In Eastern Ukraine, one town stands between Russia and the Donbas heartland. “Kostiantynivka is almost encircled,” says Gorb, a drone operator with Ukraine’s 28th Brigade, who spoke recently from the basement of a building in the city. “The enemy is attacking us from three directions.”

Threat Status special correspondent Guillaume Ptak offers a dispatch from the battered industrial town, which during recent weeks has become one of the most critical flash points of the war. Sitting astride the vital axis linking Bakhmut, now under Russian occupation, to the fortified twin strongholds of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the town serves as a logistical lifeline for Ukraine’s defenses.

Its fall would open the road for Russian forces to push deeper into Donetsk and potentially outflank Ukrainian positions, a scenario commanders in Kyiv warn could have cascading consequences across the front. Russian troops are pressing from three sides, striking supply routes with swarms of attack drones and artillery fire.

U.S. forces are vulnerable to drone swarms due to insufficient scale and urgency in efforts to meet the demand for affordable, precise drone and counter-drone systems. That’s the conclusion of a report by the Center for a New American Security, which acknowledges the Department of Defense’s efforts to improve drone capabilities over the last decade, but says it hasn’t been enough.

The Pentagon has invested in drone and counter-drone systems, but a lack of urgency has let U.S. rivals take the lead, according to the report published this week. It cites China as far outpacing the U.S. in development and production.

“Without deep magazines of substantially enhanced counter-drone capabilities,” the report states, Washington “risks having its distributed warfighting strategies overwhelmed by massed Chinese drone attacks, and the United States could lose a war over Taiwan.” It provides numerous recommendations, advocating for increased counter-drone training across all U.S. armed forces.

Tens of thousands of people across China are tagged as troublemakers and trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. An eye-opening Associated Press investigation exposed how most of the technology run by the Chinese Communist Party came from companies in the United States.

American companies often say they aren’t responsible for how their products are used. But marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco and Seagate show how some have directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens. Their sales pitches — made both publicly and privately — have cited CCP catchphrases on crushing protests, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield.”

The AP investigation highlights how other companies, such as Intel, Nvidia, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett-Packard, or HP, also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies.

China and Russia ran their first joint underwater patrol, part of exercises dubbed the Chinese Maritime Interaction-2025 held from Aug. 1-5 in the western Pacific. U.S. intelligence agencies closely monitored the operation, which featured diesel-electric submarines from the Chinese and Russian militaries.

The patrol was hailed by China as highlighting its interoperability with Russian assets. An unspecified Chinese Kilo-class submarine joined the Russian Kilo sub Volkhov in sailing underwater from the Sea of Japan to the East China Sea. The exercise raised questions about the extent of wider Chinese and Russian military collaboration regionally. Military analysts called the joint submarine patrol a “varsity event” requiring extensive trust in data sharing on highly secretive submarine operations.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz reported last month on a European hacker group’s revelation that Beijing is working with Moscow to develop a Russian-origin automated command-and-control system for landing operations, such as a future airborne invasion of Taiwan.

Rep. Eric Burlison, Missouri Republican, played footage of a U.S. Hellfire missile apparently bouncing off a UFO near Yemen at a hearing this week of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. It’s the latest in a string of stunning videos in recent years showing purported encounters between American military jets and ships with UFOs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), as the Pentagon refers to them.

Mr. Burlison didn’t reveal how he obtained the video, which he said was shot by MQ-9 Reaper drones on Oct. 30. The authenticity could not be independently verified. A Pentagon spokesperson told Threat Status that “we have nothing for you on that.”

If it’s real, the video appears to show one of the more shocking interactions between the U.S. military and a UFO. The 50-second clip seems to show the Reaper drone tracking the object from overhead, while another drone fires a missile at the object. The missile appears to bounce off the object, which can be seen continuing to fly over the waters off Yemen.

• Sept. 11 — U.S.-Iraq Security Partnership after Operation Inherent Resolve, Atlantic Council

• Sept. 15 — Competing Visions of the Regional Order in the Middle East, Chatham House

• Sept. 15 — Securing America’s Technological Edge: A Conversation with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Acting Director Coke Stewart, Hudson Institute

• Sept. 17 — New Visions for Grand Strategy, Stimson Center

• Sept. 20-21 — AFA National Convention 2025, Air & Space Forces Association

• Sept. 22-23 — Cyber Defense Summit 25, Mandiant & Google Threat Intelligence

• Sept. 23-25 — National Cyber Summit

• Sept. 23-27 and Sept. 29 — U.N. General Assembly 2025: General Debate, United Nations