The Atlantic: Zelensky authorized a plan to swarm Moscow’s airports with 1,000 drones — after warning it could harm civilian aircraft and passengers. His office calls the account ‘total nonsense.’

Ukraine’s military drew up plans to strike Moscow’s airports with a swarm of 1,000 small AI-guided drones, two sources told The Atlantic on condition of anonymity.

The swarm was meant to shut down the airports for an extended period, forcing the foreign airlines still flying to Moscow to suspend service. Members of the Russian elite, no longer able to travel abroad, would then put additional pressure on the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin, forcing it to return to peace talks, The Atlantic said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was briefed on the plan, worried that civilian aircraft, passengers, and airport staff could be harmed. He authorized preparations anyway, seeing the operation as another source of leverage over the Russian authorities, according to the magazine.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s defense minister at the time, was the driving force behind the preparations. He secured financing from Western allies to mass-produce the drones and helped assemble a team of Ukrainian programmers to build an AI targeting system.

The operation’s development, The Atlantic’s sources said, advanced far enough to earn a code name of its own, M&Ms — what The Atlantic described as “a reference to the many small, cheap, and nearly identical drones that the mission would require.”

Preparations were halted after Fedorov’s dismissal. One of the magazine’s sources said reviving the project with a new team would be “technically possible” but would take about three months.

Ukraine’s presidential office, however, denies preparing any drone-swarm attacks on Russian airports. “That’s total nonsense,” a representative said. The Ukrainian military’s only objective when it comes to civilian airports, the representative said, is to force Russia to keep declaring “Carpet,” the emergency protocol that clears the country’s airspace, thereby disrupting flight schedules.

The war in photos

Russian forces carried out a combined missile-and-drone strike on Kyiv overnight into August 20. Zelensky called it one of the most cynical, calculated, and large-scale attacks. The attack killed at least 15 people and damaged dozens of buildings, among them homes, a school, and a kindergarten. Russian forces struck Kyiv again with drones that evening. Many Kyiv residents take shelter in the metro during Russian attacks.