David Kirichenko
“There’s been a huge surge in their drone numbers lately, and so many different ‘birds’ in the air, including a lot of fiber-optic drones that you can’t jam,” said Anatoliy, the commander of a mortar battery from Ukraine’s 92nd Separate Assault Brigade, who was transferred from Kharkiv to Kursk to help counter relentless Russian assaults.
“We’ve already lost a lot of equipment,” he said. “They’re constantly dropping KABs [guided aerial bombs] and launching a ton of first-person view (FPV) drones.”
Amid intense fighting, the battle for Russia’s Kursk Oblast has become a proving ground for new technologies and a center for drone warfare innovation. Ukraine’s General Staff has reported nearly 40,000 Russian casualties in six months, including more than 16,000 killed, along with the capture of over 900 enemy combatants.
Alongside the drones, “they’re throwing waves of meat at us,” Anatoliy said. Kursk is also where Moscow deployed troops lent by North Korea, showing how desperate Russian President Vladimir Putin is to reclaim Ukrainian-occupied territory.
Russia started using fiber-optic drones in Ukraine in the spring of 2024. At first, Kyiv did not see them as necessary for the battlefield but, as technology became increasingly effective at disrupting standard drone communications, they realized the need to adapt. Now Ukraine is aggressively developing its own to counter the enemy’s growing use of them.
Initially, drones relied on wireless signals, prompting both sides to deploy electronic warfare systems to jam them. Now, the shift to fiber-optic has become the latest front in the ongoing battle for superiority.
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