Aggressive First Person View Drone Technology Targets Both Military and Civilians

Aggressive First Person View Drone Technology Targets Both Military and Civilians

Aggressive First Person View Drone Technology Targets Both Military and Civilians

FPV (First-Person View) drone technology has become a significant factor in modern warfare, emerging prominently in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine. The Russian army is increasingly using FPV drones to target both military and civilian sites.

In this recent piece by New Eastern Europe magazine, the Kurakhove police rescue team—long supported by Assist Ukraine—shares its experience working under the constant threat of FPV drone attacks. The article also explores protective measures against FPVs, including radio-jamming devices and drone detectors.

Assist Ukraine Director, Olga Shpak, Plays Critical Role in Dramatic Beluga Whale Rescue, The New York Times Reports

Assist Ukraine Director, Olga Shpak, Plays Critical Role in Dramatic Beluga Whale Rescue, The New York Times Reports

How Two Beluga Whales Made It to Safety From Ukraine

A pair of whales were extricated from the besieged city of Kharkiv and taken to an aquarium in Spain with help from experts around the world.

Marc Santora and

It was a whale of an evacuation. Actually, two.

In what experts said was among the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken, the pair of beluga whales were extricated from an aquarium in the battered city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and transported to Europe’s largest aquarium in Valencia, Spain, on Wednesday morning.

As Russian aerial bombardments of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, have intensified, the evacuation of Plombir, a 15-year-old male, and Miranda, a 14-year-old female, came just in time, marine mammal experts said.

“If they had continued in Kharkiv, their chances of survival would have been very slim,” said Daniel Garcia-Párraga, director of zoological operations at Oceanogràfic de Valencia, who helped lead the rescue.

Belugas, whose natural habitat is the Arctic, need cold water to survive. The devastation of the power grid in Kharkiv meant that the aquarium there had to rely on generator power, making it challenging to keep the waters cooled.  Read full story here.

THE NEW YORK TIMES GUEST ESSAY

Have Gear, Will Deliver: Why I Carry Supplies to Ukrainian Troops (excerpts)
By Anna Husarska, a journalist and political analyst

Kharkiv (Ukraine) This past summer, Britain’s defense minister at the time, Ben Wallace, chided Ukraine for not showing enough gratitude for the West’s weapons supplies. “We’re not Amazon,” he said.

No, but there is a kind of Amazon for the Ukrainian military, in analog form: a network of civilian volunteer groups that deliver an array of goods to soldiers in the field, on request.

I know because I’m one of those volunteers. We deliver tourniquets, chest seals for lung wounds, observation drones, night vision monoculars, power banks, underwear and feet warmers, all within a few days. A secondhand four-wheel-drive vehicle or a thermal drone takes a little longer, up to two weeks.

Volunteerism has played a powerful role in Ukraine’s recent history. An opinion poll conducted that summer, when the economy was already suffering from Russian attacks, found 86 percent of Ukrainians had donated to charities and 33 percent were actively volunteering.

Supplying the army quickly, often with imported items, could not easily be done otherwise: The military’s lingering post-Soviet bureaucracy makes reacting to its own soldiers’ needs difficult. Soldiers get kitted out with gear when they sign up, but lost or damaged items, from socks to helmets, are not automatically replaced. The Defense Ministry is busy dealing with big-ticket items, distributing tanks and heavy weapons coming in from all over the world.

That’s how we, the volunteers, ended up fund-raising and supplying so many essential bits and pieces through ad hoc arrangements with parts of the Ukrainian military. In the grand scheme of things, our individual efforts are minuscule, but they are lifesaving all the same [. . .]

My most recent delivery was to the 3017th Military Unit of the Ukrainian National Guard [. . .] I pick up the vehicle in Berlin. On the Polish side of the Rava Ruska border crossing into Ukraine, I am waved through. On the Ukrainian side, the customs officers know me from previous deliveries, so things go smoothly there, too. An hour later in Lviv I meet up with Olga Shpak, a biologist specializing in whales who abandoned her research, friends and apartment in Moscow two days before the invasion to return to her native Kharkiv. She now is a representative there for another volunteer group, Assist Ukraine, co-founded by the retired NPR journalist Anne Garrels.

Small and flexible groups like these are crucial in this war because the big international humanitarian organizations shy away from anything remotely military. Even a lifesaving tourniquet smells martial to them. But, as Ms. Garrels said soon after the invasion, Ukrainians “don’t need teddy bears, they need flak jackets.”

Ms. Shpak is a one-stop supplier for the military units she knows. Their needs range from dry showers and insect repellent to night-vision devices. She finds the product on the market — in Ukraine or abroad, via the producer or online — and buys it with funds from Assist Ukraine or similar groups, and then organizes the delivery. “Can you urgently find a sturdy pickup for the 3017th?” she had texted me. Soon, it was in the unit’s shopping cart [. . .]

I for one have never seen a war effort — and I have reported on several dozen conflicts — relying so much on volunteerism.

POLITICO MAGAZINE: Ukraine Needs More Than Just Weapons to Win. That’s Where I Come In.

I drive donated equipment to Ukraine’s frontlines. Here’s a photo diary of my deliveries.

When Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I was a long way away, scuba diving in Madagascar. Having decided to stop reporting on conflicts, I was writing a book on Cuba. But when the war broke out next door to my native Poland, I was overwhelmed by the scale of the monstrosity and couldn’t stay away.Click here to read more.

MOTHER JONES: She Was on the Front Lines of Whale Conservation. Now She’s on the Front Lines of War

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended Olga Shpak’s life—and a generation of science.