Ukrainian forces struck and damaged another ship supporting Russia’s war effort on the Black Sea on Thursday night.

Another ship strike isn’t remarkable. In the 43 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, the Ukrainians have sunk or damaged roughly a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s three dozen warships. Most notably, the cruiser Moskva, holed by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles way back in April 2022.

What’s notable about the Thursday strike on the Project MPSV07 rescue and salvage ship was how and where Ukrainian operators hit it. The 73-m salvage ship, operated by Russia’s auxiliary rescue agency, was patrolling just outside the port of Novorossiysk, in southern Russia, 400 km from the front line.

Rather than send a squadron of comparatively slow drone boats or expend a precious cruise missile that might cost $1 million or more, the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the HUR, flew a fixed-wing attack drone at very low altitude all the way to Novorossiysk, and struck the Project MPSV07’s bridge area, where many of the most delicate electronics are.

The hit on the Project MPSV07 had the effect of “destroying its electronic warfare systems and forcing it out of action,” the Ukrainian strategic communications service announced.

The raid came just two weeks after a Ukrainian drone team scored a hit on a Black Sea Fleet missile corvette in a similar way—by maneuvering an attack drone at wave-top height and striking the corvette’s topside electronics.

Blowing up topside radar masts and satellite receivers with a small drone might not sink a ship, but it can inflict a lot of difficult-to-repair damage—and at low cost and risk to the attacker. Even the priciest attack drones cost just $200,000; most are in the range of five figures.

It’s worth noting that the Project MPSV07 is an ice-hardened vessel, with a reinforced hull for sailing through icy northern waters. All that extra steel makes a Project MPSV07 a harder target than, say, a thinner-hulled missile corvette.

In that context, the attack on the vessel’s electronics makes even more sense. The Ukrainians hit the ship where it’s most vulnerable.

Rolling back the air defenses

The virtuosic raid didn’t come together overnight. Until recently, the waters around Russian-occupied Crimea were protected by one of the densest air-defense networks in the world: dozens of Russian radars, mobile guns, surface-to-air missile vehicles, and batteries, including long-range S-300 and S-400 SAM sites.

Moreover, Ukraine’s Starlink satellite terminals, which most of its drones rely on for control and communication, work just fine over Crimea. They generally don’t work over Russia proper—likely a deliberate choice by Starlink founder Elon Musk.

Bayraktar is back—and it’s all over Crimea

That the airspace over and around Crimea is becoming more favorable to Ukraine is evident—and not only in the Thursday hit on that Russian salvage ship. Ukraine’s Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drones are now very active over Crimea, flinging tiny precision missiles at Russian boats and other equipment.

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Ukraine’s 60 or so TB-2 led Ukraine’s initial drone counterattack in the first weeks of Russia’s wider invasion in early 2022. However, the big, expensive TB-2—it weighs nearly 700 kg and costs millions of dollars—eventually lost relevance.

TB-2s were big, fat, and hard to replace. Smaller, better, and cheaper drones—many of them made in Ukraine—soon displaced the surviving TB-2s.

That some TB-2s are back in action over Crimea speaks to the insatiable demand for drones as Russia’s wider war grinds into its 43rd month. But it also points to yawning gaps in Russia’s air defenses.

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.

It’s clear that, over southern waters, the Russians can’t deploy their best air defenses. At least, not without them swiftly coming under attack by the very drones they’re supposed to defeat.

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Tiny first-person-view drones are everywhere all the time over the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 43-month wider war on Ukraine. But most of them are surveillance and attack assets. They scan for targets over or near the front line—and then zoom in and explode.

Now at least one Ukrainian unit is finding a new use for the ubiquitous FPVs. The 225th Assault Regiment, holding the line outside Vorone in southern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with its M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles, has begun attaching FPVs to infantry squads to help the squads clear buildings of Russian troops.

“Clearing buildings is deadly—an enemy can be in every corner,” the regiment explained. When the infantry must enter a structure, they can send an FPV “to scout ahead.” “If the enemy is found,” the regiment explained, “the drone strikes, keeping our infantry safe.”

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It’s delicate work requiring extreme precision on the part of the distant drone operator, who wears a virtual-reality headset to see what the warhead-clutching FPV sees. An FPV explodes on contact with any surface, so an imprecise maneuver can endanger the drone’s human squadmates.

To guarantee an uninterrupted signal between the operator and their drone, the 225th Assault Regiment uses fiber-optic FPVs for clearance missions. Fiber-optic drones send and receive signals via kilometers-long optical fibers, making them impervious to radio jamming and the signal dead zones created by buildings or hills.

Drones as suppressive fire

The Ukrainians aren’t the only ones innovating with their smallest drones. The Russians have new ideas, too. FPVs are so dangerous—and so terrifying—that soldiers tend to duck into their trenches as soon as they hear the drones’ distinctive buzzing. For that reason, some Russian regiments use the drones as suppressive fire.

Suppressive fire is an infantry tactic that’s as old as gunpowder. Basically, it means shooting at the enemy with something—rifles, machine guns, mortars or artillery—with enough intensity to drive the enemy underground for as long as it takes friendly forces to “breach” the enemy’s defenses … and advance.

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Drones can suppress the enemy without even striking. “Soldiers begin to hide from the sound of UAVs alone and do not leave cover for a long time,” Russian blogger Unfair Advantage wrote.

“If the enemy is accustomed to being afraid of drones, then a UAV ‘carousel’—that is, the successive replacement of one strike UAV with another, can lead to the effect of suppressing positions, despite significant time intervals between strikes,” Unfair Advantage explained.

Infantry should begin their movement to contact with the enemy during an initial wave of drone attacks. “After the strikes are completed, the infantry takes cover and waits for the next wave of UAVs to arrive—or continues to move, but out of the line of sight of the defenders,” the blogger wrote. “This is repeated several times until the infantry reaches the immediate vicinity of the attacked position.”

There, the attackers wait for more drones before making their final push through the enemy positions. Drones should be overhead the whole time during the breach—”a mixed carousel of observation UAVs and attack UAVs,” Unfair Advantage advised.

To prolong the endurance of any turn of the UAV carousel, the operators can land some drones on the ground or on rooftops, idling their engines but keeping their cameras on—thus preserving the robots’ batteries. As long as at least one drone is audible by the defending infantry, the infantry should keep their heads down. They should, in other words, remain suppressed.

The respective new drone tactics belie deepening manpower problems on both sides of the wider war. More and more, both the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces are counting on robots to perform tasks most militaries still assign to human beings.

Ukraine’s manpower shortage is well-known. It’s possible Ukrainian brigades are short 100,000 trained infantry. But Russia has too few troops, too—despite generous bonuses and deceptive recruiting practices that lure or trap tens of thousands of fresh enlistees every month. Overall, Russian regiments probably have plenty of soldiers. But like Ukrainian brigades, they may specifically lack trained and experienced infantry.

Why risk them on a mission that a robot with a skilled operator can handle?

Ukrainian defense tech CEO Yaroslav Azhnyuk delivered a stark warning to Western allies at Thursday’s defense cooperation forum in Lviv: hearing wake-up calls about Russian threats isn’t the same as waking up.

Speaking at the “Joint Ventures, Joint Defence” forum in Lviv, Azhnyuk challenged fundamental Western assumptions about Ukrainian innovation and military preparedness that could leave NATO vulnerable to the same threats now devastating Ukrainian forces.

Western armies sleep through drone revolution

“We live in many lies that we take for granted,” Azhnyuk told the defense technology audience. One of the most dangerous delusions: Western armies planning for future readiness while, if not ignoring current battlefield realities, then at least not taking them as seriously as they should.

“How many units in Western armies have units that have been trained to use them?” Azhnyuk asked rhetorically. “None at all or such a tiny percentage that we need a microscope to see it?”

Azhnyuk said that instead of getting prepared now, Western armies set readiness targets for 2027, 2029, or even 2031 for technology that’s being used in the battlefields today and will be redundant in a couple of years.

Azhnyuk speaks from direct experience. His companies—thermal camera manufacturer Odd Systems and AI firm TheFourthLaw.ai—develop technologies Western militaries are still planning to adopt.

Odd Systems produces Kurbas cameras, currently the world’s best 256-pixel thermal imaging systems for mass-manufactured FPV drones—technology born from battlefield necessity, not laboratory planning.

Ukraine isn’t the testing ground—Russia should be

Azhnyuk challenged another Western assumption: Ukraine is a “test ground” for defense technology.

“Russia should be that test field!” he declared, arguing that authoritarian threats from Russia and China will continue expanding without fundamental changes in Western strategic thinking, which is very cautious and slow to adapt to new realities.

The CEO also dismissed claims that Ukrainian innovations represent “low-tech” solutions with a pointed analogy: “An FPV drone is like a burger—you can assemble it in your kitchen, just like you can make a hamburger in your kitchen. Still, your kitchen-made hamburger isn’t McDonald’s.”

But that doesn’t mean the homemade version lacks the same components, Azhnyuk explained. The difference lies merely in packaging and marketing, not technological sophistication.

The gap isn’t in innovation but in scale and battlefield validation.

Market reality vs production hype

The latter reveals harsh realities: while there are hundreds, if not hundreds, of FPV drone producers operating globally, when asked, the frontline drone operators consistently identify only 4-5 reliable producers despite the theoretically crowded market.

Azhnyuk noted that the fact that only a handful of producers make reliable equipment tells us yet again about the differences between theory and praxis, between the laid-back attitude of many Western companies and the we-needed-it-yesterday feverish attitude of the Ukrainian producers, who work in a tight feedback loop with the men and women on the front.

Beyond military: Strategic blindness everywhere

Azhnyuk’s critique extended beyond military preparedness to broader Western strategic thinking. He cited European data protection claims while companies rely on Google Cloud services that may not comply with European laws.

He warned of upcoming election cycles that would bring “Russian-influenced and financed radical parties” to power across the West while military capability gaps persist.

The uncomfortable truth

The “Joint Ventures, Joint Defence” forum, organized by Tech Force in UA, brought together governments, global defense companies, and technology innovators to explore scaling joint defense production partnerships with Ukraine. The event featured booths from seven partner countries seeking drone and high-tech cooperation opportunities.

But Azhnyuk’s message cut deeper than partnership mechanics. Europeans constantly speak of various crises as “wake-up calls,” he observed, but there’s a critical difference: “Hearing a wake-up call is not the same as waking up.”