Cutting-edge technologies in the Russian-Ukrainian war are bizarrely mixed with century-old inventions: FPV drones on Starlink with thermal imagers drop shells from the 1950s or ram other drones with a tethered stick, “maize” drones from the First World War shoot down drones with machine guns or turn into unmanned drones themselves, and a wide variety of transport, from horse-drawn carts to unicycles, scurry behind the front line. Russians are going into assault attacks on motorcycles (which they didn’t do even in the Second World War), and the sky is protected by century-old Maxim machine guns with thermal imagers. The Insider tells how the co-evolution of modern technology and century-old equipment has turned the battlefield into a Mad Max sequel.
Legacy of the Cold War
By the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the two sides had similar arsenals: most of them were Cold War legacy, which was later modernized with varying success. Russia had an advantage in operational-tactical level reconnaissance drones, electronic warfare systems , and long-range fire weapons (cruise and ballistic missiles). Ukraine, in turn, had better-developed digital communications, and was armed with modern anti-tank weapons supplied by the West. But the Soviet army of the 1980s remained the basis of both countries.
The start of the war in Ukraine looked like a clash between two Soviet armies in the 1980s
However, this could not continue for long. There was a lack of technological and industrial base, which was at the disposal of the Soviet army. The opponents had to scrape together the bins. The first signs of a rollback to the technological past appeared even before the start of a full-scale aggression, when the fighters of the Ukrainian territorial defense began to be given Degtyarev machine guns developed in the late 1920s. Soon after the start of the invasion, those mobilized in the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” received Soviet SSh-68 helmets (and in some cases SSh-40 from the Second World War) and Mosin rifles developed in 1891.
Both sides had to improvise on the fly. During the battle for Kiev, local residents used “wedding” quadcopters to help guide Ukrainian artillery, in particular the heavy self-propelled guns “Pion”. The Russians, in turn, faced with the problem of non-working communication systems (in which huge funds were invested before the war ), began to buy cheap Chinese Baofeng radio stations, which were easily tapped.
The development of strike and reconnaissance UAVs took a new leap after the end of the Russian “blitzkrieg” of the first months of the war and the beginning of the offensive in Donbas. By this time, both sides discovered a shortage of artillery ammunition – first, the Soviet reserves of Ukraine were exhausted , and then the Russians faced a “shell famine” after a series of effective strikes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Russian warehouses from American HIMARS MLRS .
Instead of shooting “at squares” from Soviet manuals, small reconnaissance drones were now in operation. They directed each precious shell precisely to the target. At the same time, grenades dropped from drones made it possible to hit small lightly armored targets without using artillery at all.
Mutual “shell hunger” has made drones a key condition for the effective use of artillery
This is where the shortcomings of the pre-war provision of the Russian army with drones came into play — in particular, the late Vladlen Tatarsky spoke about the acute shortage of regular Orlans in combat units. In addition, due to the poor quality of the optics, the Orlan was more suitable for adjusting the fire of divisions and batteries on large enemy concentrations, which the Ukrainian army quickly abandoned. Fire missions had to be distributed by gun, and now almost every crew needed a drone. This forced the Russians, following the Ukrainians, to begin purchasing commercial UAVs with volunteer funds and mastering special artillery programs for smartphones.
In the absence of a secure military messenger, Telegram became its replacement for the Russians , while the Ukrainian Armed Forces went further and began using the Discord service, popular among gamers, at command posts , which allows making group video calls and watching several UAV broadcasts live at once.
The number of Russian artillery systems was replenished with the D-20 howitzers taken out of storage , and then the D-1 model of 1943. The main advantage of the latter was the ability to use artillery rounds that had been gathering dust in warehouses since the middle of the last century. In turn, the Ukrainian Armed Forces, along with Western guns, put into service the Soviet D-44 guns , the development of which began in 1944, and some of them began to be installed on the MT-LB , turning them into ersatz self-propelled guns.
Over time, both sides mastered the production of so-called “gun trucks” ( 1 , 2 ) – weapons improvisedly mounted on truck chassis. Later, due to the lack of even artillery weapons, some Russian fighters began to master such forgotten systems as rifle grenades and even bows with tips in the form of ammunition for a mounted grenade launcher.
Drones on Starlink and unmanned “corn” drones
The use of various unmanned systems has become a kind of calling card of the Russian-Ukrainian war. In part, their importance is exaggerated, since mostly videos of successful drone attacks end up on the Internet. Nevertheless, drones play a significant role on the battlefield – this is especially true for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which in the winter of 2023-2024 were desperately short of artillery supplies due to delays in the adoption of the American military aid bill.
Like any innovative weapon, drones are rapidly “evolving”, acquiring special warheads , thermal imagers and machine vision , which allows the UAV to automatically target the operator’s chosen target. From “wedding drones”, they have turned into Starlink carriers , retransmitting the signal and allowing attack drones to be controlled at a much greater distance. Satellite communication terminals have even been hacked to bypass territorial restrictions imposed by Elon Musk’s company.
The Ukrainian military-industrial complex also found a response to the Iranian Shahed (more about their development in the article “Drone Wars: How Drones Became the Defining Factor of the War in Ukraine” ). The Lyutiy drones became frequent guests in the western regions of Russia, and soon Ukrainian drones learned to fly to Tatarstan – this became possible thanks to the conversion of light aircraft from the Ukrainian enterprise Aeroprakt into drones. The Armed Forces of Ukraine created the world’s first Unmanned Systems Forces, which effectively singled out drones as a separate branch of the armed forces, on par, for example, with artillery or air defense .
Ukrainian brigades are acquiring companies of strike unmanned aerial systems ( RUBpAK ) one after another, and some are creating entire unmanned battalions . The Russian army is clearly lagging behind, at least in organizational terms – strike drone companies are currently being created only at the level of troop groups. Regular UAV companies unite operators of reconnaissance and strike drones and are inferior to their Ukrainian “colleagues” in firepower. However, Russian troops continue to demonstrate an advantage in aircraft-type reconnaissance drones, filming strikes on Ukrainian targets at a distance of up to 150 kilometers from the border.
In addition to unmanned aerial vehicles, marine and land-based unmanned systems have become widespread. At sea, the Ukrainian Navy and special services, using UAVs , inflicted significant losses on the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which led to the resignation of the Black Sea Fleet commander and the evacuation of most of the fleet’s ships from Crimea to Novorossiysk.
The unmanned boats are controlled via Starlink, and their latest modifications carry air-to-air missiles for combating helicopters and Grad MLRS guides for attacks on the shore. The UAVs have allegedly even “learned” how to plant mines remotely. Russia, in turn, presented its own line of unmanned boats at the Fleet 2024 exhibition — however, Ukraine has no large surface ships, so there is little point in such developments.
Ground-based unmanned systems occupy their niche. They perform a variety of functions, including remote mining (including directly under enemy positions), mine clearance , undermining enemy facilities, and using electronic warfare . There is even a known attempt to convert a captured Ukrainian tank into a ground-based drone, which looks more like a revival of past technologies: the first remote-controlled tanks were used by Soviet troops during the Soviet-Finnish War. Ground drones turned out to be extremely important for logistics, which will be discussed below.
If drones on land, on water and in the air are at the cutting edge of military-technical progress, then the means of combating them are a bizarre mixture of different technologies. After the first raids of the “Shaheds” on Ukrainian cities, a manual on shooting at drones with a lead from small arms, very reminiscent of manuals for Soviet soldiers on fighting German bombers, flew around social networks.
Passive protection of armored vehicles from kamikaze UAVs reached its peak with the appearance in the ranks of Russian troops of “tsar-mangals” – tanks enclosed in a kind of cocoon made of metal or rubber sheets, often covered on top with another layer of anti-drone grids for reliability .
Some military experts note that as a result, tanks are beginning to resemble their ancestors from the First World War, most of which did not have a rotating turret and were also designed primarily to storm enemy fortified positions.
Russian tanks increasingly resemble models from the First World War
To protect against drones, the “EW monster” is sometimes used in combination with the “tsar-barbecue” – a pile of various electronic warfare systems that provide acceptable protection against enemy FPV drones . Passive protection in the form of “barbecues” has also begun to be installed on tanks at Russian oil depots and refineries, which regularly suffer from attacks by Ukrainian drones.
The measures taken to combat drones in general look extremely unusual. In addition to radars , Ukraine has a sound reconnaissance system consisting of 8,000 mobile phones installed on towers to detect Russian long-range drones. At the same time, one of the most effective means of combating the “Shaheds” has proven to be the Maxim machine guns , created in the century before last, which, thanks to a water cooling system, are capable of firing continuously for a long time.
The Russians have not yet managed to create a full-fledged system of mobile anti-drone groups similar to the one operating in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and therefore hunt Ukrainian UAVs with the help of helicopters and fighters . The Ukrainians, in turn, fight Russian reconnaissance drones by firing at them from Soviet Yak-52 light aircraft . In this case, they use the “tactics of the First World War”, when one of the crew members of an unarmed aircraft fires from a personal weapon. Judging by the marks of downed UAVs on one of the “Yaks”, the tactic is effective.
Increasingly, other drones are coming to the forefront in the fight against drones. Russian and Ukrainian FPV kamikazes successfully manage to destroy land and sea drones. Ukrainian UAV units use “active defense tactics ,” identifying enemy drones with SIGINT and sending their own drones to intercept them.
Russian “drone operators” use aerial ramming against “Baba Yaga” , but this tactic does not always work .
Safer for the interceptor is the Russian “net-comet” system, which drops a net on the enemy drone, which causes the propellers to entangle and the drone to fall. The Ukrainians respond with the “innovative” “Palka” system , which, despite its simplicity, also ensures the fall of enemy UAVs.
In parallel with such primitive systems, the highly high-tech industry of electronic warfare and electronic countermeasures is developing. GPS spoofers are increasingly used during air raids in Ukrainian cities, “sending” local residents’ cars to Turkey. Similar systems that knock drones off course are apparently also being used in Russian populated areas.
The famous Ukrainian “drone breeder” Robert Brovdi, call sign “Madyar”, is making plans to cover the entire front with systems that allow for the timely detection and suppression of enemy drones. Meanwhile, Ukrainian and Russian volunteers are sending individual drone detectors to the front that can warn of approaching UAVs and even determine their type. The Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade is investing millions in the development of directional jamming stations and interceptors to protect industrial enterprises. Russian “war correspondents”, in turn, are demonstrating individual portable electronic warfare systems, which, however, are associated with risks to the operator’s health ( 1 , 2 ).
“Assault” equipment and logistics
In The Insider’s review of the “evolution” of the Russian army over two years of war, special attention was paid to the huge losses of armored vehicles, which throws the level of mechanization of line units back to the situation of the 1940s, as some Z-authors openly write about . The same problem is in the Defense Forces of Ukraine – the National Police recently announced the formation of three combined rifle brigades at once. The status of a “rifle” unit, as opposed to motorized rifle or mechanized units, means that at the very least it does not have enough tanks and armored combat vehicles for all personnel. In an effort to protect those tanks that remain in service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, they are being modernized by installing “barbecues” and dynamic protection , including Ukrainian-made ones .
The Russians, faced with a shortage of dynamic protection elements for armored vehicles, are forced to make it in a makeshift way , for example, from the “filling” of mine-clearing charges. In particular, the MT-LB and BMP-1 armored vehicles are being redesigned to expand their landing capabilities: their troop compartments are expanded and their gun turrets are dismantled. In cases where armored vehicles are completely absent, but it is still necessary to go on another “meat assault” , in addition to the notorious Chinese “golf carts”, Russian forces also use “assault motorcycles” .
During World War II, motorcycle units were often found in the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army , but they performed reconnaissance and light cavalry roles and did not use their equipment to storm enemy positions.
Motorcycles are believed to allow one to quickly slip through the range of Ukrainian artillery and drones, but according to available evidence, this is far from always possible . Some motorcycles are covered with special “motorbike barbecues”, but even in the Z-environment, the effectiveness of such structures, which evoke associations with the post-apocalyptic franchise “Mad Max”, is doubted .
The use of motorcycles as a means of frontline logistics may be more justified – allegedly, there is even talk of creating motorized platoons in Russian regiments and brigades. In any case, even the Russian Defense Ministry demonstrates the use of light tankers based on motorcycles (as well as buggies and UAZ vehicles). The dispersed nature of positions, the bulkiness and visibility of conventional trucks (and perhaps their shortage) lead to the appearance in the frontline zone of such exotic types of transport as ATVs , motorized cultivators and even (rarely) horse-drawn carts. Some servicemen use such modern types of personal transport as unicycles , electric scooters and electric bikes .
Modern means of “micrologistics” also include electric trucks and robotic platforms , which are used both for delivering cargo to the front lines and for evacuation. Forward positions are often supplied with UAVs , and recently heavy copters have been created on the Russian and Ukrainian sides, capable of transporting not only supplies, but also fighters in full uniform.
However, there are also more exotic means of unmanned communication between positions – for example, a bathtub that Russian soldiers pulled on a cable between trenches until it was hit by a Ukrainian drone.
During the years of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the lack of modern weapons, military and special equipment, combined with the availability of commercial electronics and the spread of engineering skills, led to the most bizarre combinations of technologies from the 19th to the 21st century. Not all of them find their niche at the front, but every day new (or well-forgotten old) devices appear in “garage” laboratories and on the front lines, striking the imagination of observers. And since, as The Insider wrote in a recent article , the war, unfortunately, does not think of ending, and the needs of armies are constantly growing, the technological diversity will only increase.