Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones are losing relevance among Ukrainian forces amid a drone battle over the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine – Newsweek.
The TB2 distinguished itself in the first months of the war. The Turkish-made medium-altitude, long-range drone swiftly became a symbol of Ukrainian unmanned combat operations in the first weeks of the conflict.
Analysts and Ukrainian military officials claim that the TB2s lost their surprise attack capability once Russia discovered that Kyiv was operating Turkish drones.
According to British drone expert Steve Wright, the TB2 and similar drone models were designed primarily for surveillance and control of other strike weapons. Indeed, modifying the TB2 to add strike capabilities has brought Ukraine “some early wins” in airspace.
“The Russian forces have now got wise to its weaknesses, and it is being forced back to its less glamorous core missions of assisting other forces and weapons.”
Ukrainian sources, including Andriy Pidlisnyi, a captain in one of Ukraine’s reconnaissance battalions, suggest that the country finds it increasingly difficult to use drones on the battlefield with the same effectiveness.
They were very useful at the beginning of the full-scale war. But now that Russia has bolstered its air defences, Kyiv deploys the once-heralded TB2s largely for reconnaissance.
Ukrainian Colonel Volodymyr Valiukh stated that Ukrainian forces used TB2 more often at the beginning of the military conflict.
“For the TB2, I don’t want to use the word useless, but it is hard to find situations where to use them.”
According to Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence outlet, Ukraine lost 24 confirmed Bayraktar TB2 aircraft between February 2022 and the beginning of last month, but the real figure could be much higher as the statistics consider only visually confirmed losses.
However, the TB2 is not the only model deployed by the Ukrainian forces. Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov stated that the country was gradually becoming “a world leader in drone production.”
I don’t think that there is any doubt that Ukraine is winning the drone conflict.
However, Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, noted that the gap between Russia’s and Ukraine’s drone fleets was shrinking.
“Russia has been somewhat behind in drones, but it is slowly catching up.”
