It has become known that the new military assistance package to Ukraine awarded by Sweden includes the transfer of two Visby-class stealth corvettes (K31 Visby and K35 Karlstad) to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The ships have already been tested by the Ukrainian military before the sale, and the Ukrainian crews have traveled to Sweden for training on materials. It is noted that the ships will be used to monitor ceasefire clauses in the western Black Sea, as well as to escort civilian ships to and from Ukrainian ports. The delivery of both corvettes is scheduled for the second half of the summer.
As the United States shares less intelligence with Ukraine about Russia, Ukrainian UAV combat units must find creative solutions to refine their plans to strike Russian strategic industrial infrastructure, French intelligence agencies say.
The 14th Independent Unmanned Aerial Regiment’s UAV strike planning is based on open source intelligence (OSINT), composed of several OSINT experts led by 28-year-old Osinter nicknamed “Clover.” The team uses a variety of algorithms and artificial intelligence tools to verify Russian Telegram accounts. They compare them with geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) files for each specific Russian industrial site provided by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. This allows them to verify the effectiveness of the attack, make any necessary adjustments, and most importantly, anticipate where the Russian military might move its air defenses.
Daily Ukrainian strikes have caused damage to some Russian defense facilities, oil refineries, and most recently, the Engels air base.
Russian citizens living near or in the flight paths of Ukrainian drone strikes post images and comments on the Telegram messaging app on a daily basis. Thousands of accounts broadcast or use these messages to conduct detailed analysis of the attacks. The content obtained by the Ukrainian OSINT research unit provides critical information needed to plan drone strikes and assess the success of their mission.
Russian users comment on everything from the drones’ engine noise to tracer munitions and sightings of explosions in the sky. This information provides insight into the presence of Russian anti-aircraft systems. Analysts can quickly extract valuable metadata from these videos and photos to locate them along the flight paths of Ukrainian drones.
They also use the data found on Telegram to assess the damage to the targeted infrastructure. If the strike misses, they can adjust the flight path and radar jamming settings. The GUR highly values the OSINT damage assessments, which it uses to statistically estimate the decline in Russia’s oil production.
Ukrainian analysts have several tools at their disposal for automatic data collection. One of them is telegramCrawlerBot, made freely available by the collaborative software development platform GitHub. The bot collects all Russian content on Telegram related to night drone strikes on a daily basis.
Ukrainian osinters have also modified the coding of the free online artificial intelligence tool Crawl4AI to sort this data. By combining the two tools, they can collect most of the public messages, including those deleted by Russian cyber units that closely monitor Telegram.
The Russian side, in turn, is constantly working to try to remove records of damage to its critical infrastructure.
Graziella Giangiulio
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