Ukraine fires over 1,000 drones at Russia, including 'largest ever' attack on Moscow.

Extract from ABC News

• Topic:War

about 10 hours ago

A multi-storey apartment building that local authorities said was hit by Ukrainian drones. (Reuters: Stringer)

In short:

Russia's Ministry of Defence said its forces shot down 1,100 Ukrainian drones across the country on Sunday.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that 450 drones had been destroyed en route to the city, with an oil refinery and a residential building hit.

What's next?

The attack comes as Russia enters the third and final day of voting in its first wartime parliamentary election.

Ukrainian forces have fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, officials say, including what Moscow's mayor has described as the "largest ever" attack on the Russian capital.

Russia's Ministry of Defence said that its forces shot down 1,100 Ukrainian drones across the country on Sunday, as well as over the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the waters of the Black Sea.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that 450 drones had been destroyed en route to the Russian capital, and a residential building was hit.

The drone strikes killed two people in the Moscow region and two more in the Russian-held part of Ukraine's Kherson region, including an election official, according to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and election authorities.

A residential building hit by a drone strike in Sofyino, close to Moscow. (Reuters: Stringer)

Central Election Commission (CEC) chairwoman Ella Pamfilova said a drone attack on a civilian bus killed two people, including an election official.

The attack happened in a Russian-controlled part of the Kherson region in Ukraine, RIA news agency reported on Sunday.

In the village of Sofyino, south of Moscow, a body covered in a stained blanket lay in front of a damaged apartment block, the upper windows of which were blown out.

"Glass went flying; people started screaming and shouting. I turned around, and the entrance doors had already been blown out, debris everywhere," said resident Vitaliy, who gave only his first name.

Moscow oil refinery struck

A facility at the Moscow refinery was damaged in the attack, Mayor Sobyanin said, without giving further details, news agency Interfax reported.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the strike on the refinery in a post on X on Sunday.

Plumes of smoke rise from fires at an oil refinery following what authorities say was a Ukrainian drone strike. (Reuters: Stringer)

"One of Russia's key oil industry facilities and the aggressor's logistics facility were hit. These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine," Mr Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian strikes have knocked out a significant part of Russia's oil refining capacity, triggering oil product shortages, fuel price increases and long queues at filling stations in many regions across the country's 11 time zones.

The Moscow plant, which has been targeted multiple times, processed 11.6 million metric tons of oil in 2024, producing 2.9 million tons of gasoline and 3.2 million tons of diesel, the latest available data shows.

In the wider Moscow region, in addition to the two deaths, 400 people, including 70 children, were evacuated from a 21-storey apartment block in the Ramenskoye district and a number of homes were damaged, said Governor Andrei ​Vorobyov.

A voter casts his ballot at a polling station in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled city of Ukraine. (Reuters: Alexander Ermochenko)

Russia enters final day of voting

The major attack came on the third and final day of voting in Russia's first wartime parliamentary election, with balloting virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin's policies and all but certain to cement the Kremlin's dominance.

Behind his strongman image, Putin's world is shrinking

To his supporters Vladimir Putin restored Russia's pride. His opponents describe a strategist, strongman, gangster and mafia godfather who is living in an increasingly shrinking world.   

Mr Sobyanin said on Sunday that the "unprecedented attack" on the capital was an attempt to disrupt the elections.

"The enemy failed in this regard," he said.

Russia held voting in four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed after the war began but still does not fully control, and in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Kyiv has denounced the action as illegal.

Reuters/AP

White House turns away CNN, MS NOW, Politico reporters after Donald Trump's media ban.

Extract from ABC News

• Topic:World Politics

about 1 hours ago

CNN reporter Betsy Klein was one of the journalists who had her press pass confiscated. (AP: Jose Luis Magana)

In short: 

The White House has confiscated the press passes of journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, denying the reporters entry to the building's grounds.

It comes after US President Donald Trump announced yesterday he was banning the three media outlets from the White House and warned that other outlets will also be banned.

The media outlets have signalled they may contest the ban, while the White House Correspondents' Association says the ban violates press freedom protections enshrined in the US Constitution.

The White House has denied access to journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, following through with US President Donald Trump's announcement yesterday that he would ban them from the building's grounds.

All three news outlets separately said their teams' press passes were confiscated on Saturday morning, local time, when their reporters went to the White House.

They have signalled they may contest the ban on the grounds it conflicts with the US Constitution's First Amendment protections for free speech and a free press.

Donald Trump accused the three media outlets of publishing "fake news". (AP: Alex Brandon)

A CNN statement on Saturday called the ban "an illegal assault" on its constitutional right to do journalism without interference from the government. In separate statements, MS NOW and Politico said they would "defend our First Amendment rights".

MS NOW said it intends to "take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy".

CNN and MS NOW said they would continue reporting on the Trump administration, and Politico said it stands by its reporters covering the White House.

An association representing hundreds of journalists who cover the White House called the ban a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which enshrines press freedom, and called for immediate restoration of access for banned colleagues.

"Courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting," said Jacqui Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents' Association.

The White House declined to issue any new statements on the matter on Saturday, referring AFP to Mr Trump's comments on Friday announcing the bans.

A social media post by Mr Trump accused the outlets of "reporting FAKE NEWS" and said that they "shouldn't be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they're covering the President of the United States".

Trump bans outlets from White House

Cable networks CNN and MS NOW and newsletter publisher Politico have been banned from the White House, effective immediately, with more to follow, US President Donald Trump says.

He added, "Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow."

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Mr Trump answered a question about what he meant by other outlets, by describing The New York Times and the Washington Post as examples of "fake news," although he did not specifically say he would ban them from the White House.

The New York Times in a statement called Mr Trump's latest ban "yet another retaliatory and unconstitutional threat" and said the newspaper "stands in support of the news organisations being unfairly targeted by the president".

The Washington Post in a statement on Saturday said its access to the White House is a "non-negotiable constitutional right," and called the US president's actions "a clear form of intimidation meant to silence coverage".

Mr Trump previously has tried to keep certain news outlets or specific journalists out of press gatherings.

Last year he banned the Associated Press from the pool of reporters that cover his movements because the news agency did not adopt Mr Trump's preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico after the president instructed the executive branch to call it the Gulf of America. AP has challenged the ban.

In his first term, Mr Trump's White House sought to revoke or suspend the credentials of Playboy correspondent Brian Karem and CNN's Jim Acosta, but federal judges ordered their ⁠White House press passes be restored.

Reuters/AFP

Rainfall brings 'super bloom' of Sturt's desert pea to outback SA.

Extract from ABC News

Feel good

By Olivia Mason

• Topic:Environment

26 minutes ago

Sturt's desert peas have sprung up near the border of South Australia and New South Wales (Supplied: Bella Gale)

In short:

Rainfall has prompted a super bloom of Sturt's desert peas across large parts of South Australia and New South Wales.

While typically red and black, variations seen this year in the outback include pink, white and purple flowers.

A horticulture curator says the seeds stay dormant for "many years" until the conditions are right to grow.

A perfect storm of weather conditions has seen South Australia's north erupt into a sea of colour with a super bloom of Sturt's desert peas.

"We're looking at three or four times the average [rain totals for the region]," Flinders and Outback Parks and Wildlife manager, Phillip Strachan, said.

He said the wildflowers had arrived early and were continuing to bloom en masse about the Flinders Ranges — the most rangers had seen in the area since 1974.

"It's like something out of Scotland. It's phenomenal," Mr Strachan said.

Park rangers say it is the most Sturt's desert peas they have seen in the area since 1974. (Supplied: DEW)

"I've never seen anything like it. They're everywhere.

"I don't think I've seen a more beautiful flower. It depends on what you're into, but I just reckon it's an absolute cracker looking flower."

Further east, the peas have also taken over paddocks and fields on the border of South Australia and New South Wales.

Sturt's desert peas, which typically present with elongated red petals and a large black boss in the centre, are beginning to bloom across the outback. (Supplied: Bella Gale)

Zanna Gale, who runs a sheep station 270 kilometres north of Broken Hill, said the flowers were particularly outstanding this year.

Ms Gale and her family have been documenting the array of flowers in shades of white, purple and pink, which they had previously never seen.

"We haven't seen them in the house paddock like this ever before," she said.

"It looks amazing — it's unbelievable."

Zanna Gale runs a sheep station north of Broken Hill.  (Supplied: Zanna Gale)

The Adelaide Botanic Gardens' senior horticulture curator Matt Coulter said the variations were unusual, estimating the traditional red and black flower accounted for about 99 per cent of sightings.

"It doesn't happen a lot, but because it's such a big flowering thing happening this year, we're actually starting to see some quite different colours," he said.

"To see these variations is … really quite incredible, you might just see one or two flowers within a big patch of the red and black ones, but they really stand out."

Residents of some of the nation's most remote places have been treated to a rare assortment of pea blossoms. (Supplied: Bella Gale)

He said the Sturt's desert pea seeds could stay dormant for "many years" in arid land until the conditions were right to grow.

"To the north of our state, we've had the most rain we've had in probably about 52 years since 1974, so all that moisture actually helps with the germination," he said.

Mr Coulter recently returned from a trip to the Flinders Ranges to see the flowers in the wild.

Amid the outback super bloom have been rarely-seen colour variations, like these white and pink blooms among the typical red and black. (Supplied: Bella Gale)

"It's a real super bloom going on this year and to see whole hillsides of them flowering … for me it was a bucket list thing to see for sure,"

he said.

Tricky to grow

The Adelaide Botanic Gardens grows the flower from seed collected in Roxby Downs in 1997.

"It's a really important plant to us because it's our state flora emblem of South Australia and it has been ever since the 1960s when our director at the time put it forward to become a floral emblem," Mr Coulter said.

The Adelaide Botanic Garden grows the plant from seed collected in Roxby Downs in 1997. (Supplied: Adelaide Botanic Garden)

But for green thumbs wanting to try their hand at growing the species away from its desert home, Mr Coulter warns it can be a painstaking process.

"Every single one of the seeds that we propagate, we actually look at it under a microscope and take a little nick out of it so they all will germinate at the same time, and they can germinate within two or three days by doing this technique called scarification," he said.

Mr Coulter said the plant needed very good aeration in the soil to ensure moisture did not stay around its roots.

"The funny thing is they actually like moisture, but they just don't like it to be around the roots, so you need that moisture to be able to move away," he said.

Sturt's desert peas are a protected species, meaning it is illegal to pick them on public land.  (Supplied: Bella Gale)

"But the biggest killer for them is any humidity because they come from a very arid, dry environment."

Despite the challenge, Mr Coulter did concede that the pay-off was well worth it when the flower came to fruition.

"They almost look fake, they're just so perfect," he said.

Gemini hacked three companies in first known breakout by Google's AI.

Extract from ABC News

Nelli Saarinen with wires

• Topic:AI

about 15 hours ago

Google's Gemini model guessed credentials to access three websites during a cybersecurity test. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic, illustration)

In short:

Google's AI model Gemini accessed the internet and hacked three companies during a cybersecurity evaluation.

Gemini found public information online and guessed credentials to access three websites.

What's next?

Researchers say loss of control incidents with AI are on the rise, with the potential for more serious incidents with "catastrophic consequences" to come.

Google's Gemini AI model has accessed the internet and hacked other companies during a test of its cybersecurity capabilities, in the first known example of the company's artificial intelligence systems autonomously committing such an act.

The hacks occurred in May during a test conducted by Irregular, an independent company that conducts cybersecurity evaluations.

During the cybersecurity assessment, Gemini found public information online and guessed credentials to access three websites it thought were within the scope of its test, Heather Adkins, Google's vice-president of security engineering, said in a statement.

Ms Adkins said that in all three instances, the model ceased the hacking when it learned it had accessed a real company.

"We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they've now made to their testing processes," Ms Adkins said.

"These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly."

Irregular notified Google about the hacks in July, the two companies told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which first reported on the hacking incident on Friday local time.

Google told the WSJ it didn't consider it necessary to disclose the incidents earlier because its model stopped the hacking upon learning the companies were real and did not cause harm to them.

AI escaped testing environment

The hacks happened while Gemini was participating in a "capture the flag" exercise conducted on infrastructure belonging to Irregular to test the model's cybersecurity capabilities.

AI 'kill switch'

As the heads of the biggest AI companies in the world call for a "kill switch" to be mandated, an expert says it's only a "distraction". 

It was tasked with retrieving information from software operated by a fictional company inside the testing environment, Google told the WSJ.

The fictional company in the test exercise shared the same name as a real company.

Although the model was not intended to be able to get online, internet access was unintentionally made available, Irregular said.

In one of the cases, the Gemini model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system.

In the other two cases, the model found credentials in a public repository that allowed it to then access protected systems, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Testing company linked to multiple incidents

The testing company Irregular has been involved in a number of incidents in which AI models escaped their testing environments and hacked other companies during evaluations.

Similar incidents linked to Irregular have been disclosed by Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI.

The hack by Google's Gemini is one in a sequence of incidents involving testing company Irregular. (Reuters: Issei Kato)

Irregular told the Wall Street Journal that the incident with Google Gemini was due to the same problem as the earlier breaches during tests with other AI models.

All relevant labs were notified in late July, an Irregular spokesperson said.

"All known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago," the spokesperson said.

Irregular said it was working on best practices for securely conducting AI cybersecurity evaluations.

Loss of control incidents on the rise

The hacking incidents have raised questions about the safeguards needed as AI agents gain greater autonomy and access to the internet and computer systems.

The July incidents prompted more than 1,000 tech workers to sign a petition calling on the US government to support a coordinated slowdown in the development of the most advanced AI systems.

Incidents of AI escaping user control are on the rise, prompting calls for a slowdown and regulation. (Four Corners: Mark Hiney)

The initiative, called Pacing the Frontier, includes employees from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google's parent company Alphabet.

During testing, AI agents will often resort to cheating if they get stuck and realise a task is impossible.

A recent example involved OpenAI's model attacking start-up AI company Hugging Face during an internal evaluation.

How AI agents swarmed another company

Tens of thousands of messages from hundreds of rogue OpenAI agents reveal how the self-described "collective" coordinated the attack on AI infrastructure company Hugging Face.

While the test was intended to run without internet or any communication between agents, an autonomous AI agent found a loophole and created a secret message board where the agents shared information.

The agent had identified a potentially useful dataset at AI start-up Hugging Face and shared the information with other agents, hundreds of which proceeded to attack the company.

Once OpenAI staff realised that something was amiss, Hugging Face's infrastructure had already been compromised.

Incidents of AI escaping user control are on the rise, and those incidents are worsening, according to research by the Loss of Control Observatory by UK think tank, Centre for Long-Term Resilience.

The Loss of Control Observatory has detected 1,664 real-world loss of control incidents in 2026, including ones that showed agents circumventing controls and forging approval to escalate privileges.

"If AI models continue to become far more powerful, and continue to evade control, there is the potential for much more serious incidents to come, including ones with catastrophic consequences," said Tommy Shaffer Shane, researcher and senior policy manager at the think tank.

ABC/wires

Knitting and crochet can be 'deceptively good' for the brain, neuroscientist says.

Extract from ABC News

Feel good

• Topic:Craft

24 minutes ago

Crafts can help improve brain health, neuroscientist says (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

In short:

Crafts like knitting and crochet provide an ideal mix of challenge and repetition that can help with attention span and mood.

A neuroscientist says some crafts can be an important part of a broad brain health regime, along with other considerations like exercise, diet and sleep.

Knitter Will Seager says he finds attempting difficult patterns both calming and stimulating.

Will Seager taught himself to knit nine years ago. Now, it's something he does every day.

"I'm naturally a little bit of an anxious person so for me it's really nice to let go of any other worries or things that I need to be thinking about and focus entirely on my knitting," Mr Seager said.

Will Seager says knitting is both relaxing and challenging. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

"I do it also because it's very intellectually stimulating for me … I like to choose patterns which are technically quite demanding and quite difficult."

Neuroscientist Sarah McKay said crafts like knitting and crochet were "deceptively good for the brain".

"It's like this ideal mix of repetition plus cognitive challenge,"

Dr McKay said.

Will Seager says he likes to continually challenge himself by seeking out more complex patterns. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

"You have to remember where you're up to, you have to problem solve, you have to make decisions, you're constantly challenging yourself if you're doing more and more complicated patterns.

"But at the same time, it's challenging but it's low stakes … which I think might be one of the best kinds [of cognitive challenge] we can have," she said.

Dr McKay said craft activities could help with attention.

"What they're doing is they're almost training us to pay attention to something for quite a long time," she said.

Will Seager enjoys knitting socks. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

Researchers have also studied how useful craft activities could be for mood regulation and stress reduction.

"We're mastering a skill, we're getting better at that and we're kind of just doing the task for the sake of doing the task … it's quite a simple form of mastery and there's something really soothing and good for our mood about that," Dr McKay said.

Mr Seager is constantly looking for new ways to challenge himself as a knitter.

"I like to choose patterns that enable me to learn new skills … Most recently I've got into a type of [ribbed] knitting called brioche knitting," he said.

"It took me a long time to get the hang of it … [but] after a little while you settle into the rhythm and your fingers and hands do the work without you having to think too much about it."

Brioche knitting is a technique Will Seager has recently become interested in. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

Mr Seager likes to knit alone so he can focus.

But, for others, craft is a way to connect with people.

Looking after each other through craft

Once a week in Hobart's northern suburbs, the Glenorchy Library Knitting Group meets. Its members mostly knit and crochet items to donate to local charities.

"Some of the ladies [who come], this is their only outing apart from the supermarket," Carolee Marino, who started the group in 2011, said.

"It's all about looking after each other … we all help each other."

Carolee Marino started the Glenorchy Library Knitting Group in 2011. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

One of the group's newest members is Gill Shilling.

"It's awesome, I've met all these amazing ladies with interesting stories,"

Ms Shilling said.

"But the fact that we're actually making things to give to people in the community who are in need, that's really important to me."

Gill Shilling says she enjoys the social aspect of the group, as well as contributing to charity. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

Another relatively new group member, Irina Bridges, learnt to knit after moving to Australia from Russia seven years ago.

She said she was looking to share her love of knitting with others.

"I dreamt to knit for my whole life, but I couldn't because when I was a kid in Soviet Union all stores were empty without yarn so I couldn't," Ms Bridges said.

"I enjoy our group and showing off what I [have] knitted."

Irina Bridges enjoys sharing her love of knitting with others. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

Miriam Ritchie has been part of the group for about two years.

"This is it, this is my social, and I get pretty lonely so I can't wait to get here," she said.

Miriam Ritchie (right) looks forward to catching up with the other members of the Glenorchy Library Knitting Group. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

Norma Kelaart joined the group after moving to Tasmania in 2024.

"I needed some company of other women to chat with and relax with and have a joke and a laugh," she said.

One part of a broader brain health plan

Dr McKay said there was not enough evidence to prove that activities like knitting and crochet helped prevent dementia — many of the studies were observational and self-reported, not randomised clinical trials that look specifically at dementia risk.

The magical healing power of crochet

The steady click of needles and hooks on couches around Australia tells us that knitters have been onto the very real therapeutic benefits of crochet for a long time.

But she said the many clear benefits meant craft activities could be an important part of a broader lifestyle brain health program.

"Alongside exercise and diet and sleep and stress reduction … [and] taking care of your cardiovascular health, your metabolic health — all of the things that we know are good for our mental health in the short term and our brain health long term — this can sit really nicely and neatly in there," she said.

"We know that social connections are a really important part of long-term brain health, we know that having purpose and meaning in life are a really important part of brain health, so it can fulfil those requirements in a really lovely, non-digital way."

The UN often feels damned to irrelevance, but it is needed now more than ever.

Extract from ABC News

Analysis

By Laura Tingle

• Topic:Foreign Affairs

about 3 hours ago

US President Donald Trump addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York last year. (Reuters: Mike Segar)

When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening.

Australia joined a number of other nations in recognising the state of Palestine. The world was scrabbling to regroup around the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump. The UN was itself fighting for survival amid Trump's hostile assault on it.

This year, things feel like they will be a bit more… prosaic. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due to finish his term at the end of the year so lobbying is in full swing on the question of his replacement.

Australia is lobbying for a non-permanent place on the Security Council for the 2029-30 term.

That's something that Australia has always taken reasonably seriously — though outsiders might wonder why, given veto powers of the permanent members of the Council (the US, Russia, China, France and the UK) means it rarely makes significant decisions.

Albanese is seeking the icing on the international cake

Securing a UN Security Council seat would cap the Albanese government's international efforts. 

The Security Council is still seen as an important platform for smaller countries.

Australian leadership "of the Council's response to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and the first Council resolution on small arms and light weapons are prominent examples" of what occasional membership of the Security Council can achieve, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website says.

And there is a particularly long history for Australia with the Security Council, given the significant role the country, and External Affairs Minister HV 'Doc' Evatt, played in the establishment of the UN in the first place. It was one of the first members of the Council in 1946 in acknowledgement of that role, and in fact even chaired its first session.

What's on the UN's agenda?

The hostility of the Trump administration to the UN — and for that matter many multinational institutions — often feels it damns it to irrelevance.

(In July, the US also reportedly attempted to enlist its NATO allies in a campaign to "systematically dismantle" the International Criminal Court.)

But the UN continues to play important roles, to the extent its much reduced funding allows, in humanitarian work and peacekeeping.

Those activities would only seem more important just now, given the increasingly intractable and widening conflicts in the Middle East and Europe.

Yet strangely the escalation of those conflicts doesn't seem to be reflected in any material actions contemplated by the UN when leaders meet there next week.

There will be a "two state" conference where leaders will discuss events in Israel.

When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening. (AP: Andres Kudacki)

But there are no signs of any further movement to try to address the lack of progress in Gaza, nor the increasing settler violence and land grabs by Israel in the occupied West Bank.

This is despite the fact that the Trump Board of Peace proposal for Gaza — to which the Security Council gave its blessing last year — has gone absolutely nowhere since then.

There seems to be no talk of any further UN resolutions on these issues. Or of Australia pushing for them, even as it now finds itself at odds over West Bank trade sanctions with the countries it acted with on the recognition of Palestine last year.

Last year's meeting of the UN happened before the US and Israel attacked Iran, and before events seemed to turn for a while in Ukraine's favour before, in more recent times, looking as if they may have turned in Russia's favour.

And it happened before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz gave a whole new impetus to the long conflict in Yemen by increasing the strategic importance of the Red Sea.

These developments feel to have only tipped the scales determining world events further towards those possessing weapons and away from those pursuing diplomacy and multilateral action.

Drone warfare in Ukraine

The wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East are now being transformed by defensive weapons being depleted, or running out altogether, while new forms of offensive weapons are arriving.

In Ukraine, analysts note the arrival of the newest iteration of drone warfare — but this time it is not drone innovation on the Ukrainian side as it has so often been this past year.

Instead, Russia is using Iranian-sourced attack drones with a terrifying new feature: the capacity to travel at jet speed, thanks to turbojet engines rather than propellers, carrying large payloads, at considerable distance. For all intents and purposes, these are likened to a cruise missile, but much cheaper to build.

It was one of these Shahed 136 drones — a new version called the Geran 5 — that hit a train station near the Ukrainian-Polish border, well to the west of Kyiv, just after a train carrying a range of European officials had passed through and while former Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was in the station.

Russian strike on Ukraine-Poland border shows war at Europe's 'doorstep'

A Russian drone hit a passenger train near the Ukraine-Poland border shortly after European diplomats, including former prime ministers of the UK and Sweden, had used the same line.

The managing editor of Foreign Policy, Ravi Agrawal, sketched a bleak picture this week after returning from Kyiv.

"We're coming up against the cold months now, and Russia's been developing about maybe 3,000 of these jet-powered drones a week", he said.

"That means that, come the winter season, it'll probably have tens of thousands of these drones ready to go. And it could shoot them at all forms of civilian and energy infrastructure."

What this is going to end up meaning, Agrawal said, "is that Ukraine could lose energy supplies, power supplies. It could get very cold, very dark for the Ukrainian people."

Agrawal observed that "one could have made the case a few months ago that Ukraine was in the ascendancy".

"It was really beginning to attack Russian energy installations. They had made Putin fearful to the extent that he low keyed his Victory Day parade, which he cares about a lot."

Germany's weapons transformation

But Russia can now target passenger trains on Ukraine's western borders, as well as penetrate the airspace of Lithuania, Poland and Germany.

While analysts vainly searched for signals about what had been achieved at the recent meeting in Moscow between Donald Trump's envoys and Vladimir Putin, you have to assume that they were prompted by Trump altering his assessment of who may come out a winner from this war, after briefly putting the case that Ukraine had the upper hand.

The same drones being fired at Ukraine can be used by the Iranians, of course, in their assault on Gulf states and US facilities located there.

Like Ukraine, the Gulf states have run out of interceptors, making them increasingly vulnerable to attacks, including those on Saudi Arabia from Iranian-linked Houthis in Yemen.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cancelled his trip to the UN. (Reuters: Christian Mang)

Donald Trump was this week dismissing calls for the US to give more immediate assistance to Saudi Arabia in fighting the Houthis, despite the threat their move along the coast of Yemen now poses to global oil markets.

The sudden urgent need for armaments — and the transformation of many economies into weapons manufacturers — notably Türkiye, Poland and now Germany — changes many geopolitical equations.

Two more states in Germany, in the old East, will have elections this weekend, with uncertain outcomes. But German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is concerned enough — and worried enough about his own future — that he cancelled his trip to the UN.

Just consider the spectre of a Germany run by a far-right party, openly sympathetic to Moscow, that has been transforming itself into one of the world's major weapons manufacturing hubs.

It casts manoeuvring at the UN headquarters in a rather irrelevant light.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.