Business Insider on the evening of May 22 quoted a report published by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) last weekend on Russia's military capabilities, estimating that the country's military shoots down about 10,000 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) each month.
Russia's electronic warfare capabilities
According to RUSI, electronic warfare is a “key component” of Russian tactics and contributed to the staggering losses to Ukrainian drones.
Enterprise UAV with a range of up to 3,100 km is being used in Ukraine
The report did not specify which models were lost or in what proportion. However, James Patton Rogers, a professor of war studies and a UAV expert at the University of Southern Denmark, told Business Insider that the majority of the lost drones were small, relatively cheap commercial drones used for surveillance.
While he said the damage figures may be exaggerated, Mr Rogers said they still highlighted the high level of effectiveness of Russian electromagnetic warfare against Ukrainian UAVs. He also said the figures showed the unprecedented scale at which UAVs were being used in Ukraine, calling it “one of the first conflicts between UAVs and UAVs”.
Accordingly, the RUSI report said that along about 1,200 km of the conflict's front line, every 10 km, Russia maintains a large electronic warfare system, with the task of neutralizing UAVs.
Dr. Jack Watling, co-author of the RUSI report, wrote on Twitter that Russia’s success was due to high-tech systems such as the Shipovnik-Aero jamming station, which is difficult to detect, can mimic a variety of signals and deploy a range of sophisticated positioning effects to knock out UAVs, according to The New York Post.
Watling also noted that the 10,000 UAVs shot down per month is not an exact statistic. According to him, the actual number varies from month to month, from day to day, and is not closely monitored. However, the damage is certainly very high.
Ukraine gradually overcomes
Frontline drone operators told The Guardian in April that one of the most popular models, the commercial DJI UAV, was rapidly losing its usefulness.
However, Ukraine is developing proprietary drone systems to fill this capability gap, Rogers said.
A Ukrainian marine takes part in a training course on controlling an FPV UAV on May 15.
According to Business Insider statistics, Ukraine has many UAVs, from small, commercial-grade types often used for reconnaissance or as stealth weapons, to the multi-million dollar Bayraktar TB2 capable of destroying Russian tanks.
In addition, Ukraine is also developing its own army of rudimentary, low-cost UAVs. Through an online fundraising program called UNITED24, in a short time, Ukraine has added to its arsenal many types of UAVs that are considered capable of destroying similar but more expensive Russian weapons. According to Business Insider, some of Ukraine's homemade suicide UAVs are so rudimentary that the explosives are fixed to the fuselage with nothing more than tape.
As of mid-May, data from UNITED24’s equipment inventory and a report from the Ukrainian UAV Force show that Kyiv’s donations have been used to purchase a total of 3,839 UAVs and unmanned aerial systems. More than half of these have been sent to the front lines.
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