- Ukraine's drone campaign has three zones over occupied territories
- Quadcopters patrol near the gray zone
- AI drones fly over the main truck routes
- Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s blast high value targets such as headquarters
Russian forces in southern Ukraine heavily depend on trucks to bring them reinforcements and supplies. Those trucks, hundreds every day, mostly travel from Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia through occupied Mariupol in occupied southern Ukraine before heading farther west toward occupied Crimea or turning north toward occupied Donetsk.
Both routes—the M-14 highway from Rostov and the H-20 threading north into Donetsk—are under intensive drone attack.
It's working. Strikes on Russian logistics in the occupied south more than doubled between February and March, Ukrainian analysis group Tochnyi found. And the Russians lost ground in March and April. Ukrainian drone units have organized themselves into three concentric zones—short-range FPVs near the gray zone, mid-range AI drones over the highways, long-range Fire Point models reaching 200 km deep.
The aim: bleed Russian supplies. And, in so doing, buy Ukrainian engineers time to prepare better defenses along the 1,200-km front line of Russia's 51-month wider war on Ukraine.
"The Rostov-Crimea and Mariupol-Donetsk roads are the backbone of Russian presence in the south," mapper and analyst Clément Molin explained. And that's why more Ukrainian drone units are launching more drones toward the roads.
Tochnyi connected the dots. "The intensity of attacks on munitions storage aligns with observed reductions in Russian artillery usage, while fuel-related targeting suggests a parallel effort to constrain mechanized operations by disrupting supply chains behind the front."
Anecdotally, it seems the middle-strike drones are becoming a serious problem for Russian truckers. More and more drivers are recording Ukrainian drones swooping low over the M-14 and H-20 highways. More and more drivers are passing burning trucks and logging their distress on social media.
One startling video that appeared online this week depicts a Ukrainian drone narrowly missing a military cargo truck parked beneath some trees lining the M-14 near Pryazovske in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. The drone, apparently a Swift Beat Hornet with AI-assisted targeting, exploded in the trees.
Three drone zones
The Ukrainian drone deployment has three distinct zones range-matched to risk, as Molin explained.
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- Long-range first-person-view quadcopters patrol the zone nearest the disputed gray zone out to a distance of around 20 km.
- The Hornets and other AI-assisted drones, including the mysterious B-2, are ranging as far as 150 km and hitting logistics trucks [and] cars," according to Molin.
- Remote-controlled Fire Point FP-1s and FP-2s, the latter with warheads weighing as much as 150 kg, strike what Molin described as "high value targets" including supply depots, oil infrastructure, logistical centers, command centers and air defenses out to a distance of around 200 km.
The campaign is only possible because Ukrainian industry has massively scaled up drone production over the last four years and now churns out millions of small FPVs and tens of thousands of heavier drones every year.
But there's another key enabler: the communications infrastructure that connects drones to a growing roster of remote operators. "The drone program has intensified, with more pilots available who can fly their drones far behind the front lines thanks to excellent Starlink connectivity," Molin explained.
The Starlink satellite terminals can be jammed, however, so Ukrainian drone units have backup comms. Mesh radio networks, in which many connected drones send and receive signals to each other, are the main backup. But some drones also have entirely self-contained inertial navigation systems that work when all external comms go down.
To blunt the drone campaign, the Russians must adapt. They could position more air defense teams near the highways and cover the same roads with nets. But even these adaptations would count as a victory for the Ukrainians. "This is the Ukrainian strategy," Molin explained. To "force Russia to change [its] strategy, which will obviously be less efficient."
A better-protected but less efficient Russian logistical system still results in fewer reinforcements and less supplies reaching front-line regiments.
