Lawfare Daily: How Ukraine Is Winning the Drone War

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even if you do shoot down, you know, 90% of these drones, the 10% that gets through are going to cause significant damage. It's the Laughairepauntcast. I'm Anastasia LaBatina, Ukraine Fellow Ed Laughaire, with Jimmy Rushton, a co-eve-based journalist and security analyst.

“I think the longer this campaign goes on, the more difficult and the more strange Russian logistics will come.”

And that will cause problems again, the tactical level, because trucks can't move without fuel, tanks can't move without fuel, soldiers can't fight without bullets, and the drone teams can't fight without drones. So it's going to cause them significant problems, I think. Jimmy and I talked about how Ukraine seems to be gaining an upper hand in its drone war against Russia. And about Russia's latest missile strike on Kiev.

We brought you on to talk about your recent piece at the Kova Independent, where you've analyzed the Ukrainian drone war against Russia. And in that piece, you basically argue that Ukraine has recently gained the upper hand in its drone operations, and you go through, you know, the tactical level, the middle strike operations, and the deep strike operations. You also talk about the interceptors and Russians, ahead attacks against Ukraine.

So I want to go through all of that, but perhaps in more depth than the article "What Allow For?" And I want to start with the tactical. So we know that drones these days account for more than 80% of all of the casualties on the battlefield, which is, you know, a striking figure to think about. You've investigated that Ukraine is surging ahead in several aspects of the tactical drone level usage.

“So can you just sort of explain what it is that the Ukrainians are doing that maybe they haven't done before, and why is it working?”

Sure. So essentially the drone war is, is comparative obviously you have two sides, and both sides attempt to achieve dominance in this arena.

But unmanned systems are the most important weapon or category of weapon systems in this war.

And as you said, currently they account for over 80% of all casualties killed and wounded on the front. At the tactical level, a moment ago, about the tactical level, we'll talk about date today, offensive and defensive operations. Ukraine increasingly uses drones to win these operations, whether they are, you know, offensive or defensive engagements. They use FV drones, drop drones and large bomb drones to inflict casualties on the Russians and to defend their positions or to, you know, support offensive operations. Obviously infantry is still vital to these operations, but drones pay an incredibly important supporting role in these types of engagements.

has been something of a game changer here where really wrecked Russian communications, have they, have they been able to adapt to that role?

“They've tried, so Starlink is an incredibly effective form of communication. It's very difficult to jam, it's incredibly fast.”

Because the nature of the system essentially requires a line of sight to the sky, but it doesn't need, you know, wires, it's relatively cheap, a Starlink mini is about $300. And it provides very, very fast speed to enables real time streaming of high definition video, so you can have a drone team on the front flying weak on drones. And that footage can be being back to a command center to enable commanders to have, you know, real time, a situational awareness of what's happening on the battlefield.

And if you go into the Ukrainian command center, you'll see the banks of monitors that relay footage in real time of these drones, which monitor the front lines continuously.

So the Ukrainians have this, the Russians don't.

“And the Russians have been trying to adapt. They've been using these Wi-Fi bridges by this, this company ubiquity.”

That it supplies large numbers of these, these Wi-Fi bridges to the, to the Russians. But it's not as good. They are far more vulnerable. They have to be placed at, you know, high levels, some poor Russian combat engineer has to call up, you know, telecommunications masks and install them and they're very vulnerable to drone strikes. And they're using old fashioned battlefield telephones, which use, you know, wide connection between positions. But, you know, this is nowhere near as effective wars as, you know, high speed and resilient to interference.

So resilient to jamming, resilient to, you know, just that the everyday kind of degradation of a battlefield showing, et cetera, that you would get it. The, the Russians really don't have any arms at the storm, and it's, it's head and shoulders above anything that they have access to. I want to now kind of skip the middle strike and owner and because I want to come back to that and focus most of our discussion on that.

“I think it's the most interesting part of that discussion. And I want to go for now to deep strikes, which I've covered for a lot of fair a little bit before.”

And it's kind of a very flashy in the media kind of subject. Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil infrastructure, industrial target, very, very deep interaction territory. And, you know, in these kind of very stunning operations, Ukraine has been doing that for many, many months, right, over a year now at least. Is there, is there anything special happening recently that's sort of raising the cost for the Russians?

I mean, that the first Ukrainian long-range drone strikes in the Russian territory were conducted in 2022 using off the shelf Chinese drones that they purchased from Ali Barbar.

But what you're seeing is this maturation of multiple Ukrainian indigenous drone programs that have created a whole range of deep strike drones. And they're all manufacturing their own models, so you have, you have firepoint, you have the beaver drone, you have the lootie drone, a bunch of others. And they've all essentially, you know, started mass-producing these things. They're relatively cheap. The 5.FP1 is about $55,000. The lootie and the beaver are slightly more expensive. But, you know, they're very effective, and we've got them to the point where Ukraine is now firing or launching hundreds of drones into Russia every night.

And this has come at the same time as Russia's own long-range drone program, which uses Shahid's, which is an Iranian supply drone, which the Russians now mass-producer in Alabuga in Tartistan. They call it the "Jurran". Russia still fires huge numbers of drones at Ukraine, about 6,500 a month. But the Ukrainians have become far more capable than knocking these out the sky, so it's interesting using this. This Ukrainian long-range strike campaign really become very, very effective, very capable of inflicting severe damage on the Russian economy and Russian military industrial sites.

At the same time as the Russian deep-stroke drone campaign has become less effective because of Ukrainian adoption, particularly the FPV intercepted the program. I wanted to ask actually by the interceptor, so Ukraine now has, and for a while, you know, Ukraine has had kind of staggering very successful and very high rates of interception of these drones, right, the Shahid's or the Russian variant they get on.

Is it similar to the same in Russia? Is there a kind of a mass production of interceptor drones? How are the Russians approaching that technology?

No, there isn't, so Russia has interceptor drones, like Ukraine does, but they haven't invested in the program, probably because Ukraine essentially, because Russia had had to start in the one-way attack munitions of Shahid's.

“It was the impetus was on Ukraine to create a council measure to that, so that's why they put a lot of time and effort into developing these FPV interceptors.”

And also very, very important to target Russian tactical and operational level reconnaissance drones. So these subcams, Zalos, which were flying over Ukrainian positions and observing everything that was happening on the ground.

The initial phase of the interceptor drones were to target these Russian reconnaissance drones.

They weren't originally designed to target Shahid's that came later, because Shahid's fly a lot faster than these Russian reconnaissance drones. Essentially, although the Russians do have the access to this technology, it's not as extensive.

“Also Russia is just a bigger country, so it's more difficult for Russia to defend itself against drones than is to the Ukrainians.”

You know, in regards to the interceptor program, it really does change the game in regards to economics simply because you average interceptor drone costs about 2,300 to 3,000 dollars, which is very, very cheap for any form of addifence munition. Significantly cheaper than an incoming Russian drone, roughly each Shahid is about 35,000 dollars. That's for the very cheapest they can range up to about 120,000 dollars. But the cheapest model is about 35,000 dollars. 35,000 dollars. So it kind of really neatly changes the cost per engagement compared to what it used to be, which was having to use CESTER missiles or anti aircraft artillery,

which was significantly less effective than either a self-termist or a FPV interceptor. Yeah, I mean, in regards to Russia's mass drone, it's against two of both of us live in GIF, and we've talked many times about how really the drone threat is barely perceived the threat at all. I mean, both of us civilians, you know, kind of having to make calculations when to take shelter, etc., and you know, correct me from wrong, we're neither a state that drone threat really seriously, because the interception rates are so high.

“So, yeah, I want to now talk about the middle strike campaign, the Ukrainian middle strike campaign, which I think is the most interesting part of it.”

And when we talk about middle strike, we're talking about the distances, you know, between 25 and 200 kilometers away from the front line roughly. And Ukraine has been developing more and more technologies capable of targeting, you know, various Russian sites at that distance. And it's been ramping up that campaign and doing it very effectively, and it's causing a lot of, you know, leaking a lot of havoc and causing a lot of chaos on the Russian side.

Can you talk a little bit about the targets that Ukraine is choosing at this range and why they're so critical?

Sure, so essentially, but as you said, you're talking about the operational depth between about 20, 25 kilometers to 200 kilometers from the front. So in that area, you're talking about elephants, systems, you're talking about logistics operations, so that's both the trucks that carry logistics from supply depots to the front. And also the supply depots itself, so fuel dumps, ammunition depots, command centers, anything really that supports operations at the tactical level. So when you strike these targets to the operational level, you make tactical level operations significantly more difficult because if a soldier has no ammunition,

if artillery has no shells, or increasingly if a drone unit has no drones, they can't really do that much. So it's about, you know, creating problems with the tactical level, and also when you're talking about strikes on air defense systems, it's increasingly the case that it improves the ability of Ukraine to carry out operators. You know, the strategic level using deep strike, because you're removing air defense systems that would have potentially shot down these these drones that are going further and further.

So yeah, no, it's facing significant, and you're seeing a lot of strikes along the M14 highway, which is long the coast of, as of, and see if it's all sorry.

Occupied Crimea to mainland Russia, and, you know, there is this patch of occupied Ukrainian territory there with several highways, you know, M14 and M18, the Russians used different names for them. It's a little confusing, but the key point is that there are several very critical roads there, and as far as I understand, very recently Ukrainian forces have began systematically targeting those areas for the first time.

“And it's caused so many problems that part of that highway have even been closed to, you know, civilian traffic, right?”

Yeah, so the Russians call it the R280, which is the the road, as you said, from from Rustov and Dawn, down to Crimea. And they run a lot of logistics along that road, so Ukraine has been using a variety of different systems to hit things on that road, but primarily the Hornet. A lighting munition, which was developed by Eric Schmidt's General Tournament, it's very, very cheap, it's about $5,000, but it's very effective. As of, I've been using them with star links, it's dropped on the top, and that has increased around about 200 kilometers, so, you know, that, that, that effective, that cheap.

And it causes problems for Russia, because you'll talk about a system that can be deployed on mass, that is, that is, again, cheap that can be produced in large quantities. Like, is there anything that the Russians can do to counter it, or are they doing anything now? That's, you know, that's humping at all? You know, there are, there are potentially ways that you could counter them, you could devote more forces to anti-grown operations.

But the problem is, when you're talking about something that's so cheap and capable of being deployed in such large numbers, even if you do shoot down, you know, 90% of these, these drones,

the, the 10% that gets through are going to cause significant damage. And again, it's, it's, a lot of war is about economics.

“If you've got a munition, which costs $5,000, which can take out a truck that costs $80,000 or whatever, that's a significant, you know, exchange rate, right?”

That's a significant. You don't need that many drones to get through to, to, to, to tip the balance in your favor. And, and Russian logistics have always been pretty poor. They aren't US military as much as they would like to think that they are.

And, and they've never had very good logistics.

And this is increasing the straining logistics. You're already seeing keys to fuel and military, you're also seeing keys to fuel and Crimea. So, I think the longer this campaign goes on, the more difficult and the more straining the Russian logistics will become. And that will cause problems again, you, the tactical level, because trucks can't move without fuel. Tanks can't move without fuel, soldiers can't fight without bullets and drone teams can't fight without drones.

So, it's going to cause them significant problems, I think. Yeah, it really seems like the middle strike campaign has the potential to create significant change. And, and just have significant impact in the short to meet him term in a way that the deep strike campaign can't.

“Not, you know, not to say that the deep strikes aren't important. They are very important, but it's, I think the math there is is very different.”

And you're really looking at like kind of annual or longer term impacts of, you know, chipping away at the Russian oil infrastructure. Whereas here, as you've said, if trucks don't have fuel, that's a very immediate kind of impact on the battlefield. And you, we can see already that Ukraine is really leaning into this, so the Ukrainian Defense Minister, then newly appointed Defense Minister, Mahalo Federov, just yesterday actually announced what he called a log down.

Very flashy and a very kind of typical Ukrainian government communications fashion.

And basically, this logistical logged on program is the government allocating an extra $5 billion, which is around $110 million,

a little more than that, to procuring more drone technology specifically for those middle strikes. And Federov said that quoting, "We're seizing the initiative using technology and the cold math of the war to paralyze operations." So the Ukrainian government seems to be really prioritizing this. Yeah, it's very interesting. I wanted to ask also about the recent Russian strike on Kiev.

Both of us live in Kiev, but I wasn't actually in the city during this strike.

But Jimmy, you live like 200 meters, 300 meters away from where there was what looked like a direct cruise missile hit.

“Do you want to just talk a little bit about this recent last weekend's attack and sort of what happened there?”

Sure, what I mean, as you correctly stated, it was our cruise missile cage, one of one apparently, which hit a office of the DSNS, which is a, it's the Ukrainian ambulance and rescue service, essentially, and the Chernobyl Museum, which was just behind it. And yeah, it was very loud, and it blew out quite a few windows on my street, not in my building, thankfully. But it damaged a significant, you know, part of our neighborhood, which is, you know, obviously, it's very different. When you, as a journalist, you, you visit lots of destroyed areas of Kiev and other cities, but it's obviously different when it's your area of Kiev that's, that's been hit.

Thankfully, you know, obviously it did a lot of damage to the building that it struck, but it seems like most of the other buildings will be relatively quickly repaired,

because that's what the Ukrainians do.

There was a business center that got hit by a shall-head drone about two, two, three months ago. They also hit the synagogue for local synagogue at that time, all very close. This is in your neighborhood, of Kiev. This is in my neighborhood, yeah. And, you know, that's been completely repaired now, it looks like nothing had happened.

“So, I think, you'll see, you know, as, as happens, life goes on, that would pair the buildings.”

Thankfully, nobody was killed in this attack. Nobody was killed in your neighborhood, but I think two people were killed in the, in the wider attack. Yeah, but in general, in the wider attack on Kiev, two people got killed, yeah. In this Christmas hospital, nobody was killed. Yeah, yeah.

So, it's, you know, it's a terrible thing, but I think one nice thing you saw, so there was this one cafe that was just opened the day before. And, you know, the owner was understandably very upset that his cafe had been hit, all been damaged by the shop wave. So, he posted on Facebook and he even penned it around. Story about it, and then lots of Ukrainians came up with a queue to buy coffee from him, which is very sweet. So, it's, you do see kind of the communities coming together during times like this, and you see kind of people looking after each other.

But, yeah, it's, you know, it's not pleasant when large explosive devices land, close to your apartment. No, it's not speaking of large explosive devices. The Russians also used the Russianic missile, which they're intermediate range ballistic missile that's nuclear capable. And, you know, it's supposed to make everyone shatter and fear.

“They've also used two of them, I think, in the latest attack.”

This was only the third time that they've used this. I've used it against the crane if I'm correct. There was one hit on Neepro, and then there was one hit on Leave. Sometime ago, and then this is the third. And, the Russians have really, you know, as they do with all of their new technology and new weapons,

they try to sell it as this like invincible missile that's ultra powerful and possible to shoot down.

Of course, nuclear capable, so that's, you know, scary or supposed to be scary. And, every time they use it against the crane, what, what happens is that there is really very minimal damage. I mean, there is damage, but by the standards of all other Russian attacks in Ukraine, like the damages quite minimal. And you actually have gone to the side of where this latest atashnik missile hit. Can you just talk a bit more about what you saw there and sort of what this part of the attack was and why the Russians did it?

Sure. Well, I mean, so almost every long-range mission in Russia fires Ukraine is nuclear capable. So you could stick in nuclear warhead on every Christmas on this missile that Russia fires at Ukraine. You know, that doesn't really say that much. That the interesting thing about Russian is it was specifically designed to carry nuclear weapons. So for example, in this kind of, I can carry a conventional warhead, classification warhead or nuclear warhead.

And it's effective at delivering any of those. The Russianic is not effective at doing anything of them to literally nuclear weapons because it's essentially, it's not particularly accurate. But this when you design a weapon system to deliver nuclear weapons, you don't need to be precisely accurate as you do when you're delivering a conventional weapon. Also, the munitions are relatively small. They arrive at significant speed, but they're not that big.

This is because Russianic uses Murfs, which is multiple independently targeted military vehicles, which is designed to overwhelm missile defense and deliver multiple nuclear warheads on the target.

It's essentially completely useless at delivering a conventional payload. And when I, I went to the site and it was where in the very, very small area that it hit, it's quite destructive. But not as destructive as a conventional ballistic missile, or it was around about the sort of level of destruction that I would say I've seen from Shahid's. Shahid drones, possibly less. Actually, the thing about Shahid is that it has a high explosive warhead and it can deliver a shrapnel.

There was no shrapnel damage at these locations, essentially. What you saw is that these very, these suddenly unique ones were very, very fast. They punch through the, the roof of these garages and created, you know, these garages will burn out and destroyed.

But the neighboring garages were not, they were basically completely untouched.

So, you know, it's a very expensive way of delivering a message.

“Except it seems like nobody actually cares about the message, right?”

No, I think the initial strike was definitely far more shocking and intimidating, but at this point. You mean the first time they've used it? The first time they used it in in neat probe, but even then, you know, Russian military bloggers were complaining about the lack of impact, because it really is not. It hits the roots of some industrial minister industrial units in in neat probe, but it didn't do much damage. And again, significantly less damage than a conventional ballistic missile or conventional cruise missile.

So, again, coming back to economics, because a lot of wars about economics, right? You're spending 50 to 100 million.

Nobody knows the true cost, but it's between 50 to 100 million on this thing. To cause relatively little damage and to, you know, create a lot of noise and a lot of spectacle and a lot of light. I actually saw the Rationalian land from my balcony, because I'm one of these crazy people, that being a journalist being a kind of security analyst, I look at what's happening. I don't go to shelter. Which is like the exact opposite of what you're fighting to.

But away from the windows, but anyway.

“Oh, no, I was on the other side of the window, so yeah, but I think again, so the point of being a journalist at least from my perspective is, you know, you want to witness these things.”

You want to tell people what's happening and I still want to stay alive. But anyway, I'm not going to let you on what to do with your signal. But so, so I saw the Rationalian landing and it was very underwhelming to be honest. Again, significantly less intimidating than a conventional weapon, a conventional ballistic missile, conventional cruise missile. So, it's an expensive way of attempting to send a message, which is increasingly not being listened to.

Yeah, I mean, every time the Russians are preparing to send an Rationalian missile, intelligence services get a wind of that, because the preparations for the launch are quite distinct from other launches. And every time, like in the three times, the Rationalian has been sent at Ukraine, the U.S. Embassy posts this special security alert. And that's kind of when everybody knows that they're going to send a Rationalian. And it's interesting that the U.S. Embassy doesn't, I mean, correct me from wrong to me.

But I haven't seen any similar warnings about any other type of attack. It's only a Rationalian stuff that they sort of publish these for, but it's such a contrast, because they're actually quite underwhelming. I'm objectively like I'm pretty sure they haven't actually killed anyone. And the three times that they've been used. So yeah, I mean, it's definitely part of Russia's broader sort of campaign of intimidation and how they're signaling their displeasure with sort of an event with certain Ukrainian attacks.

I mean, just recently, a few days ago, they've started this new wave of threats, basically announcing this new campaign of target strikes against Kiev.

And they've publicly called on all foreign diplomats to leave Kiev. And we're witnessing this now sort of a few days after that that nobody seems to care. Like, I haven't heard of any.

“I mean, I think there may have been a few embassies that have evacuated part of their stuff, but not any of the key, like British embassy, American embassy, all of the European teams.”

Like, nobody is responding to it, which, you know, just speaks to how overused this fear-mongering tactic is, right? Yes, so as far as I'm aware, no embassies have closed. We'll have left here as a response to this Russian threat. So yeah, I, you know, Russian makes these delicous threats all the time. And I think that the problem with making a lot of threats is that if you don't follow up on them, people stop paying attention.

You're seeing this, this kind of Russia was so delicous and so threatening.

And so that they come out with all these ridiculous statements all the time. It gets to the point where, you know, they just become background noise. And, you know, if I was the Russians, I think. Part of it is, it's a little bit worrying for them because when they do actually want to issue a genuine threat, everyone's going to ignore them.

“And that's why it's good to not be so delicous.”

And if you look at most governments, most governments don't speak like this. So if, for example, the British government came up tomorrow and said, you know, we're going to bomb a country.

You probably take that quite seriously because the British government never says that.

But with the Russians, they say. I mean, there also not had war, but yes. We also not had war, right?

“But, but, you know, it's like if if Russia talks about invading the Baltic countries all the time, it talks about thinn and it talks about, you know,”

it was to our menu the other day because our menus left the CTSO. And it's just like, it's just constant stream of threats from Russia towards everyone. And people just tune it out because it's just constant and the threats. Yeah, they're so bad at closing this outlandish and just ridiculous that it doesn't have the impact that Russia, that Moscow wants it to have at this point. Well, on that note, Jimmy, thank you so much for coming on.

Hopefully we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you very much. The law of her podcast is produced by the law of her institute.

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