The guys in front,' Boettcher wrote, referring to three fresh-faced, clean-shaven young men kneeling in the foreground, 'have killed more people than cancer.' Excerpt adapted from The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp. Published by arrangement with Viking. Copyright © 2025 Seth Harp.
Newsweek
41 minutes ago
- Newsweek
China Reacts to Trump, Putin Meeting Without Ukraine, EU
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. China said it hopes all those with a stake in the Russia-Ukraine war would play a role in the peace negotiations, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, August 15. The Trump-Putin summit will discuss the control of land in Ukraine, swathes of which Russia has seized during the course of its full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022. Trump is trying to broker an end to Russia's war. Kyiv and its European allies have urged Trump not to agree to any concessions of Ukrainian land to Russia, saying such decisions are Ukraine's alone to make, and warned against what they said is rewarding Moscow's illegal aggression. At a daily press briefing on Tuesday, August 12, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was asked about Trump and Putin's decision to hold a summit without inviting any representatives from Ukraine or the European Union (EU). "China supports all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis, and is glad to see Russia and the U.S. keep in contact, improve their relations and advance the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis," Lin said, according to a transcript released by the ministry. "We hope all parties concerned and stakeholders will take part in the negotiation process in due course and reach a fair, lasting and binding peace agreement acceptable to parties concerned at an early date." China is a vital strategic partner of Russia's. While it has said it plays no role in the war, Beijing has provided Russia with a major economic lifeline through large-scale oil purchases, helping Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions. This is a breaking news story. Updates to follow.
