It might seem like overkill. But there’s a reason the Ukrainian main intelligence directorate devoted precious resources—a surveillance drone, a High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System and at least two attack drones—to a coordinated effort to track and strike a two-man Russian drone team.
As Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its fourth year and resource-fixated U.S. Pres. Donald Trump threatens to nudge the politics of the conflict in Russia’s favor, the Ukrainians are fighting to preserve their most important battlefield edge: their advantage in drones.
The overwhelming strike on the Russian Orlan drone team, somewhere in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast recently, began with a Ukrainian Shark surveillance drone patrolling a snowy dirt road somewhere on the Russian side of the front line in the oblast.
It spotted a solitary civilian-style truck—and followed it. After losing more than 15,000 purpose-made military vehicles, Russian forces increasingly travel—and even attack—in civilian cars, trucks and vans.
The Ukrainian drone team’s curiosity paid off. The Russian truck parked and two Russians piled out, carrying an Orlan surveillance drone between them. The Orlan is one of the Russian armed forces’ primary surveillance drones.
Determined to destroy the Orlan and its launch team before the drone could contribute to Russian surveillance of the front line, the Ukrainian intelligence directorate rang up the Ukrainian army—and requested assistance from one of the army’s American-made HIMARS launchers.
Responding quickly—note that the Orlan team was still setting up its drone for launch—the HIMARS fired what appeared to be an M30 rocket from potentially scores of miles away. The “cheerful cluster munition,” as the intelligence directorate described it, exploded above the Russian drone team, peppering the ground below with lethal fragments.
The Russian operators apparently died or fled, as they were nowhere to be found as the next Ukrainian munition—an explosive first-person-view drone—arrived. The FPV flew through the open back hatch of the truck, blowing up the vehicle. A second FPV drone struck the now-abandoned Orlan. “The battle for freedom continues!” the intelligence directorate crowed.
But that battle is getting harder for the Ukrainians. Desperate to match Ukraine’s all-seeing, all-striking drones but struggling to overcome Ukrainian radio-jamming, Russian forces are deploying more fiber-optic drones that, controlled via long thin cables rather than radio, are unjammable.
To suppress Russian drone teams and preserve their drone edge, the Ukrainians are doubling down on a strategy the U.S. military pioneered in its campaign against insurgent bomb-makers in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade ago. They’re trying to get “left of the boom” and hit the Russian operators before they launch their drones.
But the rightward lurch in U.S. domestic politics threatens the Ukrainian strategy. Trump is pressing Ukraine to give the United States half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, as payment for past U.S. aid to Ukraine, which has included dozens of HIMARS launchers and thousands of rockets for them.
Worse, Trump has hinted that he may withhold future aid unless Ukraine agrees to the mineral extortion. “We have to get something,” Trump said, ignoring the obvious benefits of U.S. support for a democracy battling an authoritarian aggressor. “We can’t continue to pay this money.”
In expending a rocket it may not be able to replace in order to strike that Russian Orlan team, the Ukrainian intelligence directorate underscored how important it was to hit the team. But as Trump’s demands escalate, there may soon come a time when Ukraine runs out of some of the weapons it currently uses to suppress Russian drones—and thus maintain its own drone advantage.
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