Has Ukraine found a solution to regain serious control in the drone war?

These are often large machines, much slower than their kamikaze or attack versions. By going to glean information as close as possible to the front or behind enemy lines, by allowing the targeting of troops or equipment that other machines or artillery pieces can then target, so-called ISR or ISTAR drones (for “intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and recognition”) nevertheless play a major role in the conflict in Ukraine.

According to some Russian fighters themselves, whose comments were shared on decided to exploit.

Destroy ISR drones to blind the Russians

Russia, like Ukraine, has several types of these “ISR drones”. The Orlan-10, which Capital described as “designed with a plastic bottle and adhesive”is undoubtedly one of the most emblematic since the start of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Like other reconnaissance and intelligence models, designed in particular by the ZALA firm, the Orlan is considered inexpensive (around $100,000 each, all the same). By providing it with precise targets, the Lancet kamikaze drone constitutes a shock tandem with the terror of the Ukrainians, as explained by the specialist site Inside Unmanned Systems.

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Inexpensive, sure, but everything is relative. Because Ukraine, for its part, has “interception drones”: very fast, piloted with mastery by experts in the field, who now have their own armed branch as recently explained by the Defense Lines blog of Philippe Chapleau, they have become an all-purpose weapon for kyiv’s troops, particularly while awaiting more specialized Western weapons.

As conventional anti-aircraft weapons could do, they are used in particular to destroy Russian ISR drones in flight, which seems to cause a slight wave of panic among some of the commentators taken up by Sam Benett. “This is a very alarming development, explains a text that he spotted on Russian networks, and translated on X. If people don’t die directly with this destruction, the consequences could be more serious than those of delivering a dozen Abrams tanks.”

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For Russia, a big technological leap backwards

“Many units depend on these ISA drones (Orlan, ZALA, Supercam). Destroying our “eyes” in the sky will set us back a generation, forcing us to fight in 2D, while they continue to fight a war in 3D FPV drones cost almost nothing, but this is not the case for large ISR machines.continues the Russian commentator.

Who explains that the lack of Western weapons, particularly anti-aircraft weapons, pushed Ukraine to use these interception drones “with great success”. According to him, they can reach speeds of 500 kilometers per hour, and are sufficiently maneuverable to be used against these ISR machines, or even slow attack drones like the Geran, this Russianized version of the Iranian Shahed, which poses so many problems for the Ukrainian infrastructure.

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According to the Russian observer, these extremely fast kamikaze devices could even, thanks in particular to their relative discretion in the air and on the ground (“no need for a multi-ton truck, two men on a motorcycle can deploy one”), used to shoot down Russian attack helicopters, such as the Ka-52 Alligator, so effective when deployed near the front.

In short, in the same way that it strives to blind Russian defenses by systematically targeting its radars and anti-aircraft defenses, in occupied Crimea in particular, Ukraine seems to want to perfect its work by also targeting ISR drones who, on the front or behind the lines, are orchestra masters for much more deadly devices.