Drones Filling The Skies Over Ukraine Battlefields

However, Mynailenko boasted that his unit within the Fury Brigade had the lowest rate last year of drone losses and the highest hit rate – they only lost 64 drones over an eight-month period.

The battlefield is quickly becoming oversaturated with unmanned aerial vehicles. A recent report highlighted how
Ukraine
needed to pull US-provided M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks from the battlefield, due to their vulnerability to drones. As a result, the battle between drones continues to shift toward whoever has the edge in electronic warfare. The
Wall Street Journal
recently reported that American drones being used in Ukraine have been unable to fend off“Russian jamming and GPS blackout technology.”

Vasyl Shyshola, a commander in an aerial reconnaissance unit from the 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade, said that the unit's drone missions are becoming harder and harder to fly due to electronic warfare.“Jamming can be so intense in one area, we quickly start to lose signal and have to retreat in order to preserve the drone.”

Ukrainian soldiers can even lose their signal within a mile of flying due to Russian
jamming . Electronic warfare is one of the areas in which the Russians have demonstrated high competence. They use their jamming
technology
to overpower Ukrainian signals by broadcasting on the same frequencies, but at much higher power.

Mynailenko said his unit is“constantly trying to find gaps, attempting to identify different altitudes where we can fly and avoid jamming. If someone can find an altitude that works, and they can quickly adjust and fly through it, they make a temporary breakthrough on the battlefield.”

Only temporary. With time, the Russians will adapt their jammers to the new frequency range as will Ukrainians. Both sides attempt to shift drone frequencies to bands outside the jammed range.

Mynailenko also speculated that drone development in the next year will focus on advancing capabilities to perform better at night.

In any case, he firmly believes in the idea that warfare will continue to transition more and more into a war of drones, at least on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Lingering questions remain: To what extent will
AI-enabled
drones alter the battlefield? Will we see drones fighting each other more often? What will happen once the sky above is filled with fully autonomous drones racing to kill each other and making decisions about life and death down below? Are
drone-zapping laser weapons
going to make a difference soon?

Drones' growing importance on the battlefield will continue whether it's by becoming more autonomous or playing a supporting role to other weapon systems. In February 2024, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
signed
a decree to establish a separate branch of forces – the Unmanned Systems Forces. As Mynailenko said, both sides are racing to develop tech, whether to make drones more resistant to jamming or to improve the targeting of night drone operations.

Drones alone won't determine who wins battles, but they will play a vital role for military planners in the future.

Many of Russia's assaults on Ukrainian positions are thwarted by Ukrainian infantry supported by FPV drones. These are mostly off-the-shelf drones that any typical drone enthusiast flies. The small DJI Mavic 3 is the most popular, and has been adapted for combat use by both Russian and Ukrainian units. However, because they're simple commercial drones, they're also easily susceptible to jamming technologies.

By some accounts, as many as 90 percent of the wounded Ukrainian soldiers who have made it to a stabilization point have been hit by an FPV drone or by explosives dropped by a drone.

Dmytro Lysenko, a drone pilot with the 109th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade of Ukraine's Armed Forces, hunts for Russian soldiers and heavy armor on an almost daily basis in the Donetsk region. He feels a certain unease when dropping explosives on Russian soldiers.

“Even when we drop explosives from drones on Russians,” he said,“I sometimes shiver and feel discomfort because I remember all those times I was sitting in a trench. The Russians would shoot at us with everything possible. But the drone was the scariest. A shell can fly and miss and that's it. But a drone pilot aims and will be very accurate when they drop an explosive.”

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If there is no drone in the sky watching movements, then there is no visibility into the tactical situation on the ground.

Much of the drone-dropped ammunition being used by Ukrainian soldiers is still being produced in improvised workshops near the front. Oleksiy Tymofeev, a drone unit commander with the 108th Separate Territorial Defense Brigade, shared that his unit utilizes a 3D printer at their base to manufacture components that secure and release explosives used in attacks on Russian positions. This setup allows drone operators to rapidly produce and iterate necessary parts.

Mynailenko emphasized,“Everything is shifting to a war of FPVs. The whole war is becoming a war of drones.” Over the past months, when Ukrainian units lacked artillery to shoot or had to ration shells, they used FPVs as much as they could to strike targets.

Mynailenko said that drones are more effective than artillery at this point because“our old shells are not that accurate.” But that is only to a certain degree, as Stacie Pettyjohn notes in a
publication
for the War on the Rocks defense analysis site.“Even large numbers of small drones cannot match the potency or volume of artillery fire and thus cannot substitute for howitzers,” she states.

The effect, Mynailenko said, is that it is now getting harder and harder to see Russian heavy armor on the front.“If a Russian BMP that is worth millions of dollars comes out, we will take an FPV drone, attach an RPG warhead and neutralize that heavy armor,” said Mynailenko.

Like the Russian side, the Ukrainians use Mavic 3 drones for surveillance and reconnaissance.

David Kirichenko
is a Ukrainian-American security engineer and freelance journalist. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he has taken a civilian
activist role .

This article was first published by the Kiev Post . It is republished here with permission.