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‘It is a war of drones now’: the ever-evolving tech dominating the frontline in Ukraine | Ukraine
“It’s more exhausting,” says Afer, a deputy commander of the “Da Vinci Wolves”, describing how one of the best-known battalions in Ukraine has to defend against constant Russian attacks. Where once the invaders might have tried small group assaults with armoured vehicles, now the tactic is to try and sneak through on foot one by one, evading frontline Ukrainian drones, and find somewhere to hide.
Under what little cover remains, survivors then try to gather a group of 10 or so and attack Ukrainian positions. It is costly – “in the last 24 hours we killed 11,” Afer says – but the assaults that previously might have happened once or twice a day are now relentless. To the Da Vinci commander it seems that the Russians are terrified of their own officers, which is why they follow near suicidal orders.
Reconnaissance drones monitor a burnt-out tree line west of Pokrovsk; the images come through to Da Vinci’s command centre at one end of a 130-metre-long underground bunker. “It’s very dangerous to have even a small break on watching,” Afer says, and the team works round the clock. The bunker, built in four or five weeks, contains multiple rooms, including a barracks for sleep. Another is an army mess with children’s drawings, reminders of family. The menu for the week is listed on the wall.
It is three and a half years into the Ukraine war and Donald Trump’s August peace initiative has made no progress. Meanwhile the conflict evolves. Afer explains that such is the development of FPV (first person view) drones, remotely piloted using an onboard camera, that the so-called kill zone now extends “12 to 14 kilometres” behind the front – the range at which a $500 drone, flying at up to 60mph, can strike. It means, Afer adds, that “all the logistics [food, ammunition and medical supplies] we are doing is either on foot or with the help of ground drones”.
Further in the rear, at a rural dacha now used by Da Vinci’s soldiers, several types of ground drones are parked. The idea has moved rapidly from concept to trial to reality. They include remotely controlled machine guns, and flat bed robot vehicles. One, the $12,000 Termit, has tracks for rough terrain and can carry 300kg over 12 miles with a top speed of 7 miles an hour.
Land drones save lives too. “Last night we evacuated a wounded man with two broken legs and a hole in his chest,” Afer continues. The whole process took “almost 20 hours” and involved two soldiers lifting the wounded man more than a mile to a land drone, which was able to cart the victim to a safe village. The soldier survived.
While Da Vinci reports its position is stable, endless Russian attempts at infiltration have been effective at revealing where the line is thinly held or poorly coordinated between neighbouring units. Russian troops last month penetrated Ukraine’s lines north-east of Pokrovsk near Dobropillya by as much as 12 miles – a dangerous moment in a critical sector, just ahead of Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
At first it was said a few dozen had broke through, but the final tally appears to have been much greater. Ukrainian military sources estimate that 2,000 Russians got through and that 1,100 infiltrators were killed in a fightback led by the 14th Chervona Kalyna brigade from Ukraine’s newly created Azov Corps – a rare setback for an otherwise slow but remorseless Russian advance.
That evening at another dacha used by Da Vinci, people linger in the yard while moths target the light bulbs. Inside, a specialist drone jammer sits on a gaming chair surrounded by seven screens arranged in a fan and supported by some complex carpentry.
It is too sensitive to photograph, but the team leader Oleksandr, whose call sign is Shoni, describes the jammer’s task. Both sides can intercept each other’s feeds from FPV drones and three screens are dedicated to capturing footage that can then help to locate them. Once discovered, the operator’s task is to find the radio frequency the drone is using and immobilise it with jammers hidden in the ground (unless, that is, they are fibre optic drones that use a fixed cable up to 12 miles long instead of a radio connection).
“We are jamming around 70%,” Shoni says, though he acknowledges that the Russians achieve a similar success rate. In their sector, this amounts to 30 to 35 enemy drones a day. At times, the proportion downed is higher. “During the last month, we closed the sky. We intercepted their pilots saying on the radio they could not fly,” he continues, but that changed after Russian artillery destroyed jamming gear on the ground. The battle, Shoni observes, ebbs and flows: “It is a war of drones now and there is a shield and there is a sword. We are the shield.”
A single drone pilot can operate 20 missions in 24 hours says Sean, who flies FPVs for Da Vinci, for several days at a stretch in a crew of two or three, hidden a few miles behind the frontline. Because the Russians are on the attack the main target is their infantry. Sean frankly acknowledges he is “killing at least three Russian soldiers” during that time, in the deadly struggle between ground and air. Does it make it easier to kill the enemy, from a distance? “How can we tell, we only know this,” says Dubok, another FPV pilot, sitting alongside Sean.
Other anti-drone defences are more sophisticated. Ukraine’s third brigade holds the northern Kharkiv sector, east of the Oskil River, but to the west are longer-range defence positions. Inside, a team member watches over a radar, mostly looking for signs of Russian Supercam, Orlan and Zala reconnaissance drones. If they see a target, two dash out into fields ripe with sunflowers to launch an Arbalet interceptor: a small delta wing drone made of a black polystyrene, which costs $500 and can be held in one hand.
The Arbalet’s top speed is a remarkable 110 miles an hour, though its battery life is a shortish 40 minutes. It is flown by a pilot hidden in the bunker via its camera using a sensitive hobbyists’ controller. The aim is to get it close enough to explode the grenade it carries and destroy the Russian drone. Buhan, one of the pilots, says “it is easier to learn how to fly it if you have never flown an FPV drone”.
It is an unusually wet and cloudy August day, which means a rare break from drone activity as the Russians will not be flying in the challenging conditions. The crew don’t want to launch the Arbalet in case they lose it, so there is time to talk. Buhan says he was a trading manager before the war, while Daos worked in investments. “I would have had a completely different life if it had not been for the war,” Daos continues, “but we all need to gather to fight to be free.”
So do the pilots feel motivated to carry on fighting when there appears to be no end? The two men look in my direction, and nod with a resolution not expressed in words.
Microsoft Corp. said on Saturday that clients of its Azure cloud platform may experience increased latency after multiple international cables in the Red Sea were cut.
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Pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, whose work has earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the former Google scientist cleared the air about why he left the tech giant, raised alarms on potential threats from AI, and revealed how he uses the technology. But he also predicted who the winners and losers will be.
“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
That echos comments he gave to Fortune last month, when he said AI companies are more concerned with short-term profits than the long-term consequences of the technology.
For now, layoffs haven’t spiked, but evidence is mounting that AI is shrinking opportunities, especially at the entry level where recent college graduates start their careers.
A survey from the New York Fed found that companies using AI are much more likely to retrain their employees than fire them, though layoffs are expected to rise in the coming months.
Hinton said earlier that healthcare is the one industry that will be safe from the potential jobs armageddon.
“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he explained on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June. “There’s almost no limit to how much health care people can absorb—[patients] always want more health care if there’s no cost to it.”
Still, Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, while sparing some jobs that require a high level of skill.
In his interview with the FT, he also dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s idea to pay a universal basic income as AI disrupts the economy and reduce demand for workers, saying it “won’t deal with human dignity” and the value people derive from having jobs.
Hinton has long warned about the dangers of AI without guardrails, estimating a 10% to 20% chance of the technology wiping out humans after the development of superintelligence.
In his view, the dangers of AI fall into two categories: the risk the technology itself poses to the future of humanity, and the consequences of AI being manipulated by people with bad intent.
In his FT interview, he warned AI could help someone build a bioweapon and lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more closely, while China is taking the threat more seriously. But he also acknowledged potential upside from AI amid its immense possibilities and uncertainties.
“We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,” Hinton said. “We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”
Meanwhile, he told the FT how he uses AI in his own life, saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his product of choice. While he mostly uses the chatbot for research, Hinton revealed that a former girlfriend used ChatGPT “to tell me what a rat I was” during their breakup.
“She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behavior was and gave it to me. I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad . . . I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes,” he quipped.
Hinton also explained why he left Google in 2023. While media reports have said he quit so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate denied that was the reason.
“I left because I was 75, I could no longer program as well as I used to, and there’s a lot of stuff on Netflix I haven’t had a chance to watch,” he said. “I had worked very hard for 55 years, and I felt it was time to retire . . . And I thought, since I am leaving anyway, I could talk about the risks.”
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NFL player props, odds, bets: Week 1, 2025 NFL picks, SportsLine Machine Learning Model AI predictions, SGP
The arrival of the 2025 NFL season means more than just making spread or total picks, as it also gives bettors the opportunity to make NFL prop bets on the league’s biggest stars. From the 13 games on Sunday to Monday Night Football, you’ll have no shortage of player props to wager on. There are several players returning from injury-plagued seasons a year ago who want to start 2025 off on the right note, including Trevor Lawrence, Alvin Kamara and Stefon Diggs. Their Week 1 NFL prop odds could be a bit off considering how last year ended, and this could be an opportunity to cash in.
Kamara has a rushing + receiving yards NFL prop total of 93.5 (-112/-114) versus Arizona on Sunday after the running back averaged 106.6 scrimmage yards in 2024. The Cardinals allowed the eighth-most rushing yards per game to running backs last year, in addition to giving up the eighth-most receiving yards per game to the position.
Before making any Week 1 NFL prop bets on Kamara’s Overs, you also have to remember he’s now 30, playing under a first-year head coach and has a young quarterback who’s winless in six career starts. If you are looking for NFL prop bets or NFL parlays for Week 1, SportsLine has you covered with the top Week 1 player props from its Machine Learning Model AI.
Built using cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques by SportsLine’s Data Science team, AI Predictions and AI Ratings are generated for each player prop.
Now, with the Week 1 NFL schedule quickly approaching, SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI has identified the top NFL props from the biggest Week 1 games.
Week 1 NFL props for Sunday’s main slate
After analyzing the NFL props from Sunday’s main slate and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Bengals WR Tee Higgins goes Under 63.5 receiving yards (-114) versus the Browns in a 1 p.m. ET kickoff. Excluding a 2022 game in which he played just one snap, Higgins has been held under 60 receiving yards in three of his last four meetings with Cleveland.
Entering his sixth NFL season, Higgins has never had more than 58 yards in any Week 1 game, including going catchless on eight targets versus the Browns in Week 1 of 2023. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model projects 44.4 yards for Higgins in a 5-star pick. See more Week 1 NFL props here.
Week 1 NFL props for Bills vs. Ravens on Sunday Night Football
After analyzing Ravens vs. Bills props and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Ravens QB Lamar Jackson goes Over 233.5 passing yards (-114). The last time Jackson took the field was against Buffalo in last season’s playoffs, and the two-time MVP had 254 passing yards and a pair of touchdowns through the air. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model projects Jackson to blow past his total with 280.2 yards on average in a 4.5-star prop pick. See more NFL props for Ravens vs. Bills here.
You can make NFL prop bets on Jackson and others with the Underdog Fantasy promo code CBSSPORTS2. Bet at Underdog Fantasy and get $50 in bonus bets after making a $5 bet:
Week 1 NFL props for Bears vs. Vikings on Monday Night Football
After analyzing Vikings vs. Bears props and examining the dozens of NFL player prop markets, the SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model AI says Bears QB Caleb Williams goes Under 218.5 passing yards (-114). Primetime games like what he’ll see on Sunday night weren’t too favorable to Williams as a rookie. He lost all three he played in, had one total passing score across them, was sacked an average of 5.3 times and, most relevant to this NFL prop, Williams failed to reach even 200 passing yards in any of the three. The SportsLine Machine Learning Model forecasts him to finish with just 174.8 passing yards, making Under 218.5 a 4.5-star NFL prop. See more NFL props for Vikings vs. Bears here.
You can also use the latest FanDuel promo code to get $300 in bonus bets instantly:
How to make Week 1 NFL prop picks
SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model has identified another star who sails past his total and has dozens of NFL props rated 4 stars or better. You need to see the Machine Learning Model analysis before making any Week 1 NFL prop bets.
Which NFL prop picks should you target for Week 1, and which star player has multiple 5-star rated picks? Visit SportsLine to see the latest NFL player props from SportsLine’s Machine Learning Model that uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to make its projections.
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