Ukraine is using Palantir's artificial intelligence to control thousands of drones at once in order to overcome Vladimir Putin's air defences and strike deeper into Russia than ever before. Two years ago, Kyiv had to plead with the US for old missiles to strike just inside Russia's borders, but now it manufactures millions of drones a year - launching them as deep as Siberia. Ukraine operates a number of secret intelligence bunkers from where drone attacks are executed, staffed with officers wearing casual clothes so they're not spotted by the enemy when entering and exiting the headquarters.

Inside, their screens are equipped with Palantir's PRISMA software, a system that displays flight paths, real-time maps, target coordinates, and data from thousands of drones simultaneously. The software ingests where Russian air defences are intercepting incoming drones, then calculates the optimal route for the next wave to slip through the gaps. It learns from every interception, getting more precise with every strike, transforming the chaos of aerial combat into an efficient mathematical model. Palantir's AI plays a key role in breaching Moscow's defences: it doesn't just guide drones, but constantly learns, analysing vast amounts of data in mere seconds.

The software has put targets previously considered unreachable into range, making Russia more vulnerable than ever as Kremlin loyalists begin to question Putin's endgame. The algorithms analyse the following parameters: interception points of previous waves of drones; coverage zones of Russian radars; flight trajectories that enable the avoidance of anti-aircraft systems; and the density of enemy air defence fire in specific regions. With the help of AI, the success of such attacks is significantly higher than conventional launches. Over the weekend, Ukrainian drones ​struck targets across several Russian regions including an oil pipeline pumping station, a refinery and ‌a fuel depot , as part of its escalating campaign of attacks against energy infrastructure often hundreds of miles inside enemy lines.

Kyiv struck the Lazarevo pumping station in the Kirov region, northeast of Moscow and around 800 miles from Ukrainian-held territory, as well as the Saratov oil refinery on the Volga river, 430 miles from the front line. In the Rostov ​region, which borders Ukraine's Donbas, the focus of fighting in the more than four-year-old war, authorities in the town of Matveyev ‌Kurgan ⁠said a major fire was burning after drones hit a fuel depot in the town, which adjoins the Russian-held part of Donetsk region. Governors in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions, both of which border Ukraine, also reported damage, with three civilians injured in Belgorod. On the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, Moscow-backed governor Sergei Aksyonov said ​authorities were introducing restrictions on ​sales of petrol.

He did ⁠not say why, but Ukraine has for months been attacking fuel infrastructure in southwestern Russia, close to Crimea. Ukraine's air force said Russia had launched ​229 drones on May 30, 212 of which were downed over northern and eastern Ukraine . Within special bunkers, the Ukrainian military is also utilising drones in the sky to help guide ground-attack robots, which are remote-controlled by officials sitting in gaming chairs . The Russians call the attacks 'silent death', because the robots are only audible from 10 metres away, creeping up on their enemy after hiding tactically in the battleground. Over 164 operations, the military has calculated that the robots did the job of 2,300 soldiers, about half of whom would have been killed or injured during the assault. Commanders in the facility previously fought in the bloodiest battles in the war so far, including in Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

Now, they watch combat from computer screens. 'I couldn't even imagine such a thing, back then. But I realise that if such equipment had been available at the time, more of my comrades would have survived,' said Bar, deputy commander of the NC13 Unit, Ukraine's Third Assault Brigade. Speaking to CNN, Mykola 'Makar' Zinkevych, the commander of the unit, said: 'Back then, war was somehow more masculine. 'It was your skills that mattered there - how well you'd trained, how disciplined you were. 'Now, technology decides everything. We can't escape it.' While Putin is attempting to locate these command centres, destroying the software is almost impossible, because the system is not tied to a single computer or building. Crucially, multiple monitoring centres have been created, they are dispersed across dozens of different locations, and the destruction of one node does not collapse the overall operation. Earlier in May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp, ​as Kyiv doubles down on the use of artificial ‌intelligence to gain an edge in the war.

Kyiv launched a project with Palantir called 'Brave1 Dataroom' to develop artificial ​intelligence based on its valuable combat data, collected ​throughout the conflict since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. As Palantir's own executive vice president Louis Mosley described at Davos in January, Ukraine has battlefield data 'no other country, sadly, has access to'. 'Today, technology, AI, data analysis and ​the mathematics of warfare have a direct impact on ​the outcome on the battlefield,' defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Telegram after meeting with Karp. Fedorov, who promised a sweeping, data-driven overhaul of ​Kyiv's military when appointed in January, said that more ​than 100 companies were training over 80 models to detect and ‌intercept ⁠aerial targets. 'Palantir is a renowned ​global company with strong potential, and there certainly ​are ⁠areas where we can be useful to one another, strengthening the defense of Ukraine, America, and our partners,' Zelensky said ⁠on ​X.