Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Ukraine faces'exhausting battles' against Russia in Zaporizhia, Donetsk Russian forces pressed into Ukraine's eastern towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad during the past week as Kyiv's military mounted a stout defence. On Tuesday, Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said almost half of the battles on a 1,200km (745-mile) front were happening in the two towns, claiming Russia has committed 150,000 troops - almost a quarter of its strength in Ukraine - to capturing them.

Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. One afternoon this spring, Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister in the wartime government of Ukraine, turned up the volume on his laptop and played a video to illustrate his latest innovation. Its purpose, he explained, was to make the experience of combat feel more like a video game to Ukrainian troops--or as he put it, "to gamify" the war. The clip showed a series of aerial strikes, each filmed from the vantage of a combat drone. One of them, apparently flying by night, had used its thermal-imaging camera to detect an enemy soldier in what looked like a field or forest.

Abstract-- Modular Aerial Robotic Systems (MARS) consist of multiple drone units assembled into a single, integrated rigid flying platform. With inherent redundancy, MARS can selfreconfigure into different configurations to mitigate rotor or unit failures and maintain stable flight. However, existing works on MARS self-reconfiguration often overlook the practical controllability of intermediate structures formed during the reassembly process, which limits their applicability. In this paper, we address this gap by considering the control-constrained dynamic model of MARS and proposing a robust and efficient self-reconstruction algorithm that maximizes the controllability margin at each intermediate stage. Specifically, we develop algorithms to compute optimal, controllable disassembly and assembly sequences, enabling robust self-reconfiguration. Finally, we validate our method in several challenging fault-tolerant self-reconfiguration scenarios, demonstrating significant improvements in both controllability and trajectory tracking while reducing the number of assembly steps.

North Korean drones entered South Korean airspace on Monday for the first time since 2017 in the latest example of escalating tensions between the neighbouring countries. The South's military was caught off guard, drawing criticism on Tuesday from President Yoon Suk-yeol, who sought to assuage concerns by announcing his cabinet would fast-track plans for a special drone unit. South Korea's military fired warning shots and some 100 rounds from a helicopter equipped with a machine gun but failed to bring down any of the drones. The military said it chased one of the five drones over the greater Seoul area but did not fully aggressively engage with it out of concern for civilian safety. A defence ministry official confirmed a South Korean KA-1 fighter jet was involved in an accident while flying to counter North Korea's drones after departing its Wonju base in the country's north.

Two police forces have become the first in the UK to launch a fully operational drone unit. Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police forces began trialling the technology in November 2015 and the unit has now become fully established. Five officers have been trained, with a further 40 aiming to complete their Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) accreditation in the next 12 months. Devon and Cornwall and Dorset police forces began trialling the technology in November 2015 and the unit has now become fully established. The drones take part in missing person searches, crime scene photography and respond to major road traffic collisions.