The long-range Russian drones come in swarms each night, buzzing for hours over Ukraine by the hundreds, terrorizing the population and attacking targets from the industrial east to areas near its western border with Poland.

Russia now often batters Ukraine with more drones in a single night than it did during some entire months in 2024, and analysts say the barrages are likely to escalate. On July 8, Russia unleashed more than 700 drones — a record.

Some experts say that number could soon top 1,000 a day.

FILE – A Russian drone attacks a building during a Russian missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

The spike comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has given Russia until early September to reach a ceasefire or face new sanctions -– a timeframe Moscow is likely to use to inflict as much damage as possible on Ukraine.

Russia has sharply increased its drone output and appears to keep ramping it up. Initially importing Shahed drones from Iran early in the 3 1/2-year-old war, Russia has boosted its domestic production and upgraded the original design.

The Russian Defense Ministry says it’s turning its drone force into a separate military branch. It also has established a dedicated center for improving drone tactics and better training for those flying them.

Fighting ‘a war of drones’

Russian engineers have changed the original Iranian Shahed to increase its altitude and make it harder to intercept, according to Russian military bloggers and Western analysts. Other modifications include making it more jamming-resistant and able to carry powerful thermobaric warheads. Some use artificial intelligence to operate autonomously.

FILE – In this photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on July 17, 2025, a Russian serviceman operates a “Supercam” drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

The original Shahed and its Russian replica — called “Geran,” or “geranium” — have an engine to propel it at just over 110 mph. A faster jet version is reportedly in the works.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted that cooperation with China has allowed Russia to bypass Western sanctions on imports of electronics for drone production. Ukraine’s military intelligence estimates that Russia receives up to 65% of components for its Geran drones from China. Beijing rejects the claims.

Russia initially launched its production of the Iranian drones at factory in Alabuga, located in Tatarstan. An Associated Press investigation found employees at the Alabuga plant included young African women who said they were duped into taking jobs there. Geran production later began at a plant in Udmurtia, west of the Ural Mountains. Ukraine has launched drone attacks on both factories but failed to derail production.

A report Sunday by state-run Zvezda TV described the Alabuga factory as the world’s biggest attack drone plant.

“It’s a war of drones. We are ready for it,” said plant director Timur Shagivaleyev, adding it produces all components, including engines and electronics, and has its own training school.

The report showed hundreds of black Geran drones stacked in an assembly shop decorated with Soviet-style posters. One featured images of the father of the Soviet nuclear bomb, Igor Kurchatov, legendary Soviet space program chief, Sergei Korolyov, and dictator Josef Stalin, with the words: “Kurchatov, Korolyov and Stalin live in your DNA.”

Shifting tactics and defenses

The Russian military has improved its tactics, increasingly using decoy drones named “Gerbera” for a type of daisy. They closely resemble the attack drones and are intended to confuse Ukrainian defenses and distract attention from their more deadly twins.

By using large numbers of drones in one attack, Russia seeks to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses and keep them from targeting more expensive cruise and ballistic missiles that Moscow often uses alongside the drones to hit targets like key infrastructure facilities, air defense batteries and air bases.

FILE – In this photo taken from video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on July 18, 2025, Russian soldiers prepare a strike drone aircraft to fly toward Ukrainian positions in an undisclosed location. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

Former Russian Defense Ministry press officer Mikhail Zvinchuk, who runs a popular war blog, noted the Russian military has learned to focus on a few targets to maximize the impact. The drones can roam Ukraine’s skies for hours, zigzagging past defenses, he wrote.

“Our defense industries’ output allows massive strikes on practically a daily basis without the need for breaks to accumulate the necessary resources,” said another military blogger, Alexander Kots. “We no longer spread our fingers but hit with a punching fist in one spot to make sure we hit the targets.”

Ukraine relies on mobile teams armed with machine guns as a low-cost response to the drones to spare the use of expensive Western-supplied air defense missiles. It also has developed interceptor drones and is working to scale up production, but the steady rise in Russian attacks is straining its defenses.

How Russia affords all those drones

Despite international sanctions and a growing load on its economy, Russia’s military spending this year has risen 3.4% over 2024, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which estimated it at the equivalent of about $200 billion. While budgetary pressures could increase, it said, the current spending level is manageable for the Kremlin.

Over 1.5 million drones of various types were delivered to the military last year, said President Vladimir Putin.

Frontelligence Insight, a Ukraine-based open-source intelligence organization, reported this month that Russia launched more than 28,000 Shahed and Geran drones since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, with 10% of the total fired last month alone.

While ballistic and cruise missiles are faster and pack a bigger punch, they cost millions and are available only in limited quantities. A Geran drone costs only tens of thousands of dollars — a fraction of a ballistic missile.

The drones’ range of about 1,240 miles allows them to bypass some defenses, and a relatively big load of 88 pounds of explosives makes them a highly effective instrument of what the Center for Strategic and International Studies calls “a cruel attritional logic.”

CSIS called them ”the most cost-effective munition in Russia’s firepower strike arsenal.”

“Russia’s plan is to intimidate our society,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that Moscow seeks to launch 700 to 1,000 drones a day. Over the weekend, German Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding said in an interview that Russia aims for a capability of launching 2,000 drones in one attack.

Russia could make drone force its own military branch

Along the more than 600-mile front line, short-range attack drones have become prolific and transformed the fighting, quickly spotting and targeting troops and weapons within a 6-mile kill zone.

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Russian drone units initially were set on the initiative of midlevel commanders and often relied on equipment purchased with private donations. Once drones became available in big numbers, the military moved last fall to put those units under a single command.

Putin has endorsed the Defense Ministry’s proposal to make drones a separate branch of the armed forces, dubbed the Unmanned Systems Troops.

Russia has increasingly focused on battlefield drones that use thin fiber optic cables, making them immune to jamming and have an extended range of over 15 miles. It also has set up Rubicon, a center to train drone operators and develop the best tactics.

Such fiber optic drones used by both sides can venture deeper into rear areas, targeting supply, support and command structures that until recently were deemed safe.

Michael Kofman, a military expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Russian advancements have raised new defensive challenges for Ukraine.

“The Ukrainian military has to evolve ways of protecting the rear, entrenching at a much greater depth,” Kofman said in a recent podcast.

By Andrea Castillo, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says he wants to hire 10,000 new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents, but experts and the history of law enforcement hiring sprees suggest the process could be challenging, lengthy and possibly result in problematic hires.

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The massive funding bill signed into law this month by Trump earmarks about $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement, including tens of billions for new deportation agents and other personnel. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement to The Times, said that the agency will deliver on the president’s hiring directive.

“In June, our 2025 Career Expo successfully recruited 3,000 candidates and generated 1,000 tentative job offers — nearly double the 564 from 2023,” she wrote. “Our recruitment strategy includes targeted outreach, thorough vetting and partnerships with state and local law enforcement.”

During his first term, when Trump called for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to hire 15,000 people collectively, a July 2017 report by the Homeland Security inspector general found significant setbacks.

“Although DHS has established plans and initiated actions to begin an aggressive hiring surge, in recent years the Department and its components have encountered notable difficulties related to long hire times, proper allocation of staff, and the supply of human resources,” the report states.

The independent watchdog concluded that to meet the goal of 10,000 new immigration officers, ICE would need more than 500,000 applicants. For CBP to hire 5,000 new agents, it would need 750,000 applicants.

It doesn’t appear either goal was met. In 2017, ICE hired 371 deportation officers from more than 11,000 applications and took 173 days on average to finalize hires, the news outlet Government Executive reported. And Cronkite News reported that when Trump left office in 2021, Border Patrol had shrunk by more than 1,000 agents.

“The mere mechanics of hiring that many people is challenging and takes time,” said John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University who studies U.S. incarceration and has researched the hiring challenges ICE faces.

When the initial version of the funding bill passed the House of Representatives, it laid out a target of at least 10,000 ICE officers, agents and support staff, specifying a minimum of 2,500 people in fiscal year 2025 and 1,875 people in each subsequent year through 2029.

The legislation didn’t outline specific hiring goals for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, though Homeland Security said that, in addition to the 3,000 Border Patrol agents, the funding will also support the hiring of 3,000 more customs officers at ports of entry.

The Senate modified the bill and on final passage, the law removed those hiring specifics, meaning ICE can use the funding for a variety of purposes. ICE has more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel. CBP has 60,000 employees, including about 19,000 Border Patrol agents.

Studies on accelerated hiring efforts have found that, in some cases, contracts were poorly managed. Ten months into a 2018 contract with the professional services firm Accenture, by which point CBP had paid $13.6 million, the inspector general found that just two people had accepted job offers.

Hiring thousands of employees would be an even bigger lift today, Pfaff said.

He pointed to the fact that since 2020, police departments nationwide have also struggled to recruit and retain officers. Immigration officer pay is lower than rookie salaries at big-city law enforcement agencies, such as the New York Police Department.

A job posting for a deportation officer offers a salary range of about $50,000 to $90,000. Pfaff compared that with NYPD, where officer salaries start at just over $60,000 and rise to more than $125,000 in less than six years.

Another recruitment push resulted in a wave of high-profile corruption cases.

During a Border Patrol hiring spree from 2006 to 2009, standards for hiring and training were lowered, about 8,000 agents were brought on. The Associated Press reported that the number of employees arrested for misconduct — such as civil rights violations or off-duty crimes like domestic violence — grew yearly between 2007 and 2012, reaching 336, or a 44% increase. More than 100 employees were arrested or charged with corruption, including taking bribes to smuggle drugs or people.

A 2015 report from an internal audit by a CBP advisory council said that “arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.”

Josiah Heyman, an anthropology professor who directs the University of Texas at El Paso’s Center of Inter-American and Border Studies, studied the mid-2000s hiring spree. He said smuggling organizations have only gotten more sophisticated since then, as have security measures, so it’s more valuable for smugglers to “buy someone off” instead of attempting to bring in people or drugs undetected.

Beyond corruption, Heyman said he worries the drive to quickly increase Homeland Security staffing could lead to Americans being deported, as well as an increase of assault and abuse cases and deaths of detainees.

“Getting 10,000 [new employees] means basically hiring the people who walk in the door because you’re trying to hit your quota,” he said. “Rapid, mass-hiring lends itself to mistakes and cutting corners.”

The recruitment issues at Border Patrol led to reforms, such as the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010, which included mandatory polygraph testing for job applicants (though that requirement was not implemented for ICE applicants). The polygraph tests revealed some applicants had concerning backgrounds, including some believed to have links to organized crime.

The reforms also slowed hiring as two-thirds of Border Patrol applicants began failing the polygraph exam by 2017, the Associated Press reported.

If the government is not able to hit its hiring goals, it might turn to contractors, the U.S. military and local law enforcement to help carry out Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. It is likely to continue its expansion of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to function as deportation agents. Homeland Security said the new budget will fully fund the 287(g) program.

Pfaff said that while using local police to make immigration arrests could help in the short term, many major cities and states, including California, have already banned the agreements or limited cooperation with ICE. Still, ProPublica reported that more than 500 law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) agreements since January.

Jason Houser, who was ICE’s chief of staff under the Biden administration, said training new hires takes about a year and that classes are typically capped at 50 students.

Houser said another short-term workaround for permanent staff could be the use of contractors.

Most immigrant detainees are held in facilities that are run by private prison companies, including the Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based CoreCivic.

But those companies have a limited inventory of detention space. CBP could also use its funding to erect soft-sided, temporary facilities on military bases within the 100 miles of the U.S. boundary, in which CBP has authority to conduct immigration checkpoints and other enhanced enforcement activities.

Houser said temporary facilities could be set up by October, and they could be staffed with National Guard or U.S. military personnel in administrative, nursing, food and sanitation roles.

Federal law generally prohibits the military from arresting civilians. But Homeland Security officials have said military personnel have the authority to temporarily detain anyone who attacks an immigration agent until law enforcement can arrest them.

But Houser worries that placing young service members, who aren’t trained to conduct civil detention, in charge of those facilities will lead to people getting hurt. He also worries that without other countries agreeing to accept more deportees, the number of immigrants detained for months could quickly balloon.

As of June 29, there were nearly 58,000 immigrants held in detention, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan data research organization. That’s far beyond the congressionally approved 41,500 detention beds this fiscal year.

“This is 9/11-style money,” Houser said. “Think about the money in counterterrorism post-9/11. It turns the entire apparatus toward this goal. Everything in government is going to turn to where the money is, and that’s the scary piece to me.”

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

(Ben Sargent)

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section. Find Observer political reporting here.

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By WAFAA SHURAFA, SAMY MAGDY and TIA GOLDENBERG, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since May while trying to get food in the Gaza Strip, mostly in the vicinity of aid sites run by an Israeli-backed American contractor, the United Nations human rights office said Tuesday. Israeli strikes killed 25 people across Gaza, according to local health officials.

Desperation is mounting in the territory of more than 2 million, which experts say is at risk of famine because of Israel’s blockade and ongoing 21-month offensive. A breakdown of law and order has led to widespread looting and contributed to chaos and violence around aid deliveries.

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Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals, said Tuesday that 101 people, including 80 children, have died in recent days from starvation. It did not provide precise diagnoses, but people in hunger crises often die from a combination of malnutrition, illness and deprivation.

Israel eased a 2 1/2 month blockade in May, allowing a trickle of aid in through the longstanding U.N.-run system and the newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, an American contractor. Aid groups say it’s not nearly enough.

Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid — without providing evidence of widespread diversion — and blames U.N. agencies for failing to deliver food it has allowed in.

In a statement, GHF rejected what it said were “false and exaggerated statistics” from the U.N., saying the deadliest incidents have been linked to U.N. aid convoys.

‘I do it for my children’

Dozens of Palestinians lined up on Tuesday outside a charity kitchen in Gaza City, hoping for a bowl of watery tomato soup. The lucky ones had some chunks of eggplant floating in theirs. As supplies ran out, people holding pots pushed and shoved to get to the front.

Nadia Mdoukh, a pregnant woman who was displaced from her home and lives in a tent with her husband and three children, said she worries about being shoved or trampled, and about heat stroke as daytime temperatures hover above 90 degrees Farhenheit (32 C).

“I do it for my children. This is famine — there is no bread or flour,” she said. “We take this soup, and it does not come with rice or anything.”

The U.N. World Food Program says Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation.” Ross Smith, the agency’s director for emergencies, told reporters Monday that nearly 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, and a third of Gaza’s population is not eating for multiple days in a row.

Over 1,000 killed seeking food

Of the 1,054 people killed while trying to get food since late May, 766 were killed while heading to sites run by the Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. human rights office. The others were killed when gunfire erupted around U.N. convoys or aid sites.

Thameen al-Kheetan, a spokesperson for the U.N. rights office, says its figures come from “multiple reliable sources on the ground,” including medics, humanitarian and human rights organizations. He said the numbers were still being verified according to the office’s strict methodology.

Palestinian witnesses and health officials say Israeli forces regularly fire toward crowds of thousands of people heading to the GHF sites. The military says it has only fired warning shots, and GHF says its armed contractors have only fired into the air on a few occasions to try to prevent stampedes.

Palestinians mourn their relatives killed from an Israeli army bombardment of Gaza, at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

The U.N. has refused to work with the GHF, saying its model violates humanitarian principles and puts lives at risk.

A joint statement from 28 Western-aligned countries on Monday condemned the “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” read the statement, which was signed by the United Kingdom, France and other countries friendly to Israel. “The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”

Israel and the United States rejected the statement, blaming Hamas for prolonging the war by not accepting Israeli terms for a ceasefire and the release of hostages abducted in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that triggered the fighting.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Hamas has said it will only release the remaining hostages in return for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal. Israel says it will keep fighting until Hamas has been defeated or disarmed.

Strikes on tents sheltering displaced people

Israeli strikes killed at least 25 people across Gaza on Tuesday, according to local health officials, as Israel pushed on with a new incursion in the central city of Deir al-Balah, an area that had largely been spared heavy fighting.

A Palestinian man carries the body of a child killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza, at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

One strike hit tents sheltering displaced people in the built-up seaside Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, killing at least 12 people, according to Shifa Hospital, which received the casualties. The Israeli military said it was not aware of such a strike by its forces.

The dead included three women and three children, Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of the hospital told The Associated Press. Thirty-eight other Palestinians were wounded, he said.

The strike tore apart tents and left some of the dead lying on the ground, according to footage shared by the Health Ministry’s ambulance and emergency service.

An overnight strike that hit crowds of Palestinians waiting for aid trucks in Gaza City killed eight, hospitals said. At least 118 were wounded, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment on that strike. Israel blames the deaths of Palestinian civilians on Hamas because they operate in densely populated areas.

Israel renewed its offensive in March with a surprise bombardment after ending an earlier ceasefire. Talks on another truce have dragged on for weeks despite pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump.

‘Time to end this nonsense’

Hamas abducted 251 people in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that triggered the war and killed around 1,200 people. Fewer than half of the 50 hostages still in Gaza are believed to be alive.

More than 59,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Its count does not distinguish between militants and civilians, but the ministry says more than half of the dead are women and children. The U.N. and other international organizations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.

In Jerusalem, top church leaders called on the international community to help bring an end to the war after making a rare visit to Gaza last week.

Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, left, and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III greet each other before attending a press conference following their visit to the Gaza Strip, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, July 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Their visit came after Gaza’s only Catholic church was struck by an Israeli shell in an attack that killed three people and wounded 10, including a priest who had developed a close friendship with the late Pope Francis. The strike drew condemnation from Pope Leo XIV and Trump, and prompted statements of regret from Israel, which said it was an accident.

“It is time to end this nonsense, end the war,” Latin Patriarch Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa told reporters.

Pizzaballa and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III said they witnessed a Gaza that was “almost totally destroyed.” They said they saw older people, women and boys “totally starved and hungry” and called for urgent humanitarian aid.

“Every hour without food, water, medicine, and shelter causes deep harm,” Pizzaballa said. “It is morally unacceptable and unjustifiable.”

Magdy reported from Cairo and Goldenberg from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.