Drone war in Ukraine: FPV swarms, night operations and AI shape 2024

The drone war in Ukraine ranges from first-person view (FPV) drones to the mass night-time use of unmanned aircraft – the conflict has long since become a “War of Drones”. In 2024 this “war of drones” is likely to intensify further. An outlook on current trends and developments.

In a few weeks it will be two years since Russia attacked Ukraine, and the Ukraine war enters its third year. What is remembered from the first weeks of the war are above all images of large armoured formations. Attempts to shape the situation through manoeuvre warfare were followed by ever heavier use of artillery. Rapid advances in which large areas change hands within a few days have remained the exception since the war began. Meanwhile, artillery is also used far less – both sides increasingly lack large-calibre ammunition, and guns are being lost or worn out.

For some time now, therefore, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has dominated events on the battlefield and in the rear – it is considerably cheaper and can be produced in larger numbers. Because reconnaissance drones and other modern surveillance technology are present everywhere, the area of operations has become transparent for both sides. Movements can no longer be hidden from the enemy, down to the individual soldier. Armed drones are available as air support around the clock. What happens above the soldiers' heads is decisive. As far as can be foreseen, this trend will consolidate further in the coming months – as a look at the developments and known figures shows.

FPV drones

The Ukrainians first experimented with “first-person view” drones as early as summer 2022. For these combat trials they introduced mass-produced FPV drones from the Chinese manufacturer DJI. Videos document reconnaissance flights and a field test in which an FPV drone fitted with a warhead was steered into a Russian dugout as a kamikaze drone.
In autumn 2022, the first images of home-built FPV drones emerged from Ukraine, assembled from hobby and sport model-making components. These home builds were cheaper and considerably more capable, but also demanded much more piloting skill.

The successes were “striking” in the truest sense of the word. The Ukrainian armed forces set up schools and training programmes to train new pilots. FPV UAVs continued to be supplied mainly by private, small-scale workshops, largely dependent on donations.
The result: a proliferation of similar devices, each differing in its electronic and flight characteristics.

Russia followed – although there the initiative was initially driven even more by private actors than in Ukraine. The Russian army was at first rather dismissive of the development, and the troops adopted the new weapon only hesitantly. Now, however, both sides produce FPV drones in large series and use them across the board.

Both sides claim, for themselves and for the enemy, that monthly production has now risen from five to six figures. This cannot, of course, be verified. Yet even allowing for the fact that, for a variety of reasons, only 10 to 30 per cent of FPV flights are considered militarily effective, there is a widening gap between the claimed production figures and the videos published by both sides.

Both sides, for instance, speak of a Russian monthly output of 300,000 FPV drones. What can be documented – through published videos and figures on detected and intercepted enemy drones – is only a few hundred missions a month, albeit undoubtedly with a clearly rising trend. Moreover, there have long been enough FPV drones to attack individual soldiers with them. The absolute number remains unclear; the number of missions, however, is rising steadily.

Drone war at night

What is clearly documented, by contrast, is that FPV drones now also fly at night with thermal imaging cameras. Russia led the way here, and Ukraine is catching up. For years, Ukraine has used the large and considerably more expensive copter drones known as Baba Yaga in darkness (span of more than two metres, payload of more than five kilograms). Whether it will move away from this practice in the medium term remains to be seen. There are Russian videos of captured large copter drones being repaired and tested, but Russia has not yet used this type on a larger scale. All that can be seen are Russian fact-finding missions to China, where this type – derived from civilian agricultural drones – is also built.

What is clearly emerging, in any case, is that separate day and night models are appearing in the drone war – probably because of cost and also because availability is limited. The rarer drones with the more expensive thermal imaging modules stay on the ground during the day, because they are much harder for the troops to replace.

Variety versus mass

Ukraine continues to use a considerably wider range of drones than Russia. It is unclear whether it is making a virtue of necessity, deliberately leaving this latitude in order to assess the effectiveness of individual devices in practice, or whether there may be a concept behind it of repeatedly challenging Russian air and electronic defences with changing signatures and frequencies.

At fairly regular intervals, Russian electronic warfare specialists publish a catalogue of the Ukrainian drones in use. This overview, which now covers more than 70 devices in eleven classes, is nevertheless highly incomplete.

Whether new models publicly unveiled for propaganda purposes actually go into service often only becomes clear months later – when the other side presents photos of shot-down or crashed systems.

With their means, both sides repeatedly achieve spectacular successes. The cost and development and production times of the UAVs are all too often almost abstractly low compared with the highly complex, expensive weapon systems with long lead times that drones destroy.

As the entire country lies within range of Russian guided missiles, Ukraine must continue to organise its drone production in a decentralised, small-scale manner. Russia, by contrast, has built and expanded large production facilities. The Russian version of the Iranian Shahed-136 (Geran-2), for example, is built in a special economic zone in Yelabuga near Kazan. How many are built there is not known, but a high three-digit number per month has probably already been reached.

In St Petersburg, LLC STC (Special Technology Center) produces the Orlan drone in steadily increasing numbers. The Orlan is regarded as a kind of “Swiss Army knife” among Russian drones, adaptable to numerous tasks.

Far beyond Ukraine's reach, the Zala Aero Group also produces its Lancet drones – in a former shopping centre in Izhevsk, east of Kazan. Here, too, the monthly production rate is at least in the three-digit range.

Jets and AI

Two major developments are emerging in drone manufacturing. For propulsion over short distances, the electric motor with propeller is evidently prevailing. Where endurance well beyond 90 minutes to two hours and operating radii of clearly more than 100 kilometres are required, however, piston engines with propellers are mainly used. Meanwhile, with the UJ-23 and UJ-25 UAV types, Ukraine is also using two drones powered by a small turbojet. They do not match the range of the piston-engine models, but they fly considerably faster than is possible with a propeller.

Russia could follow here – this has been expected at least since the presentation of the Shahed-238 in Iran. Russian television cited top speeds of between 600 km/h and 800 km/h. Compared with the piston-driven Shahed-131 (Geran-1) and Shahed-136, a considerably shorter range is to be expected here too; it is nevertheless at least 200 kilometres, possibly even more than 300 kilometres.

With artificial intelligence (AI), the question is no longer “if” but only “when”. The aim is for drones to become partly independent of operator and control signals. Before launch, the target area and images or the signature of priority targets are stored – for example an air defence system that takes priority over an artillery unit. Until now, loss of the control signal meant a crash and total loss of the drone. In future, the drone will continue the search on its own in this case and, if appropriate, attack on the basis of the stored signature.

Along these lines, the Lancet manufacturer Zala has for some time been developing and testing a new model designated Product 55. So far, the models have been assembled by hand by the operators and launched by catapult; Product 55, by contrast, is to launch from a container – much like an air defence missile.

Ukraine long searched for a defence against and an answer to the Lancet. It is now preparing to produce a UAV that is said to be clearly superior to the Russian model. French journalist Xavier Tytelman gained insight into this work. For shorter ranges the drone is to receive an electric motor, for longer ranges a piston engine. Like Russia, Ukraine is preparing to combine object recognition with autonomous attack capability.

EW

Electronic intelligence and electronic warfare (EW) have long been part of warfare – in the drone war they have gained an additional playing field. Both sides are making intensive efforts to open up the electromagnetic spectrum for their own forces and to deny it to the enemy. A wide range of technology is used for this: from systems that a single soldier can carry and operate to high-power systems integrated into vehicles.

As with the drones, the range starts with fairly simple, commercially available products whose size and price are designed, for example, for protecting industrial facilities. Added to this are purely military products that belong to a different category in terms of both effectiveness and cost.

Both sides' efforts to protect individual vehicles automatically are likely to have had mixed results. The test vehicles occasionally documented in photos have so far shown no discernible success – the number of successful FPV attacks on vehicles is rising steadily.

There are no reliable figures. But when there is talk of EW rifles and of large systems called “domes”, such as Bukovel-AD, for larger areas, the impression does arise that jammers can provide a certain degree of protection against drone attacks. Russians and Ukrainians alike rely on both variants, with different emphases.

Only in October, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valerii Fedorovych Zaluzhnyi, called for building up capacities to monitor the radio-electronic situation, improving existing domestic EW systems and developing new ones in order to conduct “electromagnetic warfare” across the entire “electromagnetic spectrum”.