Page 34 - bne magazine February 2024_20240206

34 I Cover story bne February 2024
more easily,” CFR said. “The more abundant, smaller drones are proving to be serious game changers in
that they have given Ukraine better battlespace awareness and more capability to hit targets.”
One of the countries that took up the drone baton has been Iran, which developed the Shahed drone, which they have sold in large numbers to Russia, that weaponised them by packing
them with explosives and flying them kamikaze-style into targets.
And drones are playing a major role
in the Red Sea crisis, which is now expanding to the entire Middle East region. In one of the most recent incidents, Iranian-backed Houthi forces on January 17 expanded the Yemen conflict into the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with drone strikes in Abu Dhabi, a key element of the Houthi extensive arsenal of missiles and rockets.
Both Russia and Ukraine have upped their production of drones and continue to innovate to make them more effective. Bankova has been increasingly talking about boosting the development of
its domestic arms production since
a conference last September where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy declared that he wants to make Ukraine a military production hub.
According to Kyiv, drone production
in Ukraine has increased more than one-hundredfold since the start of
the Russian invasion at the Skyeton production facility, and others like it, that makes the Raybird-3 drone system, which has been in use since 2018.
One of the Ukrainian developments about which little is known is the Beaver kamikaze drone, manufactured by the private company UkrJet. It can allegedly fly up to 1,000km, but no official information is yet available. Observers claim that these drones have been used on numerous occasions to hit targets
in Moscow, Deutsche Welle reports. The RUBAKA kamikaze drone is another example of a long-range attack drone developed by Ukraine. Little is known about this model, either.
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And Kyiv plans to produce a million FPV (first-person-view) drones and more than 11,000 medium- and long- range attack drones this year, Ukraine’s Minister for Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin said in December. One year ago, Ukraine had seven
“This expanded drone production could be enough to counter Russia’s shortage of drones on the front lines and turn the tide of the conflict in its favour,” CFR said.
The widespread use of drones is causing both sides a major financial headache.
“Both Russia and Ukraine have upped their production of drones and continue to innovate to make them more effective”
domestic drone manufacturers and it now has at least eighty, according to CFR.
Recently, Ukraine social media reported that the AFU has strapped a machine gun to the underside of agricultural drones that can be used to attack infantry.
Likewise, Russia has started cladding its drones to reduce their visibility
to Ukraine air defences. Russia has effectively used its own drone fleet
to counter armaments such as the US-made Abrams and German-made Leopard tanks, which face “swarms” of drone attacks as soon as they appear on the battlefield, according to reports from the frontline.
“As for Russian drone technology, Moscow deploys indigenous models, such as the Orion, Eleron-3, Orlan-10, and Lancet, but Western sanctions on crucial Russian supply chains have prevented Moscow from excelling in drone production,” says CFR. “Instead, Russia has turned to Iran for a steady supply. The Russians now boast an extensive fleet of Iranian-made Shahed- 136 drones that can carry 100 pounds (45.4kg) of explosives over a range of 1,200 miles (1931km).”
In cooperation with Iran, Russia recently finished constructing a drone factory in Tatarstan, 805km east of Moscow – out of range of Ukraine’s new long-range drones – where it could produce an estimated 6,000 Shahed-136 drones (renamed the Geran-2 by Moscow) by mid-2025, according to CFR.
At a cost of a few thousand dollars each, the air defence munitions used to shoot them down can cost tens of thousands or even millions of dollars, depending on the system used, radically changing the economics of warfare.
“An emerging challenge of counter- drone defence is the need to develop and employ a system that is cheaper than its target. Crucially, smaller drones that can swarm toward a target are more difficult to shoot down and can overwhelm air defence systems,” says CFR. “A key countermeasure has been to utilise electronic warfare in the form of jammers, spoofers, and high-energy lasers that prevent drones from reaching their target.”
Jammers are used by both Russia
and Ukraine and send out powerful electromagnetic signals that can cause a target drone to fall to the ground, veer off course, or turn around and attack its operator, according to CFR. Both sides are investing heavily into developing these countermeasures.
Novatek at risk
As reported by bne IntelliNews, Russia’s LNG exports are soaring and remain unsanctioned, but Europe is still hooked on Russian gas exports and continues
to buy half of Russia’s gas production, increasingly in the form of LNG.
The US has become the biggest exporter of LNG in the last months, overtaking former market leader Qatar, and has been less squeamish about sanctioning Russia’s LNG production.