Ukraine has launched everything he can in Russia while his total approach approach to the three -year brand. The last weapon of the military arsenal? Drones on the ground.
Other types of drones have already been essential to Ukraine during the war, and he used them to fight for the enemy – along the front lines and beyond. Russia has also sent men and machines to the fray, brandishing its own army of drones on Ukrainian soil.
In the midst of this rapidly evolving environment, Ukraine now aims to use land drones – also called unmanned, UGV ground vehicles – to help its soldiers do key tasks and protect more from its soldiers.
Managers of the Ukrainian city in Kherson say that civilians are terrorized by Russian drones and that dozens of people have been killed. Pro-Russian social media accounts claim that soldiers are targeting Ukrainian soldiers who are trying to blend into the inhabitants.
The Ukrainian Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov said The military “will increase” its use of the UGV for various purposes, including the supply of soldiers and the transport of the wounded, as well as other tasks. This follows a forecast by Mykhailo Fedorov, the Minister of the country of digital transformation, that Ukraine must tens of thousands of these tools This year.
“Ukrainians certainly want to use more and more, rather than soldiers,” said Samuel Bendett, Russian study program advisor to CNA, a research and analysis organization in Washington.
But Russia is also in the running for a UGV -focused advantage and its forces are trying a variety of new tools.
Real -time experimentation
Bendett said that UKVs deployed in Ukraine have followed the same path as the most used air drones have taken: they take care of cheaper and cheaper models that can be built quickly, tested on the fly and easily replaced when ‘They are destroyed.
“This is why Ukrainians talk about tens of thousands of them [being unleashed]”Said Bendett, stressing that larger and larger soil systems will generally be more difficult to defend and more expensive to lose.
A high level of experimentation is tolerated, he said, partly out of necessity to get soldiers what they need on front lines.
“It’s a matter of life and death,” said Bendett, who was closely monitoring emerging drone models be used in Ukraine.
The urgency for soldiers to get their hands on these tools is the same on the Russian side.
Bendett said he had seen “many stories in the Russian media on soldiers who aligned the UGVs they built themselves”.
A long time
“The UGVs are hardly new,” said Mick Ryan, a retired major-general of the Australian army, stressing the German use of the devices called Goliaths during the Second World War. They were Remote -controlled mines which were sent to a position to explode.
“We saw these things to Normandy“Said Ryan, the main member of military affairs of the international security program at the Lowy Institute in Australia.
Peter Samsonov, an author and creator of the Tank archives blog, said by e-mail that during this same era, the Soviets had a “targeted”, which was like the Goliaths. And there were other weapons similar to what happens on the battlefield of Ukraine today, he said.
“Another precursor that deserves to be mentioned is the Soviet telechetan, which was controlled remotely by radio rather than cables and has been reusable,” said Samsonov, noting These special machines were complex to maintain and operate, so few were produced.
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For more recent examples, Ryan points to robots used for bombs elimination tasks during modern wars in the Middle East. But he says that it was only during the current war in Ukraine that UGV’s broad potential was recognized – after drones showed what they could do in the air and also at sea.
Ryan says that their usefulness has been strongly demonstrated in the past year, the UGV being used in “a very wide variety of missions”.
“It’s not just killing robots – that’s part, but they are in the minority at the moment.”
Bendett de CNA agrees, noting that many UGVs “are not used in real combat, but used in supply roles”.
But there are several media reports on A Ukrainian offensive in Decembernear Lyptsi, Ukraine, who would have involved A combination of UGV and FPV drones.
Keep the soldiers safe
After three years of national war, Ukraine remains under significant pressure: the American Institute for the Study of War estimates that Russia controls approximately 112,307 square kilometers – or more than 18% of the territory of Ukraine – THURSDAY.
Ukraine is fighting against an adversary with a much more important population from which it can write recruits, and kyiv hesitated to mobilize its youngest adults to join the war. Thus, these Ukrainians already engaged in combat are considered very important for the war effort.
UMEROV, the Minister of Defense, said that the wider use of terrestrial drones aimed to save Ukrainian soldiers with particularly dangerous tasks.
“Our goal is to create a soldier where innovative technologies help perform the most dangerous tasks, saving the lives of our defenders,” he said when driving more unmanned systems on The battlefield.
According to Ryan, it is the people behind these machines who will determine how much they can do.
“Frankly, the range of missions that we will see these things will be undertaken will only be limited by the imagination of the soldiers,” he said.
