For two years, Ukraine’s drone boats have hounded the Russian Black Sea Fleet—delivering explosive payloads to sink ships at sea and in port, firing guns and missiles to take down Russian aircraft and even launching tiny first-person-view drones at coastal air-defense sites.

Now Russia is striking back with its own drone boats. On Thursday morning, a Russian Orion surveillance drone spotted the Ukrainian navy’s Simferopol reconnaissance ship on the Danube River just outside Romanian waters. An explosives-laden Russian unmanned surface vehicle motored up to Simferopol—and struck the 179-foot-ship amidships.

Two of the vessel’s 29 or so crew died, Ukrainian navy spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk said Friday. Several sailors were missing or injured. A search was underway for the missing, Pletenchuk said.

It’s painful loss for the depleted Ukrainian navy, which lost most of its large vessels—including its sole frigate, scuttled by its crew in Odesa—in the first few days of Russia’s wider invasion in February 2022. Since then, the navy has evolved, trading big ships for smaller boats and drones.

But the navy still had Simferopol, a former trawler that Ukraine fitted with a Melchior radio intelligence station and other systems and launched in 2019. Simferopol could detect Russian radio transmissions from hundreds of kilometers away. But the lightly armed ship was vulnerable—and the Ukrainian navy knew it. It’s not for no reason that Simferopol had apparently spent much of the wider war hiding out on the Danube.

Three years hiding

For 42 months, the intel ship succeeded in avoiding missile attack. But then the Russians deployed their very first explosive drone boat—and chased down the once-lucky Simferopol. The USV may be the same type that Russian firm RoboCorp recently tested in Sevastopol, in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The exact specifications of the Russian USV are unclear. But if it’s anything like the Ukrainian state security agency’s own Maguara V5 USV, it might measure 18 feet from bow to stern, travel 800 km or so under satellite guidance and pack up to 300 kg of explosives. As the Simferopol strike demonstrated, that’s enough firepower to sink a medium-sized vessel.

Fast and low on the water, USVs are hard to detect and defeat. Russia has put in place a layered defense against Ukraine’s drone boats: patrolling with drones, jets, helicopters and boats and placing armed sentries on likely targets. As Russian USVs proliferate, Ukraine may need to duplicate these defenses—especially around Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic grain port.

And if the Russian USVs evolve the way the Ukrainian USVs have, they may begin striking with guns, rockets and FPV drones. They could even threaten Ukrainian aircraft.

In the spring of 2024, enterprising Ukrainian engineers kluged together a combination of sensors and R-73 and AIM-9X infrared dogfighting missiles borrowed from the Ukrainian air force—and mounted the resulting system on some of the security agency’s Magura V5s.

On 31 December, the air-defense Magura V5s claimed their first victims: two Russian Mil Mi-8 helicopters. six months later on May 2, separate formations of Ukrainian USVs attacked Russian navy anchorages in Crimea and in Novorossiysk, a port in southern Russia.

Russian drones detected the wakes and Russian warplanes sortied to attack the incoming USVs. The drone boats fired back with at least one AIM-9X—and shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter. It was the first-ever shoot-down of a manned warplane by an unmanned warship.

But if Ukraine can do it, Russia can, too—now that it has its own drone boats.

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Ukraine’s missile crews are valuable targets now

A Ukrainian Neptune cruise missile battery tried to strike targets in southern Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region on Thursday. The strike failed as Russian S-300 air-defense missiles rose to intercept the incoming Neptunes—and then the Russians struck back.

A surveillance drone spotted a truck-mounted Neptune launcher, apparently the same launcher that targeted Krasnodar Krai. An Iskander ballistic missile streaked down, damaging if not destroying the Ukrainian launcher.

The hit on the Neptune battery underscores the risk to Ukrainian forces as they induct new and harder-hitting drones and missiles and escalate their deep strike campaign bombarding Russian factories, air bases, oil refineries and other strategic targets.

Russian troops and key war-industry workers are in growing trouble as the Ukrainian munitions strike farther and harder. But the Ukrainian missile and drone crews aren’t immune to harm. Russia is responding to Ukraine’s deep strike campaign with a counter deep strike campaign.

It’s unclear what the Ukrainian Neptune battery was trying to hit in Krasnodar Krai. There’s no shortage of targets, including air bases, air-defense sites and others. In any event, Russian surface-to-air missile batteries were ready, for once.

While the Russians “can’t defend everywhere,” according to retired US Army general Mark Hertling, they managed to defend Krasnodar Krai on Thursday. Four S-300 long-range SAMs spiraled into the air, swatting down the salvo of Neptunes.

It’s hard to say whether the Neptunes in the attempted raid were the standard 300-km version of the made-in-Ukraine missile or the new 1,000-km “long” version. The Ukrainian navy used standard Neptunes, which are capable of anti-ship and land-attack strikes, to sink the Russian navy cruiser Moskva in April 2022.

Since then, Ukraine has expanded its deployment of the subsonic missile, which packs a 150-kg warhead and may feature satellite and inertial navigation and a radar or infrared seeker. And it has added an even more powerful missile: the Flamingo, which ranges a staggering 3,000 km with a massive 1,000-kg warhead. Its guidance and seeker may be similar to the Long Neptune’s.

Ukraine strikes back

With scores of cruise missiles and thousands of one-way attack drones a month, “Ukraine is increasingly taking the war to Russia now,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko wrote in a new essay for The Atlantic Council. Drone and missile attacks on Russian oil refineries in recent weeks have throttled Russia’s refining by as much as 14%.

Russia is also waging a deep strike campaign, of course—and with more drones and missiles. But Russia’s drone and missile attacks mostly targets Ukrainian cities in a country of just 233,000 square miles. Ukraine’s drones and missiles target military and industrial targets in a country of 6.6 million square miles.

Between them, the Long Neptune, the Flamingo and Ukraine’s best attack drones should be able to hold at risk roughly half that area.

Ukraine’s air defense problem is hard but simple. Ukrainian defenses must contend with nearly daily raids involving potentially hundreds of drones and missiles, but they can concentrate around the biggest cities that are the Russians’ main targets.

By contrast, Russia’s air defense problem is hard and complex. “The Kremlin simply does not have enough air defense systems to protect thousands of potential military and energy targets spread across 11 time zones,” Kirichenko wrote. In that context, the successful interception of the Neptunes streaking toward Krasnodar Krai may have been an outlier.

And it makes sense for the Russians to target Ukraine’s best cruise missiles “left of the boom.” to borrow a US Army term. It’s better to blast a missile launcher, and kill or injure its crew, than to risk missing a missile after it launches.

Ukrainian missileers should know they’re being hunted. Every time they roll out for a launch, Russian drones will be looking for them—and Russian ballistic missiles will be ready to take aim.

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Ukraine’s missiles could cut off the $ 9 billion Putin uses to pay soldiers

Ukraine is escalating its attacks on Russia’s oil refineries, hitting 10 of them in recent days and throttling the Russian oil industry’s refining by more than a million barrels per day. That’s 14% of output.

But refineries can be repaired. And Russia’s sprawling oil sector has excess capacity that could help it compensate for damage from Ukrainian raids. “Russia has a lot of these inactive refineries, and Russia is able to switch to some of them if needed,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola noted.

To make lasting dent in Russia’s most important industry, Ukraine needs to strike more often with more damaging weapons. At present, most oil raids and other deep strikes are carried out by slow, propeller-driven drones ranging fewer than 1,000 km with warheads weighing just 50 kg or so.

The drones that Ukraine has been using are just not enough because they’re quite easy to shoot down and also their warheads are quite small, as well,” Askola pointed out. It’s crucial for Ukraine to get more and better munitions “with enough range, but with a bit bigger warheads.”

The harder-hitting munitions are coming. Ukrainian companies have developed at least two new cruise missiles—the 6,000-kg Flamingo and the approximately 1,000-kg Long Neptune—that could extend the reach and effect of the oil raids. The Americans are helping, too, with a mysterious new cruise missile called the Extended Range Attack Munition.

The enormous Flamingo, traveling as far as 3,000 km with a 1,000-kg warhead, would hit the hardest and farthest targets. Right now, Ukrainian firm Fire Point is building one Flamingo a day. It aims to ramp up production to seven missiles a day by October.

The Long Neptune, ranging 1,000 km with a 150-kg warhead, is for closer and less durable targets. It’s unclear how many of the missile the Luch Design Bureau can build.

Smallest missile

The American ERAM is the smallest of the bunch. It weighs just 1,100 kg and ranges at least 400 km. But in the short term, it may also be the most numerous. The administration of the former US President. Joe Biden launched the ERAM program in 2024, and the administration of the current US President. Donald Trump recently gave final approval for Ukraine to receive 3,350 of the small missiles. Deliveries should start in the coming weeks.

We don’t know much about the ERAM except that, in contrast to the ground-launched Flamingo and Long Neptune, the American munition is air-launched. The Ukrainian air force’s ex-Soviet Sukhoi and MiG jets, ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16s, and ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000s are all compatible with an array of precision munitions.

It’s possible the ERAM is broadly similar to the Powered Joint Direct Attack Munition developed by US defense giant Boeing. The PJDAM takes a standard satellite-guided bomb and adds pop-out wings and a tiny Kratos-TDI-J85 turbojet engine. At the low cost of just $30,000, a 220-kg PJDAM ranges as far as 500 km. Most of the PJDAM’s weight is explosive fill, making it much more damaging than Ukraine’s current deep-strike drones.

It would make sense for the US to provide Ukraine with an ERAM based on the PJDAM, as Ukraine already possesses freefalling JDAM bombs and gliding JDAMs with pop-out wings. Adding a small engine to the same basic munition shouldn’t significantly change its compatibility. Any Ukrainian jets that can carry JDAMs should also be able to carry ERAMs.

To strike Russian refineries with the same intensity that Russia strikes Ukrainian cities, Ukrainian forces need to launch hundreds of munitions several times a week. They can’t all be Flamingos and Long Neptunes, which might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Nor should they all be the cheaper, but lighter, attack drones that are most common today.

Cheap but powerful, the ERAM is the middleweight missile Ukraine needs to intensify attacks now. The wrinkle is that the US Defense Department under Trump has reportedly barred Ukraine from striking Russia with certain American-made long-range munitions, extending similar bans put in place by Biden.

It’s unclear whether that policy would also ban deep strikes with ERAMs.

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This American-made missile is Ukraine’s cheap refinery smasher

Escalating drone and missile strikes on Russia’s oil refineries have disrupted 17% of Russian refining. And it’s about to get worse for Russia’s battered oil industry as new, harder-hitting Ukrainian cruise missiles come on-line in greater numbers.

Ukrainian forces have struck 10 Russian refineries in recent days, reducing output by 1.1 million barrels per day, according to Reuters. Some Russian oblasts are also experiencing gasoline shortages and rising prices.

The oil industry accounts for 20% of Russia’s gross domestic product. If Ukraine can inflict lasting damage on the energy sector in Russia, everyday Russians are sure to notice. A souring national mood could “have an impact—and will maybe bring us a bit closer to an end of the war,” Finnish analyst Joni Askola said.

What’s most ominous for the Russians is that most if not all of the recent strikes have involved Ukrainian drone types, such as the Ukroboronprom An-196, that have small warheads weighing just 50 or 60 kg.

A 50-kg warhead delivered by a propeller-drive attack drone motoring along at just 400 km/hr isn’t likely to inflict lasting damage to a target as expansive as an oil refinery, Askola explained. Moreover, current Ukrainian attack drones rarely fly farther than 1,000 km—meaning many Russian refineries are beyond reach.

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Ukraine’s Fire Point builds 100 attack drones every day, all day—aimed at Russia

That’s changing. The new Flamingo cruise missile, from Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point, ranges 3,000 km at a top speed faster than 900 km/hr with a massive 1,000-kg warhead. The new Long Neptune cruise missile from Ukraine’s Luch Design Bureau is probably just as fast but somewhat smaller, delivering a 150-kg warhead out to a distance of 1,000 km. Both jet-propelled missiles probably navigate with a combination of satellite and inertial guidance

The Flamingo and Long Neptune are in front-line service in limited numbers. Production is scaling up fast, however. Fire Point hopes to build as many as seven Flamingos a day starting in October, potentially signalling a vast expansion of Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign—and a lot more damage to Russian refineries.

“Flamingo has so much range and such a big warhead that that’s one of the important ones that could really make a difference,” Askola said. “But there is also the ground-to-ground version of the Neptune missile that is kind of ready now.” Ukrainian firms are also developing at least two new types of ballistic missile that could add to the destruction.

“If Ukraine can combine drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles on the same place when they’re striking, then it will be hard for Russia to shoot them down or to protect the places,” Askola said. “Hopefully Ukraine can develop as many systems as possible and then scale up on the best ones and hopefully get some results.”

Squeezing the oil economy

Kyiv’s goal should be to permanently throttle Russian refining, with knock-on effects on state revenues—and on gasoline prices. The Kremlin sustains high levels of military recruitment—up to 30,000 fresh troops a month—with generous enlistment bonuses as high as 400,000 rubles ($4,500). That’s as much as many Russians earn in four months.

“Until now, a big part of the population has benefited from the war because if someone from your family goes to fight for the war, you earn way more money,” Askola noted. But the bonuses are a drain on government finances, which are also under strain from Ukraine’s refinery raids. Some oblasts are already cutting back.

The combined effect of shrinking bonuses and rising gas prices could turn more Russians against the war. “Again, it’s something that’s not going to change anything in the short run,” Askola said. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin “is not going to collapse tomorrow because people suddenly don’t like the war. But in the long run, it will still have an impact.”

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Ukraine’s Flamingo missile is for blasting Russian factories

Ukrainian forces are battling a Russian assault on the village of Vorone, just east of the town of Velykomykhailivka in southern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Luckily for them, they’re rolling into the fight in American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles—some of the best IFVs in Russia’s 42-month wider war on Ukraine.

A video that circulated online on Monday depicts two of the 33-ton, 10-person Bradleys—belonging to the 225th Assault Regiment—rolling along a paved road in or near Vorone, firing left and right with their 25-millimeter auto-cannons at Russian infantry clinging to positions in the treelines along the road.

The Russian 5th Tank Brigade recently claimed it captured Vorone. But the 225th Assault Regiment obviously isn’t ready to give up the village.

The M-2 excels at that kind of fighting evident in Vorone. Even Russian engineers, who have inspected several captured Ukrainian Bradleys, have praised the American-made vehicle. Compared to Russian-made fighting vehicles, the M-2 boasts superior firepower owing to “the accuracy of the 25-millimeter M242 automatic cannon,” the Russians wrote in an April report.

Донеччина. Дорога під контролем — Bradley штурмового батальйону 225-го ОШП косять посадки, де сидить противник.

The road is under control — Bradley IFVs of the assault battalion of the 225th Assault Regiment are clearing out the tree lines where the russians are hiding. pic.twitter.com/zSdsJsQcVW

— 225 Окремий штурмовий полк (@225_oshp) August 25, 2025

The Bradley is one of Ukraine’s best vehicles for close combat, but it’s in short supply. The Ukrainian army has six battalions that ride in M-2s. On paper, each has 31 Bradleys. But the army only got, for free, somewhat more than 300 M-2s from the administration of former US Pres. Joe Biden before the administration of Pres. Donald Trump throttled US aid to Ukraine.

Of those 300-plus M-2s, the Ukrainians have lost no fewer than 108: 95 destroyed and 13 captured. Crews have abandoned others in places where Ukrainian engineers couldn’t recover them. Dozens are badly damaged. Between them, those six Bradley battalions need 186 vehicles. If there isn’t already a shortfall, there could be soon.

But the 225th Assault Regiment is clearly willing to risk some of its Bradleys if that means blunting the Russian 5th Tank Brigade’s advance.

Over-extended Russians

It’s clear the Russians have pushed too far, too fast in recent weeks. And it’s clear why. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin was desperate to project strength in the lead-up to his Aug. 15 summit with US Pres. Donald Trump in Alaska.

To Russia’s 700,000-person army of occupation in Ukraine attacked aggressively, some might say recklessly, all along the 1,100-km front line—ultimately breaking through Ukrainian lines northeast of the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

That effort backfired. The Russian 51st Combined Arms Army failed to support its infantry marching through undermanned Ukrainian trenches outside Pokrovsk, leaving the Russian salient vulnerable to counterattack.

“Russia way over-extended,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. Sensing Russian weakness in several other eastern and southern sectors in addition to Pokrovsk, the Ukrainians counterattacked in recent days. In Vorone, however, the 225th Assault Regiment and its Bradley crews are apparently still trying to just halt the Russians.

Still, that’s consistent with Ukraine’s overall strategy right now. Kyiv’s priority, Perpetua wrote, is “stability.” “Stabilize the front, retake certain positions, reinforce others. Widen the gray zone in others.”

To protect them as they push back against Russian attacks, some Ukrainian units have been adding even more additional armor to their M-2s. A recent photo of a Bradley operated by the 33rd Assault Regiment, holding the line against Russian incursion in northern Ukraine, might depict the most heavily-armored M-2 in Ukrainian service.

It boasts its normal aluminum armor and side-mounted explosive reactive armor blocks. The Ukrainians added a telescoping anti-drone screen, metal anti-drone grills along the hull and rubber mats on the hull front and beside the driver’s hatch. Incredibly, there are also tiny mesh installations plugging the gaps between the metal racks for the side-mounted explosive blocks and the aluminum hull.

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Russia lost a brigade near Dobropillya—more brigades are coming

Ukrainian firm Fire Point is building 100 FP-1 attack drones every day. That’s … a lot of drones.

Building thousands of FP-1s and other long-range attack drones a month, Ukraine is coming close to matching Russia’s own production of Shahed attack drones.

Meanwhile, Fire Point is also building new Flamingo cruise missiles (also known as FP-5s), adding reach and punch to Ukraine’s escalating campaign of deep strikes targeting air bases, factories, oil refineries and other strategic facilities inside Russia.

“Ukraine is increasingly taking the war to Russia now,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko wrote in a new essay for The Atlantic Council.

The FP-1 production ramp-up, first reported by the Associated Press, is just part of Ukraine’s deep strike build-up. With German financing, Ukrainian industry is also churning out An-196 attack drones, pilotless sport planes modified to drop bombs and Bars “cruise missile drones,” among many other strike munitions.

More drones than expected

Back in December, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Ukraine would acquire 30,000 one-way attack drones in 2025. But the accelerating ramp-up means Ukraine will almost certainly exceed that target—by a lot. FP-1 production alone could exceed 36,000 units this year.

Russia’s sprawling drone factory in Yelabuga, 1,200 km from Ukraine, assembles around 5,000 Shahed attack drones every month. The 200-kg drones, each ranging thousands of kilometers under satellite navigation, have become Russia’s most important strike munitions as Ukrainian raids have destroyed much of the Russian air force bomber fleet with its air-launched cruise missiles.

The Shaheds are priced to move at as little as $50,000 per copy, compared to millions of dollars for just one of Russia’s best Kh-101 cruise missiles. The low price translates into bigger deliveries and denser swarms of Shaheds clouding the skies over Ukrainian cities.

There are so many Shaheds over Ukraine on a nearly daily basis that Ukrainian air defense crews struggle to intercept them in ways that don’t deplete Ukraine’s munitions stocks and shatter its finances. “The Kremlin is willing to lose many Shaheds—about 75% of attacks fail—because mass waves are designed to exhaust air-defense systems,” noted “Alchemist,” the head of the Night Watch electronic warfare team in Kyiv.

Now Ukraine can vex Russia with the same problem. As drone deliveries rise and efficiencies increase, the cost goes down. An FP-1 now costs just $55,000. It’s possible the An-196 and other Ukrainian deep-strike munitions are also dropping in price. The result should be a beneficial cycle of increasing orders that further reduce costs as efficiencies accumulate.

The bottom line: Ukraine is already pummeling Russia with thousands of drones a month and inflicting more damage, more widely. “Based on my observations and the data we have collected with the team over the past two months, there has been a noticeable increase in the effectiveness of hits,” reported “Tatarigami,” the head of the Frontelligence Insight analysis group in Ukraine.

Worse is coming for Russia: more Ukrainian drones and, soon, many more of the new Flamingo missiles. Where an FP-1 might motor 1,000 km with a 50-kg warhead, a Flamingo jets a whopping 3,000 km with a 1,000-kg warhead. Fire Point told the Associate Press it aims to ramp up to building seven of the giant missiles every day no later than October.

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Ukraine just solved the hardest math problem in modern air defense – with a 1970s German gun

After three weeks of hard fighting, the Ukrainian 1st Azov Corps and adjacent units have squeezed and cut up the 15-km salient that Russian infiltrators carved out of Ukrainian territory near the the village of Dobropillya, northeast of the fortress town of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

But Russian reinforcements are rolling in, opening a new—and unpredictable—phase in the battle for the Dobropillya salient. “The enemy’s penetration near Dobropillya remains a dynamic section on the front line where neither side can seize the initiative,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted.

It’s more apparent than ever that the Russian penetration toward Dobropillya, which sits astride one of two main supply roads into besieged Pokrovsk, was bigger and more dangerous than some analysts initially concluded.

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Robot counterattack! Ukraine rolls gun-‘bots into brutal Pokrovsk battle.

“Let’s start by describing what this absolutely is not: a breakthrough,” US analyst Andrew Perpetua asserted on Aug. 12. In fact, it was a breakthrough, albeit one that mostly moved at a walking pace.

Over a period of several months, the Russian 51st Combined Arms Army redeployed almost all of its brigades northeast of Pokrovsk, including the 1st, 5th, 9th, 110th and 132nd Motor Rifle Brigades. While the 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade slipped past empty Ukrainian trenches and marched on Dobropillya, the other four brigades attacked toward Rodynsky, at the bottom of the eventual salient.

Heavy Russian losses

The scale of the Ukrainian response, and the resulting spike in Russian losses, underscored the seriousness of the situation for Kyiv. If it had captured Dobropillya, the 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade would’ve cut the T0515 road, leaving the Ukrainian garrison in Pokrovsk dependent on just one other road threading into the town from the northwest—a road that itself is in danger of being overrun.

In addition to the 1st Azov Corps, Ukraine redeployed elements from the 79th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades, 1st and 425th Assault Regiments, 25th Assault Battalion, 2nd Battalion of the 92nd Assault Brigade, 32nd and 93rd Mechanized Brigades, 38th Marine Brigade, 14th National Guard Brigade and the Birds of Magyar drone brigade.

It’s a powerful Ukrainian force. And in the first few weeks of its counterattack, it enjoyed a decisive advantage in troops, tanks, armed ground robots and drones. The 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade’s troopers had marched toward Dobropillya “only with weapons in their hands,” Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Between Aug. 4 and 20, the Ukrainian corps killed, wounded or captured nearly 1,600 Russians, according to the the Ukrainian general staff in Kyiv. That’s nearly the entire front-line strength of the 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade.

But a few Russian survivors are still clinging to positions in Zolotyi Kolodyaz, at the top of the salient, and now the Russian 51st Combined Arms Army is deploying additional forces at the bottom of the salient.

Despite heavy losses and the near-destruction of its initial penetration toward Dobropillya, the 51st Combined Arms Army isn’t defeated—and probably won’t give up. The army “will try to advance as deeply as possible to Dobropillya,” CDS predicted.

And if it manages to finally capture the village, CDS predicted the 51st Combined Arms Army could “sharply worsen the prospects for the defense of not only Dobropillya and Pokrovsk, but also Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka” on the other side of the salient.

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Russian infiltrators near Pokrovsk are about to get the tank treatment

Russian infantry slipped past Ukrainian defenses around the city of Kupiansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, on or before Tuesday. A Ukrainian tank, presumably from the 116th Mechanized Brigade, rolled right up to the half-demolished building the Russians were sheltering in—and blasted them at point-blank range.

It’s the latest instance of Ukrainian tanks engaging, and defeating, under-supported Russian infantry in a close fight. But it’s an ominous development for Ukraine. The brutal, zero-distance skirmish took place in Kupiansk, a town with a pre-war population of 25,000 and a key strongpoint anchoring Ukrainian defenses just 90 km east of Kharkiv and its millions of residents.

Russian infantry weren’t supposed to appear inside Kupiansk, some 6 km from what most mappers consider the “front line” in Kharkiv Oblast.

The problem, of course, is that the front isn’t really a line anymore. “The reality is that there isn’t a coherent front line,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained.

Instead, there’s a wide no-man’s land between areas of clear Russian and Ukrainian control. That no-man’s-land is largely depopulated except for scattered—and carefully concealed—underground fighting positions for a few harried infantry.

Drones are everywhere all the time. Indeed, the drones—their relentless surveillance and attacks—are why the infantry are so spread out and scared. And why the front line is so indistinct.

This new reality defies the traditional language of wartime reporting. Terms like “front line,” “encirclement” and “breakthrough” have largely lost their meaning. Especially considering Ukraine’s desperate manpower shortage. Kyiv’s roughly 130 combat brigades may be short around 100,000 trained infantry.

Thin front line

“The front line is so thinned out that full-scale encirclements in the traditional sense are unlikely to occur again,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team observed. “Instead, the opposing forces are more likely to ‘slip’ through each other’s positions.”

“The front line is actually relatively porous, and there are often fewer than 10 soldiers defending every kilometer of the front, depending on the terrain,” noted analyst Rob Lee from the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. “Many Ukrainian brigades have adopted a different approach to defense where their infantry deliberately try to avoid engaging.”

Instead of actively fighting, the infantry watch for approaching Russians—and relay the coordinates to nearby drone teams. Where in previous conflicts, drones spotted targets for the infantry, in this conflict the roles are reversed.

The porous front line makes infiltration easier and exploitation harder. To “advance,” Russian regiments can “take two men dressed in cloaks to hide their thermal signature,” Perpetua explained. “They are led by a drone through a specified path, the drone ensuring their security and camouflage.”

“These infantry move up into positions and lie in wait, being resupplied by Molniya [drones],” Perpetua added. “They ambush opportunistically, and kill anyone—namely civilians—who threaten to give away their position.”

“Russia then moves up another pair and another pair and another pair to accumulate forces in exacting, specified positions,” Perpetua wrote. “The entire operation is directed from above, the people involved have no initiative. In some cases, once a route has enough of these small rifle teams, they push forward a larger group of light infantry.”

That Ukrainian tank may have interrupted the Russians in Kupiansk before they could accumulate enough troops secure a lodgement. “Ukrainian defense forces defending in the city have counterattacked the enemy that had penetrated the area several times and pushed the enemy back,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported.

But the Russians have been probing Kupiansk for a while now—and they’re sure to continue as they leverage their manpower advantage over Ukraine’s depleted brigades. “Provided current dynamics of combat operations are maintained, the enemy will be able to capture Pokrovsk by autumn, Kostyantynivka and Kupiansk by the end of the year,” CDS predicted.

In the late 1970s, Soviet officials tapped the Kirovsky Design Bureau in Saint Petersburg to develop a reconnaissance and command vehicle for nuclear warfare: a sealed, self-contained and thickly-armored turret-less tank with remote cameras and its own oxygen supply.

The Ladoga recon and command vehicle wasn’t just nuke-proof. It was also weirdly cozy.

Kirovsky produced just a handful of the tracked vehicles—maybe four or five. One spent some time in the irradiated zone around the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, following the plant’s catastrophic meltdown in 1986. Aside from another that ended up in a museum, the Ladogas then simply disappeared.

Until March 2024, that is—when a Ukrainian drone spotted, and struck, what appeared to be a Ladoga rolling toward Ukrainian lines near the Kreminna Forest in eastern Ukraine. Seventeen months later, another—or the same—Ladoga appeared at a repair yard somewhere in the Russian occupation zone.

It’s possible half the Ladogas Kirovsky produced—and the majority that aren’t on display or badly irradiated—have made their way to Ukraine.

It’s no secret why. The Kremlin is struggling to generate enough combat vehicles—either through new production or by fetching older vehicles from long-term storage—to make good the loss of new fewer than 22,500 vehicles and other heavy equipment along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 42-month wider war on Ukraine.

The “de-mechanization” of what was once arguably the world’s leading mechanized military helps to explain why some very strange vehicles have showed up along the front line. Armored vehicles are much less important in Russian doctrine as front-line regiments have shifted to harder-to-detect infantry and motorcycle assaults.

Vehicular oddities

The de-mechanization of the Russian military doesn’t mean Russia is losing wider war on Ukraine. It does mean the Russian military may struggle to exploit its battlefield victories against manpower-starved Ukrainian brigades. Russian infantry might find gaps in Ukrainian defenses. But there are precious few Russian armored vehicles on hand to rush through the gaps—and drive deep behind Ukrainian lines.

At the same time, unarmored Russian attacks are vulnerable to armored Ukrainian counterattacks. It’s telling that, after a brigade of Russian infantry marched through empty Ukrainian trenches northeast of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine a few weeks ago, the infiltrators clung to their 15-km salient only as long as it took a powerful Ukrainian force to mobilize its tanks and other heavy forces for a devastating counterattack.

To whatever extent Russian troops still ride under armor, they increasingly ride in vehicular oddities that, pre-war, resided in museums—or were totally unimaginable. The Ladoga may belong to both categories. It combines the armored hull of a T-80 tank with a 1,250-horespower gas-turbine engine and a voluminous crew compartment seating four or so people in padded armchairs.

The Ladoga has a mast-mounted television camera and a full suite of radios that would have allowed the vehicle to work in a doomsday command role. Imagine Soviet leaders speeding to safety inside a Ladoga, directing their own nuclear forces as NATO’s own nukes rain down.

Now imagine some Russian colonel commanding his battalion from a Ladoga’s cozy interior during an attack on Ukrainian forces around Kreminna or Pokrovsk. Or, equally likely, Russian infantry using the Ladoga as an improvised assault vehicle.

The tiny force of Ladogas got a workout around Chernobyl but never performed its primary role in an atomic apocalypse. Surely no one at Kirovsky imagined an aged Ladoga or two would eventually find a way to the front line of a non-nuclear war in 2024 and 2025.

But then, it’s hard to imagine the engineers in Saint Petersburg 50 years ago could anticipate Russia losing 22,500 armored vehicles in just three and a half years in a war with, of all countries, Ukraine.

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Russian infiltrators near Pokrovsk are about to get the tank treatment

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The Flamingo, a product of Kyiv-based manufacturer Fire Point, weighs in a staggering 6,000 kg. That’s four times what the American Tomahawk cruise missile weighs. The rocket-propelled Flamingo should be able to haul a 1,000-kg warhead over a distance of 3,000 km while under satellite and inertial guidance.

Speeding along at 950 km/hr, the ramp-launched missile should be able to avoid all but the best Russian air defenses. Ranging twice as far as the best current Ukrainian deep-strike munitions, and with a warhead that several times heavier, the Flamingo has the potential to significantly escalate Ukraine’s strategic bombardment campaign targeting Russian factories, air bases and oil refineries.

While the Flamingo’s existence has long been rumored, it wasn’t until this weekend that Associated Press journalist Efrem Lukatsky confirmed it—with a photo of two of the huge missiles on their trailers at a workshop somewhere in Ukraine.

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Why is Russia bombing Ukraine with 1990s-era training drones?

If the Flamingo looks familiar, it’s because it’s apparently a development of the FP-5 missile from Emirati firm Milanion. The FP-5 itself seems to borrow heavily from a missile with a storied history in Soviet and Ukrainian service: the Tupolev Tu-141.

The 5,400-kg Tu-141 was a reconnaissance drone—a product of the Kharkiv Aviation Plant in Ukraine. Ranging 1,000 km under inertial guidance at a top speed of 1,000 km/hr, it carried cameras instead of explosives. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left potentially dozens of Tu-141s behind in Ukraine along with the type’s assembly line.

A few of the 50-year-old Tu-141s were still flyable when Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022. Enterprising Ukrainian technicians got to work repairing the old drones, testing their engines and replacing with cameras with warheads. They may also have added modern satellite navigation to complement or replace their old analogue inertial computers.

Crude cruise missiles

The rebuilt Tu-141s were some of Ukraine’s first deep-strike munitions. Following a difficult teething period that resulted in at least two Tu-141s crashing, the remaining drones attacked. On Oct. 7, 2022, Ukrainian drones—possibly Tu-141s—struck Shaykovka Air Base, 200 km from the Ukrainian border. There were reports of damage to two Tupolev Tu-22M bombers.

Subsequent drones raids on Dec. 5, 2022—possibly also the work of Tu-141s—targeted the bomber bases at Engels-2 and Dyagilevo, both 600 km from Ukraine. More drones hit Engels-2 on Dec. 26, 2022. By March 2023, the last few Tu-141s had crashed or been shot down, it seems. Soon, much more modern drones replaced the Tu-141s as Ukraine struck more targets inside Russia.

But these modern drones lack range and striking power. Arguably the best Ukrainian deep-strike drone, the propeller-driven, satellite-guided Ukroboronprom An-196, ranges 800 km with a 50-kg warhead. And it does so slowly, cruising at just 320 km/hr.

On the eve of Trump–Zelenskyy talks, Ukraine unveiled footage of its new Flamingo missile — 3,000 km range, 1,150 kg warhead, now in mass production and used against targets in Russia.

Defense Minister Shmyhal: “This is very powerful, long-range weaponry — and it’s here.”… pic.twitter.com/N0f8YMgzVB

— Euromaidan Press (@EuromaidanPress) August 18, 2025

With their limited range and small warheads, the drones can damage the closest and most delicate Russian targets such as the distillation towers at oil refineries in western Russia. But they can’t do much to halt operations at bigger, more distant strategic facilities—for instance, the Shahed drone factory that sprawls across nearly 160,000 sq m in Yelabuga, 1,500 km from Ukraine.

A barrage of Flamingo missiles just might stand a chance of taking out the Shahed factory and similar hard targets. If Ukraine can afford to build the missiles in large numbers. It’s unclear how much a Flamingo costs, but it’s worth noting that most American and Russian cruise missiles set back their taxpayers more than $1 million per round.

It took German financing for Ukraine to ramp up production of the An-196, which costs around $200,000 per copy. Absent a big financial commitment from an ally, Kyiv may struggle to build up an arsenal of hundreds of Flamingos—which is what it might take to make a real dent in Russian industry in the regions currently beyond reach of Ukraine’s deep-strike munitions.

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Fighting hard to roll back a dangerous Russian incursion around Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, the Ukrainian army’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade had a little help—from gun-armed ground robots.

“Ground-based robotic assault systems were used to liberate Ukrainian territories,” the brigade reported. “The robots, equipped with machine guns, fired at the enemy concentration, approaching practically at close range.”

It’s not an isolated incident. All along the 1,100-km front of Russia’s 42-month wider war on Ukraine, more Ukrainian units are deploying ground robots to assist, and in some cases replace, increasingly precious human troops. “These robots are entering logistics, evacuations, mine-clearing and even combat roles,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko explained.

The 93rd Mechanized Brigade is part of a powerful Ukrainian force counterattacking around Pokrovsk a week after Ukrainian observers confirmed a dangerous Russian infiltration in the sector.

Marching right past empty Ukrainian trenches—an alarmingly common problem as the Ukrainian military struggles with serious manpower shortage—Russian infantry from the 51st Combined Arms Army infiltrated 15 km north of the porous front line and then pivoted west toward the village of Dobropillya, which lies 16 north of Pokrovsk and sits astride the T0515 road, one of two main supply routes into Pokrovsk.

The Russian infiltration, involving potentially thousands of troops from multiple battalions, was “aimed at completing the encirclement of the town of Pokrovsk and possibly Dobropillya, in order to compel Ukrainian forces to withdraw,” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted.

It failed. This week, the Ukrainian national guard’s 1st Azov Corps rushed toward Pokrovsk and counterattacked. Army and air-assault brigades joined in as the Azov guardsmen cut across the 15-km-deep Russian salient in at least two places.

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Search and strike

“Our search-and-strike operations have cleared the enemy” from six villages, the 1st Azov Corps announced. The multi-brigade corps, which at full strength can deploy tens of thousands of troops, claimed it killed 271 Russians, wounded 101 and captured 13.

“The enemy has also lost a considerable amount of equipment and weaponry,” the corps added. “This success was made possible through cohesive and well-coordinated action.” The 93rd Mechanized Brigade was part of that coordinated action. It focused its attention on two villages near Dobropillya: Gruzke and Vesele.

The brigade deployed a reconnaissance company, various types of unmanned systems and artillery. A video the unit posted online depicts drone strikes on Russian troops and vehicles—and the gun-armed ground robots rolling down paved roads and into residential yards, blasting left and right with their stabilized guns.

The robots give commanders options they wouldn’t have with human troops. “The vision of front-line commanders is to deploy robots across the front, for these ground robots to take on the greatest risk and most dangerous missions,” Kirichenko wrote.

Ground robots can take the place of human troops, helping mitigate the Ukrainian military’s deepening shortage in certain critical military specialties. US analyst Andrew Perpetua estimated the Ukrainians are short 100,000 trained infantry. It’s that shortage, and the empty trenches that result, that was probably the root cause of the Russians’ initial success marching on Dobropillya.

But that doesn’t mean the unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, operations don’t require people. They do. “Deploying each UGV mission still needs a large team to manage everything,” Kirichenko explained. But at least that team, lodged in a fighting position potentially kilometers from the fighting, is relatively safe from Russian attack as it controls its ground robots via wireless radio or fiber-optic cable.

The 93rd Mechanized Brigade’s robotic counterattack was a triumph of technology as Ukraine races to preserve a tech edge over its much bigger invader. But it also belies a major problem. Owing to a serious lack of operational reserves, Kyiv had to poach units from potentially vulnerable sectors in order to build up a force powerful enough to defeat the Russian incursion near Pokrovsk.

The 93rd Mechanized Brigade had been holding the line south of Chasiv Yar, 50 km east of Dobropillya. The Russians are steadily advancing through Chasiv Yar as they attempt to squeeze the fortress town of Kostyantynivka.

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Russian infiltrators near Pokrovsk are about to get the tank treatment

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Russia is building hundreds of new T-90M tanks a year—enough to rebuild some of its battered tank regiments and establish an armored reserve for Russia’s wider war on Ukraine … or for some future war against NATO.

That’s the conclusion of a recent study by the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team. But there’s a problem. According to one expert, CIT is wrong. Sergio Miller, an analyst and former British Army intelligence officer, believes Russia is struggling to complete even 100 T-90Ms a year—and most of those it does complete are revamped T-90As rather than all-new vehicles.

Journalist David Hambling was the first to report on Miller’s claim.

It’s unclear, based on the available public evidence, who is right: CIT’s experts or Miller. But it matters. The scores of tanks CIT believes Russia is producing that Miller thinks are vaporware are enough to equip at least one armored regiment every year.

The 51-ton, three-person T-90M is heavily armored and boasts modern optics and a powerful 125-millimeter main gun. It’s one of the best tanks in the world.

Has there been a “dramatic fall-off” in tank production at Russia’s Uralvagonzavod tank factory, in Sverdlovsk Oblast 1,600 km from Ukraine, to borrow Hambling’s phrasing? Or is Uralvagonzavod churning out fresh tanks at a rate faster than any tank factory in a Western country?

“According to our estimates, Uralvagonzavod produced 60 to 70 T-90M tanks in 2022,” CIT reported. “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.”

The word “may” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s worth noting that CIT isn’t alone in perceiving an increasing rate of tank production. A few months ago, Czech analyst Jakub Janovksy concluded Uralvagonzavod has been building between 150 and 200 T-90Ms annually.

For comparison, the US Army’s own tank plant in Ohio, operated by General Dynamics Land Systems, has been producing just a few dozen M-1 Abrams tanks annually—down from 90 a year in the early 2020s.

To be fair to the Americans, they’re not mired in a costly war, and they plan to boost Abrams production with the introduction of a new variant in the coming years. At the same time, the Russian military has shifted to infantry-led assaults in Ukraine, and now deploys—and loses—just a few tanks every month.

That shift means any fresh tanks Russia produces—through new production or by fetching old Cold War tanks from long-term storage and upgrading them—can go toward replacing the roughly 4,000 tanks the Russians have lost in Ukraine. Unless the fighting in Ukraine shifts back to mechanized operations, this restored tank corps can be held in reserve for future conflicts.

Production freefall?

But that’s a moot point if Miller is right and Uralvagonzavod, or UVZ, isn’t building very many T-90Ms. “In total, UVZ only claimed to deliver 100 tanks in 2024,” Miller told Hambling. “I have no idea where the high figures quoted by some Western reporting come from. There is no evidence this is the case.”

In addition to taking Uralvagonzavod’s delivery announcements at face value, Miller scrutinized images of tank shipments in Russia to arrive at his lower production figure. So far this year, he concluded, Russia has completed 10 or fewer T-90Ms.

If Miller is right, Uralvagonzavod could be on track to deliver a fraction of the T-90Ms that Janovsky and CIT anticipate. With so few new tanks, the Kremlin would struggle to restore its depleted armored regiments.

Why T-90M production may be freefalling—if indeed it is—isn’t hard to guess. “Rather than being new builds, the ‘new’ T-90Ms seen in 2024 were in fact upgraded T-90As,” Hambling wrote. “Approximately 300 of the earlier version tanks were produced.”

“It is likely that all available T-90As were withdrawn and upgraded to the T-90M standard,” Hambling added. “In theory, UVZ is capable of producing new T-90Ms from scratch,” he added. But manufacturing a T-90M from the tracks up requires precise welding, which in turn requires a skilled workforce and attentive quality control.

Squeezed by sanctions and competing with the war in Ukraine for men, Uralvagonzavod may have labor and supply problems. “The dramatic fall-off suggests that after they ran out of T-90As to upgrade, UVZ has struggled to make new T-90Ms,” Hambling wrote.

We may not know who’s right about T-90M production unless and until Russia either re-deploys tanks to Ukraine in large numbers—or launches an armored assault on NATO’s eastern flank. Maybe it’s best not to know for now.

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Russia is churning out hundreds of new T-90M tanks — but why aren’t they all in Ukraine?

Ukrainian reinforcements are rushing to the Pokrovsk area in an urgent effort to defeat a Russian infiltration that threatens one of two main supply roads into the besieged city in Donetsk Oblast.

The reinforcements include one of Ukraine’s new multi-brigade corps—and at least one Leopard 1A5 tank.

The Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion—which retrieves, repairs and returns armored vehicles—loaded one of the 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 tanks onto a heavy transport truck and hauled the tank into the Pokrovsk sector under the cover of darkness on Wednesday.

“We’ve been a little quiet the last few days,” the battalion stated on social media, “but another Leopard 1A5 with full ammunition … is successfully delivered to one of the hottest places [in the] Pokrovsk direction.”

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It’s obvious where the German-made tank wound up: somewhere along the roughly 10-km front stretching from Rodynske in the south to Nove Shakhove in the north. That front, just northeast of Pokrovsk, is the current locus of the fighting after Russian troops slipped past under-manned—or entirely empty—Ukrainian trenches last week and hooked left to threaten Dobropillya, which sits astride the T0515 road threading into Pokrovsk.

Two of the seven Ukrainian brigades that operate the 1980s-vintage—but heavily upgraded and up-armored—Leopard 1A5s are holding the line around Dobropillya: the national guard’s 4th Rubizh Brigade and the army’s 142nd Mechanized Brigade.

Each brigade probably owns a dozen Leopard 1A5s out of 170 that a German-Dutch-Danish consortium has pledged to Ukraine. Around 100 of the tanks have shipped; the Russians have knocked out at least 14 of them. Others have been damaged.

Repaired tank

It’s likely the Leopard 1A5 the 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion sneaked into the Pokrovsk area was a damaged tank that the battalion fetched from the front line and fixed up at its workshop before hauling it back to its operator.

After losing around 4,000 tanks in action in the first 42 months of its wider war on Ukraine, Russia has all but ceased deploying heavy armor along the 1,100-km front line. Production of new T-90M tanks, and the restoration of old Cold War T-72s moldering in long-term storage, simply can’t make good all those losses.

Today, the Russians mostly attack on foot or on motorcycles, counting on these hard-to-spot and fast-moving forces to slip through thinly manned Ukrainian trenches and past Ukraine’s ever-present drones. The Ukrainians still use tanks, however, fearlessly rolling the hulking vehicles from their drone-proof dugouts for close fights with infiltrating Russians.

It’s not for no reason that, last month, Ukraine lost more tanks in action than Russia did—a first in this wider war.

Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky insisted the Russian infiltrators threatening Dobropillya marched north and then turned west “only with weapons in their hands.” They’re lightly armed and poorly supplied, potentially making them easy targets for tanks. Assuming, of course, the tanks can shrug off any Russian drones patrolling the Russian salient northeast of Pokrovsk.

There’s a good reason for the Ukrainian tankers to be optimistic. The Leopard 1A5 and Leopard 2A4 tanks that are helping to defend the Pokrovsk sector have proved that, with enough add-on armor, they can survive repeated drone strikes—and keep fighting.

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

The Ukrainian army and air force teamed up for a precise air strike on a concentration of Russian troops in Bakhmut—with a Sukhoi Su-27 fighter and a mysterious new surveillance drone.

The Aug. 11 raid targeted what the army’s 24th Mechanized Brigade described as “a temporary deployment site of enemy personnel” around 15 km from the front line in Donetsk Oblast.

The personnel were reportedly from Russia’s 98th Airborne Division. The division’s paratroopers have been fighting in Chasiv Yar—and slowly pushing Ukrainian troops out of the ruins of that front-line town.

The twin-engine, supersonic Su-27—one of dozens the Ukrainian air force inherited from the Soviet air force in 1991—probably struck the site with one of its new Western-supplied precision munitions: the French Hammer glide-bomb or American Joint Direct Attack Munition, which can also be fitted with wings for gliding attacks.

A glide bomb can range tens of kilometers when tossed in a fast climb. The combination of satellite guidance, glide kits and the toss-style release method helps Ukrainian pilots attack Russians behind the front line while also staying outside the range of many Russian air-defenses.

But distant strikes require help spotting targets—and then assessing the damage following the strike. For that, the 24th Mechanized Brigade deployed a previously unknown drone type. “You can see the work of the new Ukrainian fixed-wing drone ‘Privet-299,'” the brigade stated.

Aside from the fact it’s got fixed wings—as opposed to rotors—we know almost nothing about the Privet-299. Russian forces operate a “Privet-82” drone that may be broadly similar to the Ukrainian Private-299.

Plywood drone

The mostly plywood Privet-82, which costs just a few thousand dollars, ranges 50 km or farther with a 5-kg payload. Russian drone start-up Oko designed the Privet-82 to be inexpensive and easy to produce.

The Russian Privets are cheap enough to be single-use. Some Russian drone teams are even overloading their Privet-82s with 10-kg TM-62 anti-tank mines and flying them into Ukrainian targets. “This is basically Russia’s answer to the Ukrainian heavy bomber drones,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua observed.

It’s unclear whether the Ukrainian Privet-82 is strictly a surveillance drone—or whether it too can be sent on one-way missions with an explosive payload. For now, we know the mysterious Privet-299 as an airborne spotter for manned fighter raids.

The Privet-299 could meet growing demand for medium-range attack drones.

At present, Ukraine’s FPV drones dominate the battlefield as far as 15 km from the line of contact. Efforts are underway to extend the drone kill zone to 40 km. “The goal: deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front,” American-Ukrainian war correspondent David Kirichenko wrote.

The Privet-299 should range 40 km with a meaningful payload, filling a critical gap between the FPVs and Ukraine’s much bigger—and much more expensive—deep-strike drones, which range thousands of kilometers, but at a unit cost of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ultimately, the Ukrainians will seek to establish “layers of drone superiority,” Perpetua said. They’ll need slightly heavier, but still affordable, drone models to patrol layers 50 km and 100 km from the front line.

As it happens, the Russian Oko drone firm is developing a bigger Privet drone, the Privet-120, which should range 200 km with a 20-kg payload.

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Slipping past empty Ukrainian trenches northeast of the fortress city of Pokrovsk in recent weeks, Russian infantry quickly marched 15 km to the north. Now the Russians are threatening the village of Dobropillya, which sits astride one of two main supply lines into Pokrovsk.

“The development of the operational situation in the Dobropillya direction causes particular concern,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned. But you might know it reading the latest public social media post by Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief.

“Reported on the details of the operational situation at the front,” Syrsky wrote as the first reports of Russian troops in Dobropillya appeared online.

“It’s a tough one,” Syrsky wrote. “But the opponent is held back.”

The opponent is not held back. The Russian 51st Combined Arms Army’s foot- and motorcycle-borne breach of the Ukrainian line northeast of Pokrovsk has deepened fast. And for good reason: Ukraine is desperately short of trained infantry, largely owing to an inefficient and sometimes corrupt mobilization system.

In many sectors of the 1,000-km front line, as few as eight Ukrainian soldiers defend a 900-m length of trenches, according to the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team. Normally, at least 200 troops would defend that much of the front. It’s no wonder the Russians were able to simply walk past empty trenches in Donetsk Oblast.

At least one former officer is worried Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t appreciate the scale of the problem—perhaps because he’s getting bad information. “I sincerely don’t know what exactly is being reported to you,” Bohdan Krotevych, who recently quit as the chief of staff of the Azov Brigade, wrote on social media, “but I’m informing you: on the Pokrovsk-Kostiantynivka line, without exaggeration, it’s complete chaos.”

Growing chaos

“And this chaos has been growing for a long time, worsening with each passing day,” Krotevych added. “The command structures currently being appointed (or already appointed) to ‘fix the unfixable’ will most likely be blamed for the chaos that’s already unfolding.”

“The systemic problem began with the depletion of reserves,” Krotevych claimed. Ukrainian brigades may have suffered thousands of casualties capturing a small swathe of Russia’s Kursk Oblast starting a year ago—and may have suffered hundred more while retreating form Kursk after their supply lines were severed by Russian drones seven months later in February.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s antiquated mobilization system has consistently failed to generate enough new troops. Today, the Ukrainian military’s roughly 130 combat brigades may be short around 100,000 infantry, according to analyst Andrew Perpetua.

Brigades that should have thousands of troops instead have hundreds. “The widespread fragmentation of units across the entire front line, reports of ‘captured villages’ being touted as victories amidst failures of entire sectors, the allocation of mobilization resources to ‘cronies’ and the complete lack of strategic or even operational vision” have combined to undermine Ukraine’s defenses, Krotevych wrote.

But not according to Syrsky. “Our combat units will become stronger by receiving additional funding from the state budget,” the commander-in-chief wrote.

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Ukraine’s Leopard tanks rush to Pokrovsk—100,000 Russians wait to spring the trap

The coal village Rodynske itself isn’t the objective. The objective is the much larger settlement, with a pre-war population of 60,000, that lies 10 km to the southwest: Pokrovsk, once an important transportation hub for Ukrainian forces in Donetsk.

“A larger push to seize Pokrovsk is expected, potentially with instructions to accelerate its capture” from the Kremlin, the Ukrainian Frontelligence Insight analysis group explained. “The Rodynske area remains a focal point.”

A powerful Russian force numbering 100,000 troops is determined to capture Pokrovsk. But the town is heavily defended by drones, artillery, infantry and even a few Leopard 2A4 tanks belonging to the bad-luck 155th Mechanized Brigade.

So instead, the Russians are trying to surround and cut off Pokrovsk. And that means capturing Rodynske—and then cutting west across the main north-south road, the T0515, threading past Dobropillya and Rodynske into Pokrovsk. There’s only one other main road into Pokrovsk, just west of the town—and it’s in danger of being overrun, too.

The Russian Center Group of Forces, including the 51st Combined Arms Army, spent a year marching on Pokrovsk from the ruins of Avdiivka, 40 km to the east. It was a costly march, and it ground to halt on Pokrovsk’s outskirts around the New Year. But the Kremlin mobilized hundreds of thousands of fresh troops, and deployed many of them to the Pokrovsk sector.

Speeding into battle on motorcycles or marching on foot, the Russians suffered horrendous casualties while probing Pokrovsk’s defenses. But the effort paid off last month, when the Russian 9th Motor Rifle Brigade or an adjacent unit finally found a wide gap in the Ukrainian line around Rodynske. The undermanned Ukrainian national guard brigades defending Rodynske fell back.

Now Rodynske itself is the main battleground. While the Russian air force’s KAB glide-bombs pummel the village, the 51st CAA waits for a chance to advance. “The command of the enemy’s Center Operational Grouping on the Pokrovsk direction completes preparatory actions, actively accelerating preparations for the assault on Pokrovsk,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported.

“Northeast of Pokrovsk, the enemy will continue attacks with the forces of the 51st Combined Arms Army in the direction of Rodynske from both Fedorivka and Razyne, at the same time trying to break through as close as possible to Dobropillya,” 65 km to the north, CDS added.

“As soon as the 51st Combined Arms Army blocks communications from Pokrovsk to Dobropillya, the enemy will proceed to assault Pokrovsk with the forces of the 41st and 2nd Combined Arms Armies.”

The push through Rodynske and then into Pokrovsk will be a bloody one for both sides, but especially for the Russians. “We anticipate a spike in Russian losses,” Frontelligence Insight explained, “but also the possibility of a faster tempo of advances.”

Reinforcements rush in

Aiming to delay Pokrovsk’s fall as long as possible, and inflict as many casualties as possible on the Russians in exchange for the town, the Ukrainian army has reinforced the area around Rodynske with elements of the 142nd Mechanized Brigade, which recently received German-made Leopard 1A5 tanks.

Even with reinforcements, the Ukrainian force in and around Pokrovsk is outnumbered by tens of thousands of troops. Where Russia has maintained its high pace of recruitment by spending lavishly on enlistment bonuses, Ukraine has struggled to recruit or draft enough new troops for its weary brigades.

The Russian military is actually slowly growing by around 9,000 soldiers a month as new recruits exceed casualties. The Ukrainian military, by contrast, is short around 100,000 trained infantry. As long as the Ukrainians are badly outnumbered on the Pokrovsk sector, the battle’s outcome is all but certain.

Rodynske will fall—and then Pokrovsk will, too.

But that doesn’t mean the Russians are galloping to victory in Ukraine. They’re struggling to merely capture the eastern Donbas region, of which Pokrovsk is just a small part. “We assess that a complete Russian takeover of Donbas in 2025 is very unlikely,” Frontelligence Insight stated. “Conditions around Kupiansk, Siversk and Lyman remain unfavorable for Ukrainian defenders, but Russian operational goals have not been met and progress is behind the timetable.”

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Ukraine’s deep strikes are becoming more destructive. The main reason, it seems, is the combination of a largely German-funded attack drone—and the powerful warhead, or warheads, it can carry.

As recently as last year, the Ukrainian military and its supporting agencies—in particular, the state security service, or SBU—struggled to make an impact with long-range drones. “More than half of the recorded strikes between September and February had limited impact,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight concluded in a March study.

But that’s changing as more and better drones with bigger and better-designed warheads strike more frequently many hundreds of kilometers inside Russia.

Tatarigami, Frontelligence Insight’s founder, recently sensed the change. “Based on an early look at several dozen hits over the past two weeks, both the success rate and damage from Ukrainian long-range drones have gone up compared to late 2024 [to] early 2025,” he wrote. “I haven’t put together the data set yet, but even at a glance, the results already look different.”

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have hit Russian airfields—destroying several warplanes and helicopters—while also blowing up key components of the refinery in Novokuibyshevsk, which accounts for around 3% of annual refining in Russia.

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One Ukrainian drone keeps smashing Russia’s top war factories—so Germany’s paying for 500 more

Thanks in large part to German largess, Ukrainian firm Ukroboronprom is building hundreds more of its best An-196 Liutyi attack drones than it had planned earlier this year.

According to German newspaper Die Welt, the government of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is providing around $100 million to pay for 500 of the propeller-driven, satellite-guided Liutyi drones. A Liutyi carries an approximately 50-kg warhead farther than 800 km. The $200,000 drone can follow a complex flight path and change altitude in order to avoid Russian air-defenses. 

Early Liutyi models may have had comparatively simple and light warheads. “One contributing factor” in the limited effectiveness of drone strikes in 2024 and early 2025, Frontelligence Insight concluded, “is the relatively small warhead size of certain Ukrainian drones, such as the Liutyi.”

For comparison, a Russian Shahed drone carries a 90-kg warhead.

It’s possible Ukroboronprom has been improving and enlarging the warhead on the An-196. Roy, a Canadian drone expert, recently observed a 60-kg OFB-60 warhead apparently recovered from the wreck of a crashed Liutyi. “The 60-kg high-explosive shaped-charge munition has a concave metal face for forming an … explosively formed projectile” that can punch through metal, Roy noted.

Warhead options

It’s not clear that all Liutyi drones have the 60-kg shaped-charge warhead. The drones are often described as carrying just 50 kg of explosives. It’s actually possible the drones can carry even bigger payloads. Missile expert Fabian Hoffman even claimed some An-196s are now packing 75-kg warheads.

A bigger warhead comes at a cost, however. “Given the long distances these [Ukrainian] drones must travel, increasing their warhead size would require adjustments to weight, fuel capacity and overall design,” Frontelligence assessed. In short, there’s a direct tradeoff. A bigger warhead means more destruction but a shorter range.

The reported recent development of a Liutyi model capable of traveling 2,000 km may imply some of the drones are carrying lighter warheads rather than heavier ones—trading away explosive payload in order to add fuel capacity.

So when Tatarigami senses Ukrainian drone strikes are becoming more destructive, there may be caveats. The most destructive raids might be the one striking closest to the Ukrainian border. Yes, a few An-196s or other drone types may range 2,000 km into Russia. But the ones dealing the real damage—potentially with the most powerful shaped-charge warheads—are probably hitting targets no more than 800 km from Ukraine.

Not coincidentally, SBU drones pummeled Saky air base in Russian-occupied Crimea on 3 August, reportedly destroying one Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jet and damaging another—and also damaging three Sukhoi Su-24 bombers. Saky is fewer than 300 km from the front line in southern Ukraine.

That’s well within range of a harder-hitting Liutyi drone.

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