World

Ukraine’s Race to Hold the Line

Published

3 months ago

April 24, 2024

Press Room

Source: Satellite imagery from Copernicus

This defensive line in southern Ukraine runs a staggering 27 miles. Two months ago, it didn’t exist.

Russia built something very similar in late 2022 to repel a Ukrainian counteroffensive. But now the tables have turned.

Ditches. Concrete obstacles to funnel enemy tanks into positions where they can be more easily attacked. Trenches for soldiers to fire from.

It all adds up to the Ukrainians’ grim new reality: Russia appears ready to keep advancing despite suffering heavy casualties, and all they can do is try to slow it down.

After the failure of a much-heralded counteroffensive and another winter of fending off Russian attacks, Ukrainian troops are exhausted and facing severe shortages.

The government has signed off on a conscription plan to replenish the ranks, and European countries have promised to send more vehicles and missiles, among other critically needed supplies. Ukraine received a much-needed boost on Saturday, when the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $60 billion military assistance package that will provide more weapons to their war effort.

But what Ukraine really needs is time.

Training those new troops will take months, and the European equipment will arrive gradually, over the course of the year.

Analysts believe that Ukraine is unlikely to start a major counteroffensive this year, choosing instead to spend the time reconstituting its forces. But it will still need to try to stave off Russian attacks and to keep any small enemy gains from becoming full-fledged breakthroughs.

That is where the ambitious defensive lines that are frantically being built come in.

These ditches are usually at least 10 feet wide, so tanks cannot cross them.

Reuters/Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy

Rows of concrete obstacles block vehicles from advancing across open fields.

Reuters

A new reinforced trench in Zaporizhzhia provides cover for the infantry.

Reuters

The Ukrainian government has allocated about $800 million to building fortifications along about 600 miles of front line this year, and construction is well underway.

The defenses shown above are just a small part of what Ukraine has been putting in place, much of which can be seen in publicly available satellite imagery from Copernicus, part of the European Union’s space program.

American military analysts in Wiesbaden, Germany, drawing on satellite imagery and other intelligence, have been working closely with Ukrainian liaison officers to identify gaps in Ukraine’s defenses, officials say.

Since the start of the year, Ukraine has built long defensive lines across two regions in the south, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Source: Territory held by Russia based on data from the Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project

Note: Based on analysis of satellite imagery. The defensive lines only include larger fortifications, such as long anti-tank ditches, and do not include smaller defenses like infantry trenches.

As well as the new defenses in the south, Pentagon officials and independent analysts also pointed to ones beyond Avdiivka in the east.

The Ukrainian military is eager to prevent a repeat of what happened around Avdiivka in February, after that city was captured by the Russians. Meager Ukrainian defenses allowed the enemy to keep pushing west.

So far, four officials said in interviews, the results have been mixed. A robust, multilayer tiered defense is still weeks away, if not months, they said.

But the top U.S. commander in Europe, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, expressed optimism.

“I think that their defenses are going to be very strong, and are strong,” General Cavoli said in a brief interview. “And with continued support, they’re going to be in a good position.”

But on the ground, it has not been easy.

On the outskirts of one embattled town, Chasiv Yar, exhausted troops are holding onto terrain around a canal. But their defenses are poorly constructed and should have been fortified with concrete months ago, a Ukrainian commander said.

Now the Russians are close to fighting street to street.

The defenses going up in eastern Ukraine are markedly different from many of those in the south. In place of broad defensive lines are installations meant to fortify urban areas that are in Russia’s sights.

One of them is Kurakhove.

The city lies on a main road 10 miles northeast of Marinka, which Russia began trying to capture in 2014, when it was making incursions into Ukrainian territory.

Marinka finally fell late last year. Satellite imagery now shows Ukraine working to protect Kurakhove.

Defenses built around Kurakhove this year

Source: Satellite imagery from Copernicus

This effort indicates that the Ukrainians are directing their resources to the most defensible terrain, with the idea of making ground advances as costly as possible for Russia.

The defenses also point to a strategy across much of the front line that involves keeping Russian forces off guard with small attacks and seeking to exploit flaws in their defenses, officials said.

For now, with minefields and fortifications making it difficult to attack and maneuver without big losses, both sides are relying heavily on well-prepared entrenchments.

These can include deep trenches fortified with cement, overhead protection, heating and sleeping areas. They require extensive manpower to build and to defend. With Ukraine’s ranks thinned by casualties, it remains unclear if it is up to the task.

James Rands, a military analyst with Janes, a defense intelligence company in London, said the defenses Ukraine built during earlier conflicts with Russia were exceptional. In Donbas, he said, the bunkers were dry and protected with overhead cover, fire-proofing and ballistic protection. The trenches were reinforced.

With Russia now mounting a full invasion, Ukraine is unlikely to be able to do that again, Mr. Rands said.

“The positions they have fallen back to are not in the same league by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “Ukraine now needs to build a series of defensive positions whilst in contact — which is difficult.”

Methodology

We detected newly built fortifications in Ukrainian-held territory by comparing satellite imagery taken between December 2023 and April 2024. All of the satellite imagery used for the analysis was publicly available Sentinel-2 imagery from Copernicus, part of the European Union Space Agency.

World

Mastering 'the art of brainwashing,' China intensifies AI censorship

Published

30 mins ago

July 27, 2024

Press Room

Mastering 'the art of brainwashing,' China intensifies AI censorship

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China has once again extended its policy of censorship and surveillance as it looks to keep artificial intelligence (AI) models in check even as it races to advance the ever-expanding technology.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has introduced more regulative measures to make sure its home-based tech companies adhere to the party’s ideological rules.

All AI firms are required to participate in a government review which analyzes the companies’ large language models (LLMs) to ensure they “embody core socialist values,” as first reported by the Financial Times last week.

A man walks past a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on March 3, 2023. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

A NEW BREED OF MILITARY AI ROBO-DOGS COULD BE MARINES’ NEW SECRET WEAPON

China has long worked to suppress information accessible over the internet through the use of its “Great Firewall” — which has been used to block a litany of items perceived as bad for the CCP, such as information surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre or memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.

This firewall is being extended to the AI arena as China rushes to advance its technologies while still governing the content it creates.

China’s Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is now requiring AI companies like ByteDance, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a review process that analyzes how effectively their programs are censoring the LLMs they are building.

Chatbot systems are being developed to not only collect sensitive keywords but to also block information on questions relating to banned topics, often involving queries relating to human rights.

The AI systems in turn spit out responses like “try a different question” or “I have not yet learned how to answer this question. I will keep studying to better serve you.”

But in a move to prevent the chatbots from blocking too many questions, CAC policies dictate that LLMs should not reject more than 5% of all questions, according to the Financial Times report.

Chatbot systems are being developed to not only collect sensitive keywords but to also block information on questions relating to banned topics. (Getty Images)

WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

Instead, blanket answers deemed politically correct have been created to answer specific types of questions, though controlling LLMs responses is an uphill battle for developers.

China’s continued pursuit to control the narrative among its own population speaks to a greater threat, AI expert Arthur Herman, senior fellow and director of the Quantum Alliance Initiative with the Hudson Institute, told Fox News Digital.

“That is the future that China has charted for its own citizens,” Herman said. “This is also how they see… being able to control the world of others.”

Herman pointed to China’s burgeoning relationship with the global south, where social media platforms like WeChat have taken off.

“There will inevitably be a social control, a mind control, element that goes into those programs… and to shape a world that looks more and more like China wants it to look,” he said.

Herman also warned that these strategies are not only playing out on internet platforms in authoritarian nations, but anywhere that the platforms are accessible, including the U.S.

“They have mastered the art of brainwashing through TikTok,” Herman said. “Chinese engineers have found a way to create a social media platform which is highly addictive, and which is also highly geared towards brainwashing its users to see the world in a certain way and to respond to visual and audio cues in a certain way.”

100-Anniversary-Chinese-Communist-Party-Gala

Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen leading other top officials pledging their vows to the party during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on June 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Herman said China’s use of TikTok technologies is just a “foretaste” of how Beijing can use AI applications to manipulate populations beyond its borders.

“China sees AI as a means by which to change people’s minds,” he said. “AI’s ability to enhance those kinds of brainwashing and mind control applications is so powerful…that even when you’re not actually under a surveillance camera, even when you’re not actually listening to or watching government-inspired propaganda… there are other subtler ways in which your mind is being changed and adjusted simply by your interaction with things that are taking place in daily life — which are more and more directed by how the Communist Party wants you to see the world.”

World

Where are the world’s millionaires and how is wealth divided globally?

Published

1 hour ago

July 27, 2024

Press Room

Where are the world’s millionaires and how is wealth divided globally?

The world has at least 58 million US dollar millionaires, accounting for 1.5 percent of the global adult population, according to the 2024 UBS Global Wealth Report (PDF), which sampled 56 markets that account for 92 percent of global wealth.

The United States has the highest number of millionaires, with some 21.95 million individuals having wealth in seven figures or more. China comes at a distant second with some 6.01 million millionaires, followed by the United Kingdom (3.06 million), France (2.87 million) and Japan (2.83 million).

UBS defines wealth as the value of financial assets and real assets minus debts held by a household.

Global wealth, in dollar terms, grew by 4.2 percent in 2023 after a decline of 3 percent in 2022, according to UBS.

“If you think of millionaires or the wealthy in general, there’s kind of an indigenous, core of millionaires that has a strong attachment to the country. Then there is a more mobile element that globally [is able to] fairly easily switch domiciles,” Samuel Adams, an economist at UBS, told Al Jazeera.

By 2028, the UK is expected to lose the most millionaires – nearly one in six of its millionaires will lose that status. The Netherlands is another country set to lose 4 percent of its millionaires by 2028.

“The point here with the Netherlands and the UK that we’re making is that both of these countries already have a lot of millionaires – they have a growing core. But then you have a very mobile [element] working around that. And it might be that, in the global competition for wealth, they could see some outflows of the more mobile element of the wealthy. Which doesn’t necessarily mean the economy isn’t working. There’s still wealth being created in those countries. It’s just that the people who are mobile might consider all the places that they want to domicile to.”

How is wealth divided globally?

Almost half of the world’s wealth, 47.5 percent or $213 trillion, is held by just 1.5 percent of the global adult population, according to the Global Wealth Report. These are households that hold more than $1m.

In contrast, those with a wealth of less than $10,000 hold just 0.5 percent ($2.4 trillion) of global wealth, but make up 39.5 percent of the world’s adults.

Households with a wealth of between $10,000 and $100,000, representing 42.7 percent of adults, account for 12.6 percent of global wealth or $56.2 trillion.

INTERACTIVE- How is wealth divided globally--JULY22-2024-1721899027

The fastest-growing millionaires (2000-23)

In terms of wealth per adult, the world’s population has made substantial progress since the beginning of the millennium. The percentage of adults whose wealth exceeds $1m tripled from 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent.

Since 2000, Qatar saw the greatest increase in the number of millionaires, which rose from 46 to 26,163. China saw the second largest increase, from 39,000 to 6,013,282 millionaires, followed by Kazakhstan (918 to 44,307).

INTERACTIVE Where most increase millionaires-1721899023

“I think it’s important to appreciate that in general, wealth grows kind of proportionate to economic growth, as well as kind of vaguely to asset price growth,” Adams said.

“Emerging market economies such as China, especially if we think back to the 2000s, which was in a very different stage, Russia equally, tend to see more wealth growth in general, and then it also helps if you have a certain concentration in a sector, for example, that sees particular growth. So commodity exporters – thinking of Russia, but also some Middle Eastern countries – tend to see very fast accumulation of wealth, particularly in the top 10 percent of the wealth bracket, which supports millionaire growth.”

UBS said over that the 15 years that it has published its report, the Asia Pacific region has posted the biggest growth in wealth, up almost 177 percent, followed by the Americas at nearly 146 percent, while Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was up just 44 percent.

The US hosts 38 percent of the world’s millionaires, Western Europe 28 percent and China 10 percent.

By country, in percentage terms, Switzerland has the highest share of millionaires, with 12 in every 100 people having a wealth of more than $1m. This is followed by Hong Kong, where eight in every 100 people are millionaires, Australia (seven in 100), the Netherlands (seven in 100) and the US (six in 100).