Ukraine staged a dramatic series of strikes across Russia, deploying drones hidden in trucks deep inside the country to hit strategic airfields as far away as eastern Siberia. Around the same time, Moscow launched one of its longest drone and missile attacks against Kyiv, escalating tensions ahead of crucial peace talks this week. More than 40 Russian aircraft, including the Tu-95 and Tu-22 M3 long-range bombers capable of deploying conventional and nuclear weapons as well as the A-50, are reported to have been damaged in the operation on Sunday, an official in Ukraine's Security Service said on condition of anonymity as the details are not public. Ukraine's Security Service chief Vasyl Malyuk led the operation and losses are assessed to be at least 2 billion, the person said.

"No intelligence operation in the world has done anything like this before," defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told Ukrainian TV. "These strategic bombers are capable of launching long-range strikes against us," he said. "There are only 120 of them and we struck 40. It is hard to assess the damage, but Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko says that even if the bombers, and command and control aircraft were not destroyed, the impact is enormous. "The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future," he wrote on his Telegram channel. The strategic missile-carrying bombers in question, the Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160 are, he said, no longer in production. Repairing them will be difficult, replacing them impossible. The loss of the supersonic Tu-160, he said, would be especially keenly felt. "Today, the Russian Aerospace Forces lost not just two of their rarest aircraft, but truly two unicorns in the herd," he wrote. Beyond the physical damage, which may or may not be as great as analysts here are assessing, Operation Spider's Web sends another critical message, not just to Russia but also to Ukraine's western allies. My colleague Svyatoslav Khomenko, writing for the BBC Ukrainian Service website, recalls a recent encounter with a government official in Kyiv. "The biggest problem," the official told Svyatoslav, "is that the Americans have convinced themselves we've already lost the war.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities reported a massive overnight drone and missile attack on its territory. All this comes as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are heading to Istanbul, Turkey, for a second round of peace talks on Monday. Expectations are low, as the two warring sides remain far apart on how to end the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula annexed in 2014.

Ukrainian forces destroyed dozens of Russian warplanes with a drone attack on air bases deep within Russian territory on Sunday. Ukrainian forces destroyed 40 aircraft in the attack, which an official says took more than a year to orchestrate. Russia's defense ministry confirmed the attack on Sunday, saying it struck five airfields. The operation saw drones transported in containers carried by trucks deep into Russian territory, he said. The drones reportedly hit 41 planes stationed at several airfields on Sunday afternoon, including A-50, Tu-95 and Tu-22M aircraft, the official said.

Officials say multiple military airbases have come under drone attacks in Russia in a major operation taking place ahead of peace talks with Ukraine due to start in Istanbul on Monday. The Russian Defence Ministry said that Ukraine had launched drone strikes targeting Russian military airfields across five regions on Sunday, causing several aircraft to catch fire. The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions – Murmansk and Irkutsk, the ministry said. "In the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions, the launch of FPV drones from an area in close proximity to airfields resulted in several aircraft catching fire," the ministry said.

Ukraine claims to have left more than 40 Russian bomber planes "burning" in a large scale drone attack" in the Murmansk region. The footage appears to show Russian warplanes on a runway being struck and bursting into flames. Sources from Ukraine's security service, SBU, told the BBC "enemy strategic bombers are burning en masse in Russia". They also said Ukraine was conducting "a large-scale special operation aimed at destroying enemy bomber aircraft," according to a statement sent from sources within the service to BBC Ukraine.

Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine have killed at least two people, according to officials, as Ukraine ordered the evacuation of 11 more villages in its Sumy region bordering Russia. Russian troops launched an estimated 109 drones and five missiles across Ukraine on Friday and overnight, the Ukrainian air force said on Saturday, adding that three of the missiles and 42 drones were destroyed and another 30 drones failed to reach their targets without causing damage. The attacks came amid uncertainty over whether Kyiv will take part in a new round of peace talks early next week in Istanbul. In the Russian attacks on Saturday, a child was killed in a strike on the front-line village of Dolynka in the Zaporizhia region, and another was injured, Zaporizhia's Governor Ivan Fedorov said. The shockwave from the blast also damaged several other houses, cars, and outbuildings," Fedorov wrote on Telegram.

The war between Ukraine and Russia is being fought increasingly via drone --and NATO and US military leadership is training troops for future conflicts that will pit man against machine. Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking "Try Free" at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.

The rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing demand for timely, cost-effective last-mile delivery have increased interest in collaborative logistics. This research introduces a novel collaborative synchronized multi-platform vehicle routing problem with drones and robots (VRP-DR), where a fleet of $\mathcal{M}$ trucks, $\mathcal{N}$ drones and $\mathcal{K}$ robots, cooperatively delivers parcels. Trucks serve as mobile platforms, enabling the launching, retrieving, and en-route charging of drones and robots, thereby addressing critical limitations such as restricted payload capacities, limited range, and battery constraints. The VRP-DR incorporates five realistic features: (1) multi-visit service per trip, (2) multi-trip operations, (3) flexible docking, allowing returns to the same or different trucks (4) cyclic and acyclic operations, enabling return to the same or different nodes; and (5) en-route charging, enabling drones and robots to recharge while being transported on the truck, maximizing operational efficiency by utilizing idle transit time. The VRP-DR is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to minimize both operational costs and makespan. To overcome the computational challenges of solving large-scale instances, a scalable heuristic algorithm, FINDER (Flexible INtegrated Delivery with Energy Recharge), is developed, to provide efficient, near-optimal solutions. Numerical experiments across various instance sizes evaluate the performance of the MILP and heuristic approaches in terms of solution quality and computation time. The results demonstrate significant time savings of the combined delivery mode over the truck-only mode and substantial cost reductions from enabling multi-visits. The study also provides insights into the effects of en-route charging, docking flexibility, drone count, speed, and payload capacity on system performance.

-- Path planning is a fundamental capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs), enabling them to efficiently navigate toward a target region or explore complex environments while avoiding obstacles. Traditional path-planning methods, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have proven effective but often encounter significant challenges. These include high search space complexity, sub-optimal path quality, and slow convergence, issues that are particularly problematic in high-stakes applications like disaster response, where rapid and efficient planning is critical. T o address these limitations and enhance path-planning efficiency, we propose Vision Language Model RRT (VLM-RRT), a hybrid approach that integrates the pattern recognition capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) with the path-planning strengths of RRT . By leveraging VLMs to provide initial directional guidance based on environmental snapshots, our method biases sampling toward regions more likely to contain feasible paths, significantly improving sampling efficiency and path quality. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments with various state-of-the-art VLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed approach. As Unmanned Aerial V ehicles (UA Vs) operate in increasingly dynamic and complex environments, the demand for reliable navigation [1], including efficient and adaptive path-planning strategies [2], has grown significantly.