May 16, 2025:
Ukrainian drone developers, operating under wartime pressure, have been very innovative. In the last few months the new drone designs in development or recently entering service have been impressive. One of these is a countermeasure for the Russian Fiber Optic Guided, or FOG drones. These jam-proof drones are used to attack Ukrainian troops, but the Ukrainians developed a technique for using the fiber optic cable to locate the Russian drone operators and kill them with First Person View, or FPV drones. So far this year, Russia has been losing many of its experienced drone operators. These are irreplaceable soldiers whose absence makes Russian drone operations less effective.
This increased innovation began with new countermeasures to foster attacks by remotely controlled drone swarms. The usual Russian defense was jamming the control signals. The new Ukrainian swarms had drones capable of operating independently when jammed and continuing the attack with less accuracy and, because it is a swarm with dozens of drones, some are still going to hit the target. This was used against the Russians but the enemy quickly came up with their own new countermeasures.
Ukrainians are able to modify their tactics and technology faster than the Russians, which is critical in mutual drone warfare. One was FPV drones used to plant magnetic mines on the edge of a road or trail Russian armored vehicles use. When the armored vehicles show up, all that moving metal activates the magnetic mines, blowing the tracks or wheels off the armored vehicles. Immobilized crews are terrified and abandon their vehicles, whereupon more armed Ukrainian FPV drones arrive to finish off stalled vehicles.
Ukraine has developed the Flamingo VB140 anti-drone interceptor, a meter-long, fixed-wing, propeller-driven aircraft that can operate at altitudes up to 4,500 meters high and fifty kilometers from its launch site. Flamingo VB140 will intercept, by crashing into them, any airborne drone in its target list which it encounters. If no targets are found Flamingo VB140 will just fall to the ground when its battery is out of power.
By early 2025 the Ukrainian military had ordered production of a number of new FPV drone designs. One of the more impressive of these was Vidmak. While it appears to be just another quadcopter, its software enables it to operate at higher speeds to overtake the fastest wheeled vehicles and disable or destroy them with less than a kilogram of explosives. Able to operate at night and in bad weather, its speed is used for surprise nighttime attacks against enemy troops in trenches or standing in bunker entrances.
Ukrainian developers independently produced several other similar drone designs like U15, Baton, Zeus and Hades. Ukraine is relying more on drones to intercept relatively slow moving Russian cruise missiles. Most of these cost tens of thousands of dollars. Bringing them down with drones that cost five or six hundred dollars has left the Russians with patchy reconnaissance capabilities. Russia never expected Ukrainian drones to be effective anti-aircraft weapons.