Ukraine shoots down 200 drones in one day, Russia loses 61 artillery systems — Kiev

Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday that Russia had lost 61 artillery systems and at least 200 unmanned aircraft in just 24 hours, as the gap between the two major battlefield capabilities appears to be narrowing further.

Since Russian troops entered Ukraine 23 months ago, the Russian military has lost a total of 9,008 artillery systems, 61 of which were lost on this day.Armament of Kyiv The military announced this on Wednesday.

Separately on Tuesday, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavsky, who heads the Ukrainian army’s Tabria force defending the hotly contested Avdiivka, said Kiev had intercepted 200 different Russian drones in the past 24 hours.

Tarnavsky said Russia fired 919 shells on this part of the front line in the past day, resulting in the loss of nearly 400 soldiers, five tanks and 15 artillery systems.

newsweek could not independently confirm Ukraine’s tally and referred an email to Russia’s Ministry of Defense for comment.

Artillery and artillery shells support both Russian and Ukrainian operations, a critical capability that Moscow and Kiev are struggling to maintain as the war rages on.

Ukraine continues to ask its allies for supplies of ammunition and shells for its artillery systems. 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.

“Artillery was very important in this war,” said Davis Ellison, a strategic analyst at the Hague Center for Strategic Studies. newsweek In August 2023.

Since being invaded by Russia in February 2022, Ukraine has spent months of full-scale war building up its “drone army,” constantly developing new airborne vehicles and raising more funds. Drones cover nearly every aspect of combat, from supporting reconnaissance to drone suicide attacks to directing artillery fire.

One of the most well-known types is the first-person view (FPV) drone. Earlier this week, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of the Russian Space Agency and a Russian government official in the annexed Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, said Kiev was using FPV drones to relentlessly raid Russian positions. Ta.

“This is a new type of artillery, high-precision aviation,” Rogozin added in a Telegram post. “Traditional artillery and rocket artillery will be gradually replaced because they are much more accurate, cheaper, and the record of hits on targets will be visible to the operators of these UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).”

In early December, Kyiv’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhail 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.”

This was said by a Ukrainian fighter stationed around the Donetsk town of Avdiivka. newsweek In mid-December, it was announced that Russia had stepped up its use of FPV drones around settlements it had been attacking since early October.

“Russian drones are cheap, so the Russians can use them 24/7,” said Evhen, a major in the Ukrainian National Guard. “They’re in the air 24 hours a day.”

However, in mid-December, a Ukrainian military commander said that in overall numbers, Kiev had one drone for every five to seven pieces of Russian FPV hardware in key battlegrounds in eastern and southern Ukraine. He said that only one has been deployed.

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.

Moscow has certain types of drones that Ukraine does not yet have, Fedorov said. newsweek“They have more money” to pour into the development and production of large numbers of drones, he added.

“It’s difficult to compete with Russia in terms of volume,” he added.