Nine months after Australia pledged 49 surplus M-1A1 Abrams tanks to the Ukrainian war effort, the 69-ton combat vehicles are finally about to reach Ukraine. A photo that circulated online on Friday depicts one of the heavily-armed tanks in Poland, presumably awaiting onward shipment to Ukraine.

Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy celebrated the Abrams’ imminent arrival way back on 18 May. “I’m grateful for Australia’s comprehensive support, for the Abrams tanks that are helping our warriors defend Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said at a meeting in Rome with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Ukrainian troops surely welcome the fresh tanks, even as heavy armored vehicles play a smaller and smaller role along the drone-patrolled, mine-infested 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 41-month wider war on Ukraine. 

But the brigade the US-made tanks are likeliest to join, the 47th Mechanized Brigade, was recently in the throes of a leadership crisis. Citing “clueless leaders” ordering troops to execute “stupid tasks,” one of the brigade’s battalion commanders, Oleksandr Shyrshyn practically begged for his chain of command to relieve him of duty in a 16 May post on social media.

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It’s unclear what, if anything, resulted from Shyrshyn’s protest. But the turmoil in and around the 47th Mechanized Brigade risks wasting precious tanks the Ukrainians have been waiting a long time for. It’s possible, however, that the Ukrainian army will distribute the newly arrived M-1s across more units than just the 47th Mechanized Brigade.

Pat Conroy, Australia’s defense industry minister, announced the M-1 donation in October. “These tanks will deliver more firepower and mobility to the Ukrainian armed forces, and complement the support provided by our partners for Ukraine’s armored brigades,” Conroy said.

The four-person M-1A1s equipped the Australian army’s armored brigade until the brigade upgraded to newer M-1A2s last year. The older tanks are still in “reasonably good working order,” J.C. Dodson, a Ukraine-based defense consultant who helped negotiate the tank transfer, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Ukrainian officials had asked for the old Abrams in 2023, but the Australians waited until their new Abrams arrived before pledging the excess tanks. The US government holds the export license for the M-1s, which were made in Ohio—and the Russia-friendly administration of Pres. Donald Trump waited to sign off on the deal, adding further delay.

In any event, it seems at least some of the tanks are finally on the last legs of their long journeys to Ukraine. It’s apparent what the Ukrainian army will do with the ex-Australian Abrams. First, it will up-armor them with extra reactive armor, anti-drone cages and radio jammers. And then it will probably assign at least some of them to the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank battalion, the only Ukrainian unit with any experience on the M-1.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade got all 31 of the surplus M-1A1s the United States pledged to Ukraine in 2023. In 18 months of hard fighting, the brigade has lost at least 12 of the original M-1s: 10 destroyed, one captured and one so badly damaged it wound up as a museum piece in Ukraine. 

Other M-1s have been damaged—and at least a few are probably write-offs. The 47th Mechanized Brigade may be down to half its original tank strength.

Fresh tanks

The 49 Australian M-1s are enough to restore the brigade’s tank strength while also equipping a second battalion in another brigade—or in one of the new multi-brigade corps the Ukrainian army is standing up.

The same sweeping reorganization that’s introducing the army to corps operations is also reducing, or even eliminating, Ukraine’s four separate tank brigades—each with 100 tanks—in favor of smaller but more numerous separate tank battalions with just 31 tanks apiece.

In the meantime, it’s apparent that some brigades are making do with just a single tank company with a dozen or so tanks. That seems to be the plan for Ukraine’s growing fleet of German-made Leopard 1A5s.

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Ukraine deploys Leopard 1A5 “sniper tanks” with 7 brigades

Ukrainian officials clearly appreciate that tiny explosive drones, and not 69-ton tanks, are now the dominant weapons along the front line. 

The May leadership crisis may also complicate the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank refresh. “I haven’t received any more stupid tasks than in the current direction,” Shyrshyn wrote.

“I’ll tell you the details sometime, but the loss of people has dulled my mind, trembling before the clueless generalship leads to nothing but failures,” Shyrshyn added. “All they are capable of is reprimands, investigations, imposition of penalties. Everyone is going to Hell. Political games and assessment of the real state of affairs do not correspond to either reality or possibilities. They played around.”

It’s possible Shyrshyn was referring to Ukraine’s six-month incursion into western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, which saw a strong Ukrainian force of around a dozen battalions cling to a 650-square-km salient around the town of Sudzha before an elite Russian drone team finally deployed—and severed the only main supply route between Sudzha and the border with Ukraine, destroying hundreds of Ukrainian vehicles in the process.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade was in the thick of that fighting and, soon after retreating back to Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast in early March, supported smaller-scale raids into Kursk—raids that risked heavy Ukrainian casualties for fleeting territorial gains of questionable strategic value. 

More recently, the 47th Mechanized Brigade has been defending Sumy Oblast from an infantry-led Russian counteroffensive that has, at great cost in Russian lives, brought Russian artillery to within firing range of Sumy city.

That the general staff in Kyiv continued to order brigades to fight their way into Kursk even as Russian troops massed for their coming Sumy operation was an ominous development for the units, including the 47th Mechanized Brigade, that had to carry out the pointless or even counterproductive orders. It was even more ominous for the innocent residents of Sumy Oblast.

The 47th Mechanized Brigade is probably on the cusp of receiving new tanks, thanks to Australia’s largess. Shyrshyn and other brigade troops surely hope their superiors don’t ask them to squander those tanks on ill-conceived missions. 

Especially when they have a Russian counteroffensive to defeat.

A photo that circulated online last week confirms it: the Ukrainian army’s 142nd Mechanized Brigade is the latest unit to operate Leopard 1A5 tanks. The vehicles were built in the 1960s and heavily upgraded in the 1980s.

The 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 boasts a reliable 105-millimeter main gun and accurate fire controls, but its armor—just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest—is thin compared to other tanks. That’s a third the protection a contemporary T-72 enjoys.

Still, “it is too early to write off this tank as scrap metal,” insisted the Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion, which repairs damaged armored vehicles. “It just so happened that it first met the opponent it was designed to fight 60 years later—and it’s a completely different tank now, to be fair.”

It’s completely different because it now rolls into battle with at least two extra layers of armor: bricks of explosive reactive armor attached directly to the hull and turret and, over the reactive armor, a skirt of anti-drone netting.

The reactive armor explodes outward when struck, potentially deflecting explosive munitions. The netting catches incoming first-person-view drones before they can strike the tank. 

The add-on armor works. Back in January, one Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 survived at least eight hits by Russian FPVs before potentially three more explosive FPV drones finally finished it off. It’s unusual for a single vehicle to draw the attention of 11 FPVs.

All that extra protection gives Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 crews the confidence to engage Russian troops at close range—something fewer and fewer tanks do in Ukraine as Russia’s wider war of aggression grinds into its 41st month. 

The growing threat from tiny drones, which are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line, compels tank crews on both sides to hide their vehicles in dugouts or buildings, rolling out only to fire a few rounds at distant targets.

Sniper mode

That’s a mode of fighting the Leopard 1A5 is pretty good at. The Leopard 1A5 works best as a “mobile sniper tank,” the 508th SRRB explained.

“A well-trained crew can fire 10 rounds per minute while its Russian opponents fire six to 10 rounds, the battalion noted. “Add a modern fire control system that allows accurate fire from a distance of 4 km during the day and about 3 km at night and you get a real hunter capable of taking down prey that doesn’t even know it’s being hunted.”

But as Russia extends its summer offensive, attacking all along the front line and making incremental gains in Sumy and Donetsk Oblast, some Leopard 1A5 crews have had no choice but to fight close.

On June 18, a powerful Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—rolled northeast from the village of Novoolenivka in Donetsk Oblast, heading for the village of Yablunivka, the next stop on the road to the town of Kostyantynivka, a top Russian objective in the east.

The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions, halting the mechanized attack. 

But a few Russian infantry managed to sneak forward and gain a lodgement around Yablunivka. A drone from the Ukrainian 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade spotted the Russians—and one of the brigade’s Leopard 1A5s counterattacked.

The tank engaged the Russians with its main gun from just meters away. “Clear work, accurate fire and cold calculation,” the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade crowed.

In addition to the 142nd Mechanized Brigade and 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, five other brigades or regiments possess Leopard 1A5s: the Rubizh Brigade, the 21st Mechanized Brigade, the 44th Mechanized Brigade, the 68th Jaeger Brigade and the 425th Assault Regiment.

It’s possible each unit has just a single company with a dozen or so tanks. Those 84 assigned tanks would account for almost every since Leopard 1A5 that’s currently active in Ukraine. A German-Dutch-Danish consortium has pledged 170 of the tanks, and around 103 have shipped. Of those, at least 13 have been lost in action.

Ukrainian troops might have to wait for more Leopard 1A5s to ship before they equip an eighth brigade or regiment with the swift, accurate-firing tanks.

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“No Russian tank would survive”: German Leopard 2A4 withstands 10 FPV drone strikes in Ukraine

When Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the famed commander of Ukraine’s elite Birds of Magyar drone unit, accepted a big promotion and took command of the entire Unmanned Systems Forces, the Ukrainian military’s separate drone branch, he immediately got to work reforming Ukrainian drone groups.

And now we know why. Brovdi just declared war on Russia’s own drone groups. Brovdi “has made drone operators his main target,” explained Roy, a Canadian electronic warfare and drone expert.

Brovdi has even gamified the mission. A new app-based system allows Ukrainian drone teams to upload videos confirming their successful strikes. Hits on Russian troops and equipment earn the teams points they can trade in for new equipment. 

The new targeting priority and the game—it’s all the right call for the Ukrainians. Struggling to match the quality and quantity of Ukraine’s wireless first-person-view drones and radio jammers for grounding Russia’s wireless FPV drones, the Kremlin has increasingly shifted to fiber-optic FPVs.

Sending and receiving signals via kilometers-long optical fibers that are a fraction of a millimeter thick, fiber-optic FPVs are unjammable. The only way to directly defeat them is to shoot them down, dodge them, absorb their blows, hide from them or cut their fibers. 

But there are indirect ways to defeat fiber-optic FPVs. Ukraine’s long-range attack drones have been bombarding the factories, deep inside Russia, that produce optical fiber and other FPV drone components. Closer to the front, short-range Ukrainian drones can target Russian FPV operators in their dugouts just a few kilometers from the line of contact. 

That’s Brovdi’s plan—and the Russians don’t like it. “Bad news from the front,” one Russian blogger intoned. “After the appointment of ‘Magyar’ as commander of the unmanned systems of the armed forces of Ukraine, the hunt for our bird houses began.” 

“From my own experience,” the blogger noted, “I can say that now the pressure on logistics has been eased and all efforts have been thrown into identifying and destroying our UAVs.” 

Fiber-optic drones in the crosshairs

Ukrainian drone teams will “pay special attention to fiber-optics,” the blogger warned. A few months ago, one enterprising Ukrainian drone team discovered it could track Russian fiber-optic FPV teams by scanning for castoff optical fibers, stretched across the battlefield from past FPV strikes and leading back to the operators’ positions—assuming, of course, the operators hadn’t moved.

Moving may now be a matter of life and death for Russian FPV teams. “We need to strengthen camouflage and change positions more often,” the blogger advised.

But a second Russian blogger warned that moving too often can expose drone teams to Ukrainian surveillance. “Less movement—longer life,” they wrote.

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Decoy positions could help Russian drone teams avoid the deadly attention of Ukrainian drones. “Start using a large number of false antennas,” the second Russian blogger advised. 

And in the real drone positions, the crews—operators who fly the drones and the engineers who maintain them—should spread out. “Separate the points with your engineers,” the second blogger recommended. “Operators sit separately and engineers sit separately.” 

Regardless of any preventative measures they take, Russian drone teams should expect an uptick in aerial attacks on their positions. “The enemy understands the threat, so they use their entire arsenal to strike,” the second Russian blogger observed.

The first blogger wrote that more attacks by Ukraine’s best High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems are possible. “When they calculate [the positions of drone] nests, they use all means of suppression. They do not skimp—and send HIMARS.”

The best defense for Russia’s drone crews might be to return the increased attention—and escalate their own surveillance of, and attacks on, Ukraine’s drone crews. “It is necessary to intensify work on the enemy’s birdhouses,” the second blogger advised.

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Surprisingly, Russian soldiers used scissors to down a Ukrainian fiber-optic drone — but Kyiv also knows a trick or two

First there was the porcupine infantry fighting vehicle. Then the porcupine tank. After that—the porcupine engineering vehicle. Now the Russians are adding metal anti-drone quills to “bukhanka” vans.

The first video of an ex-civilian bukhanka—a 4.4-m, six-passenger van—with add-on spikes made of steel rebar circulated online on Sunday. In just the past month or so, Russian troops in Ukraine have become increasingly convinced the metal quills can prevent strikes by Ukraine’s tiny first-person-view drones, which are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine.

They’re not necessarily wrong. The spikes look ridiculous, of course. But then, so did the very first anti-drone screens—so-called “cope cages”—the Russians added to their armored vehicles in the early months of the wider war in 2022. Cope cages are now factory-standard on both sides of the wider war—and many armies around the world are adopting them, too.

Also silly-looking: the layers of metal sheeting the Russians added to the many vehicles once Ukrainian drone operators learned how to steer their drones underneath the cope cages. These “turtle tanks” work well enough. They’re heavy and ungainly, but they can survive multiple drone strikes.

It’s unrealistic for the Russians to convert all of their vehicles in Ukraine into turtles, but it’s feasible they could add rebar quills to many vehicles that don’t warrant—or can’t support—a full metal shell. Don’t be shocked if the porcupine bukhanka that appeared earlier this month produces a lot of clones. 

The first Russian porcupine vehicle, a BMP with hundreds of quills, didn’t last long. Apparently immobilized by a mine around the town of Troitske in Donetsk Oblast in mid-May, the BMP was later blown up by Ukraine’s famed Birds of Magyar drone group, which flew an explosive FPV directly through an open hatch on the idling BMP.

The porcupine vehicle’s fate may not have been the fault of its add-on anti-drone protection. An unmoving vehicle is an easy target for any FPV pilot. On the move, a vehicle with quills may be able to deflect many FPVs before they can strike the vehicle’s hull.

At least, that’s the Russians’ assumption. They’ve subsequently added rebar quills to tanks, BREM engineering vehicles and—most recently—that bukhanka.

Porcupines are spreading

Operating near or along the front line, BMPs, tanks and BREMs are exposed to a lot of FPVs. Many Russian bukhankas don’t operate near or along the front line. Instead, they haul troops and supplies to and from the front.

But even that can be dangerous. Ukrainian workshops are churning out literally hundreds of thousands of $500 FPVs every month. And Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, now under the command of Robert Brovdi, the former head of Birds of Magyar, is exploiting gaps in Russia’s radio-jamming to build a veritable wall of drones extending into Russian-occupied Ukraine a distance of 15 km from the line of contact.

As Ukrainian FPVs—not just wireless models, but also jam-proof fiber-optic models—range deeper and deeper into the Russian rear, more Russian supply vehicles are coming under drone attack. In that context, it makes sense to turn bukhankas into porcupines.

Of course, some unfortunate Russian regiments ride their bukhankas into battle owing to a growing shortage of BMPs, tanks and other purpose-made armored vehicles. Assault bukhankas need quills even more urgently. 

It may only be a matter of time before Ukrainian brigades produce their own porcupine vehicles. The Russians are often first to deploy some desperate new defense against drones—a logical state of affairs, given Ukraine’s slight but enduring quantitative and qualitative drone advantage. But Russian forces deploy hundreds of thousands of FPVs every month, too—and also target the Ukrainians’ supply lines.

The Ukrainians must protect their own cars, trucks and vans from tiny drones. If the metal quills work—and there’s growing evidence they do—Ukrainians troops won’t hesitate to install them. Even if they look stupid.

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Russia’s latest porcupine tanks are actually working

A video that the Ukrainian navy posted online on Tuesday depicts a series of precision strikes on Russian troops traveling in boats along the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. We know the video depicts the propeller-driven TB-2 because the Turkish-made drone features distinctive symbology on its control screen.

The TB-2 led Ukraine’s initial drone counterattack in the first weeks of Russia’s wider invasion in early 2022. But the big, expensive drone—it weighs nearly 700 kg and costs millions of dollars—eventually lost relevance.

TB-2s were big, fat, and hard-to-replace targets for Russian air defenses. Smaller, better, and cheaper drones—many of them made in Ukraine—soon displaced the survivors of the approximately 60 TB-2s Ukraine had received from Türkiye.

That some TB-2s are back in action over the Dnipro speaks to the insatiable demand for drones as Russia’s wider war grinds into its 40th month. But it also hints at gaps in Russia’s air defenses over the southern front. The TB-2s were vulnerable three years ago. They’re even more vulnerable now, but only when the Russians can deploy their best air defenses.

The Ukrainians have been degrading those air defenses, in part by targeting the radars and launchers with the same small drones that largely replaced the TB-2s in Ukrainian service. The new generation of drones has afforded the previous generation of drones another opportunity to fight for Ukraine.

The TB-2—a 6m-long, satellite-controlled drone with day-night optics and hardpoints for small, 8km-range missiles—was decisive in Ukraine’s defense of Kyiv in the spring of 2022.

After recovering from air and missile strikes that destroyed some of their 20 pre-war TB-2s on the ground on day one of the wider war on 24 February 2022, the Ukrainian air force and navy surged the drones into action.

The TB-2s opened an ever-widening robotic counteroffensive. By mid-March, analysts had confirmed nearly 60 tanks, air-defense vehicles, supply trucks, and even locomotives that had fallen prey to missile-armed TB-2s.

A sign of things to come

The Russians retreated through the fall of 2022, consolidated their hold on Ukraine’s easternmost and southernmost oblasts while rebuffing the Ukrainians’ 2023 counteroffensive in the south—and then counterattacked in 2024. But the pace of Russian advances dramatically slowed as 2024 turned into 2025 and the wider war entered its fourth year. 

Ukraine’s drones are a main reason why. But the TB-2s no longer lead the aerial assault. The Russians shot down 26 of the Turkish-made drones in 2022 and 2023. Some of the survivors were still active as late as the fall of 2023, but they too soon faded from view. 

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Ukraine’s fast-growing defense industry replaced the few dozen multi-million-dollar TB-2s with literally millions of tiny first-person-view drones, each weighing just a few kilograms and costing a few hundred dollars. Controlled via radio or fiber-optic cable by a headset-wearing operator who sees what the drone sees, the warhead-clutching FPVs have utterly devastated the Russian war machine. 

It’s hard to say how many of the roughly 17,500 armored vehicles that the Russians have lost since February 2022 were hit by drones. But it’s no exaggeration to say that, right now, Ukrainian FPVs are the main killers of Russian troops and wreckers of Russian vehicles. 

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s helicopter-style bomber drones drop grenades, its fixed-wing surveillance drones patrol the front line and its long-range attack drones—also fixed-wing—range as far as 1,600 km inside Russia to strike air bases, command posts and factories. Even the best long-range attack drones cost less than a TB-2 does.

The TB-2s aren’t strictly necessary given the abundance of more affordable alternatives. That TB-2s are venturing back into what was once heavily contested air space points to the depletion of Russian air-defenses across swathes of southern Ukraine. 

Drones, some launched by Ukraine’s fleet of unmanned surface vessels, have been relentlessly hunting Russian radars, surface-to-air missile batteries and air-defense vehicles in Crimea this year, recently striking S-300 and S-400 SAM batteries and Buk and Tor vehicles as well as several radars and jammers.

The TB-2s have rejoined the fight because they can—and because they still pack a punch, even as newer drones have left them far behind.

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Ukrainian drones strike Russian air defenses in occupied Crimea (video)

Production of the 51-ton, three-person T-90M tanks has more than tripled since 2022, despite tightening foreign sanctions on Russia’s Uralvagonzavod tank plant.

The T-90M is Russia’s best tank. Thickly armored and boasting high-end optics and a powerful 125-millimeter main gun, the T-90M is the closest Russian analogue to America’s best M-1A2 tank and Germany’s best Leopard 2A7. 

Despite losing more than 4,000 tanks in Ukraine since widening its war on the country in February 2022, and despite successive rounds of sanctions on Russia’s arms industry, Russia has managed to expand production of the T-90M at Uralvagonzavod. 

That’s the conclusion of a new study from the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team. “According to our estimates, Uralvagonzavod produced 60 to 70 T-90M tanks in 2022. In 2023, amid efforts to mobilize the defense industry, output may have increased to 140 to 180 tanks, and by 2024, it may have surpassed 200 units annually, possibly approaching a production rate of 250 to 300 tanks per year.”

It’s likely, with the ongoing production boost, that the T-90M is the most produced tank in 2025, on an annual basis. US firm General Dynamics Land Systems has built no more than 90 new M-1A2s annually in recent years. The Ukrainian army operates the survivors of 31 ex-American and 49 ex-Australian M-1s.

Uralvagonzavod expanding output, in defiance of sanctions, allows Russian regiments and brigades to replace any T-90s they lose in action in Ukraine, while also allowing Russian forces to build up a small reserve of T-90s for possible future conflicts. In 40 months of hard fighting, the Russians have written off more than 130 T-90s—not just the latest M-models, but also older T-90As and T-90s. 

“Given that over 130 of [the T-90Ms] have been destroyed, an estimated 410 to 500 remain in service,” CIT concluded. They represent approximately 15% of the tanks deployed along the 1,100-km front line in Ukraine, according to CIT. Older T-80s, T-72s, T-62s and T-55s—some recovered from long-term storage after decades of disuse—account for the rest of Russia’s deployed tanks.

But as the wider war grinds into its fourth year, these tanks only rarely participate in direct assaults on Ukrainian lines. “In a battlefield where neither side holds air supremacy and large-scale combined-arms operations remain difficult to execute, combat has shifted to smaller tactical formations—usually at the squad or company level, backed by armored vehicles,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained. 

“In this environment, traditional platforms like tanks and [infantry fighting vehicles] face growing challenges, especially amid constant artillery fire and the widespread use of cheap, fast drones,” Frontelligence Insight added.

So tanks usually remain in hiding inside structures or in camouflaged earthen dugouts, occasionally breaking cover only long enough to fire a few main gun rounds at targets potentially miles away—and then retreating back into concealment. It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

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Saving the T-90Ms for later

With infantry taking the lead in more assaults, often riding on motorcycles or other civilian-style vehicles, Russia can preserve its slowly-growing fleet of T-90Ms—and save them for a major future offensive in Ukraine. Or for some other conflict. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service warned that Russia could launch a war in a country bordering Russia six months after the war in Ukraine ends.

Ukraine’s allies could constrain Russia’s T-90Ms by tightening sanctions on Uralvagonzavod. The firm once imported certain crucial tank parts, including optics and circuit boards. These imports are now sanctioned, so Uralvagonzavod increasingly uses Russian-made versions of the same parts. 

“It is clear that while Russia continues to grapple with production delays, quality control issues and the challenges of sourcing components under sanctions, it is also making tangible progress in both manufacturing and the deployment of new technologies,” Frontelligence Insight warned.

But these parts are still manufactured on industrial machinery that Russia bought from Chinese or Western firms. The machines don’t last forever—and this is a key Russian weakness. “Existing machinery, now in its third year of nonstop, around-the-clock operation, will also increasingly require replacement,” CIT noted. 

To suppress production of new T-90Ms, Ukraine’s allies must prevent Russia from replacing the machinery at Uralvagonzavod. “Enforcing stricter sanctions is key to limiting Russia’s defense potential growth,” CIT asserted.

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Russia’s latest porcupine tanks are actually working

First there were cope cages: metal grills surrounding a vehicle. After that—turtle tanks with sheets of metal attached to their cages. Now the Russians are adding metal quills to more and more armored vehicles, transforming them into “porcupine” vehicles.

A striking image of a bizarre modification to a Russian armored engineering vehicle is the latest evidence that a layer of metal spikes—like the quills of a porcupine—can protect vehicles from some types of explosive drone.

A photo recently circulated online depicting a Russian BREM engineering vehicle, based on the chassis of a T-62 tank. But it wasn’t just any BREM. No, this vehicle sports seemingly hundreds of lengths of rebar or some other thick metal wiring, jutting from an anti-drone screen bolted to the vehicles’ hull.

Both sides in Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine use BREMs to tow disabled vehicles, help build fortifications and breach the enemy’s own fortifications. Traveling near the line of contact, BREMs are in constant danger from the thousands of tiny first-person-view drones that prowl the 1,100-km front every day.

So it makes sense that the Russians would up-armor their BREMs. What’s surprising is that they’re adding porcupine armor in addition to the standard cope cage. One month after the first Russian porcupine vehicle appeared along the front line, there’s mounting evidence that the strange armor is becoming standard on the Russian side.

Which means it may spread to the Ukrainian side, too—as Russian anti-drone innovations have tended to do.

The first prominent Russian porcupine vehicle, a BMP with hundreds of quills, didn’t last long. Apparently immobilized by a mine or some other munition shortly after first appearing around the town of Troitske in Donetsk Oblast in mid-May, the BMP was blown up by Ukraine’s famed Birds of Magyar drone group, which flew an explosive FPV directly through an open hatch on the idling BMP.

The porcupine vehicle’s fiery fate may not have been the fault of its add-on metal spikes. An unmoving vehicle is an easy target for any skilled FPV pilot. On the move, a vehicle with quills may be able to deflect most FPVs before they can strike the vehicle’s hull.

Proliferating porcupines

It’s for that reason that more Russian vehicles are getting porcupine armor. In late May, Russia’s Zvezda T.V. news broadcast a report on a Russian tank unit on the Pokrovsk front in eastern Ukraine—and the tanks all had rebar spines, similar to the spines on the BMP. 

The spines are the fourth layer of anti-drone defense on those particular tanks. First, the tanks’ own armor offers some protection—although there are lots of weak spots on the top, in the rear, along the treads and between the turret and hull.

On top of the baseline armor, the tanks have cope cages. The spines are the third layer. “Bundles of metal wire like these are welded directly onto the cope cage,” Zvevda noted.

“Before a combat mission, they are fluffed up,” Zvezda continued. That is, the crew bends the quills outward. “The tanks turn into an iron hedgehog”—porcupine is more accurate—“and when FPV drones attack, they run into these needles.”

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The fourth layer of protection comes from the short-range radio-jammers that can be found on many Russian vehicles. That the Russians are adding additional layers of physical protection points to possible issues with the jammers.

It’s also possible the metal spines themselves might interfere with the jammers’ signals, according to the pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team. “It raises questions about how such modifications affect the effectiveness of [electronic warfare] systems,” CIT noted.

But if the jammers are already ineffective—a distinct possibility given Ukraine drone operators’ transition to frequency-hopping controls or even fiber-optic drones that don’t rely on wireless radio links—why not try spines?

There’s another risk, however. It’s already difficult for the crews of up-armored tanks to escape their vehicles after taking a hit. The spines could exacerbate the issue. CIT wondered aloud whether porcupine armor may “hinder the crew’s ability to quickly exit the vehicle.”

It’s clear the Russians are willing to risk electronic interference and crew access if it means a vehicle stands a greater chance of blocking FPVs. The tiny drones now account for the majority of vehicle losses on both sides.

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Russia tests new anti-drone “porcupine” tank. Ukraine’s drones still win.

When Russian infantry seized a position east of Pokrovsk, a fortress city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, one of the Ukrainian army’s German-made Leopard 1A5s left its hideout to blast the Russians with a 105-millimeter shell fired at point-blank range.

Frustrated in their attempts to directly attack Pokrovsk, Russian forces are trying to flank the city—by rolling through the town of Kostyantynivka, 40 km to the northeast. 

On Wednesday, a substantial Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—split into two sections and rolled northeast from the village of Novoolenivka, heading for the village of Yablunivka, the next stop on the road to Kostyantynivka.

They didn’t get very far. The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions. When the smoke cleared, half or more of the vehicles were on fire.

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“No Russian tank would survive”: German Leopard 2A4 withstands 10 FPV drone strikes in Ukraine

But some Russians managed to gain a lodgement around Yablunivka on or just before Thursday. We know this because the Ukrainian 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade spotted the Russians with a drone—and deployed a Leopard 1A5 to take them out.

The up-armored tank engaged the Russians from just meters away. “Clear work, accurate fire and cold calculation—the enemy is demoralized, the positions are burned!” the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade crowed.

It was a rare tank fight in a war increasingly fought by infantry and drones. And it was an even rarer close tank fight for Ukraine’s Leopard 1A5s. The tanks were built in the 1960s, upgraded in the 1980s, donated to Ukraine by a German-Dutch-Danish consortium four decades later and are now set to become the Ukrainian military’s most numerous Western-made tank.

The 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 boasts a reliable 105-millimeter main gun and accurate fire controls, but its armor is thin compared to other tanks: just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest. That’s a third the protection a contemporary T-72 enjoys.

Still, “it is too early to write off this tank as scrap metal,” insisted the Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion, which retrieves, repairs and returns to the front line all manner of damaged armored vehicles. “It just so happened that it first met the opponent it was designed to fight 60 years later and it’s a completely different tank now, to be fair.”

The European consortium has pledged 170 Leopard 1A5s to Ukraine, drawing the old vehicles from surplus Belgian, Danish and German stocks and refurbishing them for onward transfer. The Ukrainian army further upgrades the tanks with add-on reactive armor and anti-drone cages.

The extra armor weighs down and slightly slows the otherwise nimble Leopard 1A5—but that’s a small price to pay. “Drones are the biggest threat to tanks nowadays so we had to take necessary steps even though the extra weight slightly impaired mobility,” the 508th SRRB noted.

Of the hundred or so Leopard 1A5s the Germans, Dutch and Danes have delivered since late 2023, the Russians have hit 18 of them, destroying 13.

Minimal losses

The 508th SRRB considers that an acceptable rate of loss—and credits the crews of the three or so army and national guard brigades that operate the tanks. “There are reasons to believe that they are being used properly,” the restoration battalion stated.

But the close fight outside Yablunivka was unusual. The Leopard 1A5 works best as a “mobile sniper tank,” the 508th SRRB asserted.

“A well-trained crew can fire 10 rounds per minute while its Russian opponents fire six to 10 rounds. Add a modern fire control system that allows accurate fire from a distance of 4 km during the day and about 3 km at night and you get a real hunter capable of taking down prey that doesn’t even know it’s being hunted.”

Given the growing threat from tiny drones that are everywhere all the time along the front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine, tank crews on both sides tend to hide their vehicles in dugouts or urban areas, rolling out only to fire a few rounds at distant targets.

It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

The Leopard 1A5 is good at this kind of combat. “After taking the shot that may disclose the tank’s position, a Leopard can quickly roll back to cover,” the 508th SRRB explained. “It is true the armor of the first Leopard is really weak, but it doesn’t matter if the enemy even has no time to see it.”

While suited to quick fire missions from concealed positions, the Leopard 1A5 isn’t necessarily appropriate for other tasks that heavier tanks might perform: direct assaults on defended positions and close combat with enemy armor, for instance.

“It is safe to say that the concept of a mobile sniper tank is quite successful and effective, although not very versatile,” the 508th SRRB concluded.

But the situation around Kostyantynivka is urgent, despite the Ukrainians’ recent successes defending the approaches to the town. 

“Ukrainian units prevented any deterioration of tactical positions” in recent days, the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. But “the enemy continues to build up forces for further attacks.”

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Russia keeps burning through its last tanks — so why isn’t Ukraine winning?

It’s increasingly rare for Russian regiments to organize a large mechanized attack. Running low on armored vehicles but flush with fresh infantry, the Russians increasingly attack on motorcycles, quad bikes … or on foot.

So it’s worth taking note when and where Russians forces roll out some of their vanishingly rare tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. The targets of the infrequent mechanized assaults are some of the Russians’ main objectives as their wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 40th month.

It should come as no surprise that the town of Kostyantynivka is one of those main objectives. Frustrated in their attempts to directly attack the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, Russians forces are trying to flank Pokrovsk—by rolling through Kostyantynivka, 40 km to the northeast. They’re willing to risk some of their armored vehicles for the chance to capture Kostyantynivka.

On Wednesday, a substantial Russian force—around a dozen up-armored BMPs and other vehicles—split into two sections and rolled northeast from Novoolenivka, heading for the village of Yablunivka.

They didn’t get very far. The Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade and 12th Azov Brigade spotted the approaching vehicles—and hit them with drones and potentially other munitions. When the smoke cleared, half or more of the vehicles were on fire.

The Wednesday assault was one of several in the area. All failed. “Russian forces assaulted Ukrainian defense forces positions near Predtechyne, Bila Hora, Oleksandro-Shultyne and Yablunivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. “Ukrainian units prevented any deterioration of tactical positions.” 

But “the enemy continues to build up forces for further attacks,” CDS noted. And at least one analyst isn’t optimistic Ukrainian lines will hold. The Russians may be low on armored vehicles, but they’ve got infantry to spare thanks to strong recruiting numbers—driven in part by generous enlistment bonuses.

Mounting damage

“Things aren’t going well for Ukraine,” wrote Tatarigami, founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group. 

While the Russian military steadily inducts 30,000 fresh infantry every month—more than enough to replace permanent losses to Ukrainian action and establish a few new units, the Ukrainian military is still struggling to recruit the 80,000 new infantry it needs to fully staff existing brigades. “With current resources, Ukraine can’t win,” Tatarigami claimed. 

“Russians will likely take Pokrovsk and Kostyantynivka, and Kupiansk is also at risk,” Tatarigami added, without saying when the Russians might take those cities and towns. 

But a Russian advance through and around Pokrovsk wouldn’t necessarily signal catastrophic defeat for Ukraine—nor decisive victory for Russia. “The most optimistic anticipated outcome here is where both sides lose,” Tatarigami explained.

“Russia’s realistic goal … may no longer be outright occupation,” Tatargami added, “but rather rendering Ukraine unviable as a functioning state—undermining its economy, depopulating its cities and precipitating long-term sociopolitical collapse.”

But “the Russian state itself suffers economic and demographic decline,” Tatarigami pointed out. In 40 months, more than a million Russians have been killed or wounded. War spending now accounts for 40% of the Kremlin’s budget. “Even a ‘successful’ outcome in Ukraine could leave Russia so depleted that it enters its own period of internal instability and geopolitical marginalization.” 

“If Ukraine manages to repel Russian advances, why wouldn’t that constitute a victory? Because, as noted, winning a war is not only about holding ground—it’s about what remains afterward.” 

Half a million Ukrainians have been killed or wounded. Entire cities are in ruin. “A country left with ruined infrastructure, lost territories, millions of its citizens displaced and a dramatically aged population with a GDP per capita over twice smaller than Mexico cannot claim a strategic win.” 

It’s better for Ukrainian forces to repulse a Russian mechanized attack than to not repulse a Russian mechanized attack. But that’s fleeting good news in a war that’s catastrophic for both sides. “If you think this has a happy ending,” Tatarigami concluded, “you haven’t been paying attention.”

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Ukraine’s new bike unit mirrors Russia’s dumbest suicidal tactic — and that’s a strategic problem

Uttering one word, one man could end Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. 

With a single word, he could halt the fighting that, in 40 bloody months, has killed or maimed some 1,000,000 Russians and nearly half a million Ukrainians. He could ease the nuclear fears the conflict has stoked. He could relieve the strain on the Russian and Ukrainian economies—and allow the devastated landscape in eastern and southern Ukraine to finally begin healing.

That word is “stop.” And the only man who can say it is the Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, on whose orders 200,000 Russian troops further invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. 

What will it take for Putin to say the word? That question, more than any other, informs Ukraine’s theory of victory as the wider war grinds into its fourth year and both sides show signs of exhaustion. Ukraine could defeat Russia militarily, effectively giving Putin no choice but to say stop—lest the Ukrainian army destroy whatever forces Russia might still have left following decisive losses in Ukraine. 

Or Russia could defeat Ukraine militarily, satisfying Putin’s original conditions for victory. Putin could say stop because he’s gotten everything he ever wanted in Ukraine.

But there’s a third and arguably likelier outcome. Putin could order his armies to stand down not because they’ve actually won, but because Putin says they’ve won.

Dictators, including elected ones such as Putin, tend to be political survivalists—and Putin’s sense of self-preservation could lead him to declare victory in Ukraine if and when he begins to sense he’s losing … and losing domestic political support as his armies falter.

Declaring victory without winning

This sort of thing happens all the time. Palestinian military group Hamas routinely declares victory in its various clashes with Israel, even when the outcomes of the conflicts are often devastating to the group. Hamas has repeatedly declared victory in the bloody war instigated by the group’s brutal cross-border raids into southern Israel in October 2023—despite Israeli retaliation that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians and rendered Gaza all but uninhabitable. 

“The Hamas claim of victory … has further goals,” Palestinian writer Aws Abu Ata noted. “The movement seeks to form a safety belt for itself to avoid being held accountable for the very crises it has provoked.”

As long as a critical mass of Hamas supporters believe, despite their suffering, that they and the militant group are the victors, the Palestinian liberation movement may endure in some form.

Putin could pursue a similar survival strategy. He could simply declare victory in Ukraine, and then attempt to convince his base—Russian elites and tens of millions of everyday Russians—that the victory is legitimate and not the desperate projection of an imperiled dictator.

And yes, Putin is imperiled. Just two years ago, the Wagner Group—the notorious Russian mercenary company led by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—staged an uprising against Putin’s regime. Thousands of Wagner troops marched on Moscow. The uprising ended when Prigozhin unwisely agreed to meet Putin in Moscow, only to perish when his plane fell to the ground in flames, likely shot down. 

Meanwhile in Ukraine, increasingly vehicle-starved Russian field armies are losing more than a thousand troops a day in grinding assaults on Ukrainian defenses—and gaining just a few hundred square kilometers a month in exchange for the massive bloodletting, in a country with a total area of 603,000 square kilometers.

The costly Russian attacks are sustainable because the Kremlin recruits slightly more troops than it loses every month. But that robust recruitment is possible for just two reasons. “Driven by high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over, more than 1,000 men join the Russian military every day,” noted Janis Kluge, deputy head of the Eastern Europe & Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. 

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How Ukraine can win, p.2: The single drone target that could cripple Russia’s oil empire

The bonuses and other wartime spending are eating the Russian economy.

“All told, Russia’s defense budget will account for 40% of all government expenditures, which is at its highest level since the Cold War,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of US Army forces in Europe, told US lawmakers on 3 April.

By comparison, the US federal government spends 13% of its budget on the military.

This is unsustainable. As the cost of servicing a ballooning debt crowds out other spending priorities, Putin has reportedly been casting around for conflict off-ramps. However and whenever Putin chooses to end the war, declaring victory for Russia is surely part of the exit strategy.

The US may give Putin the cover he needs

Talk is easy, of course. Real persuasion could be hard.

“Putin has laid out his maximal goals for this conflict,” explained Thomas Graham, a former US National Security Council staffer who is currently a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. “At the moment, he needs to make a credible claim of success on each of these goals to declare victory—and that means no NATO membership for Ukraine, international recognition of the land he has seized as Russian, the demilitarization and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, and the lifting of Western sanctions.”   

“He will not achieve these goals in a negotiated settlement,” Graham asserted.

That’s almost certainly true if the settlement is with Ukraine. But US President Donald Trump, who frequently apes Russian propaganda and has described Putin as strong and smart, has sent his envoys to speak directly with their Russian counterparts in an effort to negotiate an end to the war on terms that favor Russia. 

Trump could lend Putin the domestic political cover Putin needs to sell a unilateral declaration of victory in Ukraine—by giving Russia things Ukraine and Ukraine’s European allies won’t give it. 

What a US-brokered deal could mean for Ukraine

Trump could officially endorse Russian control over occupied territories. Indeed, the White House has already offered to recognize Crimea as part of  Russia. And since the admission of a new member state to NATO requires the consent of all current members, the United States alone could block any Ukrainian bid to join the alliance. 

The Trump administration could also lift US sanctions on Russia—and clearly wants to. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships” between the United States and Russia. 

“The Russian president is in the extraordinary position where he sees the opportunity to entrust his American colleague with imposing a Russian-designed peace settlement on Ukraine,” observed John Lough, a fellow with Chatham House, a London think tank.

The stated Russian war objectives Washington can’t just deliver to Moscow are the most esoteric—and the easiest for Putin to simply claim: the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of the Ukrainian armed forces. 

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Russia has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops since February 2022: does that qualify as “demilitarization”? There are very few actual Nazis in the Ukrainian military, but there are surely thousands of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists among Ukraine’s war dead: is that “denazification”?

When both sides claim victory, the war may end

It’s evident Putin is already laying the rhetorical groundwork for claiming Russia has demilitarized and denazified Ukraine. Putin believes key war goals have been achieved, a source close to the Kremlin told Reuters in January.

As Russian casualties reached one million, Russia’s stocks of armored vehicles run low and borrowing costs continue to climb in the sanctions-squeezed, war-strained Russian economy, the temptation for Putin to declare victory and halt major offensive action—at least for a while—should only increase. Especially given how little ground Russian forces have gained in Ukraine since their retreat from Kyiv Oblast in the spring of 2022.

Incredibly, Ukraine could also claim it has won.

“In the end, both sides may claim some form of victory,” explained Tatarigami, the founder of the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group.

“Russia by pointing to territorial gains; and Ukraine by claiming its success in preventing Russia from achieving its stated strategic objectives.”

David Axe

David Axe is a writer and filmmaker in South Carolina in the United States.

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Russian motorcycle assault tactics have spread to the southern front of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine. The result in the south is the same as in the east. A lot of Russia’s southern bike troops are getting killed by Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

But as in the east, the few southern bikers who survive can make dangerous dents in Ukrainian lines. The bike attacks are almost always fatal for the troops who attempt them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Ukrainian commanders should think twice before copying the method, however. The Russians can afford to lose troops. The Ukrainians can’t.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ southern task force claimed the Russians attacked “in the Malynivka area” on Friday. But analysts geolocated the site of the attack in Nesteryanka, 40 miles to the east in the same oblast.

In any event, the attack failed as around a dozen bike troops ran over mines, got plinked by drones or blasted by artillery. “Their plan was doomed to failure,” the Ukrainian southern task force stated. “Our soldiers met the motorcycle assaults with dense fire, and as a result, all the enemy equipment burned down! Not a single occupier passed!”

The Ukrainian defenders, possibly from the 65th Mechanized Brigade, were lucky. The thinking behind the Russian bike attacks is perverse, but not insane. “It involves heavy losses, but it still has certain results,” the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit explained.

“For example, 20 motorcycles are going, some of them are destroyed by artillery, some by drones, someone is eliminated by mining and our infantry will get someone in a gun battle. But several motorcycles still have a chance to jump into the landing.”

It only takes a few infiltrating Russian troops to create a lodgement inside Ukrainian lines—one that can grow into a larger breach. In deploying large numbers of bike troops, Russian commanders are playing the odds—and betting that a few will eventually ride unscathed past Ukrainian mines, drones and artillery. 

“Behind them is the same group, then more and more,” Peaky Blinders warned. The Friday bike attack in Zaporizhzhia may have failed, but the next one might not.

Abundant manpower

This costly assault method only works for the Kremlin because it has manpower in abundance. Motivated by generous enlistment bonuses and apparently believing Russia is winning the wider war, 30,000 fresh troops sign up for Russia’s war effort every month. That’s slightly more troops than Russia loses every month in Ukraine. Even the “suicidal bike attacks” haven’t tipped Russia’s manpower balance into a monthly deficit.

But Ukraine doesn’t have a durable manpower surplus. So it’s worth questioning the decision by one elite Ukrainian unit to form its own motorcycle assault group. The 425th Separate Assault Regiment organized its bike company, the first in the Ukrainian armed forces, last month. 

“During the training, the fighters spent hundreds of hours behind the wheel and practiced shooting in motion, firing thousands of rounds,” the regiment announced. “As a result, we have a modern cavalry whose main task is to rapidly break into enemy positions, carry out assault actions and quickly change the direction of strike.”

But can the regiment afford to lose almost all the bike troops it sends into battle? And will the Ukrainian people accept the loss of life? 

The Russians are determined to advance north in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. “Russian troops conduct six to seven attacks daily in the direction of Malynivka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted. One of these attacks may eventually succeed—and open a gap in Ukrainian lines that Russian reinforcements can exploit. 

Even if the effort succeeds, it will come at the cost of most of the bike troops carrying out the initial assaults. “The majority of these bikers are suicidal,” Peaky Blinders observed. “But apparently they are completely satisfied with it.”

Ukrainians might not be so satisfied dying like that.

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Russia’s ghost riders are storming Sumy—and they’re not meant to come back

Ukraine has received 108 Krab self-propelled howitzers from Poland. In three years of hard fighting since the first of the 53-ton, five-person guns arrived in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have lost no fewer than 35 of the howitzers, which fire Ukraine’s best 155-millimeter shells as far as 31 km.

On or just before 7 June, a Russian drone crew showed what happens when artillery gunners don’t take every precaution. The Russian crew flew two fiber-optic first-person-view drones through gaps in the front and back of one Krab’s covered, concealed dugout in a tree line somewhere along the 1,100-km front line—and lit the gun on fire, destroying it.

It’s probably the 36th Krab loss. And it was totally preventable. 

Tiny FPV drones weighing a few pounds and clutching small warheads have, for two years now, hounded troops and vehicles on both sides of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine. For most of those two years, however, the drones’ prey were fairly safe inside or under loose concealment. 

After all, almost all FPVs were, until recently, controlled via wireless radio—and radio signals can’t always penetrate wood, brick and metal. At the very least, structures limit how far a drone can fly. “Obstacles between your transmitter and receiver can significantly reduce range,” FPV expert Oscar Liang explained.

The proliferation of fiber-optic drones has changed everything. Controlled via signals that travel up and down miles-long, millimeters-thick optical fiber, these FPVs are largely unbothered by buildings and dugouts—as long as their operators can avoid snagging the fibers and find some way into the covered position: an open door or window, a gap between layers of camouflage netting.

Which explains the new genre of drone video from the front line of the wider war: indoor drone strikes. FPVs are slipping through open doors and past dangling tarps and nets to strike soldiers and vehicles hiding inside what were once safe havens from FPV raids.

Knock knock

A dramatic video of one indoor strike, carried out by the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ Birds of Magyar unit in April, is typical of the new genre. Easing inside a warehouse, maneuvering past one parked Russian vehicle to take aim at a BMP fighting vehicle with its back hatch ajar, the drone struck inside the BMP.

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The explosion ignited a blaze that may have spread throughout the warehouse, if footage from an overhead surveillance drone is any indication. It’s possible one drone costing less than $1,000 destroyed several vehicles.

“Magyar birds are looking for worm equipment in the corners where the enemy definitely doesn’t expect the FPV drone,” someone—presumably Robert Brovdi, then Magyar’s leader and now the head of the USF—narrated over footage of the strike.

The Ukrainian Krab crew clearly also didn’t expect Russian FPVs to come snooping, which may explain why they accidentally left entrances for the maneuverable drones.

The Krab’s bulk—typical of all self-propelled guns, or SPGs—makes it hard to cover and conceal with 100% certainty. According to analyst Andrew Perpetua, it may actually be easier to dig an effective hideout for a towed gun. 

And it’s not like SPGs are actually rolling around the battlefield the way they may have done in previous wars. Tiny drones have made it virtual suicide for an artillery crews to “shoot and scoot.” So they don’t need tracks. They don’t need to be self-propelled.

“Instead of investing gajillions of dollars developing crappy SPGs that barely carry any ammo and often weigh obscene amounts of tons but can ‘shoot and scoot,’ countries should be investing in ultra lightweight, long-range towed guns that specialize in push and bush,” Perpetua wrote.

That is, push into position, hide in the bushes—and stay there. The gunners just need to work much harder to completely cover their guns when they’re not actually shooting at the enemy.

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Surprisingly, Russian soldiers used scissors to down a Ukrainian fiber-optic drone — but Kyiv also knows a trick or two

The 2S7 tracked howitzer is one of the biggest artillery pieces in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. Both sides use them. And both sides prize them. Firing a 100-kg shell as far as 32 km, the 14-person 2S7s can avoid most retaliatory fire.

But that’s changing as Ukraine’s drones range deeper and deeper behind Russian lines. On or just before Thursday, a surveillance drone belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade—perhaps one of the unit’s Shark drones—spotted a Russian 2S7 and its ammunition truck somewhere along the 700-mile front line.

“The adjacent units turned the self-propelled artillery system with a powerful 203-mm cannon into scrap metal with a well-aimed shot,” the brigade boasted.

It’s unclear which adjacent unit struck the 2S7, and with what, but it’s worth pointing out that the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade is equipped with BM-30 Smerch rocket launchers that lob 800-kg rockets as far as 120 km.

Sure, there are plenty of munitions that can range farther than the 2S7’s shells. It’s not for no reason that Ukraine has lost around half a dozen of its 100 pre-war 2S7s—and the Russians have written off around three dozen of their own stock of several hundred 2S7s. 

But the 2S7s and their North Korean-made equivalents, the M1989s, tend to operate far enough from enemy positions to avoid the densest concentrations of surveillance and attack drones that represent the biggest threats to forces on both sides. “They are long-range—quite hard to destroy them,” Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian drone operator, wrote about the North Korean artillery systems the Russians use in increasing numbers.

The Russian armed forces “received a huge amount of artillery from Korea,” Kriegsforscher observed. They may number in the hundreds. Finding and destroying them and other long-range Russian guns and launchers—including the 2S7s—is a top priority as Ukraine struggles to stabilize the front line.

Building the drone wall

More and better drones are the key. Lately, the Ukrainian armed forces have been acquiring at least 200,000 small drones every month—and deploying them to create what David Kirichenko, a fellow with the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, described as a “wall” of drones extending 15 km into Russian-occupied territory.

15 km isn’t deep enough, of course—not for 2S7s and M1989s that shoot more than twice as far. But efforts are underway to extend the drone wall to 40 km. “The goal: deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front,” according to Kirichenko.

Drones that capture and repeat radio signals, thus increasing the range of the most distant first-person-view attack drones, are critical to this extension. As the control system falls into place, analyst Andrew Perpetua anticipated the Ukrainian drone wall will stretch even farther—eventually as far as 100 km.

“You have layers of drone superiority,” Perpetua projected. 

Russia could counter with its own drones, of course. But Russian industry—cumbersome and often corrupt—struggles to scale and innovate at the same pace as Ukrainian industry. At the same time, Ukraine’s electronic warfare—that is, radio-jamming—is much more effective than Russia’s and often grounds Russia’s wireless drones while Ukraine’s own drones fly freely. To counter this, the Russians are scrambling to deploy more fiber-optic drones, which send and receive signals via thin wires instead of wirelessly over the radio spectrum.

If Ukrainian troops can preserve their drone edge, they could eventually rob Russian forces of any freedom of action.

“You push a critical number of drone pilots into each layer [of the drone wall], overwhelming Russian pilots and completely cutting off all logistics access,” Perpetua explained. “I mean, all artillery is cut off, all infantry cut off, out to 100 kilometers.”

That the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade could find and hit a Russian 2S7 potentially 32 km away is one small signal that the Ukrainian drone wall is slowly getting wider.

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Russia’s new V2U AI drone hunts Ukraine’s best weapons—so far, it is unjammable

Ukrainian drones, missiles and artillery devastated a Russian assault group outside of the town of Siversk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast on or just before Wednesday, blocking the Russians’ latest attempt to punch through Ukrainian defenses in order to drive at the so-called “fortress belt”—a chain of Ukrainian cities stretching through Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

It was a rare armored assault in a war where armored vehicles are increasingly vulnerable to drones, mines, missiles and artillery. At least four Russian vehicles—a tank and three fighting vehicles—rolled toward Siversk in broad daylight. The tank fired shells. At least one vehicle popped smoke grenades, its crew clearly hoping to hide the assault group from Ukrainian drones.

It didn’t work. Drones from the Ukrainian 4th National Guard Brigade spotted the Russians mid-assault. Massive firepower rained down, including explosive first-person-view drones, drone-dropped grenades, an apparent Javelin anti-tank missile and cluster artillery. “In the first minutes of repelling the attack, one tank and three units of enemy armored vehicles were hit,” the Ukrainian brigade reported.

A dozen or more Russian infantry managed to dismount from the harried vehicles. First-person-view drones, bomber drones and artillery made quick work of them.

If the Russian assault was as poorly led as it appeared to be, it may have been doomed from the beginning. It’s typical, as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 40th month, for Russian regiments to send under-trained, unprotected troops on “reconnaissance-by-force” missions in the early hours of a planned attack—often in civilian cars and trucks or on motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles or even electric scooters.

Costly strategy

Believe it or not, there’s a deliberate strategy at play. Yes, it’s costly. No, it doesn’t always fail.

Unencumbered by heavy armor, lightly-equipped Russian recon troops can move fast—and that gives them a chance, if not a great one, to get across the drone-patrolled, mine-seeded, artillery-pocked no-man’s-land before Ukrainian brigades can deploy their heaviest firepower. 

These troops “are ordered to advance towards where they assess Ukrainian positions to be, conducting reconnaissance by drawing fire,” Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“If the group encounters resistance, Russian commanders assess where they believe the best lines of approach are, and in particular, where the boundaries between defensive units lie,” Reynolds and Watling added in their February study. 

“If Ukrainian positions are positively identified, sections are persistently sent forward to attack positions, which are further mapped and then targeted with artillery, FPVs and UMPK glide bombs,” Reynolds and Watling wrote. “When rotation or disruption of the defence is achieved, Russian units aim to conduct more deliberate assault actions.”

What’s most important is that the “deliberate assault actions,” involving heavy vehicles, only takes place after the lighter recon forces have identified a safe route across the no-man’s-land—and Russian artillery, drones and bombs have suppressed the nearby Ukrainian forces.

Russian commanders don’t appear to have followed the usual plan outside Siversk on Wednesday. And potentially scores of Russians paid with their lives.

But don’t expect the Russians to give up. The Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies anticipated further Russian action in the area. “The 3rd Combined Arms Army will try to break through to the northern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River between Yampil and Hryhorivka, and from the southeast—toward Siversk,” CDS predicted.

If the Wednesday assault didn’t end with the millionth Russian casualty, the next assault just might.

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Ukraine learned how to jam Russian bombs. So Russia made them fly beyond the jammers

Russia’s new AI kamikaze drone can navigate and attack without any connection to a human operator. The V2U may be one of the most sophisticated small attack UAVs on either side of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine—and it risks tilting the life-or-death drone race in the Kremlin’s favor.

The electrically-powered, propeller-driven, explosives-laden V2U, roughly 1.2 meters from wingtip to wingtip, first appeared along the 1,100-km front line this spring. 

Recovering crashed examples, Ukrainian and allied analysts have been able to identify the components—many of them Chinese, Japanese or American in origin—that help the V2U fly for up to an hour at 60 km/hr and strike with a vehicle-wrecking 2.9-kg shaped-charge warhead, all without human intervention.

That autonomy makes the V2U essentially impossible to jam. Like smaller fiber-optic first-person-view attack drones, the V2U is impervious to electromagnetic attacks on its control link. The only way to defeat it is to shoot it down—or hide from it. 

“Autonomy is the inevitable pathway drone warfare will follow,” explained “Roy,” a Canadian drone expert. With the V2U, “Russia is pulling ahead of Ukraine in the crucial field of drone autonomy.” 

Total autonomy

Like many drones, the camera-equipped V2U boasts satellite positioning by way of the American GPS and Russian GLONASS constellations. It’s the “ubiquitous approach to navigation,” wrote Justin Bronk and Jack Watling, analysts for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

But satellite navigation is fragile. “The power of these navigational emissions is very low,” Bronk and Watling pointed out. “They are, therefore, easy to receive, but also easy to jam through saturation of the frequencies used. Alternatively, adversaries can deliver false signals such that the receiver is spoofed into locating itself in an erroneous position.”

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So the V2U’s designers added a backup navigation system. “A 100-GB solid state drive on a video support board, combined with a laser range finder, gives the UAV terrain-following capability in the presence of GPS/GLONASS jamming,” Roy noted. 

Terrain-following is entirely internal, and requires no connection to an outside operator or satellite. “If a platform has an electro-optical sensor and a pre-loaded map of the terrain over which it is flying, computer vision can be used to match the UAV’s camera view against identifiable terrain features and physical markers such as rivers, roads and forests,” Bronk and Watling wrote. 

Terrain-matching can be inaccurate at the lower altitudes where a smaller drone such as the V2U is most comfortable, so there’s a backup for its backup. “If a platform has a laser rangefinder and flies at a low and level altitude”—and yes, the V2U does fly like that—“it can compare changes in contour of the ground over time to track its progress over its pre-loaded map,” the RUSI analysts explained.

Probing as deeply as 60 km behind the front line, a V2U—or, more ominously, a swarm of several V2Us—will use its built-in AI to scan for targets matching pre-loaded images of the most valuable Ukrainian vehicles and systems. Tanks. Rocket launchers. Artillery. Air-defenses.

The V2U “would be effective against a range of valuable targets,” Roy warned.

The Ukrainian armed forces have highly autonomous, AI-assisted attack drones, too, of course—but the V2U may be the best of the bunch. The type’s proliferation is a waving red flag—a warning that the sanctions-squeezed Russian drone industry is still capable of adaptation and innovation. It’s capable of making technological leaps in arguably the critical capability of the wider war: autonomy. 

“Ukraine must not let the Russians lead this race,” Roy stated.

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Ukraine found a way to beat Russia’s unjammable drones. It doesn’t work anymore.

On or before Saturday, Russian troops somewhere along the 700-mile (about 1,100-km) front line of Russia’s 40-month wider war on Ukraine detected incoming Ukrainian drones. Specifically: fiber-optic first-person-view drones that send and receive signals via millimeters-thick, but miles-long, spools of optical fiber.

Fiber-optic FPVs are extremely difficult to defeat. The main defense against wireless FPVs, which send and receive signals by radio, is electronic jamming that can ground the drones before they strike. But fiber-optic FPVs can’t be jammed. That’s why both the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces are building more of the fiber-optic models—even though they’re several times more expensive than the $500 wireless models.

But sever a drone’s optical fiber, and it’ll fall from the air. Optical fiber is tough, but it can be broken by bending it 180 degrees. Surgical scissors can also cut right through it—as the Russians were well aware. “Got the scissors?” one hidden Russian asked after a Ukrainian FPV buzzed past, trailing its optical fiber, in a video from the Saturday incident. “Got ‘em,” another hidden Russian responded.

The soldiers hurried from their hiding spot, found the drone’s thin optical fiber—and cut it.

The drone lost its command signal. “It’s falling,” one Russian breathed right before the drone exploded a short distance away.

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The circumstances of the Saturday fiber-cutting will be difficult for the Russians—and Ukrainians, for that matter—to duplicate. The soldiers had to have ample warning of the incoming drone raid, opportunity to hide from the passing drone and plenty of luck. If a second drone had followed the first, it might’ve struck the Russians as they tried to scissor the first drone’s fiber.

Cut the cord

Yes, scissors are an effective defense against fiber-optic drones—but only in the most extraordinary circumstances. That’s why both sides are literally digging in, going underground to avoid the millions of FPVs swarming the front as the war grinds into its fourth year.

More and more, armored vehicles and infantry hide indoors or underground when they’re not actively attacking or defending. It’s a new “era of the cautious tank,” according to David Kirichenko, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C. 

The only scalable active defenses against fiber-optic drones are to shoot them down right before they strike, usually with shotguns. That’s risky, however. Miss with your first shot, and you might not get a second one before the drone strikes.

Acknowledging the difficulty of stopping fiber-optic FPVs right before they explode, the Russians and Ukrainians are trying to stop them “left of the boom,” to borrow a US Army term. That might mean detecting the optical fibers left over from earlier attacks, tracing the fibers back to the drone operators—and bombarding the operators with drones or artillery. 

That only works if the operators unwisely linger in the same location long enough for the enemy to hunt them down. 

Ukrainian forces are trying to get even farther left of the boom—attacking the factories that produce Russia’s FPVs. 

On 13 March, long-range drones belonging to the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency struck a hidden drone manufacturing facility in Obukhovo, just outside Moscow, 300 miles (about 480 km) from the border with Ukraine. A few weeks later, in April, Ukraine sortied one of its then-new Aeroprakt A-22 sport plane drones to strike a drone plant in Yelabuga, 550 miles (about 880 km) east of Moscow.

And on 4 April, a dozen Ukrainian attack drones motored 460 miles (about 740 km) into Russia and struck a factory in the city of Saransk. The target was the Optic Fiber Systems factory, which produces—you guessed it—fiber-optic cables. The critical component in Russia’s best unjammable FPVs.

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Ukraine found a way to beat Russia’s unjammable drones. It doesn’t work anymore.