At the beginning of March, Russia had sent new tanks north of the Ukrainian capital kyiv, a convoy of more than 60 km which the Ukrainians succeeded in repelling brilliantly. Indeed, the Ukrainian army used its drone unit, nicknamed “Aerorozvidka”, to lead the convoy towards an ambush. As the tanks approached the capital, the drone pilots on their quads were arranged in teams in the woods along the road and remotely controlled their devices equipped with thermal cameras and capable of dropping 1.5 kg bombs.
“The elite team destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of the convoy that night. The tanks then remained blocked. The first Russian troops were stranded without heating, fuel and ammunition. This is the job of our 30 men,” Yaroslav Honchar, the commander of the drone unit, told the Guardian. The drone pilots then stayed for several more nights in order to destroy other Russian tanks.
Before this military success, Ukrainian drones had already succeeded in preventing the capture of Gostomel airport by Russian soldiers. Indeed, the pilots quickly succeeded in locating some 200 Russian paratroopers present on the spot. “This was a significant factor in preventing them from continuing to use this airfield for their attack,” explained Yaroslav Honchar.
The “Aerorozvidka” unit was imagined by academics who wish to use their knowledge to defend Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014. Bankers, IT specialists or management consultants who first created this unit of drones with commercially available devices before upgrading them to the military models we know today.Unfortunately, Ukraine today faces a serious problem in the supply of the parts used to create these drones, so the team is forced to rely on crowdfunding and personal contacts to keep producing the devices.
Faced with these successes of the Ukrainian drones, Russia has of course taken steps by installing electronic warfare vehicles in particular to block enemy radio signals. “In this case, you have to wait until the jammers are disabled and only then do you attack,” explained the commander of the Ukrainian drone unit. Note that Russia has also equipped itself with large-scale drones. New technologies therefore play a certain role in the war currently raging in Ukraine. “Aerorozvidka can be compared to a swarm of bees, except that we work at night. A single bee is nothing, but if a thousand bees attack, they can drive away a big enemy,” concluded Yaroslav Honchar.