The Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, which reportedly assisted Ukraine in military successes earlier in the war, are now of limited utility amid Russian forces bolstering their air defenses, according to a Ukrainian military official.
The assessment by Col. Volodymyr Valiukh, a commander in Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, comes as unmanned aerial vehicles of all sizes and flavors continue to play a key role in Ukraine’s defense calculus. But new tactical constraints have come into play, he said.
In the early weeks of the Russian invasion, the drone often singled out in news headlines was the TB2, produced by Turkish manufacturer Baykar. Among the hits logged by Ukrainian TB2s are five tanks, six towed artillery pieces, six naval ships, two logistics trains, two multiple rocket launchers, two anti-aircraft guns and over a dozen surface-to-air missiles, according to the Dutch open-source intelligence website Oryx.
However, over the course of the last year, several reports noted that the drones seemed to have disappeared from available footage of battlefield action and that their use had become more limited in the face of more sophisticated Russian air defenses.
“For the TB2, I don’t want to use the word useless, but it is hard to find situations where to use them,” Valiukh said at the GSOF Symposium here on Oct. 26.