Dramatic Drone-on-Drone Combat Ignites Ukraine’s Skies!

Check this out! An incredible mid-air showdown between two drones was caught on camera by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. Usually, drones are busy buzzing around, focusing on ground targets. But this time, things were different.

What we saw was something pretty rare in the world of drone warfare — a head-to-head collision. A Ukrainian drone was seen plowing right into a drone the video claimed was Russian. This sort of aerial jousting isn’t what drones typically do; during this conflict we mostly see them dropping explosives of flying into military vehicles, troops, or supplies on the ground.

The video shared by the SBU shows us a rare case of drone-to-drone warfare. As it rolls, about 10 seconds in, you see the Ukrainian drone slam straight into the enemy’s.

The rest of the footage showed more ‘traditional’ suicide FPV drone ops, with the drones seeming to target Russian military supply trucks. Unfortunately we do not have any specifics on dates or locations.

The type of drones used here? Single-use models, known as “suicide” drones, designed to explode on impact.

As for the targets? Most didn’t even see the drone attack coming. Except at around the 30-second mark, a couple of soldiers next to a stationary vehicle caught sight of it and hit the deck just before the video cut out.

James Patton Rogers, a war-studies prof and drone expert at the University of Southern Denmark, dubbed Russia’s invasion as “one of the world’s first drone vs. drone conflicts.” It’s a claim that the video seems to back up.

The uptake of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), on the battlefield has skyrocketed since Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine, leading to some pretty innovative uses of the tech, including even mediating surrenders.

A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reportedly said Ukraine is losing a whopping 10,000 drones every month. This highlights how robust the Russian army’s electronic warfare capabilities are.

But Patton Rogers adds a silver lining — the massive losses underscore how extensively the technology is being used. And Ukraine isn’t sitting still, they’re busy developing “its own resilient drone systems to fill this gap in capacity.” So watch this airspace!