Russian forces have encountered a new enemy in the Black Sea: Ukraine’s arsenal of naval kamikaze drones. These deceptively small unmanned vehicles have targeted Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since September 2022, picking off Russian battleships one by one. The latest of Ukraine’s maritime conquests was the Russian Mangust-class patrol boat, which it destroyed off the coast of occupied Crimea with a MAGURA naval drone. Ukraine shifted its focus to naval drones after the start of Russia’s full-scale

Drone combat in Russia’s war against Ukraine is changing warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used at an unprecedented scale for which neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian armies were quite prepared. Both militaries have made significant progress with respect to drones, sometimes modernizing them in the midst of battle on the front. Let’s take a look at the evolution of Russia’s drone arsenal. Forposts The Forpost, a licensed replica of the Israeli IAI Searcher, is the most we

Russia’s war against Ukraine is shattering the conventions of warfare in many ways. One of the most illustrative examples is the systematic destruction of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) by Ukraine, a country that has virtually no navy of its own. The Ukrainian military’s use of coastal missile systems, air-launched cruise missiles, and sea and air drones has forced Russia to up its Black Sea port defenses and create a naval base in Russian-occupied Abkhazia. An early symbol of humiliation was t

The Ukrainian military shot down five Russian military aircraft in the span of three days in early March, begging the question: How many planes does Russia have? This is a complex question, but I'll let you in on a little secret: The numbers listed in international indexes are often quite far from the reality. Objective data can only really be obtained by comprehensively analyzing open-source intelligence (OSINT) which, until 2022, was relatively easy to obtain. Prior to the start of full-scale

How many tanks does Russia really have left? This question has come up quite frequently in discussions, and it’s simply impossible to find a precise answer – Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov probably don’t even know. But this doesn’t deter us from trying to count Russia’s tanks anyway. Estimates on the number of tanks Russia has in storage vary greatly. For example, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimated in 2022 that Ru