Ukrainian forces armed with stunning new weapons and using inventive battlefield strategies have brought Russia’s spring offensive to a standstill. In a dispatch from Kyiv, Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak examines how advanced new drone technologies continue to transform how the conflict is being waged.

The nearly 800-mile front line separating Ukrainian and Russian forces no longer consists of only a narrow strip of trenches and defensive positions. “Around the front line, a so-called ’kill zone’ has formed, previously estimated at around 20 kilometers deep, where vehicles can no longer operate effectively due to the mass use of drones,” says Andriy Hrytseniuk, CEO of Brave1, Ukraine’s state-backed defense technology cluster.

The widening kill zone has become central to Ukraine’s cautious new optimism. While Russia still holds the initiative in several sectors and continues to pour men, drones and artillery shells into the fight, Ukrainian soldiers say Moscow’s assaults are increasingly disrupted or destroyed before they can reach their positions.

Mr. Trump is expected to raise security concerns regarding China’s large-scale nuclear expansion during meetings with Mr. Xi. The catch, according to senior Trump administration officials, is that the Chinese president and his advisers remain adamant that they are not interested in Mr. Trump’s push for Beijing to join in nuclear arms reduction talks with the U.S. and Russia.

China during recent years has undertaken what U.S. military leaders have called the fastest and most extensive strategic nuclear weapons buildup since the Cold War. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz writes in his weekly “Inside the Ring” column that a central element of the buildup was discovered by U.S. intelligence in 2021 when an estimated 320 new silos for multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles were spotted in western China.

Overall, China’s nuclear stockpile has increased dramatically from about 250 warheads several years ago to 600 warheads today and is expected to grow to as many as 1,000 by 2030 and eventually, 1,500. Mr. Trump has said he is willing to support bilateral nuclear talks with China but would favor the creation of a three-way forum with officials from the U.S., China and Russia.

The Congressional Budget Office gave a critical review this week of the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield, stating it could cost a whopping $1.2 trillion over 20 years and that, even at that price tag, the system would not be an “impenetrable shield” that could fully stop an all-out missile assault on the American homeland.

One of the massive upfront costs involves the further development and deployment of cutting-edge space-based missile interceptors that are widely seen as crucial to the project’s secretive architecture. The CBO study is likely to fuel questions about the costs and viability of the ambitious project.

Mr. Trump wants the shield to be operational by 2028. The CBO says estimating the total costs is difficult given the lack of public knowledge about the Golden Dome architecture. Officials say the major aspects of the architecture need to remain classified to prevent China, Russia or other actors from being able disrupt or penetrate the system.

The Pentagon has inked agreements this week with Virginia-based defense tech companies CoAspire and Leidos and California-based Anduril and Zone 5 to compete for contracts to mass-produce low-cost cruise and hypersonic missiles as U.S. officials work to expand domestic stockpiles.

The companies will compete under the Low-Cost Containerized Missiles program, designed to deliver more than 10,000 cruise missiles to the Pentagon starting next year. Test missiles from all four vendors are set to be procured as early as June. A separate agreement with California aerospace company Castelion targets production of at least 500 hypersonic Blackbeard missiles annually.

The agreements come as the Pentagon faces a munitions crisis following the launch of the Iran war. The U.S. has reportedly expended more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles and drawn down nearly half its Precision Strike Missile stockpile during the 2½-month conflict. Analysts warn it could take four to five years to replenish those stocks.

Americans are quietly being squeezed by a crisis most have never heard of: A global memory chip shortage “driven by demand for artificial intelligence and a federal government that is watching from the sidelines,” writes Bob Gibbs, a former Republican congressman from Ohio.

“The biggest AI companies in the world, the ones spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers and training models, are consuming memory chips at a rate the global supply chain simply cannot match,” Mr. Gibbs writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“High-bandwidth memory, the specialized RAM that powers AI servers, is sold out through the end of the year,” the former congressman writes. “Because making 1 gigabyte of that AI-grade memory consumes four times the manufacturing capacity of standard RAM, every chip that goes into an AI server is a chip that doesn’t go into your phone, your car or your hospital’s medical equipment.”

• May 14 — Offset Symposium 2026: Scaling Software Advantage Across the Mission, Second Front

• May 15 — What Did the Trump-Xi Summit Achieve? Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 15 — North Korea Diplomacy in a Shifting Geopolitical Order, Brookings Institution

• May 15 — Decoding the Trump-Xi Summit: What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations, Stimson Center

• May 18-21 — Special Operations Forces Week 2026, Global SOF Foundation

• May 19 — Environmental Agendas, Geopolitical Ends: Climate Policy and Great Power Competition, Hudson Institute