Putin laments Ukraine’s ‘gamers with drones’ after overnight FPV attack

With unmanned vehicles at an all-time high in the 23-month war, Russian forces are using first-person view (FPV) drones to engage Ukrainian “gamers” on the front lines against Russian strongholds. A senior Russian official said.

Dmitry Rogozin, a former head of the Russian Space Agency and a Moscow-based official in the now annexed Zaporizhzhia, said Ukrainian drone pilots had carried out “consecutive raids” on Russian positions for several days at undisclosed locations along the front lines. said that he had done so. Region of southern Ukraine.

“In the span of four hours, 24 FPV drones flew into just one base of our volunteer battalion,” he said in a Telegram post on Tuesday.

“This is a new type of artillery, high-precision aviation,” Rogozin added. “This will gradually replace traditional artillery and rocket artillery as they are much more accurate and cheaper, and the target hit records will be visible to the operators of these UAVs.”

newsweek contacted the Ukrainian military for comment via email.

In early December, Kyiv’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is in charge of Ukraine’s drone operations against Russia, said: newsweek FPV drones are becoming more useful than artillery for Ukraine’s frontline fighters.

FPV unmanned vehicles quickly became a “game changer” on the battlefield in Ukraine, destroying large amounts of Russian hardware, Fedorov said.

“They can sometimes work more efficiently than artillery,” he commented. “So FPV drones are certainly a technological revolution, although the technology itself is very simple, but it turns out to be very efficient.”

UK-based drone expert Steve Wright said FPV drones certainly appear to work better than artillery for Ukraine in some cases. newsweek last month. “In many ways, the use of FPV drones on the battlefield is a continuation of the trend of increasingly targeted explosives, especially by Western countries,” he said.

Ukraine continues to rely on its allies for supplies of ammunition and shells for its artillery systems, which remain a critical capability for Kiev. NATO on Tuesday signed a deal to buy $1.2 billion worth of 155mm artillery shells to replenish the alliance’s stockpile after dropping shells on Ukraine.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: “Russia’s war in Ukraine has become a scramble for ammunition, and it is important that our allies replenish their own stockpiles as we continue to support Ukraine.” .

“Why does the Ukrainian army need shells and artillery instead of gamers flying shells and grenades with high-speed drones?” Rogozin wrote on Tuesday. “We must take immediate steps to prevent our adversaries from dominating our skies with the advantage of reconnaissance and killer drones.”

“They breed and multiply. There is no place to hide from them,” Rogozin said in another post on Wednesday. “There is an urgent need to resolve the issue of FPV drone destruction.”

Ukraine has amassed tens of thousands of these drones through fundraising and is ramping up domestic production.

FPV drones are frequently used to record footage of the battlefield, often showing attacks on Russian military targets by Ukrainian kamikaze drones, and the footage is shared by Kiev’s military. Explosive drones are inexpensive, often use off-the-shelf components, and can deliver powerful attacks against enemy vehicles and their personnel.

“The front-line situation relies on drones,” Fedorov said. “This is a 24/7 war.”

However, in mid-December, the Ukrainian military commander said that in terms of overall numbers, Kiev has only one drone compared to five to seven Russian FPV drones in key battlegrounds in eastern and southern Ukraine. He said he had not.

Russian FPV drones are flying into Ukrainian airspace and searching for any targets they find there, Yuriy Fedorenko, commander of Ukraine’s Achilles drone squadron of the country’s 92nd Assault Brigade, told Ukrainian media. Told.

Samuel Bendet of the Center for Naval Analysis, a U.S. think tank, previously said that Ukraine had a monopoly on FPV production as of 2023, but Russia is ramping up its plans and sending large numbers of unmanned vehicles to the front lines. . newsweek.

Bendet said Russia’s FPV development is probably “growing rapidly,” but it’s difficult to determine how many FPV drones are on or in the air above the battlefield.