As of: March 26, 2024, 12:17 p.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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Ukrainian vision of the future: A webcam image shows flames and smoke over the dome of the Kremlin Senate building.
The picture is from May 2023. The Kremlin claims that Ukrainian drones struck.
The Ukrainian drones could now actually reach that far.
© IMAGO/Kremlin Red Square CCTV
She can do Marathon: the newly developed drone called “Evil”.
Thanks to its ingenuity, Ukraine is putting Moscow within reach of its revenge.
Kyiv – Ulrike Franke could be right.
“Ukraine has become a drone power in recent years and especially since the beginning of the war,” Franke from the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations told
ZDF
.
And she is pretty sure: “It is likely that Ukraine will emerge from this war as an important drone manufacturer country.” With the Magura 5 surface drone, the defenders against Vladimir Putin had almost become a naval power, now this seems to them Hussar piece also seems to have been successful in the air.
The latest innovation in the Ukraine war is called Liutyi (in German: “evil, combative”) and can fly – and really far.
Russia is already attributing the massive Ukrainian drone attack on the Beriev aircraft plant in Taganrog at the beginning of March to this new type of Ukrainian drone - which would mean that it can cover at least 1,000 kilometers.
And that would not only far exceed the German Taurus cruise missile with its 500 kilometer range, but would also dwarf the Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of around 200 kilometers.
That would mean that the bickering over German cruise missiles would come to an end and Ukraine could take the war back to Vladimir Putin's doorstep - using its own resources.
The new marketing: social media presentation with a cat and houseplant
At the end of last year, Mykhailo Fedorov announced to the
Euromaidan Press
that Ukraine would build an army of thousands of drones with depth attack capabilities this year.
According to the Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation, around ten private companies in Ukraine have now constructed drones that can reach Moscow and St. Petersburg.
“This is a cost-effective solution that can be easily used from any location.
“The remote control minimizes the need for personnel and the risk of human losses in combat operations,” enthused the developers of the Magura 5 sea drone in the Ukrainian online magazine
Militarnyi
- Ukraine has now given wings to its innovative strength and is projecting a similar cheap solution into the sky .
Details are secret; at the end of 2023, the Ukrainian company Ukroboronprom first spread claims on social media that a developed combat drone had gone through “a series of successful test phases”.
At that time, a photo of a model with a cat and a houseplant appeared on Deputy Minister of Strategic Industries Anna Gvozdiar's Facebook page, which then went viral.
Euromaidan Press
reports that since the beginning of 2024, Ukraine has already deployed its new indigenous long-range unmanned aircraft “Liutyi” operationally on a mass scale for precise attacks on targets deep inside Russia.
More than a dozen of Russia's high-value industrial facilities were paralyzed, including refineries, oil depots and factories - within a radius of 800 kilometers from Ukraine's borders.
The appearance of the drone is vaguely reminiscent of the Israeli Heron, which the Bundeswehr also uses for reconnaissance.
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The new marathon drone: 75 kilograms of explosives up to 1,000 kilometers away
Militarnyi writes
that the fuselage is in the form of an integrated twin-jet rocket-shaped missile.
It is powered by an internal combustion engine with a pusher propeller in the rear.
This arrangement was probably chosen to balance the weight so that a heavy explosive device could be installed in the bow - it is said to be able to transport up to 75 kilograms of explosives.
The drone has a fixed landing gear with wheels, which enables the use of a classic aircraft take-off by accelerating on the runway.
The relatively small dimensions of the aircraft make it possible not to be tied to airfields and to carry out take-offs, especially from hard-surfaced highways.
“The new drone forces are not a question of the future, but rather something that should lead to a very concrete result in the near future”
Volodymyr Selenskyj in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The dimensions are unknown.
The design with the long, two-part tail unit is reminiscent of the Heron, which, with a length of almost nine meters and a wingspan of almost 17 meters, transports around 250 kilos of payload - it is probably larger than the Liutyi.
The Iranian Shahed drone is a narrow delta wing aircraft with a load capacity of up to 60 kilograms and is therefore comparable to the new Ukrainian drone.
This would make Liutyi the first Ukrainian system comparable to Iran's Shahed-136 suicide drones in terms of payload, range and autonomous attack capability, writes the online magazine
UAV
.
Militarnyi
claims to have learned from its own sources that the approximate cost of a Liutyi drone is around $93,000.
There are different reports about the costs of a Shahed drone, between 20,000 and up to 180,000 euros.
The Liutyi makes the war affordable for Ukraine.
Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told Euromaidan Press
that
most Ukrainian manufacturers are private companies, in contrast to state-dominated Russian drone production.
He shared the assessment of the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, that Ukraine had achieved “a certain kind of parity” with Russia in the production of long-range drones.
The new start-up hype: The state is providing venture capital for drone engineers
The minister told
Euromaidan Press
that more than 300,000 drones of various types were contracted in 2023 and more than 100,000 of them were sent to the front.
Ukraine has waived taxes on components, simplified contract processing and abolished state monopolies in ammunition and artillery production, which have reportedly supported the rapid growth of Ukraine's drone industry.
The 33-year-old digital minister Fedorov is at the center of Ukrainian efforts to promote private military startups to build the drone industry,
n-tv
recently wrote.
The recent series of attacks, including with the Liutyi drone, reflects the government's progress in deregulating the drone market and increasing funding, Fedorov said.
The state acts as a venture capitalist in this area.
According to this, a government initiative collected a little more than million euros in grants for start-ups in the military sector last year.
The minister said the amount should increase about tenfold by the end of 2024.
“We will fight to further increase funding.” In contrast, Russian drone production is modest.
At the end of last year , Wirtschaftswoche
wrote
about its own Russian production facility: Since autumn 2022, it will be in the Tatarstan region, around 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow.
“President Vladimir Putin has taken a big step closer to his goal of producing 6,000 drones in Russia every year,” wrote
Wirtschaftswoche
in December.
In January 2024, Moscow raised the bar: Russia wants to produce more than 32,000 drones per year by 2030;
That is almost three times the current production volume, said First Vice Prime Minister Andrei Beloussov, according to the state news agency
TASS
.
Although the Ukraine war is a catalyst for new technologies, the benefits depend on a high degree of organizational intelligence and flexibility - here too, Ukraine seems to be a step ahead of the Russians.
The new drone force Ukraine establishes the Unmanned Systems Force
According to the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
Ukraine's drone army will now be fully integrated into the command structures in organizational terms.
According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian army founded the independent Unmanned Systems Force by decree and cited the successes against the Black Sea Fleet for its decision.
“Thanks to drones, Ukraine has really changed the security situation in the Black Sea,” Zelensky said.
Through the use of so-called sea drones - unmanned boats with high explosive loads - the Russian Black Sea Fleet was displaced both from the southern Ukrainian coast and from the area around the Crimean peninsula.
“This is an important step in the development of the Ukrainian army,” said Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov on the occasion of the decree.
New technologies require new approaches, new doctrines, different planning and different leadership than the classic field army, judges
DefenseNetwork
.
“The list of tasks is now clear,” said Zelensky, according to the
FAZ
, “special staff positions for working with drones, special units, effective training, systematization of experience, constant scaling of production and bringing together the best ideas and the best specialists in this “This is now a task for the army, the Ministry of Defense and the government as a whole.
According to him, the new drone forces are “not a question of the future, but rather something that should lead to a very concrete result in the near future.”
Possibly the most effective drone army in the world.
(Karsten Hinzmann)