Ukraine and Russia launched waves of drone attacks overnight with reports of a fire at an oil refinery in Ukraine's Poltava region and four Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) being shot down over two regions in Russia's west, officials say. A Russian drone hit the Kremenchuk oil refinery in the central Poltava region of Ukraine, causing a fire, the regional governor, Dmytro Lunin, said on Wednesday. "Last night, Russians repeatedly attacked Poltava region. Our air defence system did a good job against enemy UAVs," he said on the Telegram messaging app. The General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces said air defence systems shot down 17 of 24 drones that Russia launched against targets in Ukraine.

MOSCOW – Ukraine launched its biggest ever drone attack on Moscow on Tuesday but air defenses destroyed all eight of the drones, Russian authorities said, bringing the 15-month war in Ukraine to the heart of the Russian capital. Drone attacks deep inside Russia have intensified in recent weeks, with strikes on oil pipeline installations and even the Kremlin earlier this month that Moscow has blamed on Ukraine. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said two people were injured, one of whom was hospitalized, in the early morning attack. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Russia has blamed Ukraine for setting ablaze one of its oil refineries, while Kyiv has accused Moscow of launching dozens of overnight strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles for the second day running. The targeting of the fuel facility on Thursday occurred at the Ilsky refinery near the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk in the Krasnodar region, Russia's TASS news agency reported citing local emergency services. A fuel reservoir was on fire, it said, but gave no further details. A day earlier, a fuel depot further to the west caught fire near a bridge linking Russia's mainland with the occupied Crimean Peninsula. "A second turbulent night for our emergency services," Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram, confirming tanks with oil products were set ablaze.

A massive Crimea oil reservoir fire broke out after the site was hit by a drone, according to video posted Saturday. A Ukrainian drone strike caused a massive fire to erupt at an oil depot in Crimea, a Russia-appointed official reported Saturday. Mikhail Razvozhayev, Russia's selected governor of Sevastopol, said that authorities had spotted two "enemy drones" that attacked the depot, with four tanks burned down as a result. Local forces were able to shoot down a third drone and disable a fourth through radio-electronic means. Razvozhayev assigned the fire the highest level of difficulty to extinguish, but he claimed the fire had at least been contained.

Japan has tightened its sanctions against Russia following its latest wave of missile attacks in Ukraine, adding goods to an export ban list and freezing the assets of Russian officials and entities. The decision on Friday comes after Russia launched missile attacks across Ukraine on Thursday, killing at least 11 people, following a pledge by Germany and the United States to supply tanks that could help Kyiv counter a new Russian offensive. "In light of the situation surrounding Ukraine and to contribute to international efforts to secure peace, Japan will implement export bans in line with other major nations," Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry said in a press release. Among the new sanctions, Japan will prohibit shipments of items to 49 organisations in Russia from February 3 that could be used to enhance Moscow's military capability. Those will include products ranging from water cannons, gas exploration equipment and semiconductor equipment to vaccines, X-ray inspection equipment, explosives and robots, the ministry said.

Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI's API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have created blog posts on how to bypass the geo controls of OpenAI, and others still have created tutorials explaining how to use semi-legal online SMS services to register to ChatGPT. "Generally, there are a lot of tutorials in Russian semi-legal online SMS services on how to use it to register to ChatGPT, and we have examples that it is already being used," wrote Check Point Research (CPR), which shared the findings with Infosecurity ahead of publication. "It is not extremely difficult to bypass OpenAI's restricting measures for specific countries to access ChatGPT," said Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point Software Technologies.

The United States has announced that it is sanctioning Iranian industries that produce ballistic missiles and drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which the US says have been used to facilitate Russia's war in Ukraine. In a news release on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the sanctions would target seven people in leadership positions at Qods Aviation Industries -- an Iranian UAV manufacturer -- and Iran's Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO), which manages the country's ballistic missile programme. "Iran has now become Russia's top military backer," Blinken said in the statement. "Iran must cease its support for Russia's unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, and we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to disrupt and delay these transfers and impose costs on actors engaged in this activity." Iran is fueling Russia's war in Ukraine with its provision of UAV technology. Today, the United States sanctioned seven people involved in Iran's UAV and ballistic missile programs – programs Moscow is using to target Ukraine's critical infrastructure.

After all the dreaming, our technologies can still take unexpected turns, amazing and alarming us. As we agonize through another year about whether, as the Christmas carol says, "the wrong shall fail, the right prevail," I've traditionally started each new year with what I've called "a massive MapReduce on the year gone by" -- a lively lightning round of overlooked moments, in a final closing ceremony for the year gone by. But in asking what was truly significant about 2022, are we also highlighting events that foreshadow things to come? Besides technology playing a role in the world's geopolitical conflicts, there was also one unmistakable trend in 2022 that was both haunting and hilarious. It was the advances in both the performance and the accessibility of AI technology.

British navy personnel planted explosives and blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month, Russia's defence ministry says, a claim London called false and designed to distract from Moscow's military failures in Ukraine. Russia did not give evidence for its allegation that a leading NATO member had sabotaged critical Russian infrastructure amid the worst crisis in relations between the West and Moscow since the depths of the Cold War. The Russian ministry alleged "British specialists" from the same unit that directed Ukrainian drone attacks on ships from the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea earlier on Saturday were responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. "According to available information, representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year – blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines," the ministry said. The United Kingdom denied the accusation.