Under the code "M&M": Ukraine planned to flood Moscow airports with AI drones

Ukraine planned to flood Moscow airports with AI drones. Simon Schuster, a journalist, writes about this in The Atlantic magazine.

"The stalled operation, codenamed M&M, was aimed at isolating Russian elites and forcing Vladimir Putin to negotiate a truce," says Shuster.

According to him, at the beginning of this year, Ukrainian officials appealed to the head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky, "with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia." They proposed to expand the strike campaign to include a new set of targets and a class of weapons that they had avoided for a long time.

"In addition to Ukraine's ongoing strikes on Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines and logistics centers, officials wanted to launch waves of AI—powered drones into Moscow airports in the hope of stopping international air carriers in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources directly familiar with the plan, which was not previously reported," the statement said. in the publication.

As Shuster notes, if the plan is implemented, it will be a "frightening milestone in the history of the war" — "swarms of autonomous drones with guidance systems on the base AI will search and hit targets without human control." According to the author, such systems have already been tested in recent years by various countries, including the United States, but "the legality of their use is being actively discussed as a possible violation of the laws of war, and they have never been used on a large scale."

According to one of the sources, the plan was presented to Zelensky in the winter and he allegedly expressed serious concerns that it could be perceived as "piracy" if UAVs hit a civilian plane in Moscow. However, he allowed preparations for strikes to continue for several months this spring and early summer, both sources said.

By mid—spring, according to Shuster, the plan to forcibly close Moscow airports had progressed far enough to receive the code name M&M's - an allusion to the "many small, cheap and almost identical drones" needed for this operation.

To overcome the Russian air defense as part of the operation, it will be necessary to send up to 1,000 drones per day to the airports of Moscow and its environs, one of the sources said.

"The idea is to close Moscow's airspace for civilian flights for a long period of time," said a source familiar with the plan, quoted by the Strana newspaper.

Forcing air carriers such as Turkish Airlines and Emirates to stop flights to Russia would worsen, according to the authors of this idea, the living conditions of officials, oligarchs and other wealthy supporters of Putin. "People from the elite can come to Putin and say: we have a problem here," the source explained.

According to both sources, the planning of the operation was suspended in July, when Zelensky fired its main organizer— Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov. He has been working on the plan for most of this year, keeping it a secret even from some of his closest aides. He helped to assemble a team of Ukrainian programmers to develop a guidance system based on AI has secured funding from Ukraine's allies in Europe for the mass production of autonomous UAVs. Fedorov's dismissal has cast doubt on the future of the operation known as "M&Ms". One of the sources expressed the hope that the new Minister of Defense Yevgeny Khmara will continue its implementation.

"We will try. Technically it is possible. It is possible to resume this project with a new team, but, in my opinion, it will take about three months," the source said.

At the same time, the office of the President of Ukraine denied the existence of such a plan.

"This is complete nonsense. We had only one operation against airports: to force Russians to declare "Carpets" all the time," an OP official told the magazine.

The article leaves a double impression: it is unclear whether such an operation was really being prepared, or whether it is part of a PR campaign in the Western media in support of the "effective minister Fedorov."