Ukraine’s battalion commander ‘Achilles’ warns against Western drones

Only one Ukrainian drone battalion, the ‘Achilles’, specialized in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks by Kyiv’s 92nd Assault Brigade, uses an average of 3,000 first person-view drones per month. But they don’t opt ​​for some Western-made weapons, or the most advanced drones, simply because they can’t do the job.

“The best examples of weapons,” such as systems like the GPS-guided Excalibur artillery shells, “don’t work at all,” Rustam Nurgudin, the battalion’s executive officer, told a briefing of defense companies and journalists in London.

“The best drones can’t fly,” he said.

Drones have defined the more than two and a half year war in Ukraine, with the design update cycle lasting just over a month. Kiev’s domestic industry is pumping out drones, and Ukrainian officials say the war-torn country could produce millions of drones every year. Kiev also has a new branch of its military dedicated exclusively to drone warfare.

The problem, Kiev officials insist, is financing. Ukraine’s capabilities far exceed the money funneled into the more than 250 companies involved in drone production, said Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s former minister of strategic industries, who oversees Kiev’s defense industry.

‘It’s so frustrating, it’s so embarrassingto be able, but not have enough resources” for the defense industry, Kamyshin, now a presidential adviser on strategic affairs with a focus on the military-industrial complex, told Newsweek in Kiev in mid-September.

But electronic warfare is also thrown into the mix, and its ability to confuse, throw off and disable navigation systems on weapons that fly across the battlefield every day.

Although Ukraine’s international backers have donated their own drones and many types of weapons to the war effort, experts say the vast majority of these are ill-suited to the ever-evolving front lines that wind through eastern Ukraine and along the border with Russia.

Some Western-made drones have difficulty breaking through dense electronic warfare systems on the battlefield. Another factor is cost: Kiev is burning through drones, which means they can’t be expensive.

In the midst of NATO countries and their armies, “no one understands what is going on,” Nurgudin said. There is still a misunderstanding about what a “current” war looks like, heavily influenced by fighting in wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, he added.

The UAV battalion was first deployed around Kharkov, before heading to the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk, which Russia has controlled for about a year and a half. The soldiers were then sent back to Kharkov to fight around the city of Kupiansk, Nurgudin said.

Moscow’s forces had taken control of Kruhliakivka, near Kupiansk, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian army has not acknowledged that the settlement has been captured.

Fighting in Kharkov has been going on since the early days of the all-out war, and parts of the northeastern Ukrainian region were captured by Russia in 2022, before a lightning Ukrainian counter-offensive removed Moscow’s grip on much of the region.

The front lines in Kharkov have been relatively static for the past two years, although Moscow launched a cross-border attack on northern Kharkov earlier this year.

The US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War said on Saturday that Russia has not made any confirmed progress on the part of the front line stretching from eastern Kupiansk to western Russian-controlled Svatove and Kreminna, towns in the east of Luhansk. region.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday it had captured Pershotravneve, a village west of Svatove.

Whether Russia advances on Kupiansk will depend on how many shells Ukraine has in stock to load into its artillery systems, whether the country has enough anti-aircraft systems to go after Russian fighter jets and how many fighter jets end up in the area, he said.

“We don’t know how many North Korean soldiers, for example, will appear before us unexpectedly,” Nurgudin said.

Ukrainian, South Korean and Western intelligence agencies have said in recent weeks that North Korea has sent between 10,000 and 12,000 soldiers to Russia to bolster Moscow’s war effort against Kiev.

The US said on Thursday that about 8,000 were stationed at the border with Ukraine. “We have not yet seen these troops deployed in combat against Ukrainian forces, but we expect that to occur in the coming days,” the US secretary of state said. Anthony Blinkensaid during a joint press conference with the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austinand South Korean Foreign and Defense Ministers Cho Tae-yul and Kim Yong-hyun.