We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Canada shows Kyiv the money
Defense officials say Ottawa will inject CA$30 million into a push to buy ammunition, working with Czechia, aka the Czech Republic, to get artillery shells into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers. Allies are being urged to step up since US funding lapsed – and in the wake of Ukraine’s withdrawal from Avdiivka amid heavy losses.
At the Munich Security Conference, as attendees absorbed news of the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Denmark announced it would send all of its artillery to help the struggling Ukrainians and called on other countries to do more.
Republicans in the US Congress, under the influence of Donald Trump, meanwhile, have blocked aid, and rookie House Speaker Mike Johnsonhas failed to bring a Senate-passed $95-billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel up for a vote. Johnson is under threat from hardline Republicans who may try to oust him if he passes aid for Ukraine. But Democrats are considering taking steps to protect Johnson if he helps them get the package passed.
Unlike the US, Canada’s government has not wavered in its support for Ukraine, although the amounts of money are tiny in comparison. Defense Minister Bill Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Czechia but has not yet revealed any details.
Canada is also facing intense pressure to boost its defense spending. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenbergsaid Tuesday that Canada needs to set a date to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP, NATO’s guideline for members. Canada spent just 1.38% of GDP on defense in 2023. Meanwhile, only 11 of NATO’s 33 members met the 2% guideline last year, but several European countries have been increasing their spending sparked by fears of Russian aggression.
Robots are coming to a battlefield near you
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything – from education, health care, and banking, to how we wage war. By simplifying military tasks, improving intelligence-gathering, and fine-tuning weapons accuracy — all of which could make wars less deadly – AI is redefining our concept of modern military might.
At its most basic level, militaries around the world are harnessing AI to train algorithms that can make their work faster and more effective. Today, it is used for image recognition, cyber warfare, strategic planning, logistics, bomb disposal, command and control, and more.
But there’s also plenty of debate over whether this could lead to killer robots and an apocalyptic endgame. Science fiction offers plenty of images of this – from Isaac Asimov’s rogue robots, the “Terminator” and Skynet, to Matthew Broderick racing to stop a supercomputer from unleashing nukes in “War Games.” Can we have less deadly wars without robots taking over the world?
Much of the concern about the future centers on lethal autonomous weapons, aka LAWs or killer robots, which are military tools that can target and engage in combat without human intervention. The weapons can be programmed to seek and destroy without a human steering them. LAWs could eventually become commonplace in war, and while critics have long campaigned to ban them and halt their development, militaries around the globe are exploring and testing this technology.
The US military, for example, is reportedly using an AI-powered quadcopter in operations, and early this year, the Air Force gave AI the controls of an F-16 for 17 hours.
During the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial this spring, the UK tested a collaborative swarm of drones, which were able to detect and track military targets. And the US has reportedly developed a “pilotless” XQ-58A Valkyrie drone it hopes will “become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.” While the AI will help identify the targets, humans will still need to sign off before they shoot – at least for now.
Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the potential uses of AI permeate all aspects of the military. AI can help the military “sift through huge amounts of information and pick out patterns,” he says, and this is already happening across the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
AI can also be used for advanced image recognition to aid military targeting. “For example, if the US has millions of hours of drone footage from the wars in the Middle East,” he says, “[they] can use that as training data for AI algorithms.”
AI can also help militaries plan hypersonic or ballistic missile trajectories — China reportedly used AI to develop a defensive system to detect such missiles.
There are innumerable other uses too, such as advancing cyber-espionage efforts and simplifying command-and-control decision-making, but the way militaries use AI is already garnering pushback and concern. Just last week, a group of 200 people working in AI signed an open letter condemning Israel’s use of “AI-driven technologies for warmaking, in which the aim is to make the loss of human life more efficient.”
World leaders like US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likewise concerned about the global adoption of AI-infused military tech, but that’s not slowing down their own efforts to gear up and gain a strategic advantage over one another.
•••
As the US ramps up its military capabilities, it is doing so as part of an AI arms race with China.
Last week, Biden and Xi met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, where they talked about artificial intelligence (among other things). The two world leaders “agreed to a dialogue to keep the [AI] from being deployed in ways that could destabilize global security.”
As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with their countries’ military ambitions and capabilities, Biden and Xi appear interested in keeping one another in check but are not in any rush to sign agreements that would prevent themselves from gaining a technological advantage over the other. “Both of these militaries want desperately to develop these technologies because they think it’s going to be the next revolution in military affairs,” Bresnick said. “Neither one is going to want to tie their hands.”
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and founder of Global Cyber Strategies, said he is concerned that AI could become the center of an arms race with no known endpoint.
“Thinking of it as a race …could potentially lead the US more toward an approach where AI systems are being built that really, as a democracy, it should not be building — or should be more cautious about building — but [they] are being built out of this fear that a foreign state might do what we do not,” Sherman said.
But with AI being a large suite of technologies, and one that’s evolving incredibly quickly, there’s no way to know where the race actually ends.
As AI plays an increasing role in the military destinies of both countries, Sherman says, there’s a risk of “the US and China constantly trying to one-up each other in the latest and greatest, and the most lethal technology just becomes more and more dangerous over time.”
North Korea keeps shipping, Russia keeps shooting
For 20 months now, Russia has been shelling Ukraine nonstop — sometimes as often as 80,000 times a day. But even as the war grinds into a deepening stalemate, Western intelligence officials say the Kremlin still has the firepower to keep pounding Ukraine at least through the end of next year.
Estonia’s top defense spook said earlier this week that Russia has at least 4 million artillery shells in its arsenal, enough to hit Ukraine at the current rate of 10,000-15,000 times daily until New Year’s Eve 2025.
A big part of that stockpile has come from North Korea, which reportedly ramped up military cooperation with Russia after a September summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Western intelligence services believe, based on satellite imagery, that Pyongyang has recently sent as many as 500,000 pieces of ammunition to Russia.
Last week, US President Joe Biden asked Congress to approve another $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, more than half of which would reportedly go to military support.Did the Ukrainians just use ATACMS?
Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Washington for months to provide its military with so-called Army Tactical Missile Systems, widely known as ATACMS, to hit important Russian targets deep behind enemy lines. It appears the US has now sent a small number of these missiles – and Ukraine claims that it used them on the battlefield on Tuesday to big effect. Its Special Operations Forces say they destroyed nine Russian helicopters, an air defense launcher, and an ammunition depot, with multiple Russian casualties.
Were the weapons they used the sought-after ATACMS? Ukraine isn’t saying, though President Volodymyr Zelensky dropped some not-so-subtle hints following the strike. “I thank those who are destroying at scale the logistics and bases of the occupiers of our land. We have results,” Zelensky said Tuesday. “I thank certain partners of ours: effective weapons, just as we agreed.”
Zelensky has every reason to talk up Ukrainian successes. The counteroffensive has so far fallen well short of the hopes and expectations of allies. The crisis in Israel has distracted the US and Europe and may require military resources that might have gone to Ukraine. Some hard-right Republicans in the US have called for a halt to US help for Kyiv.
It’s also likely that the missiles used in this case were an older version of ATACMS that lack the range of the more modern weapons Ukraine is still hoping for. Most targets inside Crimea, for example, remain out of reach for now.
But this attack reminds us that Washington remains Ukraine’s ally, Ukraine’s military remains a potent fighting force, and much still happens behind the scenes that we become aware of only when something large explodes.
Meet the Merchant of Death
WNBA star Brittney Griner has now landed in the United States after Russia agreed to free her from a nine-year prison term for drug possession in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian citizen and notorious arms dealer known as the "Merchant of Death." Who is he, and why is he worth so much to Moscow that Vladimir Putin agreed to trade such a prized bargaining chip as Griner to get him back?
This dude is perhaps the GOAT of weapons traffickers — even inspiring a (not-so-good) Hollywood film. A Russian national born in Soviet-era Tajikistan, Bout cut his teeth selling old Antonov and Ilyushin airplanes, which offered a bumpy ride yet were perfect for dirt airstrips across conflict-ridden parts of Africa. He later branched out into weapons, becoming the go-to arms dealer for both tin-pot dictators and the rebel groups fighting them.
Couldn't pay in cash? No problem, he accepted blood diamonds. No paperwork? No worries, Bout forged end-user certificates for a fee. Al-Qaida? No way, although he once claimed he flew weapons to Afghanistan in the mid-’90s to fight the Taliban.
In his heyday in the mid-2000s, Bout was the world's top gun-runner. His web of supply routes sourced weapons and ammo from cash-hungry and corrupt former Soviet Bloc states and sent them to war-torn African nations like Angola, Liberia, or Sierra Leone.
Bout got busted in 2008 by American DEA agents masquerading as Colombian FARC buyers in a glitzy Bangkok hotel. Following a lengthy trial, two years later Thailand extradited him to the US, where in 2012 he got 25 years on multiple charges.
What has made Bout so valuable to Russia? His silence.
Since he’s been on US soil, the Merchant of Death has clammed up. Whatever the Feds have tried, he hasn't given them even a nugget of all of the valuable intel he gathered for years while building his global arms-trafficking empire.
Someone who likely had Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former warlord-turned-president, on speed dial probably knows way too much about who illegally bought and sold weapons around the world for more than two decades. And for Putin, ensuring that Bout keeps all that to himself forever is certainly worth one Griner.The Graphic Truth: Ukraine's long-range Western arsenal
For months, Ukraine has been resisting the Russian invasion in no small part due to a steady supply of arms from Western nations, led by the US and its NATO allies. This includes long-range weapons, which allow the Ukrainians to strike Russian targets from a distance — crucial to keeping enemy forces away and stalling their advance. But the West has also been careful to avoid giving Ukraine its most high-tech toys, wary that it might push the Russians to escalate and perhaps even go nuclear. Still, Kyiv's arsenal is definitely a match for Moscow's. We look at the most effective long-range weapons supplied to Ukraine by the West.