In response to military setbacks in other parts of Ukraine, Russia used single-use drones to attack central Kyiv Oct. 17. The drones, according to Ukraine and the US, are supplied by Iran.
1. What are drones?
Named the Shahed-136, they’re sometimes called “kamikaze” drones because they aren’t designed to survive their mission. But they are really more guided missiles than airplanes, and all missiles are kamikazes. Because the Shahed-136s are fitted with swept wings and a propeller motor, they can loiter for hours before locking onto a target and striking. While new to the war in Ukraine, the Shahed comes from a family of slow, low-flying projectiles that have been around since the 1980s, upgraded primarily by the inclusion of commercial GPS systems available on Alibaba. The name can mean martyr in Persian.
2. Is this the first use of Iranian drones in Ukraine?
No. According to the US, Russia took delivery of 1,000 drones from Iran at the end of August. The next month, the Russians started using them to attack the southern port city of Odesa. For months before that, the Ukrainians had been hammering Russian forces with the much smaller Switchblade 300, a portable, single-use, loitering drone made by the Virginia-based company AeroVironment Inc. Ukrainian forces have also used the reusable, armed Turkish Bayraktar drone, as well as commercially available drones improvised to drop explosives over a target.
3. What’s Iran’s role?
Iran says it’s not a party to Russia’s war in Ukraine and denies exporting any weapons for use there. Ukraine hasn’t bought it, and has ejected Iran’s ambassador from the country. Remnants of the drones — renamed Geran-2 (Germanium-2) by Russia — have been found after being shot down.
4. What’s the advantage of using the Shahed drones?
As Russia runs down its stockpile of precision-guided missiles and struggles to buy or make replacements while under sanctions, Iran’s drones offer an accurate, mid-range alternative. Several drones may be necessary to achieve a hit equivalent to a cruise missile, but because they are inexpensive they can be deployed cheaply in so-called swarms. Although they move relatively slowly, they fly low and can be hard for some air defense systems to locate and shoot down, especially when used in numbers. The air defense missiles often used to shoot them down cost far more. The launch systems for the drones can be mounted onto trucks and are therefore relatively mobile and hard to destroy on the ground.
5. How are the Russians using them?
When deployed against cities such as Kyiv and Odesa, the Shahed has a psychological impact on residents, spreading fear and disrupting daily activity. They’ve also been used at the front, with some Russian military bloggers publishing images of Ukrainian armored personnel carriers and artillery pieces they said were destroyed by the Shaheds, a scenario supported in a report by the Wall Street Journal. On pro-Russia online sites, there’s been speculation that the drones could be used in swarms to destroy Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries, giving Russia the air superiority it has lacked throughout the war. Those hopes aren’t so far being realized.
6. What’s the defense against drones?
They can be shot down using old-fashioned anti-aircraft cannons, as well as more sophisticated missile defenses, and the Ukrainians have brought down some of them. The difficulty, in a country larger than France, comes in deciding where to place limited stocks of air defenses. The Shahed can fly hundreds of kilometers. (Iran’s claim of a range in excess of 2,000 km, or 1,243 miles, is likely an exaggeration). Ukrainian officials have expressed interest in buying air defense systems from Israel, which has a near perfect record shooting down even more sophisticated Iranian drones. Israel’s provision of such equipment would risk upending relations with Russia. Russia, which continues to maintain a military presence in Syria, has turned a blind eye to Israeli attacks there. Those strikes target Iranian arms supplies to Hezbollah, the militant, anti-Israel Lebanese group.
(Bloomberg)
