Month: October 2025

• Ukraine said it used Storm Shadow missiles to strike a gunpowder facility in Russia on Tuesday.
• Kyiv is repeatedly striking Russian industry, trying to whittle down Moscow’s ability to wage war.
• Now, it’s adding the UK-made missiles to its list of weapons against Russia’s war economy.

Ukraine officially said on Tuesday that it used Storm Shadow missiles to strike a production facility in Russia, adding the Western-made advanced munition to its arsenal against the Kremlin’s key war industries.

The Ukrainian General Staff of the Armed Forces wrote on Telegram that it had conducted a “massive combined missile and air strike” on the Bryansk Chemical Plant in southern Russia, a facility that manufactures gunpowder, explosives, and rocket fuel components.

It added that the salvo included air-launched Storm Shadows, subsonic cruise missiles jointly developed by France and the UK that can carry a 1,000-pound explosive payload.

“The Defense Forces of Ukraine continue to strike strategic facilities of the military-industrial complex on the territory of the Russian Federation, thereby weakening the offensive potential of the aggressor state,” the post said.

Ukrainian officials said the results of the strikes were “being assessed.”

Russia’s defense ministry said it had destroyed 57 Ukrainian drones over Bryansk on Tuesday evening, but did not say if Storm Shadow missiles were detected in the attack.

Bryansk’s governor, Alexander Bogomaz, also said that Kyiv had attacked the region with fixed-wing drones. While he later issued two missile alerts, Bogomaz also did not mention the Western-made cruise missiles.

Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels circulated clips of a large fire breaking out in what appears to be an industrial facility, saying that a power substation in Bryansk had been hit. Business Insider could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage.

Tuesday’s attack comes as Kyiv ramps up its campaign of deep strikes on Russian industry complexes to undermine the Kremlin’s ability to pay for and manufacture arms.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on October 8 that “long-range sanctions against Russia,” referring to attacks on Russian energy facilities, are achieving “truly significant results” and have forced Moscow to tap into its diesel reserves.

That effort has relied mainly on Ukraine’s homegrown fixed-wing drones and missiles, which were used to strike dozens of oil facilities and weapons factories in the last year.

The latest use of Storm Shadow missiles indicates that Kyiv is now officially adding these Western weapons as an offensive option against Russian industry.

Russia previously said that it had shot down three Storm Shadow missiles over the Rostov region in December, and that a fourth missile struck a building in a chemical plant after being deflected.

The Storm Shadow can strike targets 155 miles away and fly at low altitudes to avoid detection. The UK and France delivered an unspecified number of these missiles to Ukraine in 2023, but limited Kyiv to using them against Russian targets in occupied territory.

In November, Ukraine was permitted for the first time to launch Storm Shadows against military targets in Russia.

Using these Western weapons against Russian industry points to Ukraine receiving more explicit backing from the UK amid Washington’s waning and inconsistent support.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump was reported to have urged Kyiv to submit to Russia’s demand of surrendering eastern Ukrainian territory, after months of publicly voicing displeasure with Moscow.

Representatives for Russia and Ukraine’s defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• YC partner Gustaf Alströmer advises startups to hire only when they are at a breaking point.
• Hiring should not be seen as a success metric but a necessity to avoid failure, he said.
• Across tech, leaders are emphasizing efficiency and AI usage over head count growth.

Head count is no longer the hot success indicator, says a Y Combinator partner.

“It’s the right time to hire when things are so busy that you can’t even find a slot in your calendar to do an interview with a candidate,” YC partner Gustaf Alströmer said in an episode of YC’s “Office Hours” podcast released on Tuesday.

He said this is when things are at their “breaking point” and the cofounders must work beyond their regular schedules to keep things running.

Alströmer, who worked as a product lead at Airbnb from 2012 to 2017, added that hiring can take about three months, and founders should look out for early signs.

“An early indicator of that moment is that there’s a specific thing in the company that’s breaking or about to break. It’s either engineering or it’s sales or onboarding,” he said. He added, “You have to be honest with yourself. Are these early indicators, or are they just my hopes that they’re going to be early indicators?”

Y Combinator is a San Francisco-based startup accelerator and venture capital firm that provides seed funding and mentorship to early-stage companies. It has funded over 5,000 companies, including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart.

On the podcast, Alströmer said head count growth should not be confused with startup growth.

“It’s a dangerous thing to start thinking about hiring as a success metric. Hiring is not a success metric at all,” he said. “It’s sort of like a way to not go under or have a functioning company fail.”

He said that many YC startups now say they want to be a billion-dollar company with 10 people.

YC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Startup founders and venture capitalists are joining the Big Tech bandwagon of wanting to do more with less, especially in the age of AI.

Across the industry, executives are touting the use of AI agents, which can perform tasks like taking customer service calls or booking travel instead of human employees.

Executives have also highlighted “vibe coding” tools that allow software engineers to write code faster and with fewer human resources.

Tech giants like Intel, Meta, and Amazon are embracing the “great flattening” — cutting middle-level management in favor of more streamlined teams and fewer hierarchy tiers, which they say should lead to less bureaucracy.

In May, Business Insider reported that at least 12 AI startups valued over $1 billion have teams of 50 people or fewer. These include OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Magic, which is backed by Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt and Sequoia Capital.

Alströmer’s idea of keeping things lean with a low head count echoes the memos the CEOs of Amazon and Shopify sent their employees in the past year.

“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Amazon’s Andy Jassy wrote in a letter last September. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration.”

In a memo to employees that Shopify’s Tobias Lütke shared on social media in April, he wrote: “Before asking for more head count and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”