Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the nature of the fighting has evolved at an unprecedented pace, thanks to rapid adoption of new equipment, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Central to this shift has been the meteoric rise of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as both sides have adopted this class of platforms in unprecedented numbers. In May 2025, ESD sat down on the sidelines of the Association of Old Crows (AOC) conference in Rome, with Iaroslav Kalinin, CEO of Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) specialist company Infozahyst, to learn about some of the latest innovations being seen on the frontlines, particularly concerning the drone war.
Overall, the past year or so of fighting in Ukraine has been characterised by a shift toward increasing technological sophistication, with various innovations making their presence felt on the front lines. Summarising the situation, Iaroslav Kalinin remarked: “I believe, we, both sides, start moving from the ‘easy and dirty’ solutions to more advanced technology – both sides.”
Perhaps the most clearly visible trend has been the rise of small, cheap UAVs, in particular first-person view (FPV) drones, which have firmly cemented their place on the modern battlefield as low-cost but effective alternatives to bespoke guided munitions. On the one hand, it is true that these weapons have sometimes received an arguably outsized level of attention, in large part due to the fact that they are uniquely well-suited to generating videos of strikes, making for an easy source of propaganda to drip-feed onto social media. Having said that, it is also true that, over time, their reputation has become more deserved. Small drones really have changed the way the war is being fought, and their presence has loomed ever larger as production numbers have scaled into the low millions of units per year for each side.
A good place to start is with a look at the front lines, which have by and large moved very slowly since the end of 2022, with a handful of exceptions. The larger-scale and more ambitious assaults of first year or so of the war broadly gave way to numerous small assaults spread over the breadth of the front line, again with some exceptions. Increasingly, drones have shaped conditions at the front, and are at the core of why the front lines look and behave as they do presently.
Enter the drone line
Kalinin painted a stark picture of the general character of the front lines of today: “Right now…we have a front line – so this is trenches, but it doesn’t look like you could imagine as in World War I, like a good trench…solid one, and the soldiers sitting with rifles and constantly cooking some food, smoking. No, this is a line of trenches with foxholes, so people (are) just surviving over there. So, they (are) dug into the ground and they’re not observing anything…they’re not sitting there and looking, and actively ready to shoot, because there is a drone line.”
He expounded, “Drone line is the, let’s say, territory of 15–20 kilometres, where (there are) too (many) FPVs from both sides. So if you’re not in a foxhole you’re likely to be killed.” According to Kalinin, the primary reason why soldiers in these foxholes typically don’t conduct much observation is because the drones high above their heads are a near-constant presence, and will see the battlefield much better than they can. Risk also plays a factor here: since many of the drones overhead will be hostile, it is also risky for a soldier to leave the cover of their foxhole for a better view.
The presence of this drone line has forced an evolution in how soldiers carry out advances. As a case in point, Russia’s use of motorbikes in assaults has faced ridicule on social media, where it has often been characterised as evidence of desperation due to equipment shortages. Yet over time, the technique was also adopted by Ukraine, and is now commonly used by both sides. Kalinin explained that this tactic is actually viable because of how the drone line changes the battlefield:
“So it becomes a question of logistics, and that because – what do you see right now? Like ‘Mad Max’ thing, the motorcycles. And that’s why motorcycle tactics actually works – because the people here (in foxholes) are not sitting shooting something, there is no grenade launchers or anything, you just hold the ground, and you won’t spot the moment when the motorcycles are arriving. So motorcycles try to cross this zone, owned position, and try to go and conquer, not even sometimes the trench itself or defence line, they (just) try to go further a little, and find the spot somewhere here just to surround, (to) cut the logistics completely, because this logistics it’s…poor, some unmanned ground system bring something, sometimes it’s over the night, sometimes…you bring something on your feet, it really depends on the situation. I’m drawing a really simplified scheme over here, but they try to sit and put their foxholes behind your foxholes, just to cut off the logistics and have a chance to shoot someone.”
Compared to larger and heavier vehicles, motorcycles and quadbikes are often faster, and much more difficult to spot at a distance, making them a better choice for passing through the drone line than a traditional armoured personnel carrier (APC), for instance. If we are to compare eight personnel on four motorbikes to one traditional APC with eight dismounts, in many ways the former are more survivable than the latter. Since each motorbike might only have one or two passengers, and each FPV drone can only engage one vehicle at a time with the potential to cause a maximum of two casualties per strike, a minimum of four FPVs would be needed to defeat four bikes. By contrast, a single FPV drone directed against an APC could potentially result in a mobility kill, leaving surviving dismounts to walk through hostile territory and risk being picked off, or in some circumstances may even inflict a catastrophic kill, resulting in the outright loss of all crew.
This approach is also more sustainable than most alternatives from a materiel standpoint, since motorcycles are significantly cheaper and easier to replace than APCs. Counterintuitive as it might sound, in many ways motorcycles have better odds of survival in the kind of environment Kalinin described than conventional mechanised or motorised forces.
Fibre-optic FPVs: A nuanced picture
In the context of discussing some of the more recent innovations in FPV drones, Kalinin was quick to note that “the drone line, it’s not a front line – it’s heights and altitude, it’s a line of radio horizon”, since it is reliant on radio-controlled FPVs, and therefore would vary with the radio horizon achievable at any given location. In this vein, this author asked Kalinin whether or not he foresaw ‘regular’ radio frequency (RF) controlled FPV drones being gradually displaced by FPV designs using fibre-optic guidance. This type of FPV drone design was first introduced by Russia in small numbers, but then scaled up and later also adopted by Ukraine. As of 2025, they have become a reasonably common sight on the battlefields of Ukraine.
As their name would suggest, fibre-optic FPVs are very similar to RF-controlled FPVs, but differ primarily in that they use a fibre-optic cable as their datalink to the ground control station instead of transmitting and receiving information via radio link. This provides a number of advantages over their radio-controlled equivalents. By their very nature, since they do not transmit or receive signals through the air, fibre-optic FPVs are completely immune to detection by direction finders or electronic intelligence (ELINT), and cannot be jammed. Crucially, their cable connection means they also do not have a radio horizon to limit how low they can fly, and this also allows them to navigate urban or heavily-wooded terrain, where their wireless brethren would risk losing the signal linking them to their ground control station. The direct connection also reduces input lag, and enables high-quality video streaming even at low altitudes, where the radio horizon would normally cause losses or signal degradation on a typical RF-controlled FPV drone.
Kalinin observed: “I don’t see this complete substitution of regular FPV for now. (RF is) still much (more) affordable, easy to use technology than the fibre-optic. But in some directions, yeah, you see these ‘spider webs’ all over the place from the fibre-optics.”
He noted that fibre-optic control enabled FPV operations previously not possible, “for some cases, fibre-optic could crack open some positions. Because (a) foxhole helps a lot against the FPVs, artillery, whatever it is. But it doesn’t help against the fibre-optic. With fibre-optic, if you really want…you can sneak into even (a) foxhole, because there is no radio horizon, and you are not limited with that. The only problem is the cord, the ‘tail’, because when you’re getting down, you need to consider that the ‘tail’ won’t be (cut) with your propellers. But it’s still possible, and we’re seeing some tactics of getting into the trenches, buildings, and some fortifications with the fibre-optic FPVs, which wasn’t there last year (2024).”
However, Kalinin cautioned that there were also a lot of downsides to using fibre-optic drones, most notably the much higher degree of piloting skill they required to fly them effectively: “Good side of this story, yeah, it’s immune to EW. The side of story which no one (is) telling you (is) it’s one (out) of say 10 operators who could actually operate that. They’re much harder to operate.”
There are a number of interrelated reasons why these types of drones are so difficult to operate. The first is that they carry a spool of optical fibre on the drone, which imposes a substantial weight penalty and therefore limits the size of the payload; as Kalinin noted, “what usually no one counts taking in the picture is much lesser payload.” He expounded, “The problem with weight, you need to get up in the air even if you will have the whole weight of your spool, and the payload, and the battery on the start of the drone (flight). So it’s a question about the payload weight on the start. Then it becomes much, much easier when the spool (is) expanding, but (not) when you (are) starting with extra few kilogrammes of the spool.”
As a consequence of this smaller payload, the munition carried is smaller than an equivalent carried by an RF FPV drone, which in turn requires the operator to aim “MUCH more carefully”. Kalinin added that it also made engaging certain types of target more difficult: “In contrast to the regular FPV, you cannot easily put one RPG grenade on top of that, so you won’t (have) the cumulative spray (known as the shaped charge jet), so you cannot penetrate the tank that easily.”
This payload limitation looks set to remain; when asked whether it would be possible to instead mount the optical fibre spool on the ground control station to save weight on the drone, Kalinin explained that this would not work. This is because the drone will always be the object creating the pulling force on the line, and so if you mounted the spool on the control station, and the line snags on a tree or bush, for example, the drone will keep pulling but will be unable to create its own slack, thereby snapping the optical fibre, and losing its control signal. The spool therefore needs to be mounted on the drone to avoid such a scenario.
The second key problem of carrying the additional weight of the fibre-optic spool, Kalinin noted, is that “you have less range.” The problem here is simple: carrying more weight generally means a shorter flight time, since the motors draw more power, depleting the battery faster. It is difficult to meaningfully expand this range, since doing so necessarily means mounting a longer, and therefore heavier, spool, which results in a corresponding decrease in the weight available for the drone’s useful payload and/or flight time. Kalinin elaborated: “I see many payloads installed on fibre-optics. For short distance, like five kilometres or so, it seems you can even see the RPG shots on top of that. I mean the maximum distance Russia claims that they have, like, 15 kilometres (range) right now with the fibre-optics, and for the regular FPVs…around 30–40 kilometres, might be claimed from both sides. It really depends, with retranslator, you can go really far with the regular FPVs.”
However, the third and perhaps most important concern is that flying a fibre-optic FPV drone is simply very difficult. It imposes a substantial cognitive load on the operator, and dealing with the platform’s quirks requires a considerable amount of skill. “The main concern here is the skill requirements for operating. It’s much higher than a regular one”, Kalinin explained, “every manoeuvre you have to think about the ‘tail’. Because the spool produces the ‘tail’, so you cannot turn more than 90 degrees right.” Kalinin explained that if the operator exceeds the turn limit, “the fibre-optic will just break and you will drop the drone.”
Beyond simply being mindful when turning, Kalinin pointed out that the operator also needs to accelerate carefully and ensure consistent speeds when doing so, while also remembering the terrain the drone has flown over to know where the line may have been snagged: “The operator have to remember the whole road, it’s at least, ok, last 50–100 metre of road, what was the bushes behind them, because he put the fibre on (those) bushes and he (made a) turn there…they’re putting their tail up out of there and he need to think about that.”
Kalinin also disclosed that weather can also affect the operational effectiveness of fibre-optic FPV drones in various ways, noting that they can be negatively affected by rain, while in cold weather, the thin optical fibre becomes more brittle and therefore more likely to break.
“It’s generally much harder to operate this type of drone. There (are) some specific operation like ambushes, when you can efficiently use these drones”, remarked Kalinin, concluding, “So long story short, yeah, fibre-optic, it’s a really cool weapon for some circumstances like ambushes, trying to penetrate the jammers. Because sometimes it’s a question of the jammers, you need to destroy the jammer, that’s where the fibre-optic comes in the picture. But it’s one to 10 (ratio) to the regular FPVs, which (are) much cheaper than the fibre-optic, much easier to operate, and if you have the assault actions against you – you won’t be using the fibre-optics, you’ll be using the regular one, just to have the advantage of (higher) amount of FPV in the simultaneous strike…and that’s a major power (in) this conflict right now.”
“That’s basically Lego!”
As alluded to previously, FPVs are continuing to evolve, with increasingly specialised designs enabling them to fill or expand capabilities in various roles, yet the impression one gets discussing the topic with Kalinin is that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible within this class of UAV design:
“That’s (the) beautiful thing about FPV, and that’s what I’m trying to scream out loud…That’s basically Lego! You can play with payload, with the control channel, with the configuration of (the) frame, so that you can go 50 kilometres with the small charge if you know what you’re trying to destroy. If it’s a single person or some assassination, you can go 50 kilometres easily. Easily with the radio retranslator – easily. If it’s anti-aircraft, anti-Shahed mission, again, you play with payload, you understand that’s some another type of threat aircraft, you need more shrapnel, more fragments.”
On the subject of their increasing capabilities in the anti-air domain, Kalinin noted: “You might spot recently the new page in our war history – the FPV shot down the Forposts (a Russian licence-produced version of the IAI Searcher UAV)”, adding, “It was shot down on altitude of four or five kilometres, I guess, by FPV.”
These are fairly impressive figures, and can be broadly compared to those achieved by man-portable air defence system (MANPADS) class missiles – albeit at a fraction of the cost. As such, this class could be effectively considered pseudo surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Kalinin explained the kinds of performance that could be expected from such specialised FPV drone designs:
“Playing with the motors and the propellers, you can make (an FPV) run with velocity of 200 (km/h). So it’s easy to shoot down (other drones). A typical fixed wing, I mean, propeller one, go 100 (km/h), 150 (km/h), no more than that. And you have 200 (km/h), so you can even go two tries, or three tries before your battery got drained, and after that, ok, you have another shot. Still much cheaper than trying to risk anti-aircraft system, put it on the front line, in (the) same spot where you cannot actually use it. So that’s something new. We have a lot of anti-Shahed FPV recently, so basically our mobile groups actively testing the anti-Shahed FPV, again much more efficient, much more cheaper.”
With regard to one particular interceptor FPV “specifically designed for anti-Shahed mission”, Kalinin noted that “They, I believe they can go…300-400 kilometres per hour.” These designs resemble the kinds of FPV drones seen in tests tracking Formula 1 cars around circuits, using a battery-powered quadcopter-type propulsion arrangement, albeit with a sleek, rocket-shaped body; “It’s like (a) really crazy RC toy”, Kalinin said. Beyond enabling them to catch much of their target set fairly easily, their speed is also part of the defeat mechanism, which is primarily hit-to-kill, Kalinin explained, “With the FPV you can do the direct hit. Ok, there is explosive on that, but it’s like grammes of explosives; it’s not that much.” He remarked that these had been observed as being highly effective against aerial targets such as the Shahed one-way attack (OWA) UAV: “If there is a mobile group with FPVs, it’s like the PATRIOT on cheat codes: you have endless rockets; it’s a carnage!”
While fast FPVs geared toward the anti-air mission can be highly effective, Kalinin was quick to point out that the technical challenge of developing them was in many ways a lesser concern than developing the skills required to pilot and operate them effectively:
“The main problem for FPV on this altitude is, again, for anti-aircraft mission, it’s a specific skill set. So this is a unique pilot. But basically, the main problem is (to) try to understand and find the target. So you need to understand where target is, where you (are), relative to the target, and what would be the point of the intersection. That’s really hard to understand. We usually provide the picture from the radar to the pilot to get him understanding where exactly he is. And to do that, we are putting some foil on the FPV to make it more visible on the radar. Because under this distance, the radar doesn’t see it.”
This foil essentially functions as a makeshift Luneberg lens, “but much simpler. That’s just aluminium foil – it works good”, Kalinin said. In a similar vein, another Infozahyst representative noted that progress had been made in decreasing friendly drone fratricide incidents. The method described involved using ELINT to establish the medium access control (MAC) address of an unidentified drone, which could then be looked up on a MAC address database – essentially a list of drones in use by Ukraine’s forces – to determine whether the drone in question was friendly or hostile.
Elsewhere, developments in automation software are expanding the possibilities for small drone operations. On 29 May 2025, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister for Digital Transformation announced that the country had used FPV drones guided by artificial intelligence (AI), launched from a ‘mothership’ carrier drone. These FPV drones use AI to independently identify and select targets for engagement. The system was developed by Ukrainian drone company Brave1, and according to Fedorov, allowed strikes at around 300 km to take place.
The empire strikes back
The exponential rise of relatively small aerial threats in Ukraine – including copter-type and fixed-wing reconnaissance and/or strike UAVs, FPV drones, loitering munitions, and OWA UAVs – has necessitated the development and deployment of distributed sensor networks, comprising acoustic detectors, direction finders, and radars, to provide early warning and track their approach. Notably, Ukraine has invested considerable effort into developing such an early warning network. According to Kalinin, this helped achieve considerable successes against Russia’s unmanned aviation, with knock-on effects to Russia’s overall intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities:
“Last year (2024), what happened? Ukraine developed the network of small-size radars. The main goal of these radars is to spot enemy fixed-wing UAV and launch a small-size interceptor, FPV, to shoot it down. It’s so efficient that Russia lost, I believe, more than 1,500 – or 1,000 for sure – fixed-wing UAVs. And each of that UAV costs…pretty big amount of money, and, moreover, it gave them blindness on some part of their front line for some period of time. So, that kicked some advantage to our forces because (the Russians) cannot use efficiently their artillery system, their ballistic missiles. UMPK (glide bombs), etc. I mean, they could use it, still use it, but they are blind.”
Consequently, Kalinin noted, “Russia start developing technology to countermeasure that, and that was trying to bring back their Orlan-based ELINT (electronic intelligence) system and ESM (electronic support measures) system.” He explained, “Russia started (to) much more intensively use their unmanned EW system – EW from the perspective of electronic intelligence and electronic support measure. And they are quite efficient about that. So, right now…they’re trying hard and they’re becoming more and more successful with spotting our small-size radars.”
The Orlan-10 platform was Russia’s most numerous tactical UAV prior to the war, and although it has been displaced somewhat in Russia’s UAV mix following the country’s adoption of a slew of other UAV platforms, it remains relevant, and continues to receive newer and more sophisticated payloads. “There’s a zoo of payloads for Orlan. At least 10 of them. I mean, not (just) different ones, but also different generations of them….we have found 10 different modifications of the payload…and with some of them, they will start pinpointing our radar system”, Kalinin said.
As a case in point, one ELINT package for the Orlan-10, dubbed ‘CN 8’ by Infozahyst, is able to locate RF emitters operating within the 0.8–26 Ghz frequency range. These would include radars, Starlink terminals, and various other sources. It is able to classify emitters based on the parameters of the detected signal, and its software is then able to generate a false-colour heat map which is overlaid onto a physical map. Once an emitter of interest source is located, the target can be confirmed with visual reconnaissance, and then engaged kinetically.
So while Ukraine’s ground-based sensors have been effective, they have also become targets for Russian strikes. Alongside the aforementioned vulnerability to detection by hostile ELINT, a further factor is their lack of range, as Kalinin explained: “From our side, we also start developing something to increase the range of the intelligence, because right now we, in the circumstances where our sensor (is placed) on the ground, (are) really limited by radio horizon, so 10 kilometres or so. And we need to see more…and the satellite component doesn’t provide much information – I mean, accurate, in time, systematically, with the guaranteed period of observation – so, we start developing the technology which could expand the radio horizon for like 80 kilometres at least. I believe Russia will do the same.”
According to Kalinin, these measures would include “UAV-based, balloon-based” sensors. In this vein the company has continued to develop their ‘Gekata’ UAV-based ELINT system. Although many concrete details of the system and its deployment timeline have been classified, it is expected to enter service with Ukraine’s armed forces in the not-too-distant future.
Aside from targeting Ukraine’s sensor network, Russia has also modified its tactics and techniques to improve the odds of its strikes getting through Ukraine’s air defences. For starters, Russia has increasingly begun to employ decoy targets as part of its strike package mix, as Kalinin elaborated: “First of all they start using actively the false targets, so it’s like a Shahed but it’s not a Shahed…we used to write in our summary reports for the air attack that ‘We shoot down this many Shaheds’, for instance. Right now we are not publishing that information because there is a lot, too (many) things in the air usually, and it’s Gerbera, Geran, Shahed, sometimes Molniya, which are hard to differentiate…So they produce more, cheaper systems to exhaust our anti-aircraft defence system.”
Beyond its use of decoys, Russia has also been able to significantly scale up the size of its aerial strikes. Kalinin previously remarked that circa 2023, a limitation Russia suffered from was its inability to generate significantly large simultaneous salvoes of Shaheds to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defences. However, looking at the state of play today, Kalinin noted that Russia is able to generate much larger strike packages of Shaheds: “They actively use the tactic where the first batch of Shaheds is circling in the area where they’re safe, and waiting for the second batch. So (the) second batch, and the third batch (arrive) and they start together to attacking the target. That’s what they are using, what we are trying to do: we have the piloted planes and we try to shoot them down.”
A further development by both Russia and Ukraine is the integration of devices to gather and send back telemetry information into their OWA UAVs. Kalinin explained how the Russians have been observed doing this: “Russia (has been) putting their SIM cards of the GSM to understand where exactly the telemetry of the single Shahed…so they exactly understand where it gets shot, so they can command other one to change the (course to avoid the threat). So I believe this is a use case, what they (are) trying to achieve, at least in (terms of) protection”.
Alongside the defensive application highlighted by Kalinin, gathering telemetry information also has a potential offensive application. By revealing the approximate areas where anti-air personnel are operating, this provides a potential avenue for Russia to reconnoitre these zones and target Ukraine’s air defenders with artillery, missiles, or FPV drones.
Elsewhere, Kalinin noted that newer Russian fast jets had been seeing an uptick in use: “I believe they have a problem with their older jets (where) they cannot repair and replace something, so they using newer and newer stuff only more intensively”.
In terms of other developments, Kalinin explained that Russia had been observed developing highly sophisticated controlled radiation pattern antennas (CRPAs). These are a key component within many Russian guided munitions, including UMPK glide bombs and Shahed OWA UAVs. Essentially CRPAs are mainly used to provide jamming and spoofing-resistant satellite navigation for the munition. These work by detecting and processing jamming or spoofing signals in real time, then sending out an opposing signal to actively cancel out the jamming or spoofing signals. This allows them to boost the relative strength of the real satellite signal, thereby allowing them to continue to navigate in a contested electromagnetic environment. Kalinin highlighted the importance of this component: “If you talk about UMPK or if you talk about the Shaheds, 70% of the capabilities is built on top of this CRPA system.” He added, “So this is the reason why Shaheds could orient on the enemy territory; this is the basically (the) main technology.”
According to Kalinin, much of CRPAs’ value is due to the fact that they are much cheaper compared to a high-end inertial navigation system (INS), while also being much more accurate. This allows Russia to keep mass-producing relatively low-cost but accurate munitions to strike targets in Ukraine even in the face of heavy jamming and spoofing. While various models have been in use throughout the war, more recent versions of Russia’s Kometa-M-VT design, developed by VNIIIR Progress, have been proving especially effective. Kalinin was notably impressed by the performance of these newer CRPA models: “I believe right now Russia is (the) top one country which (is) producing CRPA… I mean this CRPA is (a) piece of engineering art, they are really good…we don’t have in Ukraine any net or system between which could be compared to the efficiency (of) that system, so that’s disturbing.”
The consumer electronics behemoth goes to war
Examining the drone war over Ukraine, it is remarkable just how far low-cost drone technology has come, and how it has changed many of the basic rules of the battlefield. Nowhere is this more evident than when charting FPV drone evolution, from their first documented usage in Ukraine around mid-2022, to where they are just three years later.
Thinking back to Kalinin’s point that FPV are “like Lego”, their success is in large part down to the FPV format being such a flexible basic design able to be modified in many different ways. Some varieties are able to serve as pseudo-SAMs, others are able to precisely engage ground targets at around 50 km, a greater range than many common types of artillery, while fibre-optic varieties can fly incredibly low, cannot be detected by direction finders, and are also immune to jamming. Yet perhaps the most significant factor behind their success is that they are able to achieve all this at a typical cost of several hundred dollars per unit – a tiny fraction of their conventional military alternatives. Operationally, FPV drones face few restrictions on their use, needing no real infrastructure to operate, other than a shelter for the operator, and their disposable nature means the loss of one is virtually inconsequential.
Their rapid evolution, low cost, and suitability for high-volume mass production is largely down to their use of very common consumer electronics components for the majority of key systems, with the main non-civilian component being the warhead. Key components – including cameras, screens, controllers, antennas, batteries, electric motors, and others – are widely available on the open market, and often interchangeable, making it relatively easy to source alternatives if a component becomes unavailable, or to boost performance. In other cases, components such as frames can be readily produced with 3D printers.
This flexible production process allows for software or hardware modifications in very short timescales of weeks or months, allowing capabilities to be rapidly developed and fielded, as well as mitigating or nullifying old vulnerabilities or countermeasures. Additionally, their assembly from pre-manufactured or printed parts also allows FPV drones to be manufactured in simple workshops by hobbyists or volunteer organisations as well as traditional industry, massively boosting overall output and providing Ukraine with a resilient and distributed production capability. Highlighting the scalability potential of this manufacturing model, during a 23 February 2025 press conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that Ukraine had produced 2.2 million FPV drones in 2024 – translating to an average of around 183,333 per month.
Ukraine’s fast-moving FPV drone production model arguably poses somewhat of a challenge to established models of defence procurement in some areas. Current models are often beholden to slow-moving or bureaucratic decision-making processes, while the sheer length of time taken for some processes can result in obsolescence creeping in surprisingly quickly. For instance, as stated in one presentation at AOC 2025: out of the EW equipment provided to Ukraine by allies, nearly everything produced during or before 2020 was not useable, while only some of the equipment produced from 2021-2022 was useable. Russia’s EW techniques had simply evolved too quickly over that time period. Keeping up with rapidly evolving threats therefore requires both an industry highly in tune with recent battlefield developments, as well as governments capable of rapid decision-making.
In a similar vein, although important for interoperability, standards can sometimes be a hindrance. This author previously spoke to an industry representative whose company had supplied drones and loitering munitions to Ukraine; the representative noted that the drones supplied with communications systems developed to STANAG requirements were quickly jammed by the Russians, while those introduced later and deliberately not built to STANAG requirements managed to resist Russian jamming significantly better. Maintaining sufficient flexibility to deviate from predictable standards is therefore worth considering when looking to reduce potential vulnerabilities.
As a closing thought, despite their successes, small drones have limitations, and are not always a good substitute for conventional capabilities. Nonetheless, they allow Ukraine to compensate for shortages of other weapons such as anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), artillery ammunition, or short-range SAMs. Additionally, their ubiquity has put parts of the front lines under near-constant surveillance and necessitated the adoption of new tactics to survive, such as the use of motorcycles. These are all impressive results, and it is difficult to imagine how else Ukraine could have achieved them, and kept itself in the fight, if not through weaponising consumer electronics.
Author: Mark Cazalet is the Editor-in-Chief of ESD. Previously, he worked for Janes as a Senior Analyst on the Land Warfare Team, and Editor of the Janes Artillery and Air Defence, and Janes Firepower, Survivability and Mobility yearbooks. Prior to that he worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), contributing to The Military Balance.
