Can Drones Help Ukraine Turn the Tide of War?

LVIV REGION, UKRAINE – FEBRUARY 22: Participant practice flying a drone, in this case to locate colleagues who were hiding and pretending to be enemy snipers, during a combat training day hosted by a local paramilitary civil formation called TSEL on February 22, 2023 in Lviv region, Ukraine. Paramilitary civil formations are the successor to the voluntary territorial defence units that emerged in the months before Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine to train civilians in combat tactics. Today TSEL fulfils a number of roles, including supplying its own colleagues who are fighting under the Ukrainian armed forces in the east, patrolling Lviv and its outskirts to enforce nightly curfews, and to provide basic military skills such as shooting, first aid, drone operation and combat tactics to interested civilians. Today’s training brought together former military service members who have not yet been mobilized for the war as well as civilians without previous military experience, including an industrial sewing machine repairman, a car mechanic and a legal consulting firm employee. February 24 will mark the first anniversary since Russia’s invasion. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Posted: February 21st, 2024

By Ken Hughes

Senior Cyber and Technology Editor, The Cipher Brief

SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING – A weaponized drone sinks a Russian warship on the Black Sea. A series of drone attacks strike oil facilities inside Russia. And drone weapons worth roughly $5,000 burn down a warehouse in eastern Ukraine, destroying Russian tanks and other weapons worth millions of dollars.

Those are just three recent episodes in what has become a daily feature of Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, and two years after the invasion, the drone war is one of the few theaters in which the Ukrainians have notched regular victories. The destruction of the Russian warehouse this week, in the eastern village of Staronlynivka, reportedly took out a pair of T-72 tanks and several other valuable armored vehicles. The strike in the Black Sea, meanwhile, marked the second time in less than a month that a Ukrainian drone attack destroyed a Russian warship.

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