UK launches Project Octopus to deliver interceptor drones to Ukraine

They can't cut off the Druzhba pipeline because they need to keep Hungary and Slovakia happy.

They only need to keep going longer than their opponent. Ukraine has fewer soldiers and resources than Russia and currently has almost no offensive capability, as seen on the battlefield. All they can really do is defend, and even then they’re still losing ground, not much, but still losing territory. Here in the West, we’re facing economic problems, high debt, and a shortage of weapons production, especially in the EU. I’d like what you’re saying to happen, but that’s wishful thinking. And Afghanistan wasn’t the primary or even a major reason for the Soviet Union’s collapse.

> I doubt Russia can keep this one going for a decade

They have oil, gas, and minerals that the rest of the world needs, and they have an internal propaganda machine that lets them hold out for a long time. I remember "experts" saying Russia would collapse economically in 2023, then in 2024 for sure, and that they’d run out of rockets. Now it’s 2025, and that collapse isn’t even on the horizon.

But you remember, even though the US foreign policy establishment basically got every single outcome it wanted from supporting the rebels in Afghanistan, right up to the split up of the Soviet Union and Russia becoming a republic run on Chicago school of economics principles by a pro-US president, in another couple of years they instead got Russia back as an enemy state and al Qaeda.

Also, while the situation ended up back in a pretty bad place for the US, that's nothing to where Afghanistan ended up. I think the US should try pretty hard avoid winning, if winning means the same as the way they won in Afghanistan. And Ukraine should definitively avoid an Afghanistan-style victory at all costs.

How do you deal with the fact that the large majority of the population in Crimea (and probably a lot of Donbas too) preferred union with Russia over staying in Ukraine? Do you deny them the vote for a generation? Ethnically cleanse them? Or do you give them a big hand on the rudder in the new unified Ukraine, like they used to have? Either solution seems like it's a powder keg for war to break out again.

So do war reparations, of course. That's basically how WW2 happened. As I see it, the best case scenario of Russia paying for all the damages is that it becomes an impoverished breeding ground for a lot of vengeful terrorism. Maybe you're more optimistic?

Also, is this peace agreement really more likely to happen if Moscow has been London blitz-droned into submission? When did your country last sue for peace in such a situation, and how long did that last? I don't have much sympathy for "political realists" in practice, but in theory, I agree with them that you should expect other states to behave like your state would have behaved.

The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia so they (we, actually as I'm French) really ought to do something serious to help Ukraine not only stabilize the front line and wear down Russia, but win this war.

But because we underinvested in defense for decades (because the Western Europe couldn't imagine a conflict was possible with their biggest trade partner, and because eastern Europe was too keen on trading political influence inside the EU to the US in exchange for security guarantees against Russia without having to build a capable military on their own) we ended up in 2022 with little capabilities to really help Ukraine.

And because of the obsession with public spending and debt reduction, countries refused to seriously invest seriously in their industrial capabilities to supply the Ukrainians with a war-changing amount of ammo and other assets. (the fact that South Korea alone was able to give more ammo to the Ukrainians than the whole of EU in 2023 is a sad joke really).

I can't really blame the US, they played their own interests while minimizing consequences for them (and that's also why they wanted to avoid escalation in priority). But I do blame European leaders, including my own president, for not taking this matter as seriously as they should have. (For a full 10 month in 2023 Les forges de Tarbes, France's main production of 155mm shells, has been stuck with no way of producing anything because they couldn't pay their suppliers because they lacked liquidity to do so, this was utterly ridiculous and should have been solved with a single phone call. But nobody in charge bothered, for almost a year…)

All of the main neocon actors (e.g. lindsay graham) say this. The idea that western military resources are unlimited is a neocon article of faith.

It's weird coz it is possible to count the number of e.g. shells and air defense missiles manufactured and stockpiled and it is plainly obvious that it is not enough and was never enough. That is why Ukraine losing was inevitable.

>Imagine USA to send lend-lease weapons with strings attached: do not use against Hitler's troops

Imagine the USA supplying weapons to a leader who is actually just like Hitler while he is committing a genocide.

You dont have to imagine too hard.

The only real difference here is that the U.S. has even fewer advantages in this hypothetical conflict. China, like Russia, has hypersonic missiles and drone swarms both of which are aircraft carrier killers and carriers are still the U.S.’s main way to project power so far from home. According to Pentagon estimates, in a war with China, the U.S. would only have about a month’s worth of ammunition. The supply chain situation would be a disaster, and Japan and South Korea likely wouldn’t risk directly supporting the U.S. because they’d be stuck right within China’s range, not thousands of kilometers from home.

Whatever’s written on paper is meaningless if the country guaranteeing your security has too much to lose, it’s just paper. Ukraine had guarantees, Poland had guarantees in 1939, and plenty of other countries in history had guarantees that didn’t hold up. What really matters are actual capabilities, war scenarios and costs.

Colby knows that[1], because he has all the data and understands the political reality. And the reality is that the U.S. could lose the war, and all the economic and political consequences of losing its hegemony would follow.

All of America’s enemies in history were weaker than the U.S. In the last 100 years, the U.S. hasn’t fought an opponent anywhere near its level of strength. Even in WWII, three quarters of Nazi Germany’s forces were destroyed by the Soviet Union, that’s a fact you won’t see in Hollywood movies about brave heroes. Now the U.S. would be facing the world’s factory, a country with the resources, political system and industrial capacity to actually win that war.

1. https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/09/pentagon-...

Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?

> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.

Only for western country.

As well as dumb WW2 era bombs. But even if the city is leveled to the ground you need a lot of ground troops to capture it. We've seen this recently in east Ukraine as well.

A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.

Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.

Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.

It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.

I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.