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Russian intelligence operatives have been quietly working out of Tokyo for years, using Japan as a channel to buy weapons components, dodge Western sanctions, and ship the material home to supply Russia's war in Ukraine, according to a New York Times investigation.
The stakes are staggering: Roughly 90% of Russian missiles and drones contain Japanese components, according to Ukrainian government estimates.
'We have a sense of crisis about this situation.'
The investigation identifies a Russian military intelligence unit called the "20th Directorate" as the network behind the effort. Its Tokyo station is reportedly run out of an office for Russian state airline Aeroflot near the headquarters of Japan's National Police Agency.
The alleged operative in charge, Maksim Filchenkov, is a veteran Russian intelligence officer using a cover job at Aeroflot — a tactic Russian spies have used since the Soviet era.
Tokyo's response has been limited, despite its public support for Ukraine. "We have a sense of crisis about this situation," said Akihisa Shiozaki, a lawmaker in Japan's governing party.
Japan has not had a dedicated foreign intelligence agency in more than 80 years, as post-WWII restrictions left the work scattered across the police, military, and foreign ministry. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a noted Trump ally, is now racing to centralize it under one command to also counter China, which researchers say has built fake news sites disguised as Japanese-language outlets to spread pro-Beijing disinformation.
The U.S. and Australia have quietly advised Tokyo on the build-out, the Times reported, citing Japanese and other officials. So has Germany, itself in the middle of its own historic military rebuild and drawing on its foreign intelligence service's decades of experience countering Russian intelligence in Europe.
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President Trump has repeatedly accused U.S. allies of not spending enough on their own defense and questioned whether America should defend smaller nations — pushing Japan to build its own intelligence capability rather than lean on Washington. Even so, U.S. officials have quietly offered input on Japan's cyberdefense, industrial espionage, and screening of foreign investments and agents, according to the Times.
The State Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
According to the Times, Japan's government wouldn't confirm the talks directly, saying only that it "maintains close cooperation with counterparts in relevant countries on a regular basis."
Opposition lawmakers warn the new agency risks reviving Imperial Japan's wartime secret police, the Tokko, and eroding privacy rights.
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Americans bear ‘significant responsibility’ for heat wave killing the French, Paris official says
As Europe's record-breaking heat wave continues and excess deaths in France climb past 1,300, a Paris official says Americans bear responsibility for the crisis because of emissions and air conditioning.
Audrey Pulvar, Paris' deputy mayor for international relations, lashed out at American tourists and influencers who had mocked the city for its lack of widespread air conditioning as temperatures soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
'OMG, this is so rich.'
"Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': for days, some of you have been criticising and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. ... OMG, this is so rich!" she wrote on Instagram.
She argued the U.S., which she claims is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, bears a "significant amount of responsibility responsibility" for the warming driving the crisis, noting American cities are roughly 90% air-conditioned. "So please, enough with the lecture. Just start doing your part."
France has recorded at least 1,300 excess deaths since June 21, according to Sante Publique France, with officials warning the count could climb higher.
About 15,000 elderly people died in France's 2003 heat wave, though air conditioning still hasn't caught on nationwide. As of June 25, officials had confirmed at least 55 drowning deaths — a toll likely to keep climbing — after many have sought relief in unsupervised waterways.
Paris went so far as to ban public alcohol consumption on streets and in parks to "preserve emergency services and allow medics to concentrate on taking care of the most vulnerable."
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Only about a quarter of French households have air conditioning, versus roughly half in Spain and Italy and 90% in the U.S. and Japan. The French have long associated air conditioning with illness, attributing colds to "thermal shock" from sudden temperature changes, according to GB News.
With Parisians sleeping in parks and booking hotel rooms to escape the heat, even traditionally AC-skeptical politicians — including France's Green Party — have conceded wider adoption may now be unavoidable.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew fire days earlier, telling a London conference that "cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is," citing deaths tied to high energy prices after Russia's 2022 Ukraine invasion.
On Europe's air conditioning scarcity specifically, Wright said a "shale gas revolution" in the U.K. could have cut electricity bills and avoided the shortage altogether.
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How the United States can take the lead in autonomous warfare
The debate over autonomous weapons has started from the wrong premise.
Critics ask whether the United States should permit machines to kill. Advocates frame the question as whether we can afford to fall behind adversaries who will deploy such systems regardless. Both sides treat autonomous lethality as a novel moral category that demands a novel governing framework.
The United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The U.S. military already possesses such a framework, however. It has been used for decades, it scales naturally to autonomous systems, and the public debate would improve considerably if both sides understood these realities.
The military governs the use of force through weapons control statuses, a graduated system that every air defense operator and ground commander knows by three commands. “Weapons hold” authorizes engagement only in self-defense or under specific order. “Weapons tight” authorizes engagement only against targets positively identified as hostile. “Weapons free” authorizes engagement against any target not positively identified as friendly.
A commander sets the status based on mission, threat, and environment, as units within his command may operate under different statuses depending on the situation. The framework already calibrates lethal authority to circumstance. It does not require a soldier to seek individual approval for every trigger pull, because the controlling judgment comes from the posture the commander has set rather than in each discrete engagement.
This structure maps directly onto the problem of autonomous weapons.
The objection that a machine cannot exercise the contextual judgment that distinguishes a combatant from a civilian, a threat from a bystander, has force only in environments where discrimination is genuinely difficult — precisely the condition the weapons control framework already addresses.
The Taiwan Strait and downtown Tehran are not the same operating environment, and no serious framework should govern them in the same way.
Consider the contrast. An autonomous system operating in the Taiwan Strait is tasked with engaging naval vessels in a declared conflict zone where civilian traffic is minimal. Every surface combatant of a certain signature is presumptively hostile and faces a discrimination problem that is nearly trivial. The environment is uncluttered, the targets are large and militarily unambiguous, and the consequences of restraint include the loss of American ships and sailors to adversary missiles that outpace any human operator’s reaction time.
A weapons-free or weapons-tight posture for autonomous engagement in that environment is defensible on the same grounds that justify those postures for human-operated air defense.
The same autonomous system operating in a dense urban environment such as downtown Tehran, where combatants and civilians occupy the same streets, should operate under weapons hold, which requires a human to authorize each engagement. The environment dictates the posture, and the framework already exists to make that determination.
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The Pentagon has, in fact, started to incorporate this framework into existing policy. Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, requires that autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. It also requires that the design of such systems confine each engagement to a time frame and geographic area consistent with commander and operator intentions.
The directive presupposes that the appropriate level of human control varies with the system and mission rather than holding constant across all cases.
What the directive does not yet do, and what the public debate has not yet grasped, is connect that variation to the weapons control vocabulary the force already uses, which would render the entire question legible to commanders, policymakers, and the public in terms the military has been employing for generations.
Adopting this approach requires trusting the military to set the posture, which is the crux of the matter for a public institution. The objection that the U.S. cannot trust commanders to calibrate autonomous lethal force responsibly proves too much.
We already trust those same commanders to calibrate human lethal force through an identical framework — one that, when commanders adopt the wrong posture, produces civilian casualties.
An autonomous system governed by the same logic inherits the same accountability structure, because the commander who sets a weapons-free posture for an autonomous system owns the consequences exactly as the commander who sets it for a battery of human-operated interceptors.
A public institution governing an autonomous force must establish this policy explicitly rather than allow it to emerge on a case-by-case basis from procurement decisions and after-action reviews.
The military should state as a matter of doctrine that autonomous weapon systems operate under weapons control statuses set by the responsible commander; that the status a commander may set for a given system depends on the discrimination difficulty of its operating environment; and that the most permissive postures remain available only in environments where the discrimination problem is genuinely simple.
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This codification would accomplish two things that the current ambiguous debate does not. First, it would give commanders a clear and familiar vocabulary for governing systems that would otherwise arrive without doctrinal handholds. Second, it would give the public a transparent standard by which to hold the institution accountable, because a weapons control status is a decision with a name and an owner rather than a diffuse property of an algorithm that no one can identify.
The alternative is not a world without autonomous weapons. Adversaries are building them, the technology is proliferating, and the United States will field autonomous systems regardless of whether the public debate reaches a satisfying resolution.
The alternative to adopting a clear framework is fielding these systems under an ambiguous one, in which the absence of explicit doctrine forces operators and engineers to improvise the hardest decisions in the moment rather than letting commanders govern them in advance within a system the nation has already validated across decades of use.
The military knows how to use lethal force. The framework is sound, familiar, and accountable. The task now is to apply it deliberately to new autonomous systems rather than assume that such systems require the country to invent its ethics of force from scratch.
Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the American Mind.
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