Drones are used in the Ukraine war are becoming increasingly important for both warring parties – and increasingly unpredictable for the soldiers on the battlefield. For the first time, a newly surfaced video is now said to show the use of an autonomous Russian FPV drone. Shortly afterwards, Ukraine announced that it had already deployed autonomous combat drones itself.
At 11.35 a.m. on 6 January, the time had come for a report that many had been waiting for, although nobody was happy about it: Serhiy “Flash”, a Ukrainian soldier and specialist in telecommunications and electronic warfare, reported the use of an autonomous Russian drone on his Telegram channel. “For the first time, I saw with my own eyes an intercepted video of a Russian FPV with machine vision and automatic target detection – and all in thermal imaging mode.” https://militaeraktuell.at/neue-investitionen-in-die-ab212-helis-geplant/ For a better understanding: Both sides (-> to our analysis of current developments in the drone war in Ukraine) currently rely mainly on analog image transmission for their FPV drones in order to increase the range of the systems and improve their robustness against interference signals and obstacles. As a rule, interference in analog transmission manifests itself in increasingly strong noise influences. Within certain limits, bit errors can be repaired digitally, but beyond that the transmission collapses almost abruptly. One disadvantage of analog transmission is that the opponent can very easily intercept the FPV video images from the other side. And this is probably how Serhiy “Flash” (in the video below, an interview with him from last June) obtained the above-mentioned images from a Russian FPV drone. Serhiy “Flash”: “The pilot flies to the target and marks it from above, then the drone does everything else by itself.” https://youtu.be/AN-6hkeCoCY?si=Xcwmq1nJPZlKkn2q
In his Telegram post, Serhiy “Flash” uses four specific points to explain how the use of FPV drones is changing as a result of the new technology:
- Electronic warfare – i.e. the interruption/interference/superposition of the radio signal between pilot and drone becomes ineffective as soon as the target is marked. The drone controls itself and is no longer dependent on functioning signal transmission.
- Experienced pilots are not required. The most difficult part of the flight, the final approach – often an area barely larger than one square meter must be hit – is done by the drone itself.
- The loss of the video image close to the ground no longer automatically means the loss of the drone. Until now, flights over several kilometers have been supported by repeaters in order to enable the radio signals for the video image and control over obstacles and the curvature of the earth even when close to the ground.
- The drone now also takes over the even more difficult exercise of hitting a moving target.
Serhiy “Flash” concludes: “I am very concerned about this development. It will further increase the role of FPV in the war.” https://youtu.be/5SfK8Inw0aE Now that the cat is out of the bag, the Ukrainian military intelligence service also published videos of its own attacks using autonomous drones on its Telegram channel on the evening of January 6. The videos show two attacks by one drone each on Russian air defense systems in Belgorod Oblast. Judging by the infrared images, a Pantsir S1 and possibly a TOR M2E system are targeted and then attacked autonomously by drones. It is unclear what types of UAVs were used. They could be Phoenix Ghosts, which were definitely delivered to Ukraine but are not in use by the regular troops.
