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

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

Every day, 180 Russian glide bombs fall on Ukraine. Now they’re falling from twice as far away.

Russia has quietly deployed a new version of its satellite-guided glide bombs that can strike targets from more than 95 kilometers away—double the range of previous models.

The extended reach means Russian pilots can drop their deadly cargo while staying safely beyond most Ukrainian air defenses, fundamentally shifting the tactical balance along the 1100-kilometer front line.

The more aerodynamic UMPK-PD bomb first appeared under the wing of a Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber this spring.

“The Russian aerospace forces test new glide bombs with unified planning and correction modules with extended range (up to 95 km) in Kharkiv Oblast,” CDS reported. 

According to CDS, the Russians have lobbed UMPK-PDs at Kharkiv Oblast from positions over the village of Tomarovka in Belgorod Oblast, 30 km from Russia’s border with Ukraine, on May 31. “Similar glide bombs were used against defense forces in Sumy Oblast in May 2025,” CDS noted.

It’s unclear what percentage of the daily UMPK strikes involve the longer-range version. According to Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, Russia has dropped 27,700 aerial bombs on Ukraine just this year. “That’s in less than half a year,” Zelensky said.

Jam-resistant glide bombs

The farther away from the target a warplane can drop its bomb, the fewer enemy air defenses it’s exposed to. Farther is safer. 

And it might help mitigate Ukrainian jamming, too. Ukrainian forces have deployed powerful electronic warfare systems that can broadcast radio noise in the direction of satellite-guided munitions such as the UMPKs.

One new jammer, the Lima, is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing in Kharkiv Oblast, the team’s founder claimed.

Lima isn’t just a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” the founder explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”

Ukrainian forces first deployed Lima to protect Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, apparently last year.

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“After the deployment of the E.W. system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether,” said an official with Night Watch, the team that developed Lima. 

The jamming caused some Russians to panic. “The golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force, noted in a recent missive. “All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” the channel added.

But jamming requires a lot of electrical power—and it requires more electrical power the farther the target, a UMPK or another system, is from the jammer. “Like a long-distance runner, radio signals lose strength the further they travel,” explained Thomas Withington, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute in London.

A farther-flying UMPK is exposed to less jamming, especially in the early moments of its flight. For at least a portion of its one-way journey toward its target, it might be able to navigate accurately. Even if Ukrainian jamming grows more powerful closer to the target, it might be too late: the bomb might already be on course for an accurate hit.

The good news for Ukrainian developers is there’s a straightforward solution to longer-range UMPKs. That is: jam harder, with more powerful emitters.

Russian troops are piling onto motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles and attacking in small groups in Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine. But the shift to smaller, lighter assault groups doesn’t mean the Russians are losing momentum in Sumy.

In fact, they may be preparing to march farther south—toward the city of Sumy itself.

50,000 troops, 20 kilometers to target

In late May, a powerful Russian force—50,000 troops plus hundreds of vehicles—rolled toward the border and into Sumy Oblast, reversing modest Ukrainian gains along the border region. Two weeks later, the Russians had captured several border villages in a 150-square-kilometer pocket.

Sumy lies just 20 kilometers to the south.

As the offensive grinds on, the Russians’ assault tactics have begun to shift.

“On the Sumy direction, Russian forces have changed tactics and conduct assaults in groups of eight to 10 personnel, use motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles (quad bikes) for rapid movement, secure positions and mass forces for further attacks,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported Thursday.

Trading armored vehicles for unarmored ones, and fighting in smaller groups, can make individual Russian troops more vulnerable to Ukrainian drones. But that’s all part of the plan, as analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds at the Royal United Services Institute in London noted in a pair of reports from this year and last.

Costly reconnaissance by fire

According to Watling and Reynolds, small probes are just the first phase for major Russian assaults. “First, they send sections/squads of poorly trained troops, perhaps eight personnel at a time (although some larger attacks consist of up to 30 personnel supported by one or two infantry fighting vehicles),” Watling and Reynolds explained.

“These are ordered to advance towards where they assess Ukrainian positions to be, conducting reconnaissance by drawing fire,” the analysts added. “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.”

Next, Russian artillery and precision glide bombs rain down.

According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Russians are now dropping nearly 180 of the glide bombs every day all along the front line. That’s up from 100 as recently as last year.

“When rotation or disruption of the defense is achieved, Russian units aim to conduct more deliberate assault actions,” Watling and Reynolds wrote.

The small, vulnerable assaults are just the preludes to larger, more powerful attacks. This probe-then-attack approach to ground warfare, with light infantry doing the probing, can be costly in lives. It’s not for no reason that Russian casualties have exceeded 1,000 a day for the better part of a year.

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Ukraine’s difficult math

But as long as recruitment remains robust, the Kremlin doesn’t seem to mind, Watling and Reynolds explained. “The Russian group of forces continues to take significant casualties, but is nevertheless growing in size.”

The pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team initially described the Russian offensive in Sumy as “gradual.” But another analyst is worried it might accelerate as Ukraine shifts more forces to the south to block Russian advances around the eastern city of Pokrovsk.

“Ukraine shifted tens of thousands of troops” from Sumy, noted Tatarigami, the founder of Frontelligence Insight. That had the effect of “leaving that front undermanned and accelerating Russia’s gains there.”

The destruction of a few smaller Russian assault groups, most likely conducting reconnaissance missions, belies the overall superiority of the Russian force in the north—and the growing likelihood of further Russian advances.

“Unless the loss ratio begins to shift decisively in Ukraine’s favor, Russian forces are likely to continue advancing,” Tatarigami warned.

The Ukrainian air force has responded by sortieing more of its precious, ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters for bombing raids targeting the attacking Russians. But it might take more than a surge in air power to halt the Russian march on Sumy.

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Ukraine’s F-16s launch desperate strikes to stop Russia in the north

One of the latest do-it-yourself armored vehicles in the arsenal of the Russian army in Ukraine may also be one of the fakest. The up-armored MT-LB armored tractor appears to sport extensive protection against Ukrainian drones. But some of the protection might be strictly for show.

For the unfortunate Russian crew of the improvised vehicle, the possible fakery is a tragedy in the making if and when the vehicle’s potentially fake defenses meet real Ukrainian drones. For the Ukrainian drone operators, the vehicular stagecraft is an opportunity—to knock out yet another Russian vehicle.

On Sunday, Andrey Rudenko, a Russian propagandist reporting from occupied Donetsk Oblast, highlighted the work of mechanics working for the Russian army’s 1st Guards Tank Army.

“Servicemen of the repair company of the motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the west grouping of forces restore, repair and modernize military equipment,” Rudenko wrote. “Specialists are engaged in the repair of tracked and wheeled vehicles, including the replacement of engines and the installation of dynamic and anti-drone protection kits.”

The video accompanying purports to depict an impressive example of a drone-hardened armored vehicle—a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor that, in its baseline form, weighs just 13 tons and has armor that’s just 14 millimeters thick at its thickest point. That’s barely adequate to protect a vehicle from machine gun fire—to say nothing of protecting it from the thousands of explosive first-person-view drones that prowl the front line every day.

FPV drones, which Ukrainian industry builds at a rate of millions of copies a year, now account for the majority of Russian vehicle losses—and have lately driven the total tally of Russian losses to more than 17,000 tanks, fighting vehicles, armored trucks and other vehicles.

Kitchen pots disguised as electronic warfare systems

The MT-LB in the 1st Guards Tank Army’s workshop boasts a shell of welded-on metal plates, dangling chains to guard the fronts of the tracks and, most impressively, a hinged anti-drone grill—a “cope cage”—that opens up to reveal a mast for electronic systems. Potentially medium-range radio jammers for grounding incoming drones.

And on the vehicles’ front, there are three round radomes that appear to be shorter-range jammers. On its face, it’s a comprehensive anti-drone suite. The problem is: the radomes for the short-range jammers don’t seem to match any known design. They might even be kitchen pots painted to resemble military hardware. In that case, it should go without saying, they’d be totally useless against drones.

It became apparent recently that some Russian regiments were bolting pots onto their armored vehicles owing to jammer shortages and delays. “In a certain kingdom, the enemy began to hit equipment with drones,” Russian Telegram channel Two Majors wrote euphemistically. “Then the soldiers were forbidden to ride in the equipment if there was no miracle electronic warfare system on the roof.”

That was the origin of the fake jammers, Two Majors explained. “The military police were strictly told to watch for external signs of electronic warfare on the vehicles, so that the soldiers would take care of themselves. But they have to ride. The army is moving forward, they can’t carry ammunition and food on donkeys—and other types of supplies.”

Deadly theater of fake military protection

“What to do?” Two Majors asked rhetorically. “They ordered electronic warfare, but while it was coming … they took plastic basins and covered them with ‘secret paint that deflects enemy drones.’ At the same time, it looks like it’s an electronic warfare system, and now the military police posts frown from afar, but let them through: there is a yellow dome on the roof, which means there is order.”

That supposed “order” masks a serious problem for Russian forces, of course. Fake jammers might help get front-line troops through the military police checkpoints, but they won’t defeat Ukraine’s drones.

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What happens when your enemy copies your best weapon? Russia’s latest drone innovation mirrors Ukraine’s own breakthrough—and the implications stretch far beyond the battlefield.

Russia’s Molniya drone mothership carries FPV attack drones tens of kilometers behind Ukrainian lines, marking the first confirmed use of this Ukrainian-pioneered technology by Russian forces.

The innovation, which Ukrainian forces developed and Russia has now embraced, extends the range of smaller explosives-laden drones from mere miles to dozens of kilometers. It’s essentially a smaller-scale, aerial version of the drone deployment method the Ukrainian state security agency, or SBU, used to devastate five Russian air bases on Sunday.

The SBU operation, involving more than 100 small quadcopter drones smuggled across Russia in specially modified truck trailers, ended with the destruction of more than a dozen Russian warplanes including irreplaceable Tupolev Tu-22M and Tu-95 bombers and Beriev A-50 radar planes.

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Russia copies Ukrainian drone tactics

The Russian drone-carrying drone was caught on camera for the first time on or just before Wednesday. Rob Lee, an analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, identified the carrier as a Molniya, an inexpensive one-way attack drone with a battery-powered propeller engine and a payload of up to five kg. The Molniya’s payload was a standard first-person-view quadcopter.

“These could be a serious problem,” Lee warned.

The rationale behind the drone-piggybacking-on-a-drone innovation is obvious. On its own, an FPV drone ranges just a few miles. It’s constrained by its battery life and the reach of its radio transmitter. By contrast, a Molniya ranges as far as 40 km. It could launch its FPV at the end of its sortie, and even relay the FPV’s radio signal back to the drones’ operators—effectively adding tens of kilometers to the FPV’s range.

Once the FPV has struck its target, the Molniya no longer needs to act as a carrier and relay—and can strike a target, too.

Ukraine pioneered drone motherships in 2023

Drone-carrying “mothership” drones are proliferating on both sides of Russia’s 39-month war on Ukraine. Russian troops first encountered Ukrainian motherships in November 2023. Today, when Ukrainian FPVs strike as far as 40 km behind the line of contact, it’s often because they were carried into the Russian rear area by motherships.

From sea to sky: Ukraine’s expanding drone fleet

The Ukrainians even launch FPVs from their satellite-controlled unmanned surface vehicles. In other words, drone-carrying drone boats.

The first strike by a USV drone-carrier, in December, targeted a Russian-occupied oil platform in the Black Sea. Four months later, the robotic aircraft carriers motored along the coast of occupied Crimea, launching FPVs that blew up a pair of Russian air-defense vehicles: an Osa and a Strela.

The newest Ukrainian aerial mothership, the StratForce Gogol-M, deployed last month. The propeller-driven, catapult-launched Gogol-M can carry two FPVs as far as 300 km. “A $10,000 mission replaces what previously required $3 to $5 million missile systems,” a StratForce official told Forbes.

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The communication challenge driving AI adoption

The main problem for all operators of mothership drones is communication. Line-of-sight radio struggles to reach over the horizon, potentially just a few miles away. Satellite radio signals can be jammed. Ranging hundreds of kilometers from their operators, a mothership and its smaller drones risk getting cut off.

Autonomy is one answer. It’s not for no reason that StratForce has equipped the Gogol-M with A.I. that can steer the drones toward recognizable targets. “It’s like a self-driving car,” the company official told Forbes.

It’s unclear whether the Russians have installed AI in the Molniya or other mothership drones.

Reusable vs. expendable: the next evolution

It’s also unclear whether the Russians expect any of the drone-carrying Molniyas to return to base after launching their FPVs. The Gogol-M is designed to launch its FPVs and then return to base, effectively making it the small, robotic analogue of a manned bomber armed with even smaller cruise missiles.

Reusable motherships are even more dangerous than single-use motherships. If their FPVs miss you the first time, they might just return to base, load up more FPVs—and come after you again.

One of the latest do-it-yourself armored vehicles in the arsenal of the Russian army in Ukraine may also be one of the fakest. The up-armored MT-LB armored tractor appears to sport extensive protection against Ukrainian drones. But some of the protection might be strictly for show.

For the unfortunate Russian crew of the improvised vehicle, the possible fakery is a tragedy in the making if and when the vehicle’s potentially fake defenses meet real Ukrainian drones. For the Ukrainian drone operators, the vehicular stagecraft is an opportunity—to knock out yet another Russian vehicle.

On Sunday, Andrey Rudenko, a Russian propagandist reporting from occupied Donetsk Oblast, highlighted the work of mechanics working for the Russian army’s 1st Guards Tank Army. 

“Servicemen of the repair company of the motorized rifle brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the west grouping of forces restore, repair and modernize military equipment,” Rudenko wrote. “Specialists are engaged in the repair of tracked and wheeled vehicles, including the replacement of engines and the installation of dynamic and anti-drone protection kits.” 

The video accompanying purports to depict an impressive example of a drone-hardened armored vehicle—a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor that, in its baseline form, weighs just 13 tons and has armor that’s just 14 millimeters thick at its thickest point. That’s barely adequate to protect a vehicle from machine gun fire—to say nothing of protecting it from the thousands of explosive first-person-view drones that prowl the front line every day.

FPV drones, which Ukrainian industry builds at a rate of millions of copies a year, now account for the majority of Russian vehicle losses—and have lately driven the total tally of Russian losses to more than 17,000 tanks, fighting vehicles, armored trucks and other vehicles.

The MT-LB in the 1st Guards Tank Army’s workshop boasts a shell of welded-on metal plates, dangling chains to guard the fronts of the tracks and, most impressively, a hinged anti-drone grill—a “cope cage”—that opens up to reveal a mast for electronic systems. Potentially medium-range radio jammers for grounding incoming drones.

And on the vehicles’ front, there are three round radomes that appear to be shorter-range jammers. On its face, it’s a comprehensive anti-drone suite. The problem is: the radomes for the short-range jammers don’t seem to match any known design. They might even be kitchen pots painted to resemble military hardware. In that case, it should go without saying, they’d be totally useless against drones.

Jammer theater

It became apparent recently that some Russian regiments were bolting pots onto their armored vehicles owing to jammer shortages and delays. “In a certain kingdom, the enemy began to hit equipment with drones,” Russian Telegram channel Two Majors wrote euphemistically. “Then the soldiers were forbidden to ride in the equipment if there was no miracle electronic warfare system on the roof.”

That was the origin of the fake jammers, Two Majors explained. “The military police were strictly told to watch for external signs of electronic warfare on the vehicles, so that the soldiers would take care of themselves. But they have to ride. The army is moving forward, they can’t carry ammunition and food on donkeys—and other types of supplies.”

“What to do?” Two Majors asked rhetorically. “They ordered electronic warfare, but while it was coming  … they took plastic basins and covered them with ‘secret paint that deflects enemy drones.’ At the same time, it looks like it’s an electronic warfare system, and now the military police posts frown from afar, but let them through: there is a yellow dome on the roof, which means there is order.”

That supposed “order” masks a serious problem for Russian forces, of course. Fake jammers might help get front-line troops through the military police checkpoints, but they won’t defeat Ukraine’s drones. 

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Ukraine races to take out Russia’s deadliest drone jammer yet: the Black Eye

Something has changed in Ukraine’s skies. Russian air defenses that once dominated the battlefield are being picked apart with surgical precision—not by lone wolf pilots, but by something entirely new.

The Ukrainian F-16 pilots fighting to hold back 50,000 Russian troops in Sumy Oblast aren’t fighting alone anymore. More and more, the air force’s jets fight as teams.

A dramatic video that circulated online on Monday depicts a Sukhoi Su-27 from the Ukrainian air force’s 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade blowing up a Russian air-defense vehicle somewhere along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine.

When Soviet jets learned Western teamwork

The pilot of the Soviet-vintage supersonic fighter wasn’t just hunting random Russian air defenses. No, he was targeting Russian defenses “like a scalpel,” to borrow one Ukrainian pilot’s simile, to clear a path for other Ukrainian warplanes to perform their own missions.

As the Ukrainian air force takes delivery of up to 85 Lockheed Martin F-16s from a Danish-Dutch-Norwegian consortium, as well as a dozen or more Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters from France, the flying branch’s fleet is getting much more diverse.

The upgraded Western types complement a pre-war fleet that had around 125 Sukhoi Su-24 bombers, Su-25 attack jets, Su-27s, and Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters.

In all, the Ukrainian air force is probably bigger than it was in February 2022—and it’s certainly much more modern as more Western jets arrive and the Soviet leftovers get their own upgrades, including Western bombs and missiles.

This specialization, and teamwork, first became possible as US contractors helped Ukrainian airmen modify their Su-27s and MiG-29s to fire American-made AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, which home in on enemy radar signals from as far away as 148 km. 

Ukraine’s ex-Soviet jets lack internal radar-jamming equipment, so they need help fighting their way through dense Russian defenses. Sukhois and MiGs armed with HARMs can escort bomb-laden Sukhois and MiGs to their targets. 

It was a HARM that the Su-27 pilot fired at the Russian air-defense vehicle on or before Monday.

“The Cossack in the Su-27, performing the task of covering the strike group, did a good job,” noted Sunflower, the Telegram channel that first posted the video of the attack.   

From solo missions to strike packages

The arrival of the first F-16s back in August, and the first Mirage 2000s in February, allowed even more complex strike packages. Unlike the Sukhois and MiGs, the F-16s and Mirage 2000s do have internal radar-jammers.

“Sometimes when we arrive, there are already F-16s waiting there, or sometimes Mirages,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot said in an official video from March. 

The F-16s and Mirages “either cover the whole package that is sent there to [strike] our enemies, or also strike [themselves],” the pilot said.

So while some F-16s are flying attack sorties over Sumy with American-made precision glide bombs, others may be flying jamming missions to protect the attackers—while other Ukrainian fighters, perhaps Su-27s, target the Russian air-defenses that the F-16s and Mirages can’t jam.

These complex fighter packages still don’t risk striking very deep inside Russia, where the air defenses might be prohibitively dense. “Currently, we can only strike at tactical depth,” the pilot in the March interview conceded. That means tens of kilometers rather than hundreds of kilometers.

But the fight for Sumy is a fight at tactical depth—inside Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force’s fighter packages should be up to the task.

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Ukraine’s F-16s launch desperate strikes to stop Russia in the north

Ukraine is running out of choices. Russia has 50,000 troops threatening to besiege Sumy, a city with a pre-war population of 250,000 just 30 kilometers from the border. Ukraine’s response: gamble its rarest aircraft on missions they might not survive.

The Ukrainian air force is sortieing its small fleet of ex-European F-16s to drop American-made glide bombs on Russian regiments rolling into Sumy Oblast. 

Two months after an elite Russian drone group cut the supply lines feeding the Ukrainian force clinging to a 600-square-km salient around the town of Sudzha in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast—ultimately driving the Ukrainians from Kursk after a bitter, six-month battle—the Russians are pressing their advantage on the northern front of their 39-month wider war on Ukraine. 

In all, there are no fewer than 50,000 Russian troops in Kursk. The Ukrainian brigades holding the line in Sumy, just across the border from Kursk, have many fewer troops—especially now that at least one formation, the elite 82nd Air Assault Brigade, has rushed south to Donetsk Oblast to block a Russian attack on the town of Kostiantynivka, a critical strongpoint in Ukrainian defenses in the east.

The arrival of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade and other reinforcements in the east has helped to slow the Russian advance along the stretch of front line between Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar—can could save Kramatorsk and other key cities comprising the so-called “fortress belt” threading through Donetsk toward the border in the north.

“On the Sumy direction, the enemy offensive is intensifying,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned. “The Kursk group of forces is concentrating reserves in the border zone, attempting to break through between Yunakivka and Vodolahy.” 

The Ukrainian air force has received just a few dozen of the 85 American-built F-16 fighters that a Danish-Dutch-Norwegian consortium has pledged from European surplus stocks. Three of the single-engine, supersonic fighters have been lost since they first flew into action in August.

NATO’s “military Wi-Fi” arrives

The F-16s are precious assets, but the dire situation in Sumy warrants risking them. The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted F-16s lobbing US-supplied Small Diameter Bombs—114-kg precision glide bombs—at Russian forces in and around Kursk.

“The application of F-16s in this role came as somewhat of a surprise,” CIT observed, “as they were initially utilized as ‘flying air defense’ deep within Ukrainian territory and only began appearing near the front line in the Sumy region in late winter 2025, accompanying Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter aircraft that launched guided aerial bombs.”

“It is possible that the [Ukrainian air force] has begun using their F-16s closer to the front line due to the recent arrival of new aircraft or due to an acute need to increase firepower,” CIT proposed.

The F-16s are being upgraded for more dangerous missions. Kateryna Chernohorenko, the Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine for Digital Development, Digital Transformation and Digitalization, announced that the F-16s—as well as Ukraine’s French-supplied Mirage 2000 jets—will get software allowing them to plug into the Link-16 radio network.

Link-16, which Chernohorenko described as “NATO’s military Wi-Fi,” connects command posts, radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, and warplanes in a single network. It can share data so that each HQ, missile battery, and plane sees what the others see. 

The Link-16 upgrade may not save all the Ukrainian F-16s as they fly into the danger zone to bomb the Russian troops threatening Sumy. But the Ukrainian command is running out of options as it struggles to hold back Russia’s dual offensives. 

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Apocalypse comes to Kostiantynivka: every tenth Russian soldier marches on strategic town

The latest missile to join the Russian terror campaign is one of the weirdest: a target drone that the Russians have modified for a one-way attack. 

The Dan-M is a 350-kg jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle that Russia’s Sokol design bureau designed for air-defense training back in the early 1990s. Launched from the ground or air, a Dan-M is capable of flying at very low altitude and high subsonic speed for as long as 40 minutes.

On or before Thursday, Russian forces in Crimea launched three Dan-Ms at Ukraine. The Russians had modified the Dan-Ms into a kind of “attack UAV,” according to drone expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov. The modifications included repainting the drones from their normal bright red to a more subtle color, Beskrestnov wrote—and presumably also included the addition of a warhead.

It’s unclear whether the Dan-Ms struck their targets. “For information security reasons, I cannot report the fate of this group of attack UAVs,” Beskrestnov wrote.

If a Dan-M survives its training sortie, it pops a parachute and floats back to the ground for repairs and reuse. A single Dan-M is usually good for up to 10 training flights before it wears out.

It should be pretty easy to convert the target drones into cruise missiles: simply add a warhead and maybe omit the parachute.

Indeed, the Ukrainians have performed similar modifications on their 1970s-vintage Tupolev Tu-141/143 reconnaissance drones. Swapping out their cameras for warheads, Ukrainian forces fired several old Tu-141/143s at targets in Russia’s border oblasts early in Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine. 

But the Ukrainians were, at the time, desperate for deep-strike munitions. They hadn’t yet ramped up development and production of purpose-made long-range strike drones. The explosive Tu-141/143s were an expedient—one Ukraine no longer needs.

Ukraine’s drones are at work, too

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

What’s the point?

Why does Russia need to arm its Dan-Ms? Even Beskrestnov doesn’t know for sure. “We did this because we did not have cruise missiles and long-range attack UAVs,” he wrote. “And why Russia made this modification is unclear.”

One possibility is that the Russians “have a large number of these UAVs,” Beskrestnov proposed.

Russian air-defense troops get plenty of practice shooting at actual Ukrainian missiles and drones. The wider war may have rendered potentially substantial stocks of Dan-Ms redundant—so why not add warheads and shoot them at Ukraine?

The most obvious explanation—that Russia is running low on purpose-designed deep-strike munitions—seems unlikely. If anything, the Russian strike arsenal is expanding as the Kremlin finds more ways around foreign sanctions and, with growing stocks of high-tech components, ramps up production of munitions, including Kh-101, Kh-555, Banderol cruise missiles, KAB glide bombs, and Shahed attack drones.  

The two biggest Russian air raids of the wider war took place on the nights of May 24 and 25, each involving more than 350 missiles and drones. The munitions rained down on cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.

“Russian strikes against Ukraine continue to disproportionately impact civilians and civilian infrastructure,” noted the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

The intensifying raids are “part of a cognitive warfare effort to weaken Ukrainian resolve and to undermine Western support for Ukraine,” ISW explained.

Adding Dan-M drones to the Russian arsenal only slightly expands the terror campaign. But for the Russians, every weapon they can fire at Ukrainian cities is a weapon well-spent. 

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Ukraine’s WWI-style drone hunter worked so well that Russia had to steal the idea

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Russia aimed what may have been an Iskander missile at apparent high-value targets—and missed. The drone-hunting plane or planes the Russians hoped to blow up weren’t there. 

On or just before 23 May, Russia’s strike complex—aerial or satellite intel cueing Russian missile strikes across Ukraine—identified what the Russian planners clearly believed were active Ukrainian warplanes at an airfield in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, 50 km from the front line in southern Ukraine.

A ballistic missile, potentially a $3 million Iskander missile—one of Russia’s best missiles—streaked down. The Russian missile strike turned the airfield into flames. 

The targets, according to Russian bloggers, were three propeller-driven “drone-destroyers.” A clear reference to the old Yakovlev Yak-52 piston-engine training planes Ukrainian forces fly on anti-drone patrols using Russian missile defense tactics.

Yak-52s would’ve been worthwhile targets for Russian missiles. Ukrainian airmen have been taking charge of the 1970s-vintage planes, apparently buying or borrowing them from civilian flying clubs, and flying them over front-line cities in southern Ukraine with a pilot in the front seat and a shotgun-armed gunner in the back seat.

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Ukraine’s WWI-style drone hunter worked so well that Russia had to steal the idea

The shotgun-armed Yak-52s—inexpensive, slow-flying, and maneuverable—are perfect drone hunters that have frustrated Russian missile targeting. In a heady three months starting last May, one Ukrainian Yak-52 shot down a large number of Russian drones over Kherson Oblast, prompting increased Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian positions.

Fans of the World War I-style barnstormer posted videos and photos of the Yak-52 in action and on the ground. A growing number of kill markings on the side of the old trainer spoke to its effectiveness against Russian missiles and drones. It worked so well that the Ukrainian intelligence directorate also began training gunners to hunt Russian unmanned aerial vehicles from locally-made Aeroprakt A-22 sport planes.

That first Yakovlev drone killer was so irritating to Russian planners that, in July, they targeted the plane at its apparent base near Odesa using an Iskander missile strike. On 15 July, a Russian drone surveyed the airfield, pinpointing several parked Ukrainian UAVs, as well as hangars where the Yak-52 may have sheltered.

Successful and unsuccessful Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s drone hunters

An Iskander missile streaked in, exploding between the drones and the hangars. One analyst scrutinized video and satellite imagery and concluded that the Russian missile strike damaged three drones and several hangars on 15 July.

It’s unclear whether the Yak-52 was in one of the damaged hangars when the Russian missile hit. But it’s telling that, after the Iskander missile strike, there were no new sightings of the famous piston plane.

There are scores of Yak-52s in Ukraine. And there was nothing stopping the Ukrainian defense ministry from acquiring a replacement plane after the Russian missile attack. Eight months later, a second Yak-52 drone killer took to the air. 

A screengrab from the video feed of a Russian surveillance drone that circulated online on 24 March depicted a dramatically painted Yak-52 maneuvering into position so its back-seat gunner can take a shot at the drone with a rifle, despite the threat of Russian missile strikes.

It was that plane, or its equivalents, that the Russians were apparently targeting with their Iskander missile on 23 May—obviously hoping to duplicate their July success with another precise Russian missile strike.

Footage of Russian missile strike on a small airfield located near Kyslychuvatka in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The only planes stationed at that airport are Soviet-era Antonov An-2 biplanes. As Google Earth satellite imagery show, those An-2s have been there for years (pic… pic.twitter.com/wxRkIFFZpE

— Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (BlueSky too) (@Archer83Able) May 23, 2025

A four-ton, 500-km-range Iskander missile is a powerful weapon in Russia’s arsenal. And the Russian deep strike complex using these missiles is a constant threat to Ukrainian forces everywhere in the war-torn country.

But a Russian missile strike is only as effective as its supporting intel. In this case, the intel was bad. So the expensive Russian missile likely blew up old, grounded An-2s instead of active Ukrainian aircraft.

Ukraine’s Yak-52—or Yak-52s—survived to fight another day, continuing to evade Russian missiles and hunt drones.

The bad news for Russian missile strike planners is good news for Ukrainian airmen and the troops and civilians they protect from Russian missiles and drones.

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Ukraine can’t shoot down all of Russia’s missiles. So they’re blowing them up before launch.

Technology is Ukraine’s chance to win the war. This is why we’re launching the David vs. Goliath defense blog to support Ukrainian engineers who are creating innovative battlefield solutions and are inviting you to join us on the journey.

Our platform will showcase the Ukrainian defense tech underdogs who are Ukraine’s hope to win in the war against Russia, giving them the much-needed visibility to connect them with crucial expertise, funding, and international support. Together, we can give David the best fighting chance he has.

Join us in building this platform—become a Euromaidan Press Patron. As little as $5 monthly will boost strategic innovations that could succeed where traditional approaches have failed.

An awful clash is imminent along the villages and fields south of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. An industrial town with a pre-war population of 67,000, Kostiantynivka is the last major settlement between the front line and Kramatorsk, a city of 147,000 buttressing the last line of Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk.

Capturing Donetsk is one of Russia’s top objectives in its 39-month wider war on Ukraine. Holding Donetsk is one of Ukraine’s top objectives. Both sides are surging forces into the area around Kostiantynivka. The fighting is escalating. Casualties are piling up. And the worst is yet to come.

“The occupiers are trying to advance toward Kostiantynivka,” the Ukrainian army’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade reported last week. In fact, they’ve been trying for weeks now. An assault by around 150 Russian motorcycle troops on the village of Yelyzavetivka in mid-April may have signaled the beginning of the Russian offensive. 

The 93rd Mechanized Brigade is one of no fewer than a dozen Ukrainian brigades—each with thousands of troops, thousands of drones, and hundreds of armored vehicles and howitzers—that have deployed battalions around the town. 

Some of the Ukrainian ground forces’ best units are in the area. Not just the battle-hardened 93rd Mechanized Brigade, but also the aggressive 5th Assault Brigade and the 5th Heavy Mechanized Brigade, a reorganized tank brigade with up-armored Leopard 1A5 tanks.

They’re arrayed along a 30-kilometer arc—one end anchored to the southwest in the direction of Pokrovsk, the middle running through the outskirts of Toretsk and the opposite end anchored outside Chasiv Yar, to the northeast. “In the north, Russian forces are attempting to break through from the direction of Chasiv Yar,” the 93rd Mechanized Brigade noted, “while in the south they are attacking from the Pokrovsk highway.”

Ukrainian forces and earthworks are thinnest to the southwest. Probing for gaps in the line last week, the Russians advanced swiftly in this area, carving out a 15-kilometer-deep salient beginning around Yelyzavetivka and pointing toward Kostiantynivka, another 15 kilometers to the northeast.

Kostiantynivka is now within shooting distance of Russia’s short-range attack drones and smaller artillery pieces.

Russians frustrated after failure to capture Chasiv Yar

Frustrated by their failure to fully capture Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk despite a year of costly effort, the Russians sense an opportunity in Kostiantynivka—and aren’t about to waste it for a want of resources.

A huge Russian force is gathering south of the town. No fewer than three Russian field armies—the 8th, 41st, and 51st Combined Arms Armies—are nearby. The 8th CAA is apparently taking the lead.

The attacking Russian vehicles are sporting asbestos

Russia’s asbestos tank armor didn’t work. Ukraine’s drones did.

There are more than 600,000 Russian troops in Ukraine; it’s possible one out of 10 is marching on Kostiantynivka. They’re paying in blood for every yard they gain. That initial Russian motorcycle assault on Yelyzavetivka was typical. Almost all the Russians involved in that assault were killed or wounded, but more Russians followed behind them. 

Kostiantynivka is not lost. Yes, the Russians are extending a salient toward Kostiantynivka from the southwest. But the salient “is only one of the three necessary areas where Russian forces must make further advances in order to seriously threaten Kostiantynivka,” observed the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.

The other two areas are Chasiv Yar and Toretsk. And “Russian forces have struggled to break out” of those settlements, ISW noted. That “has likely complicated Russia’s plans for an offensive against Kostiantynivka and the wider Ukrainian fortress belt” running through Kramatorsk, according to the think tank. 

Moreover, Ukrainian forces aren’t exactly standing still in the sector. On Sunday or Monday, Ukrainian troops counterattacked the Russian salient and, according to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, “pushed the enemy back slightly from the village of Zoria.”

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Belgium sends Ukraine a single tank — it could revolutionize the entire drone war

Technology is Ukraine’s chance to win the war. This is why we’re launching the David vs. Goliath defense blog to support Ukrainian engineers who are creating innovative battlefield solutions and are inviting you to join us on the journey.

Our platform will showcase the Ukrainian defense tech underdogs who are Ukraine’s hope to win in the war against Russia, giving them the much-needed visibility to connect them with crucial expertise, funding, and international support. Together, we can give David the best fighting chance he has.

Join us in building this platform—become a Euromaidan Press Patron. As little as $5 monthly will boost strategic innovations that could succeed where traditional approaches have failed.