Russian Troops Left Their Warehouse Doors Open. Ukrainian Drones Flew Right Inside—And Blew Up A Bunch Of Armored Vehicles.

David Axe

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FPV drones burn down a warehouse full of Russian vehicles.VIA CENSOR

Seemingly emboldened by the Russian conquest of Avdiivka, a former Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine, the Russian army reportedly shipped some of its best armored vehicles to southern Ukraine in anticipation of a separate offensive.

But Ukrainian forces located the warehouses where the Russians were stashing the T-72 and T-80 tanks, a BMP-3 fighting vehicle and a BREM engineering vehicle.

And then some very skilled Ukrainian drone operators from the Separate Presidential Brigade flew their explosives-laden first-person-view drones through the warehouses’ open doors and systematically demolished the vehicles inside. “As if in a shooting range,” according to Ukrainian media outlet Censor.

Soon the warehouses were burning. And the vehicles inside—two tanks, a BREM, a BMP and several gun-trucks and supply trucks together worth millions of dollars—cooked. There’s video of the whole debacle.

The cost of the strike to the Ukrainians? Just $5,000, according to Censor.

The drone raid is notable not just for the extreme skill of the Ukrainian operators, but also for the apparent range of the strike. The Russian army isn’t likely to pack tanks and BMPs into warehouses within normal range of Ukraine’s two-pound FPV drones. Two miles or so.

The implication is that the Ukrainians extended the range of their first-person quadcopters, possibly by flying them in a long formation with a larger “repeater” drone that captured, and rebroadcast, the FPVs’ command signals. With the help of a repeater drone, an FPV might range more than 10 miles.

But if the Ukrainians could locate a warehouse complex full of tanks 10 miles behind the front line, why not strike it with much heavier weapons than drones—artillery, rockets, even glide-bombs—and guarantee the instantaneous destruction of the entire complex?

The answer is obvious. The United States was the main supplier of Ukraine’s heavy munitions, and Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress since October have refused to vote on fresh aid to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces are running out of their heaviest weapons.

They’re not running out of drones, however. A network of thousands of small workshops spread across Ukraine, and funded in great part by small donations, churns out at least 50,000 FPV drones a month. More and more, these $500 drones are doing the work that artillery would do faster and more destructively.

In that sense, the warehouse raid is bad news for Ukraine. Yes, it’s embarrassing for the Russians that they lost, miles from the front, nearly a company of vehicles to a handful of tiny drones.

But it’s equally appalling to the Ukrainians that they had little choice but to attack with drones instead of with, say, M30/31 rockets.