Ukrainian Drone Strategy Against Russian Energy Infrastructure: Part Two
“What our own drones are capable of is a true Ukrainian long-range capability. Ukraine will now always have a strike force in the sky.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, March 16, 2024
“Accuracy under jamming is enabled through the use of artificial intelligence. Each aircraft has a terminal computer with satellite and terrain data... The flights are determined in advance with our allies, and the aircraft follow the flight plan to enable us to strike targets with meters of precision.”
An anonymous Ukrainian source told CNN, April 2, 2024.
Hi Everyone!
Here is part two of what will be a three-part series on Ukraine’s long drone bombing campaign against Russian energy infrastructure. I greatly appreciate the warm response I received on part one and look forward to further feedback. When I wrote my first piece on Ukrainian drone attacks the number of attacks was 15 but as time progressed that number has climbed to over 40+ refineries and oil depots and counting. Not surprisingly the mere magnitude of these attacks has grown by leaps and bounds!
The final piece in the series will deal with the Russian air defense dilemma created by the drone attacks as the Russian energy sector finds itself unable to cope with this threat. The Russian Ministry of Defense basically has told Russian energy companies that they need to take care of this problem themselves by hiring private security companies and that Putin’s Praetorian Guard - Rosgvardia — is not up to the job.
Enjoy!
Glen
Introduction
The success of Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure that began in January 2024 (see Part One) and remains ongoing is attributed to several different factors:
· First, Ukraine has made key advances in its drone technology in the past year based upon the development and introduction of two key prototypes of long-range drones: the Nynja and the Lyutyi.
· Second, there has been an evolution of targeting, and integrative use of Artificial intelligence (AI) which has enabled Ukrainian drones to make important technological advances to avoid Russian electronic jamming and improve the overall effectiveness of their long-range drone strikes.
· Third, Ukraine has induced a government-private sector competition between different branches of its military services and industry significantly multiplying its drone capabilities. What initially began as an NGO-sponsored effort early in the war to field First Person View (FPV) drones has shifted to a more industrialized means of production inside Ukraine that has begun to reap enormous benefits. Last week Ukraine announced it had now attacked as many as 40 Russian refineries and oil depots, up from the number of 15 refineries attacked in the first half of the year.
Within the past six months, Ukrainian attacks have undergone a meteoric rise from what used to be a random occasional series of targeted strikes on Russian oil facilities to a more sustained focused effort aimed at hitting diverse targets geographically inside European Russia from St. Petersburg to the foothills of the Ural Mountains, and more recently several strikes on oil storage facilities in Adyghea in the North Caucasus in the past week.
Mykhailo Fedorov: The New Drone Hetman
The success of Ukraine’s long-range drone program is largely attributed to the oversight and direction of Mykhailo Fedorov who became Minister of Digital Information in August 2019. Fedorov assumed wider powers last year because of his initial success with the FPV drone program. In March 2023 President Zelensky extended his responsibilities to become Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation, Education, Science, and Technology in addition to his existing responsibilities as Minister for Digital Transformation.
With these increased responsibilities, Fedorov has become Ukraine’s wartime drone Tsar, or in the Ukrainian case “Hetman” which is more appropriate due to its use in Ukrainian Cossack culture because in English it equates to “Chieftain”. Under Fedorov’s direction, Ukraine has created a government and privately funded drone program basically from scratch. This is a major administrative achievement given the country’s entrenched Soviet-era bureaucracy and competing industrial clans that often stifled private-sector competition, particularly in the arms industry.
Drawing on his business background, Fedorov has championed private sector competition inside Ukraine to create the architecture for a drone industry which has led to a boom in production. On the second anniversary of the Ukraine war, Fedorov announced the start of a “million drone campaign” where he described how this program got off the ground in late 2023:
“At the end of last year, President (Volodymyr) Zelensky announced a plan that more than a million drones would be produced this year. Now the entire government team is working on this, and active contracting took place in January and February. Hundreds of thousands of drones have already been contracted, and this is the goal will be completed."
With the backing of President Zelensky, Fedorov took additional steps by launching an ‘Army of Drones’ program to purchase and produce drones for the armed forces as part of the United24 fundraising campaign, which has expanded Ukrainian fundraising capabilities raising millions of dollars from private and public sources to expand the country’s drone capabilities. This has enabled Ukraine to move beyond the creation of First Person View (FPV) drones to the more complex challenges of building larger drone platforms. In an interview with Reuters in late March 2024, Fedorov outlined how the program was growing in leaps and bounds and that since he assumed control over production drone deliveries in Ukraine had risen 120 times, noting that in the coming year, Ukraine would produce thousands of long-range drones capable of conducting deep long-range strikes inside Russia.
Fedorov touted the success of this program by noting that Ukrainian drones were not only capable of reaching Moscow and St Petersburg but: "the category of long-range kamikaze drones is growing, with a range of 300, 500, 700, and 1,000 kilometers. Two years ago, he noted, “this category did not exist ... at all," referring to how the drone program had been created from the ground up in 2022. As evidence of the expansion and diversification of this program from just a handful of drone manufacturers, he said that 90 percent of Ukrainian drones are now produced in Ukraine, and by 2024 there will be about 200 drone makers in Ukraine and the Strategic Industries Ministry will be able to build as many as 2 million drones this year.
Ukraine’s Internal Debate on the Utility of Long-Range UAVs
Ukraine’s ability to reach this stage of drone manufacturing was remarkable, but also one that had numerous bureaucratic challenges inside Ukraine that blocked development. Fierce internal discussions reportedly erupted between civilian and defense officials over the military effectiveness of using long-range drones. In a rare account of the development process for the Lytuyi long-range drone an investigative journalist for the Kyiv Post, described an intense debate that preceded the initial adoption of the long-range drone. According to the article, the group most resistant to the introduction of long-range UAVs was the Ukrainian military which failed to understand how the long-range drones could be militarily effective.
These skeptics had to be convinced that drones could have a military impact on the war, the Kyiv Post reported. Initially, Ukrainian military officials simply failed to understand how a drone aircraft could be successful in avoiding Russian air defense radars and were reluctant to embrace the potential of using long-range drones. Defense officials simply found it hard to imagine how a conspicuous aircraft with a wingspan of 6.7 meters crossing into Russia’s airspace through air defenses could hit its target.
Opponents of the drone program believed there was a high probability of drones either being spotted by Russian radars, misguided or disabled by Russian Electronic Warfare (EW) or even destroyed by air defenses on their initial approach to the target. In their view, it would simply be impossible for the drone to carry out its mission. However, subsequent iterations of the Lyutyi drone proved that it could be better protected against Russian jamming. The skeptics eventually changed their minds and according to the Kyiv Post, the single biggest factor in their decision was the Russian’s repeated success in using the Iranian Shaheed drones to attack Odesa, repeatedly avoiding Ukraine’s network of air defenses.
Such resistance within military bureaucracies is quite common in wartime. Similar episodes repeatedly occurred during the Second World War and were extensively highlighted in the memoirs of the British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert R.V. Jones. In his military classic Most Secret War, Jones describes the internal infighting between British scientists turned intelligence experts with the British military and intelligence establishment in the Second World War, often requiring the intervention of the British Prime Minister. R.V. Jones won many of these debates during the war but one of his most notable achievements was his success in the internal struggle over the Battle of the Beams when Jones discovered the Luftwaffe was using radio navigation systems to bomb the United Kingdom at night. R.V. Jones challenged the existing orthodoxy in thinking to spearhead an effort to respond to the Nazi bombing campaign by using jamming and deception signals which won him the enduring support of Winston Churchill.
A similar war-time debate appears to have erupted inside Ukraine between different government branches. Over time, the group that favored the use of long-range drones eventually convinced the skeptics to test their efficiency by conducting random drone attacks on buildings inside Russia. The first of these attacks occurred in August 2023 which refuted the views of the skeptics and later accelerated into a full-scale drone program to target Russia’s strategic energy infrastructure. This campaign reached a major milestone when in mid-May Ukraine conducted a 1,600-kilometer drone strike inside Russia reaching the Republic of Tatarstan hitting two targets simultaneously, striking a Russian refinery and Russian drone factory that produced Iranian Shahed-136 drones inside the Republic of Tatarstan.
Ukrainian Integration of Machine Vision Drones
One of the biggest technological hurdles overcome by Ukraine in its program has been its integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into its long-range drones. Ukraine has successfully converted its drone guidance systems to using self-guided navigation using AI to withstand Russian electronic jamming when flying over Russian territory. This is attributed to a technological breakthrough using “machine vision,” which is a form of Artificial Intelligence using terrain data to guide the drone.
Noah Sylvia, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in the United Kingdom, described in great detail how the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) accomplishes this task in an interview with CNN. Sylvia said the drone does this by integrating a basic form of AI to help the UAV navigate and avoid being jammed using machine vision which is a form of AI. Sylvia described it this way:
“Basically you take a model and you have it on a chip and you train this model to identify geography and the target it is navigating to. When it is finally deployed, it is able to identify where it is…It does not require any communication (with satellites) it is completely autonomous.”
Ukraine’s breakthrough in fielding AI-equipped drones also appears to have had help from one of its NATO partners. According to Euromaidan, a British firm called Evolve Dynamics has been working on upgrades of Ukrainian reconnaissance drones which has enabled its UAVs to resist Russian electronic warfare capabilities and continue flying. Reuters reported on 28 March that: “It is a small but important part of an international effort by Ukraine's allies to support its drone program, which Kyiv hopes will give it the edge over a much larger enemy with many more resources at its disposal.”
Finding a Long-Range Drone
During its two-year process of evaluation and development of long-range drone, Ukraine has developed several prototypes of AI-driven UAVs in its effort to target Russian refineries. The first of the long-range drones is the Sky Ranger Nynja which is a converted sports plane that is quite slow and cumbersome. According to the first initial reports about the Nynja it can travel 100 miles per hour and has a 400-mile cruising radius. It is similar in size and shape to a Ukrainian Aeroprakt A-22 civilian aircraft.
One of the biggest advantages of the Nynja is that over 1600 airframes of this light aircraft were available in Ukraine after the Soviet collapse in 1991. These planes could be converted and deployed in significant numbers and one of its major advantages is their light airframes and ability to travel autonomously for up to six hours using GPS . Each plane is reportedly equipped with a tower attached to an electro-optical sensor and a video camera that enables a remote operator to see the target which is connected to the drone via satellite. In drone terms, the plane-converted UAV also carries an explosive payload equipped with a 220-pound FAB-100 bomb and using GPS can return to base once it delivers its payload allowing it to become a reusable UAV-bomber.
While details on the use of the Nynja are scarce, the Ukrainian news site Defence Express.ua noted that Ukrainian engineers had been working overtime making modifications to the drone and had significantly extended its range. The Ukrainian news portal pointed out that a Nynja drone was used in a record-setting attack on May 9 traveling 1,500 kilometers to attack the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat oil refinery in Bashkortostan, located in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
Ukraine’s Drone Bomber of Choice: the Lyutyi
With two sets of long-range drones, the Lyutyi drone appears to have become Ukraine’s long-range drone of choice. By mid-May 2024, twelve weeks into the drone bombing campaign first announced by President Zelensky, Ukraine reportedly conducted up to 80 percent of its attacks on Russian refineries using the Lyutyi reported the Ukrainian website Militarnyi. Prominent Ukrainian military commentator Yuri Butusov voiced his support for the effectiveness of the Lyutyi and attributed its success to the fact that it has a high degree of combat effectiveness and reliability and can also carry a 50-kilogram warhead.
Recounting the history of the Lyutyi the Kyiv Post wrote that the drone was first developed in 2023 without a state order, stating that initially, this project received no attention or proper financing for a long time and that even the financing and mass production of the plane only began in January 2024 when it appears to have been rushed into production and was first used to attack the Kuibyshev oil refinery on March 16th. If this report is true then there were a reported eleven long-range Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries conducted before the Lyutyi was first used and these may have been carried out by the Nynja UAV.
Russian Refinery Vulnerabilities
By early 2024 Ukraine was finally able to field a new array of long-range drones to fulfill their targeting efforts on what they believed to be the ‘Achilles heel’ of Russian oil refineries - the distillation unit.
What Ukrainian military planners detected, either working on their own or utilizing insight and assistance from Western partners, was that due to the vast size of Russian oil refineries, no single drone equipped with a warhead by itself was capable of inflicting enough damage to destroy the facility. However, what they did figure out is that if a specific node of the refinery was hit then the entire facility could be brought to a screeching halt and would no longer be able to refine oil. Moreover, unless the damaged node was repaired or replaced the refinery would simply go offline for an indefinite period until the part was replaced or repaired. This problem becomes especially acute when one considers that Moscow has had difficulty in finding replacement parts for its refineries once damaged or destroyed due to Western sanctions.
Distillation Unit in a Russian Refinery
Consequently, the specific aim of the drone attack was not necessarily the destructive capacity of the bomb used by the drone but the drone’s precision strike capability in delivering a strike with pinpoint – almost cruise missile precision – in damaging a key part of the facility that refined oil. So what parts of the Russian refinery did Ukraine target? Ukraine selected the two most vulnerable parts of the refinery: the distillation and rectification columns which separate the oil to make it ready for export and operate together as one unit. The rectification columns of the refineries are the most vulnerable modules or nodes of the refinery and once damaged the refinery is taken offline until the damaged area is either repaired or replaced.
A damaged rectification column (unit) can debilitate a Russian refinery making it temporarily incapable of processing oil unless it is repaired or replaced. Fixing this key part of a refinery is done in two ways: first, by replacing the damaged rectification column with spare parts from another refinery with a similar column, or second, by importing the part from overseas. Ukrainian military planners likely chose the rectification column strategy as part of their drone bombing strategy because it would likely be the most difficult option for Moscow to repair the refinery.
In several instances, one of the Ukrainian government entities responsible for the refinery attacks was the Security Services of Ukraine, known as the SBU. The SBU acknowledged in two of its own UAV-directed attacks that it hit the rectification and atmospheric columns of both the Ilsky and Sloviansk refineries. So far Ukrainian experts estimate total Russian losses in equipment caused by the refinery attacks to be about $1.5 billion.
Indirect losses, including a drop in the refining capacity of the Russian oil industry, already are estimated to be more than 70 million tons per year, which is more than 25% of all Russian capacity said Torbjörn Törnqvist, CEO of the multinational energy trading company Guvnor, Based upon the initial waves of drone attacks he believes that the Ukrainian strikes have deprived Russia of at least 600,000 barrels of daily refining capacity. Another expert at American JPMorgan Chase and Company estimates this figure to be even higher, at 900,000 barrels of daily refining capacity. As to how this has affected Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine is something that only American and Ukrainian intelligence experts likely know but it is safe to say that it has pinched Russian sources and affected their morale. When asked about the effectiveness of Ukrainian long-range drone strikes the 38-year old head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrllo Budanov told the Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview published on June 25th that “These attacks may not turn the war around”….but he believes they can affect Russia’s economy “and psychological state,” which in turn “affects the military component.”
Outlook
Since President Zelensky unleashed his “Big Week” bombing campaign in mid-March this year there have been increased signs of a steady evolution - if not growing sophistication - in Ukrainian drone strategy that reflects its incorporation of new advances in machine vision (AI) technology being used as part of its weapons program. These advances have allowed Ukrainian drones to make a big technological leap in the use of AI-driven drones to resist Russian jamming. It also has heightened the effectiveness of Kyiv’s drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure to now include 40+ Russian refineries and oil storage depots.
As a result of these advances Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian port facilities, storage depots, and oil refineries have grown from an initial use of a dozen or so drones to an all-time high of 114 drone attacks used in a single sweeping attack hitting several targets at once across a specific geographic area. On June 21st, Ukraine launched its “Day of the Drones” attack by launching over a hundred drones in a major concentrated attack on multiple targets from Crimea to the Russian Black Sea province of Krasnodar. Key military targets were hit by Ukrainian long-range drones throughout Krasnodar as Ukraine is expanding its attacks to focus on every aspect of Russian logistics (oil depots, refineries, storage facilities, and ports) as part of its effort to destroy the Krasnodar hub for supplying Russian forces operating in neighboring Crimea.
Undoubtedly the emergence of Ukrainian drone “Hetman Mykhailo Fedorov and his initial 1 million drone construction campaign – which has risen now to 2 million - has enabled Ukraine to increase the number of sophisticated AI-driven UAVs it is using like the Nynja and Lyiuty. As the number of AI-operated drones available to perform these missions rises there has been a noticeable increase in the number of Ukrainian drones used in a single attack. Progressively for the past year, single-day Ukrainian long-range drone attacks have risen from the low digits of ten to 20 attacks in one strike to up to a hundred drones used on a particular target like Krasnodar. This development is a key sign that Ukrainian drone production lines are now likely operating at their highest level since the war and gaining momentum. It also demonstrates Fedorov’s ‘Army of Drones’ campaign is starting to yield major results in Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia as it stands to be one long hot summer for Putin.