- cross-posted to:
- ukraine@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- ukraine@sopuli.xyz
The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier in Ukraine is between 20-30 minutes, CIA director John Ratcliffe said. Speaking at a defense summit in Pennsylvania, he attributed the deadly conditions for Vladimir Putin’s forces to Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with AI. “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.” “And that’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines. And it’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added. Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million soldiers since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, with over 1,000 of the Kremlin’s troops killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s defense ministry said it was killing roughly 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory that Moscow claimed.
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The reason we’re 4½ years into the conflict is that Putin is a piece of shit
Honestly, my heart goes out to all these people. Every person on both sides of this senseless invasion is a person. They have parents who probably love them and want to see them again. Friends, siblings likely.
Also, Russia has a long history of conscription, right? I’m wondering how many of these soldiers want to be there.
So much senseless violence and loss of life on both sides, and for what? It’s gross.
There hasn’t been much conscription on the Russian side (though recently that’s changing) because conscription is tremendously politically unpopular, most people joined the war on that side by willingly signing a contract because they’re offering huge sums of money compared to what Russian people outside of the biggest cities can make.
Probably a clause in the contract that they only get paid after returning from combat
Life is cheap in that part of the world
The Russian people need to start saying “no”. Putin is dweeby little nothing of a creature, not a powerful sorceror. Without people to do the evil for him there is nothing.
This, in fact, is a message to all the people in the world who are just thugs for their own nasty piece of shit “leaders”.
If the current quality of life for young adult males in Russia isn’t an eye opener for those who flirt with authoritarian leaders “for the lulz” I don’t know what will get through to them.
You’re not special, dear leader isn’t going to offer your uneducated ass a seat at the table - you’re canon fodder. End.
is it the reason that Ukraine get more body on exchanges?
The swap took place at the Novaya Guta border checkpoint in Gomel Oblast, with Russia handing over 501 bodies of fallen soldiers and Ukraine returning 31 bodies of Russian servicemen.
https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/17/ukraine-bodies-from-russia/
Not much left of Russian soldier bodies after they are killed by a Ukrainian drone. A few scraps, usually if they haven’t burned up in the fire started by camp stove fuel immediately after the drone explodes.
This is great for Ukraine, but not so hot for the future of warfare. We may have to get good at building EMPs for when the urban pacification terminators come.
but not so hot for the future of warfare.
Maybe the future of warfare is to figure out a better way for people to settle their differences.
That would, of course, mean we would first have to figure out how to prevent narcissistic megalomaniacs from being in positions of power.
yeah I can’t help but read all this as very bad news indeed in the longer term. There’s nothing stopping Russia, North Korea, or indeed any random manchild billionaire deploying this tech within the coming months or years and deciding who they think should die. It’s not like nukes which are difficult to get material for and difficult to build. Most of the advanced stuff is the software, which can be easily copied.
What was stopping russia to deploy it a year ago?
Like now, they don’t have the AI technology.
This isn’t AI related. Russia was counting on a fast win to steal the resources they would need to lock it in. They didn’t get one.
What i mean is they know about it and had opportunity to do it too, but they didn’t. That means there is something else they are missing
Or they miss nothing but they are not as cruel and dystopian as our media presents them.
So they are choosing to lose thousands of soldiers everyday because it would be cruel to use more effective weapons? What the fuck are you talking about?
Right, they decided to invade out of love.
Hahahaha, yes the Russians will concede because of morality
Lol, you dummy
So, what’s the better explanation?
That seems unlikely.
Why? I haven’t heard about existing autonomously flying killer drones yet. Why should Russia have them?
If drones are operated fiber optically, does an EMP even work?
You’re confusing communication with what EMP is really good at - frying digital circuits
Emps are good, but they don’t care if you are friend or foe, or civilian infrastructure and it doesn’t stop when it hits its intended target. So itll probably take out the next few Km’s
So you can probably just shoot it forward on the frontlines. But thats not really how drone warfare works alot of the time
Are you ready yourself to join the front lines and get killed in less than 30 minutes?
If not you shouldn’t advocate for war.
The source of this claim is a tiny anonymous telegram channel, that was then cited by NY Post, which was then presumably quoted by Ratcliffe.
This is good news for Ukraine
This is godawful news for humanity. I fucking guarantee you that drones like these will later be used against citizens and innocent people
I’m pretty surprised we haven’t seen any assassinations of public figures using quadcopters yet.
These things are almost as easy to obtain and weaponize as a rifle.
It’s a lot easier to sight a drone one a clear day when a vip is giving a speech then it is to sight a drone 24/7 during active conflict.
It’s a lot easier to jam a single drone that a nobody can buy then it is to jam a swam of drones you need a defense budget to buy.
You can spot anti-drone personal carrying HERF(high energy radio frequency) guns at major public events nowadays if you know what to look for. The simplest concept just throws enough RF static in the air to make the drone loose connection to the operator.
Will that stop offline drones with its own sensing, though?
Yes, I know the definition for that is “missile,” but I think we’re getting close to the point where one could reprogram an off-the-shelf machine vision enabled drone to do this, and cover it in foil or something.
Low power herf won’t stop autonomous drones, but high powered one are microwave beams. The fines traces of semiconductors act as antennas and fry if enough amperage is drawn in.
I don’t know when off the shelf equipment will be able to do what you’re describing. Your best bet is when someone’s at a podium so there’s landmarks to reference. Face identification will still be difficult at range. At a certain point, vips will be giving their speeches in glass boxes, like the pipemobile.
I’m thinking of “action drones” that can follow around their users on skis or whatever. To film them from the air.
This is already a consumer product. Some have telephoto lenses (though face identification still wouldn’t be reliable, no).
Machine vision on a cheap ASIC is capable of doing this, too.
I’m not saying the whole package is there, but all the pieces are, so it’s not that far away. And I’m thinking one could cover a drone in metal foil to mitigate against microwave devices.
Maybe, but those are following a target. Not picking one out of a crowd. Indiscriminate weapons would be easy, but singling one target out is a different story.
Fiber optic drones are the norm now in the Ukraine war, no?
I haven’t been keeping up, but they probably use all kinds. The drones that attacked the oil refineries where probably using visual sighting navigation where their systems spot landmarks or road and river crossing. No need for remote control or satellite navigation that could get jammed.
Fiberoptic is good for short range, but that’s not something that a consumer could get off the shelf.
Not sure how accurate but it was an interesting read that tour comment lead me to.
that does not mean the connection to the operator is happening through a fiber optic cable. I also doubt it doesn’t have electrically conductive traces anywhere. what is the cpu and memory is made of?
Here’s one following Trump around.
Yeah fiberoptic is definitely going to be used in an assassination attempt of someone publically in the near future it would seem.
But would that be off the shelf type stuff?
Not that many public figures are gonna have future weapon dude at their side though.
Not that many public figures are interesting enough to target. Honestly, I’m surprised how there were no attempts on conservatives during the Bush II years by the Taliban. Judging by how easy it was for the nutjob to go after Paul Pelosi, most of these people are very easy targets.
I can’t overemphasize how much I wish we didn’t have to do this. I hope the history records we aren’t making murder drones for shits and giggles, but rather because it’s the only way to not be overwhelmed by the meat wave.
We always have an excuse. The usual one is we’re just trying to do it before the other guy does.
What history records is we like to kill each other for land, resources, and power. That’s not going to change, it seems.
Also, why won’t China leave Taiwan alone? Why won’t Russia leave Ukraine alone? Why is Trump threatening Greenland, and Canada? Good reasons, or bad?
it’s the only way to not be overwhelmed by the meat wave.
Years ago Google employees quit to avoid making killer drone AI.
In an evil world, the elite would hold back weapon deliveries at the start of the war to prevent the war from being over early on. Then enough developers would be motivated to help the good side to win.
IDF troops have been killed by FPV drones. Incredible sums of money will be spent to find countermeasures that Ukraine and Russia havent been able to make work yet. Hopefully the shield will become cheaper and more effective than the sword again.
that could solve them on the battlefield, but not anywhere else.
War often accelerates the development and adoption of technology. Russia is learning a lot too in this war and are focusing on developing and producing better killer drones as well. As much as people here want to believe so, Russians are not stupid.
Once we can fully mass produce killer drones automatically, they basically become a weapon of mass destruction. But unlike a nuke, they could depopulate a whole country without much fuss. At least theoretically. With solar panels they could even enter a kind of “lurker” mode to wait out any stragglers.
Yeah that’s the part I super hate, we’re creating hell and it’s going to come to us
The bravery and strength and heart and resilience of the Ukrainian people is awe inspiring…
It’s not just flying drones.
I saw video of Ukraine using three tracked ground drones with machine guns in concert with multiple flying drones used to launch rockets to clear a house.
Russians were firing as they fled, but it literally doesn’t matter if you shoot a land drone, they’re mini tanks.
If/when AI is really running that shit, the oligarchs will stop pretending they think we’re the same species.
Do people realize how fucked we’d be right now if the US army was just machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying?
Even if we had a utopian government guaranteed to always be just, someone could just hack it.
We need to make use/development of AI like this a major war crime while we still can.
Here’s another worry. Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
Going by previous wars over many years some of them will inevitably go down the mercanary route and sell those skills to the highest bidder.
That’s why the west should step up its support to Ukraine once the war stops. All those veterans need proper care, need to be reintegrated. Need to feel seen and heard. Otherwise you’ll have a bunch of unstable personalities with a lot of knowledge on how to kill people.
Otherwise you’ll have a bunch of unstable personalities with a lot of knowledge on how to kill people.
That’s a feature. The same happened after the Iraq war, with soldiers from both sides. The regime change in Syria can be traced back to Iraq.
I saw another video of a robot “ultimate fighting league” recently with humanoid bots.
The two clankers went for 100% roundhouse kicks and missed almost everytime, but when they fell down?
It didn’t look real, they were back on their feet perfectly in milliseconds. It was clear the kicks was just the only scripted move, but these bots have picked themselves up off the ground probably millions of times. So that’s the only thing they currently excel at.
Eventually they’re gonna be straight up ninjas.
It’s fucking stupid to wait until we can’t beat them to try and outlaw them. We need to act now before the oligarchs literally have an army of terminators.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
You’re right about getting ahead of the problem. But as a side note a robot’s ability isn’t tied to the amount of times it has done the thing.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
Chat control. They are way ahead. The Ukraine war also makes the outlawing impossible. It’s essentially over before people know that it had begun.
Yep.
Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
We’re already seeing this technology pop up throughout Iran, across Africa, and among both state and guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific. For all the lauding of Ukraine, the folks who are really making the most of this are Houthis and what’s left of the Wagner Group.
One of the ironies of this conflict is how many of these smaller militias are running circles around Silicon Valley tech firms - your Andurils and Mithrils and Raytheons and Northrop Grummonds. The Pentagon is spending a cool milly a unit to send up Reaper Drones that get knocked out by some particularly clever goat farmers with $200 in parts from Temu and a bootleg Starlink subscription.
guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific
Which conflict? Search shows ww2 content.
Necessity breeds innovation
Greed breeds obsolescence
Restrictions make you creative, money makes you stupid.
to save innocent russian soldiers the tankies will surely accept that a peace deal with ukraine so that nato can take another border country with russia and never invade will be a sensible option
also they have to gtfo of georgia and anywhere else
machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying
This isn’t as simple as it might seem. As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
And because of the rapid improvements in eval awareness, it’s also not so simple to screen out more subversive behaviors.
The same edge cases that leads to deleting drives and production databases with the newest transformers is going to start to occur in military applications if they scale out complex model intelligence.
As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
they could do similar to what some big companies do with meat employees: nobody is executing the malicious thing, everyone is just doing a small task that could be legit. nobody knows what is exactly happening.
the model flies the drone over there. after context reset, it calculates target for some object. after context reset, not knowing anymore what the target was, it shoots the target. after context reset it turns to “search and rescue mode”. when it found people, its context reset again, target and shoot.As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
they could do similar to what some big companies do with meat employees: nobody is executing the malicious thing, everyone is just doing a small task that could be legit. nobody knows what is exactly happening.
the model flies the drone over there. after context reset, it calculates target for some object. after context reset, not knowing anymore what the target was, it shoots the target. after context reset it turns to “search and rescue mode”. when it found people, its context reset again, target and shoot.The same edge cases that leads to deleting drives
That won’t limit the usage. It just means that there is additional risk for the gene
tral population.
Do they realize how fucked they would be if we all agreed to not go to work tomorrow?
Yes, that’s why they’re investing so much into AI. They can’t wait to get rid of us.
Yes they do, and they also know for a fact that you will never do it.
I’m already doing it.
you all agreed to not go to work tomorrow? all 1 of you? billionaires are terrorized by this thought!
AI is here to stay. There is no putting that cat back in the bag
We need to stop fucking around with greedy, fascist governments
We put asbestos back in the bag.
Saying that is defatism spread by useful idiots. “AI” is just software (which, hilariously, isn’t even close to AI). It’s not “here to stay”, because it’s not “here”.
We had heat-seaking, radar, face/shape-recognition with computer vision for years. Current “AI” brings nothing to the table that couldn’t be achieved earlier. Maybe a more intuitive human-computer interface, and even that is a dubious.
ML is different, and it has been “out of the bag” for a long time, but nobody batted an eye.
I’m guessing a new cold-war arms race is in effect. Nukes are devastating too but not used offensively except those two times.
I’m guessing we’re stockpiling drones now
imma doubt
Russia has never been more ripe for annexation by the USA. Unfortunately, republicans and conservative dems are literal dogs for putin.
This would end most of the election tampering happening in the world. Stop the meddling with subsea lines near russia. As well as end some proxy wars.
Attempting to annex Russia would end more than just election interference.
It will most probably end the world, yes.
Keep in mind this statement is coming from Trump’s CIA.
The 20 minute claim is definitely shady, it is explored here on More or Less from 6:32 20 mins claim
Considering Trump absolutely bums Putin does that mean the true figure of Russian casualties is higher?
I think 1.4 Megahumans matches what the Ukrainians are saying. Still, an enormous figure, considering Russia as a whole only has hundred times as many.
Call of duty: drop and pop
So… they must be spawning in the grey zone… or are they being catapulted from rostov on don?
Not an average if it is a range.
