NATO believes Ukraine used drones to destroy most Russian tanks in recent months

More than two-thirds of the Russian tanks that were destroyed by Ukrainian soldiers over the past few months were destroyed using first-person-view (FPV) drones, which shows that Kyiv has been relying on this particular weapon more and more amidst the acute shortage of artillery ammunition.

Source: Foreign Policy, citing an official representative of NATO, as reported by European Pravda

Details: The Foreign Policy article says the FPV drones used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine score low on efficiency. They are equipped with cheap cameras which makes it harder to aim at night or in cloudy weather, and often carry improvised explosive devices, which sometimes explode in mid-air or fail to detonate at all.

The analysts Foreign Policy spoke to believe that FPV drone attacks on Russian tanks give mixed results.

Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia program, says the overall accuracy of FPV drones is less than 50%, and in some cases as many as 10 or more drones are needed to destroy a tank.

At the same time, Lee says, Russia is running out of armoured vehicles and tanks, so if this continues in the combat zone, Moscow may lose its numerical superiority, which would make conducting its own offensive operations in the future more difficult.

"The issue is that Russia’s getting a lot of manpower," Lee added.

Background:

At the beginning of the year, UK Defence Intelligence analysed the impact of FPV drones on the situation on the left bank of Kherson Oblast and explained why it is difficult for the Russian occupiers to counteract them.

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