Weapons

After his existential suburban horror epic “Weapons” became an Oscar winner (for Amy Madigan’s chilling supporting performance as Aunt Gladys), filmmaker Zach Cregger has dashed off a fun little riff on one of his favorite video games. His “Resident Evil” reboot is the eighth film in the big-screen franchise based on the Japanese zombie survival game, though Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is its own beast — put those Milla Jovovich movies out of your head entirely.

There are, of course, a few shared strands of DNA in the screenplay by Cregger and Shay Hatten: an evil company, Umbrella Corporation, responsible for a virus that mutates humans into zombies and all manner of monsters, located in the lovely Raccoon City. But our hero, Bryan (Austin Abrams), a hapless medical courier, knows none of this when he takes a gig delivering what he thinks is an organ on the snowy mountain roads to the metropolis.

Abrams, who was a standout in the ensemble cast of “Weapons,” has another big movie out this fall in which he stars as the lone protagonist, “Whalefall,” and the two films comprise an apt survival thriller double feature. In “Resident Evil,” Abrams’ Bryan spends much of his lonely mission muttering to himself in annoyance and sometimes victory, much like a gamer would. During one self-reflective moment, Bryan yells, “Yeah! Video games!” elated at how his shooting is improving.

Cregger’s approach to “Resident Evil” is to seamlessly blend the cinematic with a gaming experience and his adaptation best mimics the feeling of playing an actual game or watching someone else play one. At one point, Bryan and a comrade he meets along the way (Paul Walter Hauser) marvel at the shooting skills of Maxine (Kali Reis) as if they’re watching her play the game too.

Immediately, Cregger establishes a camera that follows closely behind Bryan, a similar motif to the cinematography he used in “Weapons.” As Bryan starts to encounter the strange beings who appear on the outskirts of Raccoon City, the game mechanisms click into place. Different characters — villains and helpers — pop up along his journey, as well as different tools and weapons. He frequently encounters locked doors, obstacles and empty spaces that he has to explore. Cregger uses first-person-shooter point-of-view shots, with the long barrel of a rifle or automatic weapon lining up our sights; one running gag sees Bryan, completely hopeless with guns, having to shoot the locks off of gates.

What was already a very darkly funny and incredibly gross film gets even more disturbing as Bryan ventures into the Raccoon City hospital, trying to make his delivery. He encounters monsters that vomit acid or explode with zombie rats; one particular ward is full of undulating sacs of bloody viscera.

Cregger remains one of our finest horror image-makers, creating surreal and snowy landscapes that are as beautiful as they are disturbing: the red and blue lights of a flipped police car in a blizzard, dark pools of blood and mysterious footsteps, tentacles greeting and meeting each other, stomach acid decimating an elevator. With impeccable sound design and an eerie score by Ryan and Hays Holladay, Cregger delivers a textured, wholly realized world.

But our guide is just a regular guy, which lends to the charm. Bryan is dealing with relationship problems that add to the urgency of his desire to survive, but he’s also just a dude with questionable self-preservation instincts, which makes for a good adventure. He has an overwhelming desire to help, which leads to some ridiculous circumstances and is a quality that Cregger plays for laughs. Abrams plays the goofball well and we’re constantly rooting for him, even as his fortunes take a turn in a tragic reversal that we’ve seen in monster movies before.

Cregger wears his influences well and they aren’t just video games but pulled from the history of horror. Still, he blends it all into his own vision so it doesn’t feel derivative. While the unwieldy ending might get away from him, the tightly controlled and efficient stretch that precedes it is the work of a new master, one who delivers imaginative, terrifying and hilarious thrills and chills, whether he’s reanimating a dead franchise or dreaming up his own uncanny vibe. “Resident Evil” might be his most playful — and gooey — film yet.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Warsaw also says it has scrambled military planes in response to a Russian attack in western Ukraine, close to its border.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk says that intelligence information suggests Russia plans to launch drone and missile attacks against countries supporting Ukraine.

Warsaw’s leader outlined the assessment during an address to parliament on Thursday, saying that the attacks will be meant to weaken NATO’s ability to act collectively in response.

“According to intelligence assessments, Russia’s plan … includes hybrid drone and missile strikes against countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland,” Tusk said.

European countries suspect Moscow of being behind a series of acts of sabotage in recent months to put pressure on the allies, especially Germany, helping Kyiv in its bid to resist Russia’s full-scale invasion – something the Kremlin has vigorously denied.

“These potential strikes would be quote-unquote ‘accidental’ in nature, intended to paralyse or at least weaken the resolve of NATO states to invoke the relevant NATO provisions in the event of aggression against a member country,” Tusk added.

He did not elaborate on which intelligence agencies had provided the warning.

He also said such attacks by Russia could coincide with “political changes in certain European countries granting power – or at least a powerful voice – to those who, increasingly invoking noble slogans of peace, pacifism and needless casualties, will call for peace – or rather, the total capitulation of Ukraine”.

Tusk appeared to be referring to the advance of more Russia-friendly parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD) and National Rally in France.

Air raid near border with Poland

Earlier on Thursday, Poland said it had scrambled military planes in response to a Russian attack in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border.

Airports in Rzeszow and Lublin were temporarily closed, and residents of two eastern regions of Poland received air raid warnings. Local media reported that sirens had sounded and that pupils in some schools had sought shelter.

“Very close to the Polish border, not far from Dorohusk, a petrol station was most likely attacked again,” Tusk said.

On Sunday, a Russian drone hit a passenger train in Ukraine, just two kilometres (1.6 miles) from the Polish border.

Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said Poland was strengthening airspace protection.

“We have increased F-16 and helicopter activity, and are reinforcing our air defence and rapid response systems,” he wrote on X.

Tusk said he would visit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday to discuss cooperation within the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, a group of European countries developing an air defence system with Ukraine as a cheaper alternative to the US-built Patriot.

Critics say Serbia’s military ties with Israel are rising significantly.

Serbia has opened a factory ⁠to assemble advanced Israeli-made drones, which will supply ⁠the Serbian military and armed forces in other countries.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic inaugurated the facility jointly operated with an unnamed Israeli company on Thursday.

“Our plans are huge,” Vucic said in a social media post showing a video of him touring the facility with Israeli Ambassador Avivit Bar-Ilan, adding that at least three more factories will be opened across Serbia with Israeli partners.

Vucic said the facility “will employ around 100 workers and produce state-of-the-art equipment both for the Serbian Armed Forces and the armies of some other countries”.

Vucic did not disclose the factory’s location or the Israeli firm involved, saying journalists were excluded from the opening because of “the confidentiality of the production process”.

Previous reporting by investigative outlet BIRN and Israeli newspaper Haaretz has identified Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems as Serbia’s partner in the drone-manufacturing process.

Elbit has previously been criticised over its role in operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Last month, Vucic told Serbian news outlet Nezavisne Dnevne Novine that the goal of the factory was to “preserve peace and stability, and to be strong enough to deter all potential aggressors”.

Serbia is one of the few countries in the Western Balkans that is not a NATO member, and it has invested heavily in its military to “preserve neutrality”.

It has faced scrutiny over arms exports to Israel, which BIRN and Haaretz said rose from 1.4 million euros ($1.6 million) in 2023 to 42.3 million euros ($48.5 million) in 2024.

During a visit to Serbia earlier this year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said Belgrade remained one of Israel’s “most steadfast and determined allies” despite calls for more countries to restrict weapons exports due to the war in Gaza.

WASHINGTON — The United States has confirmed for the first time that it has deployed weapons in space.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Air and Space Cyber Conference in Maryland on Monday that the U.S. has fielded “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”

Meink did not detail what the weapons were or how they work. In 2024 the U.S. said Russia was developing a new anti-satellite weapon that could be launched from space. At the time the White House said the danger wasn’t imminent.

But reports of the anti-satellite weapon reflected longstanding worries about space threats from Russia and China, given that much U.S. infrastructure is dependent on satellite communications.

In his remarks, Meink also said the Air Force was adding more autonomous systems to its capabilities and predicted the service would look “radically different” by 2032. For example, he foresaw one-way attack drones replacing artillery as the “primary killer.”

“We are increasing readiness against existing threats,” he said.

President Trump created the Space Force in 2019.

Catalini writes for the Associated Press.

The United States has acknowledged deploying space weapons in orbit of the Earth.

US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink confirmed on Monday that the so-called “space control weapons” would be used to defend US forces on the planet, marking a significant new chapter in the militarisation of space – or at least the transparency of it.

The announcement, which Meink framed as a message to US rivals China and Russia, could turn Earth’s orbit into an increasingly contested military domain, experts warn. Warfare could include countries targeting each other’s satellites, which provide critical services such as GPS, communications and intelligence to military forces on the ground, as well as civilian infrastructure.

“Space Force doctrine describes ‘space control’ as having the outcome of space superiority, which they define as the ability to operate at the time and place of their choosing, while denying the same to an adversary,” Victoria Samson, chief director of Space Security and Stability for Secure World Foundation, a private non-profit focused on military space and security issues, told Al Jazeera.

So, what do we know about the US-deployed weapons in space? And do some countries already have them?

What do we know about these space weapons?

Not a lot. Air Force Secretary Meink said the US has stationed “weapons” in Earth’s orbit, but did not specify when they were placed there, how many there are, or what they are designed to do.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action.”

However, he did not give any details about what sort of weapons these may be, where they are positioned or what they are designed to do.

Samson said the keyword from Meink’s announcement is “weapons” in the context of “space control”. “Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain – employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities,” Meink said, adding that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes”.

“That’s the first time any official has acknowledged an actually designed weapon has been placed in space,” Samson told Al Jazeera. “It’s always been ‘systems with capabilities’ prior.”

Experts say these weapons are likely to be space-based communications jammers rather than kinetic ones that launch strikes. Kinetic weapons – for instance, a suicide satellite designed to ram into an adversary’s satellite – would likely cause fast-moving debris to be launched dangerously into space.

Bleddyn Bowen, an associate professor in astropolitics at Durham University in the United Kingdom, told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme: “We don’t know exactly what the mechanism of the weapon is. I would expect there to be some kind of electronic warfare or radio-jamming platform. This would be a non-destructive kind of anti-satellite weapon, and these variants already exist on Earth.

“Less likely would be a kinetic kill vehicle of some sort, so a vehicle that would release a projectile of some sort that would ram into a satellite and destroy it.”

What is the US Space Force?

The US Space Force is the newest branch of the US military, created in December 2019 under President Donald Trump’s first term, responsible for organising and conducting US military operations in and through space.

Unlike NASA, which focuses on civilian space exploration, Space Force is part of the US Air Force and comes under US Space Command, which is headquartered at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Its responsibilities include operating and protecting military satellites, providing satellite communications and positioning services, monitoring objects and potential threats in space, and supporting US forces on Earth.

“China and Russia are developing new space systems to enhance military effectiveness and end any reliance on US space services,” the Space Force’s website says. “China and Russia are also testing and fielding sophisticated counterspace capabilities with the intent to disrupt and degrade US space-enabled capabilities.”

Aren’t there treaties limiting weapons deployments in space?

Yes, but they do not amount to a blanket ban on weapons in space.

The key agreement is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits countries from placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or stationing them in outer space. It also bans military bases and weapons testing on the moon and other celestial bodies.

However, the treaty does not expressly prohibit conventional weapons from being placed in Earth’s orbit. That means systems such as conventional anti-satellite weapons, electronic-warfare systems, or other counterspace capabilities are not automatically prohibited.

Such gaps leave room for interpretation and are at the heart of current international efforts to enhance military activities in space.

How have Russia and China reacted to the US announcement?

China’s Foreign Ministry opposed the move, warning against the “weaponisation of outer space, turning it into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there”.

“We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told a news briefing.

Russia called for space to be kept “free of any weapons”.

“We are counting on broad international consolidation to continue working towards the complete demilitarisation of space,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Are Russia and China developing space weapons too?

Independent reports from research groups and think tanks note that both China and Russia are developing a broad range of counterspace capabilities designed to interfere with, disable, or potentially destroy satellites and other space systems.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, DC, identified both countries as possessing or developing kinetic and non-kinetic counterspace weapons.

A 2025 CSIS report notes that both Moscow and Beijing have direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, as well as capabilities involving jamming, spoofing, and cyber operations.

Samson of the Secure World Foundation (SWF) told Al Jazeera that her team has highlighted in their reports that “China and Russia have space-based jammers”. Therefore, she told Al Jazeera, “I always thought it would be strange that the US didn’t have them too.”

Bowen told the BBC: “In the last 10 years, Russia and China have been doing a lot more manoeuvres in space – rendezvous and proximity operations, as we call them – so, flying up really close to Western satellites, inspecting them, taking pictures. And on another occasion, the Chinese have demonstrated a ‘space tug’ capability. So, a vehicle that goes up to a satellite can grapple it and then move it into a different orbit.”

China has executed such a manoeuvre only with one of its own old satellites, which needed to be moved away from its location, he added.

What about other countries?

The emerging space-weapons race is not limited to the US, Russia and China: India has also demonstrated an ASAT capability and is developing technologies that could allow spacecraft to operate alongside other satellites.

France is also reported to be developing co-orbital capabilities, while the UK has conducted on-orbit cooperative operations with the US.

A 2026 report by SWF also notes how Iran, for instance, illustrates the less visible side of space warfare, relying increasingly on jamming and spoofing satellite-based services. Israel, meanwhile, has developed significant military space and electronic-warfare capabilities, although there is no public record of it conducting a debris-generating ASAT test.

Countries like North Korea and South Korea are also racing to develop more sophisticated space-based tech.

Is space the next frontier of war?

Samson told Al Jazeera that the US announcement of deploying weapons in Earth’s orbit is not essentially disruptive in the context of space technology. “What this does is normalise weaponising space,” she said.

“Space has always been a domain with the potential of being a flashpoint for conflict; this just turns up the heat there,” Samson added.

A US Space Force spokesperson told ABC News that the US “capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands”. The spokesperson noted that Washington “has warned about Russian and Chinese weapons testing and operationalisation since 2007”.

“Due to their actions, it is no longer a question that space is a warfighting domain,” the spokesperson said. “Open communication strengthens deterrence, prevents adversary miscalculation, and normalises space operations alongside the other services.”

Samson further noted that Meink’s statement “crosses a line”, and would “either encourage China and Russia to also declare weapons in space, or will make US allies and partners want to also place weapons in space”.

“Counterspace capabilities have been proliferating already – this speeds up that trend,” she said, adding that this “is incredibly destabilising and will work against US national security goals”.

“By opening the door to weaponising space, the US loses the most,” Samson noted. “Every person on this planet uses space-based data and services in some way. Any interference with access to or use of space will affect everyone, not just space powers.”

Tetiana Bubynets collapsed on the asphalt after a Russian drone exploded at a gas station in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.

Despite the violent shockwave and blast of drone shrapnel produced by the attack on July 6, the 18-year-old accounting student had no visible wounds except for a nosebleed.

She was rushed to hospital and pronounced dead shortly after, alongside two other civilians, aged 41 and 48.

One of her lecturers, Tetiana Melikhova of Zaporizhzhia National University, said Bubynets was an only child and that her mother “lost the meaning of life” after she died.

“She couldn’t speak. At the funeral, she just lay on the coffin; she couldn’t let her child go,” Melikhova told Al Jazeera.

The strike that killed Bubynets was the first recorded case of Russia’s use of a fully autonomous attack drone powered by artificial intelligence (AI), according to a New York Times analysis.

While drone strikes have hammered Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian officials who examined the wreckage found the unmanned vehicle to be unlike others.

In place of an antenna, it featured an AI-powered minicomputer sold commercially by US technology company Nvidia, which rendered it capable of directing itself to the type of target it was programmed to spot – likely propane tanks in this case – lock on to it and proceed to strike.

AI-powered drones are the tip of the iceberg as Russia and Ukraine race towards boosting tech infrastructure aimed at coordinating reconnaissance and attack, according to analysts.

“It’s not about a drone having AI in it, and then seeing something and striking,” Marina Miron, researcher at the defence studies department at King’s College London, said. “Rather, it’s the drone seeing something, communicating to a software complex which knows how to map the GPS coordinates on a live battlefield map, and notifying the closest artillery unit.”

Referred to as reconnaissance-strike architecture, these unified battlefield management systems act like a central command. They track the location of friendly forces and identify enemy positions.

AI acts as the accelerator, instantly processing massive amounts of data collected through sensors in drones or any other military products, including interceptor missiles or artillery units.

The tactical advantage on the battlefield is given by the system’s ability to compress the kill chain – meaning coordinating and distributing the intelligence to military assets on the ground to find, track and destroy targets in a matter of minutes.

In such an ecosystem, AI-powered automated drones are just pieces of a broader puzzle.

Ukraine is known to be developing its system, which it named DELTA. Following operational trials in late 2025, Russia has been rolling out its version, the Svod Tactical Situational Awareness Complex, to front-line units.

Both sides claim that once the battlefield data is processed, a decision support system (DSS) presents a military commander with options to choose from, keeping a human in the decision-making loop, said Miron.

“In how far that is true is, of course, impossible to find out,” she added.

Acknowledging full AI autonomy would provoke ethical and legal questions.

Even if humans were to retain final decision-making authority, research has shown AI systems subtly shape choices, predetermining outcomes.

“Under time and pressure, commanders often do as AI suggests,” said Miron, whose research focuses on military AI and remotely piloted and autonomous systems.

Towards full automation

Coordinated AI-powered military systems are the next frontier of modern warfare, said Serhiy Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian Ministry of Defence adviser on loitering munitions, known by his callsign Flash.

“That’s what it will all come to,” he posted on his Telegram channel on July 1. “Navigation, search for a target, and attacks will be fully autonomous.”

Drones with some autonomous capabilities are already being deployed at scale.

Heorhii Volkov, commander of Ukraine’s Yasni Ochi drone strike unit, said this is currently mostly used in the final phase of long-distance strikes, where first-person view (FPV) drones are likely to lose radio connection due to electronic warfare or the curvature of the Earth.

The use of AI in so-called last-mile operations solves this battlefield hitch. If the signal is lost, an integrated AI-enabled onboard module takes full control of the unmanned vehicle, autonomously locks on the target and carries the strike to completion.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of Ukrainian technology company The Fourth Law, which develops AI-powered autonomy software for unmanned vehicles, said Russia and Ukraine were working to deploy a wider range of autonomous systems.

“This is not simply a race to demonstrate a fully autonomous drone. It is a race to make autonomy reliable, affordable and deployable at scale,” Azhnyuk told Al Jazeera. “Electronic warfare, increasingly long engagement distances and the growing number of drones are making human-controlled systems less sufficient. Autonomy solves exactly these constraints.”

Azhnyuk believes autonomy will become a game-changer over the next six to 12 months.

“The decisive advantage will belong to the side that can deploy reliable autonomy across tens or hundreds of thousands of systems, not just demonstrate it in prototypes,” he said.

Kateryna Bondar, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), noted the dangers of AI’s reliance on algorithms.

“The system doesn’t understand what it’s doing; it’s just following the algorithm and the rules which people created,” said Bondar, who works at the CSIS’s Wadhwani AI Center. “AI has to be trained to recognise targets and engage these targets,” but writing code that distinguishes between a bus and a tank is easier than between a Russian and a Ukrainian soldier.

Additionally, cost-effective FPV drones have low-quality cameras and their resolution can be lowered further by adverse atmospheric conditions.

Military units using autonomous systems therefore “delegate the decision to a very imperfect technology that cannot distinguish between a civilian and a military person, combatant or non-combatant”, Bondar said.

“This is why there is a conversation around who makes a decision and who has responsibility for mistakes and errors.”

MOSCOW: Russia said on Friday it would aim its nuclear warheads at Lithuania if the Baltic state hosted any weapons from the nuclear arsenals of its NATO allies on its territory.

Lithuania is moving to lift a constitutional ban on having nuclear weapons stored in the country, part of an effort to boost its security posture amid Russia’s offensive on Ukraine.

The decision is currently working its way through parliament — where it needs a two-thirds majority to pass and has the support of the president and major parties — and could come into force this winter.

It would be “a very serious turn in terms of escalating tensions”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state TV when asked about the plan.

“If there are nuclear weapons on the territory that are aimed at us, accordingly, the territory of that country will fall into the crosshairs of our own nuclear weapons,” he said.

Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda had announced the plans in July, saying his country wanted to be an “integral part of this nuclear deterrence”.

Russia is displaying some of its newest air-launched precision weapons in public for the first time at the El Alamein International Airshow in Egypt this week. The S-71K Kovyor and related S-71M Monokhrom, and the S8000 Banderol, reflect Russia’s effort to field larger numbers of relatively inexpensive standoff weapons alongside its more sophisticated and costly missile types. As such, their development and early employment are closely tied to the war in Ukraine, but they also reflect wider global interest in these kinds of weapons.

The weapons, seen in the tweet embedded below, comprise, clockwise from top left: S-71K Kovyor, an unknown smaller guided munition, S8000 Banderol, and S-71M Monokhrom:

For Russia, the requirement has become increasingly important as the war in Ukraine has evolved into a prolonged contest in which industrial capacity is as critical as technology. Russia has expended huge numbers of cruise and ballistic missiles against Ukrainian targets while also developing an enormous strike-drone campaign. At the same time, Ukrainian air defenses have become progressively more capable, forcing Moscow to use combinations of missiles, drones, decoys, and different flight profiles to penetrate or saturate the defensive network. One lesson is the fact that a weapon does not necessarily have to be as capable as a high-end cruise missile if it can be manufactured in much greater numbers and still present a credible threat to the target.

The S-71M, which TWZ previously reported on in detail after Ukrainian intelligence obtained an example, is a compact, turbojet-powered weapon with a distinctly angular airframe intended to reduce its radar signature. Imagery from Egypt gives a better look at its front end, including a faceted nose flowing into a broad central fuselage. The nose has at least one optically flat transparency for an infrared or TV seeker. Its wings are sharply swept and fold against the belly of the weapon for carriage, while the rear of the weapon terminates in an inverted-V tail arrangement. The overall shape is notably different from Russia’s more conventional cruise missiles of the past.

Ukrainian analysis found that the S-71M incorporates an OFAB-250-270 high-explosive fragmentation bomb as its warhead and relies primarily on inertial guidance, rather than carrying a sophisticated terminal seeker, although the seeker window raises questions about that.

Ukrainian intelligence also described its construction as being relatively straightforward, with fiberglass composite material making up much of the outer structure and no evidence identified of specialized radar-absorbing coatings.

As we noted previously, the weapon appears intended as a less expensive, but still survivable standoff weapon option that can be produced in significant numbers.

The S-71M has been tested from the Su-57 Felon fighter, also present at El Alamein. In a press release, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), responsible for the Su-57, said that the S-71M and the S-71K displayed alongside it “were designed for fifth-generation fighters,” although there is no reason why they couldn’t be launched from a wide variety of platforms.

A Su-57 performing at El Alamein, with one of its main internal weapons bays apparently loaded with Kh-69 standoff missiles:

Regardless of launch platform, the nature of the war in Ukraine make that the S-71M particularly useful. Russia has increasingly relied on extemporized glide bombs for attacks against targets relatively close to the front, but those weapons require the launching aircraft to operate within a certain distance of Ukrainian defenses. At least in their earlier iterations, such weapons were also crude and prone to failure. Longer-range cruise missiles offer considerably greater standoff but are more complex and expensive. The S-71M sits somewhere between those categories, providing an air-launched, powered weapon with a relatively large warhead and some degree of low observability without the cost and complexity of a full-size, truly stealthy cruise missile.

The S-71K appears to represent a more capable version of the basic concept. Public information remains limited, but the weapon has been associated with electro-optical guidance and greater onboard processing, potentially giving it a capability to deal with targets in a more flexible manner than the largely pre-programmed S-71M. Exactly how that capability is employed, and how autonomous the weapon actually is, remain less clear from the imagery and information released to date.

As displayed at El Alamein, the S-71K retains the overall faceted, low-observable appearance of the S-71M but has a visibly different airframe and wing arrangement. Its body is notably broad and compact relative to its length, with folding wings that are relatively thick, and a more refined inverted-V tail giving it more the appearance of a small uncrewed aircraft than a conventional air-to-surface missile.

Meanwhile, the Banderol represents a somewhat different path to the same general problem. Ukraine’s intelligence service previously obtained and analyzed an example of the small jet-powered cruise missile, which TWZ reported on last year. The weapon is considerably smaller than Russia’s principal cruise missiles and has been associated with launch from drones and helicopters. Its reported range of around 500 kilometers (311 miles) and relatively small warhead make it something of a complementary system intended to provide another, more economical way of putting a precision weapon onto a target from the air.

In terms of its appearance, the Banderol is more conventionally missile-like, with an ogival central fuselage, a pointed nose, and sharply swept folding wings. Its proportions underline just how small it is compared with Russia’s better-known air-launched cruise missiles.

The Banderol is particularly relevant in the context of the economics of the Ukraine conflict. Russian forces have increasingly used combinations of relatively inexpensive one-way attack drones and more expensive cruise and ballistic missiles. The drones can be produced in large numbers and used to complicate air-defense operations, while the more capable missiles provide greater speed, range, payload, or penetration capability. A small turbojet-powered weapon such as Banderol offers another point on that spectrum.

At leats one image has recently emerged showing a Banderol carried by a Russian Mi-28NM Havoc attack helicopter. This would be in line with unconfirmed reports from Ukraine last month that Russia was using the Mi-28 as an additional launch platform for the weapon, including firing them from over the Sea of Azov to attack targets around Odesa.

Its reported use also illustrates how the distinction between a cruise missile and a large one-way attack drone is becoming increasingly blurred. The Banderol incorporates a conventional missile-like airframe and jet propulsion but has been associated with drone operations and makes extensive use of commercially available components. TWZ’s earlier examination of the weapon also highlighted the extent to which modern Russian weapons programs can combine relatively simple airframes with foreign-sourced electronics and propulsion technology.

Likely Banderol loitering munition on the ground (perspective exaggerates it’s size) and under Orion drone.

Banderol has been reported as one of the munition used in recent strikes and appears to use a jet engine and a FAB-100 warhead or similar. pic.twitter.com/j50DUsNuVe

— krakek (@krakek1) April 27, 2025

Seen together at El Alamein, the three weapons provide an unusually useful snapshot of where Russian air-launched strike development is heading. They are presented alongside a fourth, so-far unidentified munition. This unnamed weapon is notably short and fat, with a cruciform tail, and an optical window in the nose. Its overall size and shape suggest it may have been developed specifically to arm drones.

The appearance of the weapons at an arms fair underscores the fact that Russia is not the only country confronting the problem of producing and fielding sufficient precision weapons at an acceptable cost. The growing interest in lower-cost cruise missiles, loitering munitions, attritable aircraft, and other forms of expendable precision strike is now evident well beyond Russia.

Russia is also clearly trying to make these weapons harder to intercept, an increasingly important consideration as Ukrainian air defenses have demonstrated an ability to shoot down even glide bombs in some circumstances. The S-71K in particular incorporates unusually pronounced low-observable shaping, suggesting that survivability was also a central requirement from the outset.

There is, however, a significant complication to Russia’s attempt to turn its wartime experience into an export opportunity. Buying any kind of weapons from Moscow has become considerably more difficult because of sanctions, restrictions on access to foreign technology and financing, and the wider political risks associated with maintaining a Russian defense relationship. Those factors matter just as much to a prospective customer as the performance of the weapon itself.

Author’s note: earlier reporting on the S-71 family appears to have transposed the S-71K and S-71M versions. Most authoritative accounts now indicate that the more refined, more stealthy version is the S-71K Kovyor (meaning carpet), while the simpler weapon is the S-71M Monokhrom.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

GENEVA: Nearly 130 countries on Saturday agreed on a text defining lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) — “killer robots” to their critics — a first step toward talks on a possible international treaty to regulate them.

The text agreed upon has not yet been made public — but campaign groups following the talks have already criticized leading countries for dragging their feet on the issue.

Dutch Foreign Minister Tom Berendsen announced the agreement, by 128 countries, on Saturday. The Netherlands has been overseeing the talks.

Countries are already developing and using weapons capable of selecting targets and using force against them without human intervention.

But the International Committee of the Red Cross warned in a statement that “the unconstrained development and use of autonomous weapon systems pose serious legal, ethical and humanitarian challenges.”

The ICRC and several campaigning groups have called for international legally binding rules to restrict and regulate their use.

Nicole van Rooijen, executive director of Stop Killer Robots, an international alliance of campaign groups, accused the United States, Russia and their allies of trying to weaken the agreed text.

Lex International, a Geneva-based philanthropic group funding work on key policy issues, also criticized some nations’ position.

“The United States, Russia, India and Israel are among the key opponents of negotiations,” it said.

“The governments of Brazil, Ireland, and Norway are leading efforts to get such negotiations started in November,” it added.

UN member states will decide at November talks of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons whether to move toward an international treaty regulating such weapons.

Leader Kim Jong Un says vessel will form part of Pyongyang’s nuclear response system, strengthen naval forces.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attended the commissioning of a warship he said could deliver “annihilating retaliatory strikes on an enemy”, citing “constant threats”, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The Kang Kon, named after the North Korean military leader who was killed in action during the Korean War, was formally deployed at a ceremony at the eastern Wonsan Port in Kangwon Province on Sunday.

In his address, Kim said the warship “represents the self-respect and will” of North Korea to defend its rights and interests, KCNA reported.

“The time has come for us to exercise our sovereignty at sea and under water,” Kim said, according to KCNA.

He said that “dangerous shadows must be erased” and that North Korea was under constant threat in the “sea east of the Korean Peninsula and nearby waters”, KCNA reported.

KCNA did not specify what weapons systems might be deployed on the Kang Kon, but said it has the same weapons systems as the 5,000-tonne warship Choe Hyon launched in June.

A previous KCNA report said Choe Hyon-class destroyers can carry a range of weapons, including missiles that analysts say are capable of carrying a nuclear payload.

Sunday marks the third launch of the Kang Kon; the destroyer partially capsized during the first commissioning in May 2025 before it was repaired and relaunched the following month. It underwent further repairs and sea trials before completing weapons testing in July this year.

Kim said he would demonstrate another stage of North Korea’s naval buildup in eight months, KCNA said, without giving details.

North Korea has accelerated efforts to modernise its navy as Kim pursues a broader expansion of the country’s nuclear-capable forces.

He also said the construction of naval bases on North Korea’s east coast was under way and that the country would create new naval units and build different classes of warships.

Pyongyang, which calls itself an “irreversible” nuclear state, frames the build-up as deterrence against Washington and Seoul. The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, and Kim has accused the allies of driving the region “to the brink of a nuclear war”.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian Aerospace Forces (RAF) chief Aleksandr Chayko barely survived a blast that killed his son-in-law.

Chayko, who turned 55 in the last week of July, was reportedly having a belated birthday party on August 1 at a high-end Italian restaurant in central Moscow.

But the celebration was cut short, as an ‌unidentified woman carrying a homemade bomb tried to enter the restaurant. She was stopped by a security ‌guard, according to Russia. The explosive in her bag detonated, killing at least five people.

The Kremlin did not confirm the casualties, but blamed the attack on the “bloody tentacles” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government.

Kyiv has not commented on the attack.

Russia’s space programme in the firing line

Chayko helped lead Russia’s intervention in Syria and commanded Russian forces north of Kyiv in early 2022.

Ukraine has accused him of war crimes.

In May, President Vladimir Putin appointed him commander-in-chief of the RAF that controls the military component of Russia’s space programme.

The RAF’s satellites and ground-space facilities have been used for gathering intelligence, navigation, and supporting the coordination of ground troops and drone and missile attacks.

These facilities are located mostly in western Russia, and new Ukrainian long-range drones and missiles are capable of striking them.

“Key factories are few, and they all are within the reach of Ukrainian missiles,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.

“These attacks may result – and certainly will – in the problems with all of Russia’s space programme, including specifically civilian and international programmes,” he said.

‘Long-range sanctions’

In late June, Ukrainian drones hit the giant space communications centre in the leafy, tranquil town of Dubna outside Moscow that managed reconnaissance satellites and processed military data.

The strike damaged a 32-metre (105-foot) satellite antenna, hardware modular complexes, central control consoles and technical buildings.

“Our long-range sanctions against Russia for this war once again reached the Dubna space communications centre,” Zelenskyy said on June 30.

Russian authorities said an unspecified building in Dubna was damaged and a six-month-old baby died.

Ukrainian drones also struck three smaller space communication centres in western Russia and annexed Crimea.

“These centres are very expensive, very labour-consuming from the viewpoint of construction,” Anatoly Zak, a United States-based author and one of the foremost experts on the Russian space programme, told Al Jazeera. “It’s very difficult to transfer their functions to another infrastructure” because they manage geostationary satellites “tied” to a certain location.

So far, there have been no signs that the satellites lost orbit or became unmanageable, but “behind the scenes there are for sure serious communication problems”, Zak said.

Ukraine attacks ‘when there’s a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad’

On August 23, swarms of Ukrainian drones flew more than 1,800km (1,120 miles) to reach Russia’s northwestern Arkhangelsk region.

Some 40 drones were downed, regional authorities claimed, but at least two reached the area near Plesetsk, Russia’s military cosmodrome, or spaceport, and launchpad for intercontinental ballistic missiles and rockets carrying military satellites.

No harm was done. A day later, Roscosmos, the state-run space corporation, reported the successful launch of a rocket with unnamed “military satellites”.

The timing of the Ukrainian attack – along with two more strikes earlier this year – was calculated to strike a booster rocket that had just been fuelled and lifted for takeoff.

“There have been three attempts to air-raid Plesetsk, and not just air-raid, but air-raid at the moment when there’s a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad that is about to start,” Zak said.

The attempts were serious enough to be publicly reported to Putin.

“Our [Ukrainian] ‘friends’ did everything to make this launch not happen,” Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Kremlin-run Roscosmos space agency, told Putin in April.

At least a dozen drones are necessary to damage Plesetsk’s launch table or rocket assembly shop, according to Pavel Luzin, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.

The military satellites launched from Plesetsk are part of the Rassvet (Dawn) satellite fleet designed to rival and replace Starlink satellite modems by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Moscow claimed.

The world’s most launched spaceship

Sputnik 1, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, was the size of a fitness ball, and had nothing but a radio transmitter and three silver-zinc batteries inside.

The “Sputnik moment” was the US’s realisation, after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957, that the USSR had taken the lead in space technology and science.

But Sputnik 1 was launched on a modified R-7 – the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to carry a hydrogen bomb across continents. The same rocket technology that could deliver a nuclear warhead into the US had been repurposed to put a satellite into orbit.

The R-7 became a prototype of the Soyuz booster rockets, the world’s most launched spaceships that made Soviet and then Russian launches routine and precise, unlike US launches of space shuttles.

“Rain or shine or sleet or snow don’t matter,” Mark Bowman, deputy director of NASA’s human spaceflight programme, told this reporter in 2007 at the Baikonur spaceport, the world’s oldest in southern Kazakhstan that Russia leases.

The only place where the Soyuz rockets are produced is the Progress Rocket and Space Centre in the Volga River city of Samara – and Ukrainian missiles struck it on August 15. The attack ignited a fire and slightly damaged one of the facilities.

“So far, we see that the damage in Samara wasn’t critical,” Luzin said.

If it becomes critical, Russia would be unable to manufacture the Soyuz rockets, but the existing stash of rockets would still last a year, he said.

Communist Moscow never advertised the military component of its space programme, emphasising its “peaceful exploration of space”.

The USSR was first to send a dog, a man and a woman into space, and to launch the world’s first space station. In 1988, its Buran space shuttle became the first to complete an unmanned orbital flight and land automatically.

Its unmanned probes soft-landed on Venus and Mars and took the first photos of the moon’s dark side.

Some key figures of the Soviet space programmes were born in what is now Ukraine, and a string of crucial design bureaus and manufacturing facilities kept working there after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent breakdown in Russian-Ukrainian relations, Ukrainian aerospace facilities severed their longstanding ties with Moscow, disrupting decades-old supplies of booster rockets, guidance systems, electronics and other components.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also deepened the international isolation of its civilian space programme, with Western governments and space agencies suspending or abandoning several planned missions and partnerships.

After the war began in 2022, the European Space Agency terminated its cooperation with Roscosmos on ExoMars, removing the Russian-built Kazachok landing platform from the mission designed to search for signs of past life on Mars.

The same year, Berlin switched off its X-ray telescope on Spektr-RG, a Russia-German space observatory that maps clusters of galaxies and surveys the universe for black holes.

For the sake of seizing insignificant areas in eastern Ukraine, “Putin will waste the Russian space programme the way he wasted the rest of the Soviet legacy”, analyst Mitrokhin believes.

Yet Russia has not been completely cut off from international space cooperation.

Despite the collapse of some partnerships, NASA and Roscosmos have continued to work together on board the International Space Station, while Moscow has turned to China and other non-Western partners for new projects.