When President Volodymyr Zelensky said late last month that Ukraine needed $6 billion to fund the production of interceptor drones, setting a goal of producing 1,000 a day, the Ukrainian leader had his own reasons, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
Having already transformed the battlefield, doing work once reserved for long-range missiles, field artillery and human reconnaissance, Ukrainian drones are now battling Russian drones, a boon for Ukraine’s dwindling stock of air defense missile systems.
In the past two months, only one Ukrainian charity, which supplies drones for aerial interception, claims that its drones have shot down about 1,500 of the drones that Russia sends out daily to conduct reconnaissance on the battlefield or bomb Ukrainian cities.
The interceptor drones help preserve a valuable arsenal of missiles
Most importantly, these interceptors have the potential to become a cheap and abundant alternative to using Western or Soviet-made air defense missiles that have been depleted due to the inability or unwillingness of allies to replenish them, Reuters reported.
Colonel Serhiy Nonka of the 1129th Ukrainian Air Defense Regiment, which began using them a year ago to attack and blow up enemy drones, has estimated that they can shoot down a Russian drone at about a fifth the cost of doing the same thing with missile.
As a result, the depth at which these Russian reconnaissance drones can fly behind Ukrainian lines has sharply decreased, Nonka said. According to some estimates, the speed of the interceptor drones is over 300 kilometers per hour, although the exact data about them is kept strictly secret.
Other units use the interceptor drones to destroy "kamikaze" drones long-range "Shahed" missiles that Russia has been firing at Kiev and other cities, sometimes shooting down dozens of them a night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
In the three and a half years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the use of drones has gone from being a secondary tool to one of the main tools of warfare for both sides, Reuters reported.
To hunt them down, interceptor drones must be faster and more powerful than those that have already revolutionized long-range precision strikes and aerial reconnaissance.
Interceptor drones to become ubiquitous
Like the FPV (First Person View) drones that now dominate the battlefield, interceptor drones are controlled by a pilot on the ground via a video feed from their onboard camera.
"When we started working (with these drones), the enemy was flying at 800 or 1,000 meters", said Ukrainian officer Oleksiy Barsuk, who initiated their adoption by the 1129th regiment. "Now they fly at three, four or five thousand - but their (camera) increase is not infinite".
Most of the interceptor drones of this Ukrainian regiment are provided by military charities that finance weapons and equipment through donations from civilians.
Taras Tymochko from the largest of them, "Come Back Alive", said that the organization is now supplying interceptor drones to nearly 90 Ukrainian military units. Since the project began a year ago, the organization says more than 3,000 drones have been shot down using the equipment it provided, with almost half of them destroyed in the past two months alone.
However, these drone interceptors still cannot fully counter incoming missiles or the fast jet drones that Moscow has recently begun using. The organization said the value of the downed Russian aircraft was about $195 million, more than ten times the value of the drones and equipment provided under the project.
Sam Bendet, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, said Russian forces have complained about the effectiveness of large Ukrainian interceptor drones but are also developing their own.
"We are starting to see more and more videos of various types of interceptions from both sides. I think this will accelerate and become more ubiquitous in the coming weeks," Bendet added, as quoted by Reuters.
Ukrainian drones caused a huge fire at an oil depot in an unusual attack by Ukraine over the weekend against the Black Sea resort of Sochi in Russia, the British newspaper "Telegraph" reports. Thick smoke billowed over the city, forcing the Sochi airport to be temporarily closed and more than 100 firefighters were sent to battle the blaze.
The oil refinery was hit by debris from one of 93 Ukrainian drones that flew over Russian territory overnight, including 60 drones over the Black Sea region.
Sochi, which hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics and where Vladimir Putin once owned a villa, has seen a limited number of Ukrainian air strikes during the war.
However, Sunday's attack appears to be part of a wider Ukrainian strategy to target oil refineries and worsen a potential gasoline shortage in Russia this month, the Telegraph reports.
Low domestic supplies, peak seasonal demand and repair work at local refineries are likely to hamper gasoline supplies in August, traders told Reuters. Russian officials said the drone attack on the Black Sea resort of Sochi was accompanied by Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries in the southern Russian cities of Ryazan, Penza and Voronezh.
The Ukrainian military said over the weekend that it had struck oil facilities in Russia, including a major refinery, as well as a military drone launch site and an electronics factory. Ukrainian forces using unmanned systems said they had struck the Ryazan oil refinery, about 180 km southeast of Moscow, setting it on fire. The "Ananefteprodukt" oil depot was also hit. in the Voronezh region, which borders northeastern Ukraine.
Russian emergency services said the fuel tank in Sochi had a capacity of 2,000 cubic meters, and 127 firefighters were needed to tackle the blaze.
Tourists in the Black Sea city told the Russian news website Gazeta.ru that they had been hiding in underground passages as air raid sirens sounded in the resort town. "There were a lot of explosions, right next to us, orange flashes in the sky", one shocked tourist told Russian TV station "Krasnodar", adding: "The sound was terrible, the siren was screaming... my hands are still shaking".
Some tourists, however, made videos of themselves posing in front of the raging flames, lip-syncing to a popular rap song. The three young Russian tourists who appeared in the videos were detained after their clip attracted an unusually large number of viewers online. In a message on the social media platform "Telegram", the Krasnodar Interior Ministry said its officers had "identified and detained the characters of the scandalous video, filmed today against the backdrop of the fire".
Sochi Mayor Andrei Proshunin said on "Telegram" that "a fuel tank had caught fire at an oil depot" in the city's Adler district, adding: "I express my gratitude to the air defense services for their professionalism." Russia's civil aviation authority "Rosaviatsia" said that flights at Sochi airport were also temporarily suspended due to the attack.
In recent months, Russian airports have been repeatedly disrupted by Ukrainian attacks as part of Ukraine's campaign to bring the war home to Russians, and at least one Russian airport was reportedly temporarily closed almost every day in July, the Telegraph notes. The airport shutdowns have sparked unrest across Russia at the height of the summer tourist season and have led to a sharp increase in costs for its aviation and tourism industries, the British newspaper concludes.