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- [00:03]
Dina Temple-Rastin
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. Just a quick warning for listeners. This episode contains the sounds of explosions and gunfire. War is not something Eugene Lesson expected to become an expert in, at least not before 2022.
- [00:30]
Eugene Lesson
I'm a writer. I used to be a poet.
- [00:33]
Dina Temple-Rastin
He worked in tech, but literature was the thing that anchored him.
- [00:38]
Eugene Lesson
So basically literature was an initial part of my identity, I guess.
- [00:43]
Dina Temple-Rastin
And then Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. Now Eugene finds himself commanding a special military unit defending Ukraine's cities from Russian drones. From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, a show about how technology is changing everything. I'm Dina Temple Rastin. At this point, the war in Ukraine has been covered from almost every angle imaginable. We've learned about politics, the weapons and the shifting front lines. But this story starts somewhere else. With a poet who had no military background and no expectation that war would become part of his life. And yet today he's helping solve one of the defining military problems of this conflict. His story turns out to be about much more than one man or even one war. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Decagon Growth sounds like a good problem to have until it's 2am Customers are waiting for answers and your support team is stretched. Then a lot of companies turn to AI for help and then discover that most AI tools aren't really solving the problem, they're just creating a different one. Decagon was built for that moment. It helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24, 7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Workflows can be updated using natural language so the teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation. It's helping power millions of conversations every day for brands you know and love like Avis, affirm, fanatics and aura ready to transform your customer support. Go to Decagon AI Clickhere to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team. Check out Decagon at Decagon AI clickhere. That's Decagon AI clickhere. Support for Click Here comes from NPR's Planet Money podcast. Curious about the economic forces shaping your daily life? The Planet Money podcast makes the economy make sense by telling stories about the people inside it Take the wnba. Most people heard the leak, landed a big new collective bargaining agreement. But Planet Money went deeper inside the negotiations themselves. They found a Nobel Prize winning economist helping players make their case with something surprisingly, a pie chart. Because the real fight wasn't just about bigger salaries. It was about revenue share and whether players would finally get a bigger piece of a rapidly growing business. Planet Money explained why that matters and why this deal could reshape women's sports for years to come. That's what Planet Money does. It takes ideas that sound abstract. Collective bargaining, sanctions labor markets, and turns them into stories that feel immediate and human. Other episodes have explored why Pokemon cards are outperforming some investments, or how Russia's economy adapted after years of sanctions and what a 750 pound restaurant robot says about the future of work. Planet Money is economics told through curiosity, surprise and great storytelling. Follow NPR's Planet Money podcast and understand how money shapes the world.
- [04:48]
Eugene Lesson
An unprovoked war in Europe is now underway.
- [04:52]
Katerina Buchocki
Breaking news right now.
- [04:53]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Russia has attacked Ukraine, and Ukraine reported columns of troops pouring across the borders into the east. Like a lot of Ukrainians, Eugene felt pulled toward the war almost immediately. Not because he saw himself as a soldier, but because the country he wrote about, the people he loved, the life he recognized, all of it felt suddenly fragile.
- [05:14]
Eugene Lesson
I'm a Ukrainian. I don't want anything more than my country, my nation, being free.
- [05:23]
Dina Temple-Rastin
So Eugene put down his pen and picked up a very different line of work.
- [05:28]
Eugene Lesson
So I'm a deputy company commander of a battalion specifically focused on countering Shahed type strike drones.
- [05:37]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Today, Eugene serves in Ukraine's 412th Nemesis Brigade, helping run a special battalion called Darknode. Their job is to stop Russian drone attacks before they reach Ukrainian cities. Which means Eugene now spends a lot of time thinking about things the poet version of himself never imagined. Things like signal ranges and flight paths, software updates. The shift says something about the war itself, because when fighting first broke out in eastern Ukraine more than a decade ago, nobody was talking much about drones.
- [06:13]
Eugene Lesson
At the very beginning of our war in 2014, the drones were not used, I guess, at all.
- [06:22]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Back then, the assumptions about warfare were still pretty conventional. Tanks, artillery, infantry. And if drones had a role, it was mostly limited to helping those forces do their jobs. That was still true when Eugene joined the military in 2024.
- [06:39]
Eugene Lesson
When I joined the first unit back in 2024, the commanders, they said like, our main function is to support infantry. We protect them. We destroy the enemies who try to assault the infantry. We are the fire support Less than
- [07:02]
Dina Temple-Rastin
two years later, that assumption was already starting to look outdated.
- [07:06]
Eugene Lesson
Nowadays, like less than two years from that moment, drones are no longer fire support. It's the main damage dealer.
- [07:18]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Did you see that coming?
- [07:20]
Eugene Lesson
I mean. No.
- [07:23]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Wow. In the early years, the war still looked familiar. Trenches, artillery, tanks grinding across fields. The kinds of weapons military planners had spent decades building. Then in the fall of 2022, Ukrainians started hearing a different sound overhead.
- [07:47]
Eugene Lesson
Like autumn 2022. Shaheds have become a real threat.
- [07:52]
Dina Temple-Rastin
The drone was called the shahed, designed in Iran, but imported to Russia for the fighting. The early ones weren't sleek or sophisticated. They were loud and slow and relatively cheap. Basically, they were bombs with propellers attached.
- [08:08]
Eugene Lesson
Deadly Russian attacks forced civilians to run for their lives. This morning in the capital city of Kyiv, photographers captured these images on your screen now of a so called suicide drone. It's an unmanned aircraft which is designed to explode on impact.
- [08:22]
Dina Temple-Rastin
But though they were small and slow, they could travel long distances and swarm targets and blow things up night after night after night. And that's part of what made the shahed so dangerous. Not just the damage they could do, but the wear and tear. Because every drone Russia launched had to be found, tracked and brought down. And for a while, Ukraine was using some of its most advanced air defense systems to do it. Missiles that cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to destroy drones worth about 30,000. So over time, the math began to look less like air defense and more like a war of attrition that Russia could afford.
- [09:08]
Eugene Lesson
Traditional air defense, like missile systems were countering them constantly. And so we were spending like a lot of money and a lot of munitions. And we're like.
- [09:19]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Ukraine was still fighting with the economics of the old battlefield. Russia was introducing a new one. One where the cost of a weapon could matter as much as its ability to destro.
- [09:32]
Eugene Lesson
Once you face a real intensive and consistent threat economy, the budgets, they actually define your effectiveness and resilience on the long run.
- [09:46]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Russia realized it didn't always have to get a drone through. Sometimes it was enough just to make Ukraine spend money stopping it, to keep firing expensive missiles at cheap flying bombs night after night, wave after wave. And if that continued long enough, Ukraine risked running low on the very weapons it needed to defend itself.
- [10:11]
Katerina Buchocki
Every branch kind of independently started to realize that, like, hey, we cannot sustain this level of warfare if we're not going to transition into cost effective unmanned systems. And so you.
- [10:25]
Dina Temple-Rastin
That's Katerina Buchocki. She's the co founder and director of analytics at the Snake Island Institute, a Ukrainian military and defense think tank. And Katerina says, when you compared Russia's assets with Ukraine's, the math was brutal. Russia had more than 700 fighter jets. Ukraine had just 40. Russia had more than 2,600 surface to air missile launchers. Ukraine had just over 300. And much of Ukraine's arsenal was aging Soviet equipment that was difficult to repair and impossible to replace quickly.
- [10:59]
Katerina Buchocki
We were not going to be able to withstand a war of attrition using Soviet legacy systems. It just wasn't going to be sustainable.
- [11:07]
Dina Temple-Rastin
By the end of 2022, a hard reality was beginning to set in. Ukraine was not going to out Russia. Russia not in a war measured by stockpiles and factory lines, not when one side could absorb losses that would cripple the other.
- [11:22]
Katerina Buchocki
We were not going to be able to build patriots. We were not going to be able to build F16s. That wasn't realistic.
- [11:28]
Dina Temple-Rastin
And even once Western allies began sending some of those systems, there was still that nagging money problem.
- [11:35]
Katerina Buchocki
We are not using Patriot missiles against things that cost, you know, 1% of that price and depleting the stockpile without being able to replenish it.
- [11:43]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Which meant every time one of those missiles left its launcher, it carried a second question with it. Was this sustainable? Could you keep doing this tomorrow and the day after that? Night after night, wave after wave? Ukraine needed a way to bring the cost of defense down, way down. So like a lot of wartime innovations, the first answer wasn't elegant. It was practical. They called it a mobile fire group, which sounds a lot more sophisticated than it actually was. Just so I'm clear, a mobile fire group is basically guys in a truck shooting at shaheds.
- [12:22]
Katerina Buchocki
Yeah, you know, driving around with the truck beds responsible for shooting down the shaheds with like, manpads or guns and things like that.
- [12:34]
Dina Temple-Rastin
For a while, the mobile fire groups worked remarkably well. But every solution in this war seems to come with an expiration date. By 2024, Russia wasn't just importing shaheds from Iran anymore, it was making them. And once it controlled the production line, it could keep refining the drone, making it faster, pushing it higher, changing it just enough to make yesterday's defense less effective. So Ukraine had a keep fighting the last version of the war or invent something new.
- [13:08]
Katerina Buchocki
You're in an existential war of survival. And necessity is the mother of all invention. And when you have this much necessity all the time, you're going to have a lot of invention.
- [13:19]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Necessity has a way of expanding the circle of who gets to solve a problem. The next breakthrough wasn't going to come from some giant defense contractor. It was taking shape in workshops, warehouses, and underground factories, where people who had spent their careers building something else suddenly found themselves building weapons. That's after the break. Stay with. Support for Click Here comes from Servol Every company says AI will make employees more productive, but most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. Servl was built to automate that work. You describe what you want in plain English, and Servl builds it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everyone down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. The company guarantees customers can automate 50% of it tickets. Learn more or start a free four week pilot@serval.com clickhere that's S E R V A L.com clickhere servol.com clickhere Support for Click Here comes from Quince Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on, and they look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft, organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear, and their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summ nights. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands, and Quint's works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. But it's not just clothing. Quint's has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. I just got a Quince bathing suit that looks like one of those expensive European brands but for a fraction of the price. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com clickhere and get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com clickhere for free shipping and 365 day returns.
- [16:29]
Eugene Lesson
Quince.com clickhere if there was a big red button that would just demolish the Internet, I would smash that button with my forehead. From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
- [16:46]
Katerina Buchocki
This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.
- [16:49]
Eugene Lesson
It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [17:16]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Ukraine was learning faster than the war was changing. And a lot of that learning was happening in places you could easily miss. We visited one of them in 2023. Actually, we drove past it three or four times before we realized we'd found it. There was no sign out front. From the outside, it didn't look like much, just a rusty gate tucked away in a residential neighborhood. But behind that gate was Airlogix. Before the war, its founder, Vitaly Kolesnichenko, built cargo drones. Then the war arrived, and Vitaly found himself doing a job he never expected to do. He pivoted.
- [17:55]
Eugene Lesson
We felt that we need to help somehow, so we made a pivot from commercial drones to defense. And we had no idea how to. But step by step, we identified problems, you know, solutions. And each day, each. Each iteration, we improved.
- [18:19]
Dina Temple-Rastin
What Vitaly was describing wasn't really a product cycle. It was a wartime cycle. Ukraine would solve a problem, Russia would adjust, and then Ukraine would have to solve the new problem. And nowhere was that cycle moving faster than in the skies. In 2022, Russian Shaheds struck Ukraine 409 times. In 2025, that number had climbed to more than 54,000. From 409 to 54,000. At a certain point, the question stopped being how to shoot drones down and became how to keep up. Not long after joining the war effort, Eugene found himself helping lead a program that would have sounded improbable just a few years earlier, turning drones into mini air defense systems. The idea was simple. If Russia could send cheap drones to attack Ukrainian cities, Ukraine could send even cheaper drones to hunt them. Small, fast interceptor drones designed for one find a shahed, catch it, and knock it out of the sky. How exactly you did that was still an open question. The designs came from everywhere. Ukrainian startups, European defense firms, American companies. Some were built from wood, others were 3D printed. A few carried explosives. One looked less like A missile and more like a flying shotgun. Nobody knew exactly what would work. So Ukraine tried almost everything.
- [20:03]
Eugene Lesson
Basically, we tried different solutions. We tried to use different kinds of drones, different kinds of radars to try to intercept them.
- [20:13]
Dina Temple-Rastin
After all that innovating, what emerged wasn't a single air defense system. It was something messier. Radar operators, mobile fire groups, software analysts, electronic warfare teams, interceptor pilots. All working together to try to stay one step ahead of a threat that kept changing. So it's almost like conducting an orchestra.
- [20:38]
Eugene Lesson
Yeah, sure. We're like playing our party in the orchestra.
- [20:45]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Except this orchestra was constantly rewriting the score as it went. And Eugene's job was to help invent what was essentially a new instrument. A drone designed to hunt other drones. The idea sounded simple, but actually doing it was another matter. In early 2025, Eugene and his men at the Darknode unit launched one of their first prototypes.
- [21:08]
Eugene Lesson
We used a drone with no explosives. It was just a mock up.
- [21:14]
Dina Temple-Rastin
This version wasn't designed to bring a shahed down, at least not yet. First, they needed to answer a more basic question. Could their new drone find a shahed, catch it, and stay with it long enough to matter? They waited for a shahed to appear. Then the radar pinged, and the hunt was on.
- [21:38]
Eugene Lesson
We've seen it on a radar, and we were chasing it with a drone.
- [21:43]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Back in the operations room, pilots steered the interceptor closer. Thousands of feet, then hundreds, then tens. They aimed at the shahed's engine, and
- [21:52]
Eugene Lesson
we just headed into the engine.
- [21:55]
Dina Temple-Rastin
No explosion, no fireball. Just two drones bumping into each other in the sky and then dropping out of it.
- [22:02]
Eugene Lesson
It fell somewhere into the field, and it was like our first interception.
- [22:07]
Dina Temple-Rastin
It didn't look like much. It wasn't the kind of victory anyone would have celebrated at the beginning of the war. It was just a drone falling into a field. But that falling drone was a big milestone. And increasingly, that's what success looks like, because the goal wasn't perfect control of the sky anymore. It was just denying it to the other side.
- [22:28]
Eugene Lesson
Basically, there is no total control. The sky is very, very vast, and it can be used by multiple sides.
- [22:38]
Dina Temple-Rastin
And once Ukraine realized that, it started building around that reality. Soon, Eugene's team was launching interceptor drones around the clock.
- [22:47]
Eugene Lesson
Our battalion is targeting everything we can, and the intercepting rate is very high. For this year, we intercepted more than like 2,300 shahed type drones, about 25 shaheds a day.
- [23:03]
Dina Temple-Rastin
The pace of change is hard to overstate. Weapons that once took years to design, test, and field are now being reinvented on the battlefield. Sometimes in months, sometimes in weeks, sometimes in days.
- [23:18]
Eugene Lesson
They evolve very quickly. Now there is fiber optic, now there is AI computer vision, autonomous drones. It's all happening very intensively. And the evolution is so, so quick. I mean, it's basically not an evolution, it's a revolution, I believe. I think that this is going to be the reality of next generation war.
- [23:47]
Dina Temple-Rastin
So basically last year that future showed up in an unlikely place. A NATO exercise in Estonia. 16,000 troops, military units from a dozen NATO countries, and the scenario was a Russian invasion.
- [24:05]
Eugene Lesson
Like you know that story about the pilots of Nemesis on the NATO exercises?
- [24:12]
Dina Temple-Rastin
A handful of Ukraine drone operators took part in the exercise too. The Ukrainians arrived with a very different understanding of the battlefield. For three years they'd been fighting beneath skies, crowded with drones, always overhead, always watching. The NATO units weren't used to that. They moved supplies the way armies had moved supplies for generations. They parked equipment in the open, they left positions exposed. The Ukrainians noticed and their drones did too. The results were brutal and headline news. Ukrainian soldiers outperformed NATO forces in a simulated battlefield scenario. In a single day, the tiny Ukrainian drone unit incapacitated two entire NATO battalions. One NATO commander later summed up the lesson, saying, we're screwed. Or at least that's the radio friendly version of what he said. Because what the exercise exposed was a blind spot. The Ukrainians had spent years adapting to a battlefield where anything visible could be targeted. Their NATO counterparts hadn't. The lesson wasn't just that Ukraine had mastered the future of war. It was that the future had already arrived and much of the west was still catching up.
- [25:31]
Eugene Lesson
Drones used to have that reputation of a weapon for the cheap. The weapon for the housewives who assemble Lego or something like. The mindset begins with that. But you need to change that mindset because this, this is the new reality. So like the war, the war has changed. So what we keep telling to all our partners and our friends abroad is like, use our bitter experience to get yourself prepared. Don't be skeptical about the drones. There are only like two countries in the world who mastered this new approach. Russia and Ukraine. Russia is already sharing their technology and experience. So you better consider Ukrainian experience, tactics, economy, budgeting approaches and techniques and procedures, because this is where it's all going.
- [26:36]
Dina Temple-Rastin
For decades, military power was measured by what a country could build, how many tanks, how many aircraft, how many missiles. But Ukraine is making a different argument. That advantage may belong to whoever can adapt the fastest, whoever can take an idea, test it, break it, rebuild it, and then get it back into the field before the other side catches up.
- [27:00]
Eugene Lesson
And drones gave us, like the smaller nations with not that big defense budgets, a chance to spare our soldiers lives, people's lives.
- [27:17]
Dina Temple-Rastin
This is click here. METV is America's number one classic TV entertainment network, airing over 60 of the greatest TV series every week. Now METV presents the Golden Girls of Summer, showcasing the best of the Golden Girls. Watch Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia weeknights on MeTV at 10pm 9 Central. Log on to metv.com now to find out where to watch MeTV. Free over the air and on cable, satellite and select streaming services, METV is memorable Entertainment Television if you're looking for
- [27:53]
Recorded Future News Announcer
a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record and then aggregates all of the big cyber stor you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
- [28:23]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Here's what you need to know about the tech world this week. It's Tuesday, June 30th.
- [28:28]
Eugene Lesson
On June 20th, millions of Brazilians were suddenly awakened by an emergency alert on their phones.
- [28:34]
Dina Temple-Rastin
The message contained only Brazil's emergency alert system is designed to warn citizens about floods, landslides and other life threatening disasters. But last week it warned millions of people about something that wasn't happening. Authorities say someone outside the country's civil defense network triggered nearly a dozen false emergency alerts across Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and several regions across the country. The messages were sent to the system's highest alert level, which meant alarms sounded even on phones set to silent. Brazil has temporarily suspended the platform while federal police investigate what officials are calling a cyber attack.
- [29:17]
Eugene Lesson
Look at the commentary from the company. Rapid expansion of AI data centers created a memory surge. We've never seen a component price increase this much this quickly.
- [29:27]
Dina Temple-Rastin
For years, the economics of consumer electronics moved in one direction more computing power, lower prices. Last week, Apple suggested that equation may be changing. The company hiked up prices on several products, including the iPad, Apple TV, Vision Pro and HomePod. Apple says the AI boom has sharply increased the demand for memory and storage components, driving up manufacturing costs across the industry. The announcement sent Apple's share price lower and offered an early glimpse of how the race to build AI infrastructure could begin affecting consumers.
- [30:05]
Eugene Lesson
This is not something that's going to happen in the future, or that is an abstract threat to our strategic interest, but rather a threat in their own communities and their own families.
- [30:14]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Right now, here today, the cybersecurity debate is moving beyond laptops and computers. Now it's turning to medical devices. Last week, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced legislation calling for a federal review of Chinese made medical equipment already in use in the United States. The proposal follows concerns that some Internet connected devices could expose sensitive patient information or create new risks if compromised. The bill would also require federal agencies to assess the cybersecurity readiness of the medical device industry and China's role in the market. We're finding more abandoned toys each day. We're dumb techs invaded our house too. The original Toy Story imagined what happened when children grew out of their toys. The newest film asks a different question. What happens when their toys are screens and and they never put them down? Bonnie Screen time's over. Now In Toy Story 5, the toys aren't competing with each other anymore. Buzz versus Woody. Now they're competing with a tablet. The story reflects a familiar concern for many parents. Research shows children spend substantially more time on screens during the summer, and kids would rather sit and watch videos than go out and play. The movie isn't exactly anti tech. Instead, it is asking an older what do children lose when one kind of companion quietly replaces another? Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dena Tumble Raston, and thanks for listening.
- [32:34]
Katerina Buchocki
Foreign.
- [32:40]
Dina Temple-Rastin
Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what matters?
- [32:54]
Recorded Future News Announcer
Act first if you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.