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Air raid sirens rang out over Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities amid shelling on Saturday. In a video message late Saturday night intended to rally Ukrainians facing an increasingly grim situation, Zelensky said Russia âcannot conquer us.â
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The future of warfare could be a lot more grisly than Ukraine
Return to menuAmid the stately beiges of Genevaâs Palais de Nations last week, United Nations diplomats from Ukraine and Russia were launching strikes.
Ukraine was chastising Russia not over the countryâs ongoing invasion but a more abstract topic: autonomous weapons.
The comments were a part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a U.N. gathering at which global delegates are supposed to be working toward a treaty on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, the charged realm that both military experts and peace activists say is the future of war.
Autonomous weapons â the catchall description for algorithms that help decide where and when a weapon should fire â are among the most fraught areas of modern warfare, making the human-commandeered drone strike of recent decades look as quaint as a bayonet.
Proponents argue that they are nothing less than a godsend, improving precision and removing human mistakes and even the fog of war itself.
The weaponsâ critics â and there are many â see disaster. They note a dehumanization that opens up battles to all sorts of machine-led errors, which a ruthless digital efficiency then makes more apocalyptic. While there are no signs such âslaughterbotsâ have been deployed in Ukraine, critics say the activities playing out there hint at grimmer battlefields ahead.
Russians advance in Ukrainian cities as war deepens and diplomatic efforts fail
Return to menuMUKACHEVO, Ukraine â Russian forces continued to grind their way toward Ukrainian cities on Saturday, making limited gains in their attempts to surround Kyiv and capturing a minor city in the countryâs south. Despite mounting losses and stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces, Russia showed no signs of letting up, and President Vladimir Putin rejected direct appeals from French and German leaders to de-escalate attacks.
The humanitarian crisis is deepening across the country, with convoys of food and medicine still unable to reach hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped behind Russian lines in the southern city of Mariupol. Polish officials warned that they are running out of capacity to care for the over 1.5 million refugees who have streamed across its borders.
Russian forces captured the city of Volnovakha, a key strategic point on their advance toward Mariupol, with the cityâs mayor saying on the Telegram social media app that the city âno longer existsâ after withering Russian bombardments. Missiles, bombs and artillery continued to pound Ukrainian cities from Kyiv, the capital, to Kharkiv in the east and Mykolaiv in the south.
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