Solving the Drone Dilemma: Can Russia Succeed?

The face of the Ukrainian conflict continues to change, and many analysts and commentators alike are stuck interpreting the battlefield with an outdated model. Others stick to deficient generalities, based on vague cliches about drones, ignoring the subtle nuances at play on the frontline. Let us take a look and examine where the real war stands today, with a focus on answering the ultimate question on everyone’s mind: can Russia still “decisively” win this war which, in the eyes of many, is trending toward an entropic drone stalemate in perpetuity?

i.

To answer that question, we must examine the current on-the-ground realities, rather than rehashing out-of-date tactics from last year or the year before. One example of popularly repeated-but-dated information, is that artillery still accounts for ~90% of casualties, or thereabouts. While neither is it true that drones inflict 90% of casualties as some pro-Ukrainians swear, it is likewise no longer true that artillery dominates to such an extent as it did even a year ago, let alone further back. It’s difficult to determine the exact percentage, but at this point it would not be unreasonable to suggest that somewhere between 40-60% of deaths are drone related.

This is inferred by a variety of methods:

1. Direct quotes from frontline units. For a long time only the Ukrainian side contended that drones were their primary means of fire damage, but this was understood because they lacked in other weapons systems compared to Russia. However, now even many Russian units are reporting that drones are outweighing other systems on their section of the front.

2. Direct video evidence. We see less and less footage even from the Russian side of artillery destruction, and disproportionately more drone strikes. This is particularly the case with the advent of fiber optic or ‘optical fiber’ drones, which increase the success rate of hits exponentially.

3. The sheer scale of drone production on both sides has grown far beyond any other weapon systems. For example, while Russian artillery and glide-bomb production may increase by 20-30% per year, drone production is seeing parabolic increases of hundreds or even thousands of percentage points year-on-year.

An example, various sources claim Ukraine produced 20,000 FPVs per month in early 2024, and now produces over 200,000 per month in 2025, an increase of ~1000%.

Ukrainian producers were delivering about 20,000 of the dish-plate-sized quadcopters a month at the start of 2024, but increased investment and better-organized supply chains and manufacturing processes spiked output to 200,000 aircraft a month in January 2025, Havryliuk said.

https://www.warquants.com/p/factory-to-frontline-pipeline

Russia is said to be seeing similar figures. The scale is so staggering, that most people are not capable of comprehending it, and are stuck in obsolete paradigms of the war.

I’ve posted the photo before, depicting a Russian EW unit’s trophies of disabled AFU drones just on one small portion of the front:

Today a photo emerged claiming to show the web of fiber optics cables stringing over the battlefield—reportedly after a morning frost, which made the thin wires more visible:

Granted, the sheer scale of drone production, usage, and success may be vastly overstated. For instance, even if both sides produce 100-300k drones a month as claimed, they also both admit that the vast majority of drone strikes are unsuccessful, with the systems either brought down by EW or simply missing the target.

Let’s say 300k+ drones are produced per month, as now claimed, by the Russian side, with only 10-30% of them succeeding in some way, even if it’s a glancing blow which does not disable the target. That’s about 30-90k hits per month. Artillery is fired at a rate of 10-20k shells a day, or 300-600k shots per month, by the Russian side. If we assume a similar 10-30% do some damage to a target, we can educe that anywhere between ~30k to ~150k artillery hits are being registered per month, which does not include various other systems like aerial bombs, etc.

Judging by those numbers, it’s easy to see that drones could plausibly account for at least 20-30% of scored hits, if not much more, given their higher accuracy. It may be better to break it down by type of target: tube and rocket artillery and aerial bombs likely account for the vast majority of damage to infrastructural targets like weapons depots, ammo dumps, fortifications, workshops, stationary equipment, etc., while drones may account for a proportionally high amount of infantry kills—like I said, not necessarily the majority, but perhaps 35-65%. A huge portion of videos we now see feature not only FPV kills of infantry, but large hexacopter and agricultural ‘agro-drones’ dropping bombs on dugouts, etc. Drones have also weakened opposing artillery due to their increasing range, which now regularly allows them to roam 15-20km behind enemy lines—and even much farther in the extreme examples—which is precisely where most artillery systems work. This forces artillery systems to retreat out of range and be ineffective, with only the minority portion of systems with superior range able to consistently function along some fronts.

And there are new kinds of drones appearing all the time—to show one example on the Russian side, the Molniya-2, a kind of hybrid cross-OWA-FPV:

⚡️ Crews of the Molniya-2 strike drones of the Center group destroyed a fortified firing point of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Krasnoarmeysk direction.

Not only has production of fiber optic drones skyrocketed on both sides, but “machine vision” AI-powered drones have been increasingly as well. Here’s one recent example of a Ukrainian one, which appears to have missed, but only by an inch:

Footage has emerged of the use of the new Ukrainian attack drone UAS SETH, which uses AI machine targeting. In appearance, the drone resembles a smaller copy of the Geranium, but has an optical guidance system with automatic acquisition and target acquisition and is designed to destroy objects in the frontline zone. Looks like it needs work, because it missed.

And another more effective one, called the Shrike 10CV:

Ukrainian specialists, on the other hand, increasingly find all kinds of new Russian drones with this AI ‘machine vision’ on the front:

Recently CEO of Anduril Palmer Luckey bragged about how his company’s Altius-700M drone, which according to him features fully autonomous hunter-killer mode, has already been widely used in Ukraine.

These days the most successful drones are modular, and can be adapted to a variety of EW conditions and general tasks. Russian forces have been rolling out a highly modular copy, which can change cameras depending on needs, and most importantly, the antenna itself, allowing it to operate on different frequency bands to out-maneuver whatever EW frequencies the Ukrainians are favoring in that particular section of front:

Note they mention the drone also has AI machine vision in the final section of flight, whereby it can autonomously hold the target in case it is jammed. In fact, the developer mentions they are working on enhancing the AI capabilities even further, integrating a topographical autonomy that will allow the drone to hunt its own targets in an unknown environment, presumably after understanding the surroundings via a kind of terrain mapping (TERCOM) integration.

UGV, or ground bots, have also been increasing in vast numbers on both sides, mostly DIY or cheaply made variants.

Ukraine has virtually stopped using naval drones in a ‘kamikaze’ role, instead deploying them as mothership carriers for FPVs which attack Russian coastal targets around Crimea and the Kinburn Peninsula. In a newly released video, one can even see how Russian Pantsir-S1 missile systems are unable to hit the tiny, maneuverable drones:

It should be noted it is a good sign they fired at it, which means the Pantsir radar is at least picking the small cross-section craft up, but the missiles simply were never designed to hit such tiny, jittery targets. A new class of Pantsir-SMD mini-missiles made specifically for small drones is still being developed and rolled out.

One of the last refuges against drones now being extensively utilized by both sides happens to be a rather primitive solution: the creation of anti-drone net corridors to secure the entire length of important supply routes. Russians have now systematized the installation of these on various fronts, with engineering troops specially outfitted for the task, as can be seen below:

Click to enlarge pictures:

And Ukraine is doing the same—here’s a spliced video of two new Ukrainian supply routes:

It brings up the question of why the world’s most powerful and advanced countries cannot come up with a solution that effectively neutralizes these drones. EW (Electronic Warfare) was meant to be the silver bullet, with Russia as world leader in this intricate art—but it turns out, fiber optic and autonomous AI drones completely negate the jamming side of EW.

There is DEW (Directed Energy Weapons) like microwave emitters which can easily fry the electronic motherboards on a whole swarm of small drones at a time. The problem is, these systems are hugely expensive because they require massive amounts of energy directed in a tiny cone, which would never be able to stop swarms coming in from every side—and above—as is now common practice on the front.

One of Ukraine’s top radio-electronics experts Serhiy “Flash” Beskrestnov recently ridiculed the very idea after someone posted the following video: