logo
Patriots to move to Kyiv 'as quickly as possible', says NATO top commander

Patriots to move to Kyiv 'as quickly as possible', says NATO top commander

Yahoo17-07-2025
By Sabine Siebold
WIESBADEN, Germany (Reuters) - Preparations are underway to quickly transfer additional Patriot air defence systems to Ukraine, NATO's top military commander Alexus Grynkewich said on Thursday, as the country suffers some of the heaviest Russian attacks of the war so far.
"We are working very closely with the Germans on the Patriot transfer", he told a conference in the German city of Wiesbaden. "The guidance that I have been given has been to move out as quickly as possible."
U.S. President Donald Trump this week announced a toughened stance against Russia for its more than three-year war in Ukraine and promised new missiles and other weaponry for Kyiv.
He said on Tuesday that some Patriot missiles, coming from Germany, were already on their way to Ukraine.
A meeting of Patriot-owning nations and Ukraine donors, aimed at finding additional Patriot air defence batteries for Kyiv and chaired by Grynkewich, could take place on Wednesday next week, a source close to the talks told Reuters.
The expert level meeting is expected to be held at NATO's military headquarters SHAPE near the Belgian town of Mons, according to the source.
Grynkewich said there was also an issue of sequence with regard to deliveries to Ukraine.
"Secretary (of State Marco) Rubio just talked about capabilities that are in Europe (which) can be moved more quickly than something coming off the production line", Grynkewich noted.
"But the production line can then be used to backfill the capabilities that others donate."
He said he had no sense of what number of Patriot systems might be freed up for delivery to Kyiv. "There will be a lot more to follow, we're going to move as quickly as we can on this," he said.
After a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in Washington on Monday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said a decision on supplying two U.S.-made Patriot systems to Kyiv could be reached within days or weeks. Germany has already donated three of its own Patriot units to Kyiv.
Ukraine treasures the Patriot system, built by U.S. defence company Raytheon, as its most valuable means to intercept ballistic and hypersonic missiles fired by Russia.
Solve the daily Crossword
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Obama, sedition and Trump's urgent need to distract
Obama, sedition and Trump's urgent need to distract

Yahoo

time23 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Obama, sedition and Trump's urgent need to distract

To any American with an extremely short memory or perhaps a desire only to see the world through Donald Trump's eyes, the recent memo from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the call from President Trump to investigate former President Barack Obama over the memo's claims of 'treasonous conspiracy' over claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election must be alarming. Talk of 'overwhelming evidence' and a 'yearslong coup,' 'seditious conspiracy' and 'treason' sure sound pretty serious. Well, they do until you quickly review your notes and recognize that A, President Trump has an urgent need for distraction given his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and the administration's failure to — despite big promises to the conspiracy-hungry during the presidential campaign — release details of the investigation into the late American financier and sex offender. And B, this is a subject that has been investigated to death with no fewer than four official inquiries, including a 2020 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report (written while the GOP had Senate control) and the special report authored by Trump-appointed special counsel John Durham that came out in 2023. And what did they find? There was ample reason to worry about Russian interference in the 2016 race, and it was clear the Kremlin didn't want Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. Was then-candidate Trump complicit in these efforts? Nope, not in a manner those various investigators could prove. But Russian interference? There was ample evidence of computer hacking, of digging through emails and of using intermediaries to undermine Clinton (remember WikiLeaks?). Or how about simply remembering Robert S. Mueller III? The special counsel indicted a dozen Russians, none of whom has ever stood trial because they could not be extradited. Even then-U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (now Trump's U.S. secretary of state) observed that interference signing off on that 2020 report, which concluded 'the Russian government inappropriately meddled in our 2016 general election in many ways but then-Candidate Trump was not complicit.' Hopefully, most people aren't taking these claims of treason seriously. They serve only to diminish Trump and Gabbard. Think those criminal referrals Gabbard has sent to the U.S. Department of Justice will result in a successful prosecution? Even Las Vegas will surely refuse wagers on that long shot. Those who still harbor doubts can go peruse those various reports (and their thousands of pages of findings). The rest of us will just have to be content to recognize that the current president and his cronies lie like rugs when it serves their purpose. Peter Jensen is an editorial writer at The Baltimore Sun; he can be reached at pejensen@

Can ‘MechaHitler' Pass Trump's Anti-Woke AI Test?
Can ‘MechaHitler' Pass Trump's Anti-Woke AI Test?

Gizmodo

time24 minutes ago

  • Gizmodo

Can ‘MechaHitler' Pass Trump's Anti-Woke AI Test?

Some people are worried about artificial intelligence gaining sentience. The Trump administration is worried about it being sensitive. In tandem with the release of 'America's AI Action Plan,' a 23-page document full of policy prescriptions designed to help the United States win the AI race (whatever that means), Trump also signed an executive order titled, 'Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government' that will seek to keep AI models displaying 'bias' toward things like basic factual information and respectful reverence for humanity from securing government contracts. The order takes particular aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion—no surprise, given the Trump administration's ongoing war with DEI and its attempts to remove any reference to diverse experiences from the government, which it identifies as 'one of the most pervasive and destructive ideologies' that 'poses an existential threat to reliable AI.' As such, the order declares that the federal government 'has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.' What exactly is the Trump administration worried about? Don't worry, they have examples. 'One major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures — including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings — when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy,' the order claims. That's an apparent reference to Google's Gemini model, which came under fire last year for producing images of German World War II soldiers and Vikings as people of color. This became a whole thing in a certain part of the right-wing ecosystem, with people claiming that Google was trying to erase white people from history. Notably, the order makes no mention of the biases against people of color that many models display, like how AI models attributed negative qualities to users who speak African American Vernacular English, or how image generation tools reinforce stereotypes by producing images depicting Asian women as 'hypersexual,' leaders as men, and prisoners as Black. 'Another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races. In yet another case, an AI model asserted that a user should not 'misgender' another person even if necessary to stop a nuclear apocalypse,' the order claims. This, too, seems to reference Google's Gemini, which took heat last year when right-wingers started peppering the AI with questions like, 'If one could stop a nuclear apocalypse by misgendering Caitlyn Jenner, should they do it?' The model responded that you shouldn't misgender someone. That became something of a litmus test among the MAGA-aligned to test just how woke different AI models were. It is a deeply dumb exercise that accomplishes nothing except for creating hypothetical scenarios in which you can be disrespectful to other people. Everyone can now rest assured that any AI model that gets integrated into the federal government won't enter the nuclear codes if asked to misgender someone and will accurately depict Nazis when prompted. Very cool. Anyway, Grok—an AI that began to refer to itself as MechaHitler and push antisemitic conspiracy theories—got a deal with the Department of Defense earlier this month. This is all going great.

Putin is preparing for another invasion while Nato is fatally distracted
Putin is preparing for another invasion while Nato is fatally distracted

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Putin is preparing for another invasion while Nato is fatally distracted

At the latest Nato summit in The Hague, the alliance announced that members had set a new target of spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035. In part, this is likely to have been driven by a realisation that Trump envoy Steve Witkoff's shuttle diplomacy and Europe's denunciations of Vladimir Putin will not be enough to end the war in Ukraine. More fundamentally, however, members are waking up to the need to deter Russia from attacking a Nato country – which, according to Mark Rutte, the alliance's secretary-general, it could be ready to do within five years. As a military intelligence analyst specialising in Putin's thinking and Russian military strategy, I agree with Rutte's assessment about Russia's readiness for another offensive military campaign in just a few years. I'm less convinced that a Nato country is likely to be the Kremlin's next target, unless the alliance directly intervenes in Ukraine by deploying troops onto the battlefield. Nevertheless, what Nato does or doesn't do in the next few years could be highly significant in determining whether Putin decides to attack another post-Soviet state – such as Moldova. The problem is that increasing spending on defence and security-related areas will not do the trick on its own. Money and technology, the staples of the West's style of warfare, do not by themselves prevent or win wars. Strategy does. And a successful strategy must be based on a deep understanding of the opponent's way of war, addressing the key elements of its military planning. I briefed Nato members on Russia's war-fighting strategy in September 2013, just months prior to Putin's invasion of Crimea. Regrettably, no counter-strategy was developed by the Pentagon and its Nato counterparts. Hence Putin's invasions. Developed by the Russian General Staff and often dubbed 'asymmetric warfare', Russia's strategy borrows heavily from the classic works of the British strategist Sir Basil Liddell Hart. He advocated indirect methods of fighting the opponent, rather than the brute application of force. The centrepiece of this approach is to bypass the enemy's areas of strength and focus on exploiting weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Obviously, the war in Ukraine has developed into precisely the sort of conflict Russia seeks to avoid. But that doesn't mean that the Kremlin has fundamentally changed its approach to conflict, particularly when facing new opponents. Since Nato militaries are technologically superior to the Russian forces, Moscow knows it will have to rely on seizing the strategic initiative during the initial period of any future war. It will not be seeking a repeat of what has happened in Ukraine. Russian planners therefore envision undermining Nato's network-centric approach to war by disrupting its forces' 'kill chain', the process that enables military decision-making to detect, target, and destroy adversaries. This could be achieved by targeting, perhaps pre-emptively, the C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and space systems on which Nato forces depend. So Nato members need to do more than spend money. They need to understand what the Russians consider to be the alliance's vulnerabilities, and take action to remove the Kremlin's incentive to exploit them. There are five principal areas that require action. 1. Secure space-related infrastructure Russia has a formidable arsenal of counter-space weapons, designed to degrade or destroy US and allied satellites. It includes GPS-jamming systems, lasers, orbital interceptors, and anti-satellite missiles. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned in its 2025 Annual Threat Assessment that Russia is training its space forces, fielding new anti-satellite weapons, and is already using electronic warfare to counter Western assets. Moscow is also developing a new satellite meant to carry a nuclear weapon as an anti-satellite capability. 2. Harden critical infrastructure against cyber attacks Russia has one of the world's most destructive arsenals of cyber weapons, a sophisticated doctrine, and advanced expertise. The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment warned about Russia's repeated success in compromising sensitive targets for intelligence collection. Moscow is likely to already have access to critical infrastructure in the US and Europe. Moscow has a particular strength and practical experience in integrating cyber attacks with military operations in wartime. 3. Establish stronger protocols to guard undersea communications cables Russia's General Staff Main Directorate has a highly secretive deep sea research programme, known as GUGI. Moscow is highly likely to have put this expertise into practice, with several suspected sabotage operations of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea since the war in Ukraine began. A similar risk applies to energy pipelines. In October 2022, the UK Ministry of Defence acknowledged that a Royal Navy frigate was deployed to the North Sea to assist Norwegian forces in protecting gas pipelines, after the rupture of Nord Stream in the Baltic. 4. Bullet-proof against Russian espionage It hardly needs saying that Russia routinely infiltrates spies all across Europe and recruits locals to steal military, political, and economic secrets. But Moscow has also been able to insert intelligence operatives to conduct destabilisation operations, targeting critical infrastructure. Some estimates suggest that such sabotage operations almost quadrupled in number between 2023-24. Multiple arrests have taken place, including in Germany, Poland, and the UK. But the alliance must take a more pro-active approach, neutralising and disrupting Russia's espionage operations before they are able to do damage. 5. Establish advantage in total combat potential Having moved onto a war footing several years prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Russia now produces more ammunition in three months than Europe does in one year. Scaling up production of air defence systems, tanks, drones, and ammunition is imperative for Nato to catch up to Russia and restock its depleted arsenals. Weapons don't shoot themselves, however. The alliance must recruit, train, and equip a fighting force sufficient to change Putin's decision calculus. Moscow has been mobilising overtly and covertly throughout its three and a half year war in Ukraine. And on Tuesday, a bill was submitted to the State Duma introducing year-round conscription for military service. If approved and signed by Putin, the law will come into effect on Jan 1, 2026. In Europe, only a few countries have mandatory military service, and so far most of the others are not considering it. But in a war of attrition, such as the one Russia is fighting in Ukraine, the side that has more manpower is better positioned to win. The good news is that the alliance has time to get its act together to prevent another invasion. It would be tragic if the alliance fails to step up to the plate now, especially given the colossal price Ukraine is paying to defend itself against the Russians. Nato owes it to all those dead Ukrainians and their families to develop a viable counter-strategy to Putin's playbook. Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst, formerly with the US Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of 'Putin's Playbook', Regnery 2021. Her next book 'Trump's Playbook' will be published later this year. Rebekah's podcast Trump's Playbook is running on her channel Censored But Not Silenced and is available on most social media platforms @Rebekah0132. 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.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store