It's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But "Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station," reports Reuters, "in order to link the plant to Moscow's power grid." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia's grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant's output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow's forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. "Russia intentionally broke the plant's connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid," Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the "attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility".... Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage. Russia's continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine's energy sector "a key battleground" in the war. The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid... Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022. In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers..." At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that's a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel. Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business. Brookings looks at how Ukraine's energy sector has fared during the war: The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war... A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption... The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia's in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians. The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks. Although they note that "During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure... " And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. "As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs," warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday...

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Germany's cabinet has approved a new law allowing police to shoot down or disable rogue drones that threaten airspace security, following recent airport disruptions attributed to Russian reconnaissance. "Other techniques available to down drones include using lasers or jamming signals to sever control and navigation links," notes Reuters. From the report: With the new law, Germany joins European countries that have recently given security forces powers to down drones violating their airspace, including Britain, France, Lithuania and Romania. A dedicated counter-drone unit will be created within the federal police, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said, and researchers would consult with Israel and Ukraine as they were more advanced in drone technology. Police would deal with drones flying at around tree-level, whereas more powerful drones should be tackled by the military, Dobrindt said. Germany recorded 172 drone-related disruptions to air traffic between January and the end of September 2025, up from 129 in the same period last year and 121 in 2023, according to data from Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS). German military drills last month in the northern port city of Hamburg demonstrated how like a spider, a large military drone shot a net at a smaller one in mid-flight, entangling its propellers and forcing it to the ground, where a robotic dog trotted over to seek possible explosives. Shooting down drones could be unsafe in densely populated urban areas, however, and airports do not necessarily have detection systems that can immediately report sightings.

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Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has demonstrated its ability to launch and recover aircraft from its first electromagnetic catapult-equipped aircraft carrier, the CNS Fujian. Official imagery released by the PLAN today confirms that the new J-35 naval stealth fighters, KJ-600 airborne early warning and control aircraft, and J-15T fighter jet are carrying out carrier trials. Ben Lewis, a co-founder of PLATracker, told USNI News that the test was a "significant milestone" for the Chinese military's carrier program. "Once operational, the PLAN will have the capacity to field fifth-generation stealth carrier aircraft, supported by fixed-wing carrier-based airborne early warning and command aircraft, across the first island chain and Western Pacific Ocean," Lewis said. Electromagnetic catapults offer several advantages, not least the fact that they can be more finely tuned to very different aircraft types, including ones that are larger and slower (like the KJ-600), or which are smaller and lighter, such as smaller drones. In contrast to the U.S. Navy, which gathered decades of experience with steam-powered catapults, China opted for electromagnetic ones for its first catapult-equipped carrier. It's worth noting that the U.S. Navy's USS Gerald R. Ford was the first carrier ever to get an aircraft into the air using what is also referred to as an electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS). However, it has not launched an F-35C so far, making the J-35 the first stealth jet to achieve this feat. Based on earlier predictions, the F-35C may not do the same for some years.

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A large U.S.-made bomb left over from World War II was discovered at a construction site, reports the Associated Press: Police said the bomb was 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) in length and weighed about 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). It was discovered by construction workers in Quarry Bay, a bustling residential and business district on the west side of Hong Kong island... [A police official] said that because of "the exceptionally high risks associated with its disposal," approximately 1,900 households involving 6,000 individuals were "urged to evacuate swiftly." The operation to deactivate the bomb began late Friday and lasted until around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. No one was injured in the operation. Bombs left over from World War II are discovered from time to time in Hong Kong. The city was occupied by Japanese forces during the war, when it became a base for the Japanese military and shipping. The United States, along with other Allied forces, targeted Hong Kong in air raids to disrupt Japanese supply lines and infrastructure. "Bombs from the war have triggered evacuations and emergency measures around the globe in recent months," reports CBS News: Earlier this month, a 500-pound bomb was discovered in Slovakia's capital during construction work, prompting evacuations. In August, large parts of Dresden, Germany, were evacuated so experts could defuse an unexploded World War II bomb found during clearance work for a collapsed bridge. In June, over 20,000 people were evacuated from Cologne after three unexploded U.S. bombs from the war were found... In March, a World War II bomb was found near the tracks of Paris' Gare du Nord station. In February, more than 170 bombs were found near a children's playground in northern England. And in October 2024, a World War II bomb exploded at a Japanese airport.

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A widely used Node.js utility called fast-glob, relied on by thousands of projectsâ"including over 30 U.S. Department of Defense systems -- is maintained solely by a Russian developer linked to Yandex. While there's no evidence of malicious activity, cybersecurity experts warn that the lack of oversight in such critical open-source projects leaves them vulnerable to potential exploitation by state-backed actors. The Register reports: US cybersecurity firm Hunted Labs reported the revelations on Wednesday. The utility in question is fast-glob, which is used to find files and folders that match specific patterns. Its maintainer goes by the handle "mrmlnc", and the Github profile associated with that handle identifies its owner as a Yandex developer named Denis Malinochkin living in a suburb of Moscow. A website associated with that handle also identifies its owner as the same person, as Hunted Labs pointed out. Hunted Labs told us that it didn't speak to Malinochkin prior to publication of its report today, and that it found no ties between him and any threat actor. According to Hunted Labs, fast-glob is downloaded more than 79 million times a week and is currently used by more than 5,000 public projects in addition to the DoD systems and Node.js container images that include it. That's not to mention private projects that might use it, meaning that the actual number of at-risk projects could be far greater. While fast-glob has no known CVEs, the utility has deep access to systems that use it, potentially giving Russia a number of attack vectors to exploit. Fast-glob could attack filesystems directly to expose and steal info, launch a DoS or glob-injection attack, include a kill switch to stop downstream software from functioning properly, or inject additional malware, a list Hunted Labs said is hardly exhaustive. [...] Hunted Labs cofounder Haden Smith told The Register that the ties are cause for concern. "Every piece of code written by Russians isn't automatically suspect, but popular packages with no external oversight are ripe for the taking by state or state-backed actors looking to further their aims," Smith told us in an email. "As a whole, the open source community should be paying more attention to this risk and mitigating it." [...] Hunted Labs said that the simplest solution for the thousands of projects using fast-glob would be for Malinochkin to add additional maintainers and enhance project oversight, as the only other alternative would be for anyone using it to find a suitable replacement. "Open source software doesn't need a CVE to be dangerous," Hunted Labs said of the matter. "It only needs access, obscurity, and complacency," something we've noted before is an ongoing problem for open source projects. This serves as another powerful reminder that knowing who writes your code is just as critical as understanding what the code does," Hunted Labs concluded.

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