Ground drones are growing more popular on Ukraine’s front lines, but they’re still vastly overshadowed by the small aerial drones made famous in the war.
In November, uncrewed ground vehicles accounted for less than 0.66% of Ukraine’s total drone missions.
Usage numbers were announced on Tuesday by Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, as he gave a statement on the war situation this winter.
“At the current stage of the war, it is unmanned aerial vehicles that provide about 60% of all strikes on enemy targets,” Syrskyi wrote.
The military chief said that in November alone, Ukrainian uncrewed aerial vehicles, or UAVs, carried out over 304,000 missions, striking or destroying roughly 81,500 targets.
“Over the past six months, this indicator has been constantly growing,” Syrskyi added.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, carried out 2,000 missions in the same timeframe, he said.
The statistics underscore just how aerial drones continue to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine. UGVs, an emerging technology, are still finding their footing in the war as Kyiv moves to integrate them at a wider scale among its military units.
Amid the push, dozens of Ukrainian companies and units have been debuting their own UGVs, which can range from miniature buggies to full-size trucks mounted with remote machine gun turrets.
The ground drones are particularly useful because they can perform dangerous frontline missions that human soldiers would otherwise be required to carry out. Ukrainians are building them to serve a variety of purposes, from direct assaults and mine-clearing to monitoring roads and delivering frontline supplies.
Some units have begun using aerial and ground systems in tandem, such as troops in Pokrovsk who used a UGV to spot incoming Russian vehicles through fog and later attacked with exploding drones.
Russia’s ramping FPV production
Russia has also been pioneering new drones, including UGVs for logistics and rocket artillery. On the aerial front, the Kremlin’s forces were the first to introduce unjammable, fiber-optic drones that are now proliferating on the battlefield.
This year, Moscow has repeatedly been reported to be more readily integrating drone warfare into its ranks, scaling up mass production, forming official drone units, and creating new warfighting doctrine after observing Ukrainian tactics.
Syrskyi wrote that Russia had, at one point, reached a “period of a certain parity” with Ukraine in the use of first-person-view drones, or the small hobby drones souped up to fly explosives into targets.
“As reported by our intelligence bodies, the enemy seeks to reach monthly deliveries of up to half a million FPV drones to its troops,” he wrote.
Now, however, Syrskyi claimed that Ukraine has recently surpassed Russia in first-person-view drone usage.
“The Ukrainian response must be asymmetric and effective: strengthening the fight against enemy drones and destroying the infrastructure of the enemy’s unmanned forces units,” he added.
Syrskyi’s statement offered a grim recap of the war in recent months, saying that Ukraine’s forces have “faced some of the most serious challenges since the beginning of the full-scale war.”
Both civilians and soldiers in the country must soon grapple with another brutal winter, as temperatures are expected to consistently drop below freezing in January and February. Russia has been targeting local energy grids, disrupting Ukraine’s access to reliable heating.
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