The commander of the “Achilles” battalion in Ukraine warns against Western drones

Just one Ukrainian drone battalion, “Achilles,” which specializes in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks carried out by the 92nd Kyiv Assault Brigade, uses an average of 3,000 first-person view drones per month. But they don’t choose Western-made weapons or the most sophisticated drones just because they can’t do the job.

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

“The best drones can’t fly,” he said.

Drones defined the war in Ukraine that lasted over two and a half years, and the project update cycle lasted only a little over a month. Kiev’s domestic industry produces drones, and Ukrainian officials say the war-torn country has the capacity to produce millions of drones a year. Kyiv also has a new military unit dedicated exclusively to fighting drones.

The problem, Kiev officials emphasize, is funds. Ukraine’s capabilities far outweigh the money given to more than 250 drone companies, said Oleksandr Kamyshyn, Ukraine’s former industry minister for strategic industries, who oversees Kiev’s defense industry.

“It’s so frustrating, so embarrassing“be capable but not resourced enough” for the defense industry, said Kamyszyn, now a presidential adviser on strategic affairs with a focus on the military-industrial complex Newsweek in Kiev in mid-September.

But then there’s also electronic warfare and its ability to disorient, disrupt and disable the navigation systems of weapons flying over the battlefield every day.

While Ukraine’s international donors have contributed their own drones and many weapons to the war effort, experts say the vast majority of them are unsuitable for the ever-evolving frontlines winding through eastern Ukraine and along the border with Russia.

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

Among NATO countries and their armed forces, “no one understands what is happening,” Nurgudin said. He added that there is still no understanding of what “modern” warfare looks like, which is largely influenced by involvement in wars such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The UAV battalion was first deployed near Kharkov and then headed to the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, which has been controlled by Russia for about a year and a half. Nurgudin said the soldiers were then sent back to Kharkov to fight around the city of Kupyansk.

On Wednesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that Moscow’s forces had taken control of Kruhliakivka near Kupyansk.

The Ukrainian military did not confirm that an agreement had been reached.

There has been full-scale fighting in Kharkov since the beginning of the war, with swaths of Ukraine’s northeastern region occupied by Russia in 2022 before a lightning-fast Ukrainian counteroffensive wrested Moscow from its grip on much of the region.

The front line in Kharkov has remained relatively static for about two years, although Moscow launched a cross-border attack on areas of northern Kharkov earlier this year.

A U.S. think tank for the Institute for the Study of War said Saturday that Russia has made no confirmed progress on a stretch of the front line stretching from east of Kupyansk to west of Russian-controlled Swatove and Kreminno, towns in eastern Luhansk. region.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that it had captured Pershotrawneve, a village west of Swatove.

Whether Russia attacks Kupyansk depends on how many missiles Ukraine has on hand to load into its artillery systems, whether it has enough anti-aircraft systems to attack Russian jets, and how many fighters are in the area – he said.

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

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

The United States announced on Thursday that about 8,000 troops were stationed on the border with Ukraine. “We have not yet seen these troops deployed to combat Ukrainian forces, but we expect that to happen in the coming days,” the US Secretary of State said Antoni Blinkenhe said during a joint press conference with the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austinand South Korean Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense Cho Tae-yul and Kim Yong-hyun.