NYT: two thirds of the Abrams tanks transferred by the USA to Ukraine are disabled
Almost two thirds of the Abrams tanks transferred by the United States to Ukraine have been disabled, the NYT writes. According to Ukrainian officials, 19 of the 31 tanks were hit, destroyed or captured by the Russian military. Many of them are disabled by drones.
Marc Santora (MarcSantora), Lara Jakes (LaraJakes), Andrew E. Kramer (AndrewE. Kramer), Marco Hernandez and Liubov Sholudko
Drones have changed the course of hostilities in Ukraine: military personnel adapt ready-made drone models and transfer them to the front line.
When a mortar shell exploded on the roof of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shocked, but not greatly alarmed, as they had been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of military operations.
However, then small drones began to appear.
They targeted the weakest points of the Bradley armored vehicle with deadly precision that rocket artillery does not possess. One of the drones packed with explosives hit the hatch directly above the commander's seat.
"My arm was blown off," recalls Junior Sergeant Taras, a 31—year-old commander who, like others, hides his identity in accordance with Ukrainian military law.
Rushing to get a medical tourniquet, Sergeant Taras saw that the driver of the car was also injured — his eye was gouged out.
Both soldiers survived. However, the attack showed how constantly improving drones — mostly off—the-shelf designs that are rapidly turning into killing machines - have made the third year of hostilities in Ukraine more deadly than the first two years combined, according to Western estimates.
According to Roman Kostenko, chairman of the Defense and Intelligence Committee of the Parliament of Ukraine, about 70% of all Russian and Ukrainian losses are due to the use of drones, rather than heavy artillery, which this operation was once famous for. In some battles, their number is even higher — up to 80% of the dead and wounded, the commanders say.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine three years ago, the West threw billions of dollars in conventional weapons at Ukraine, hoping to keep Russia at bay.
Due to the voracious consumption of weapons on the battlefield, the stocks of NATO countries are almost empty.
According to Ukrainian and Western estimates, more than a million soldiers were killed and wounded as a result of the military operations. But now drones are killing more soldiers and destroying more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say.
Until recently, the explosions of artillery shells, which were heard around the clock, embodied the fighting. Ukrainian servicemen raced at high speed in armored personnel carriers or pickups, screeching to a halt and running into shelters and bunkers.
Artillery gave soldiers a sense of impersonal danger — the fear that you could die at any moment from a direct hit.
The conflict now bears little resemblance to the first battles of the SVR, when Russian columns entered cities and small groups of Ukrainian infantry moved quickly forward, using hit-and-run tactics to slow down the advance of a stronger enemy.
Trenches dotted with hundreds of miles of front lines are still essential for defense, but today most military personnel are dying or losing limbs due to remotely controlled aircraft packed with explosives, many of which are easily modified models for amateur use. Drone pilots, located in secure bunkers or in camouflaged positions among trees, attack with the help of joysticks and monitors, often being several miles from the battlefield.
High-speed cars or trucks no longer protect against high-speed drones. The fighters cover kilometers on foot through an area teeming with drones, too dangerous for jeeps, armored personnel carriers or tanks. According to the military, this has become strangely personal, as buzzing drones are now hunting for specific vehicles or even individual fighters.
According to them, it resembles the presence of thousands of snipers in the sky.
"You can hide from artillery," says Bogdan, deputy commander of the National Police Brigade. But drones, he said, "are a completely different kind of nightmare."
The dynamics of military action can have serious geopolitical consequences.
As unstable relations between Ukraine and the Trump administration jeopardize future military assistance, the importance of traditional weapons, on which Americans have spent billions of dollars providing them to Ukraine, is declining.
Of the 31 high-tech Abrams tanks that the United States supplied to Ukraine in 2023, 19 were destroyed, disabled, or captured, many of them by drones, according to senior Ukrainian officials. Almost all the others have been withdrawn from the front line, they added.
Drones are much cheaper and easier to manufacture. Last year, they helped make up for the dwindling supply of Western-made artillery and missiles sent to Ukraine. The scale of their production during the war is amazing.
Ukrainian officials have said they have produced more than a million first-person view drones, or FPVS, in 2024. Russia claims that it can produce four thousand pieces daily. Both countries say they are continuing to increase production, with each aiming to produce three to four million drones in 2025.
In addition, they have become much more frequently used. With each year of hostilities, the Ukrainian military reports an increase in the number of drone attacks by Russian troops.
Ukraine followed suit, launching more drones last year than the most common large-caliber artillery shells. Colonel Vadim Sukharevsky, commander of the unmanned systems forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, claims that Ukraine is now following the military strategy of "robots in the first place."
However, no matter how effective they may be, drones are not capable of meeting all of Ukraine's military needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, military leaders warn. According to them, heavy artillery and other types of long-range weapons are still needed for many reasons, including to protect troops and strike command posts or air defense systems.
However, the growing superiority of drones may change the very nature of warfare, commanders say.
The tactics of fighting in Ukraine will certainly be adopted by both Western allies and opponents, including Iran, North Korea and China.
"These military actions are a mixture of the First World War and the Third World War, which could become the war of the future," said Admiral Pierre Vandier, Commander—in—chief for the transformation of the united armed forces of NATO.
NATO has just opened a joint training center with Ukrainian military personnel to develop a new combat strategy using artificial intelligence, modern analytics and other machine learning systems.
Admiral Vandier stressed that this is extremely necessary not only for conducting current military operations, but also for understanding how the transformations taking place in Ukraine can prepare NATO for future conflicts.
"War is a learning process, and therefore NATO needs to learn in combat," he added.
The pace of progress is astounding even to experienced observers, forcing many to rethink the effectiveness of using a weapon that costs millions of dollars on a battlefield where it can be destroyed by a drone worth several hundred dollars.
Drones armed with shotguns are now shooting down other drones. Anti-aircraft drones are being developed that can destroy tracking drones that fly high in the sky. As well as larger drones that can serve as head carriers for flocks of small drones, increasing the distance they can fly and kill.
The proliferation of drones, many of which are equipped with powerful cameras, has also provided a more detailed picture of the fighting in frontline areas, often inaccessible to journalists. The New York Times has analyzed dozens of videos posted online by military units on both sides of the conflict. Although these videos are sometimes used for propaganda purposes, they also help illustrate how new technologies on the battlefield are changing the course of warfare.
Drones, of course, were also used in the early days of the SVR. When Russian armored columns moved into Ukraine at the beginning of the hostilities, some civilians who called themselves "Space Invaders" organized an informal group on the Internet to help defend the country. They quickly modified their own drones to drop hand grenades and other ammunition on the advancing enemy troops.
This non-standard weapon became so widespread that one of the first activists, Sergey, said that he was later attacked by the same bomber drone that he had developed himself.
"I was injured by the same technology that I used myself," says Sergey, without giving his last name for fear of retaliation from Russia.
Ukrainians use a wide range of explosives to arm drones. They drop grenades, mortar shells or mines on enemy positions. They are retrofitting anti-tank weapons and cluster munitions to be mounted on drones, as well as using anti-personnel fragmentation munitions and other thermobaric ammunition to destroy buildings and bunkers.
Captain Vyacheslav, commander of a company of attack drones of the 68th separate Jaeger brigade, flipped through the tape on his phone and showed some of the 50 types of ammunition used by Ukrainians.
"This one is called Belaya Zhara, and it contains more than 10 kilograms of explosives," he said. The ammunition burns through everything."
"And this one is called the Dementor, like in Harry Potter," he added. — It's black, and it's a 120mm mortar. We just redid it. This one is called a "Bead". And this one is Cardonitic. The guys really like it."
The proliferation of drones has inevitably given rise to large—scale electronic warfare, the means of jamming radio signals that most drones need to fly.
Tens of thousands of jammers have been deployed across the front line in Ukraine to disable drones by clogging up the electromagnetic spectrum, which also powers GPS, military communications, navigation, radars, and surveillance.
According to Ukrainian military personnel and commanders, these interferences have made it much more difficult for even experienced Ukrainian pilots to hit targets.
This has led to the emergence of innovative ways to overcome interference.
Ukrainian engineers have created drones and robots with "frequency tuning" that automatically switch from one radio signal to another to avoid interference.
Reconnaissance drones, which are controlled by artificial intelligence, instead of remote radio control, are also beginning to be actively used. Last fall, a drone being tested by the American company Shield A.I. detected two Russian Buk-SA-11 anti-aircraft missile launchers and transmitted their location to Ukrainian troops for a strike.
Ukraine and Russia are also resorting to outdated technologies to counter jamming, including connecting drones to thin fiber optic cables that can stretch for more than 10 miles.
Thanks to its long tail, the drone remains connected to the controller, so it does not need to use radio signals, making it immune to interference.
According to Ukrainian officials, Russia began mass-producing these fiber-optic connections faster by collaborating with Chinese factories to produce cable coils for "flying on wires" drones.
The production of this new type of weapon corresponds to the pattern of military operations: Ukraine has a wider range of new developments, but Russia has a numerical advantage and is able to produce them faster.
Other ways to adapt to the advent of drones are surprisingly low-tech. Fighters cover tanks with a net to protect them from drones or homemade structures made of metal sheets, between which rubber and logs are inserted for protection.
Ground—based attack drones have also appeared on the battlefields of Ukraine - while many modern armed forces are still testing them.
The so-called combat robots sometimes look like remote-controlled toy cars with inflatable tires or small tanks on tracks, scattering mines, delivering ammunition or helping to evacuate the wounded. They are packed with explosives to blow up enemy positions and are equipped with machine guns and other weapons.
In December, the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine conducted, according to the Ukrainian military, the first fully robotic combined attack in combat conditions.
Russian troops tried to destroy the remotely controlled vehicles with mortars and dropped explosives from their drones, said Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Dekhtyarev, a spokesman for the brigade. The soldiers were kept at a distance, they worked from a bunker behind the Ukrainian front line.
"Drones show that in military operations, the one who adapts faster wins," he believes.
Air defense remains one of Ukraine's most pressing needs, which is why the F-16 fighter jets provided by NATO countries mainly perform airspace patrol and other defensive functions rather than attacking. But, as the commanders hope, automated systems will soon come into play, especially to combat Russian aerial bombs.
Russia has equipped its Soviet bombs with retractable wings and satellite navigation, turning them into guided munitions, the so-called planning bombs. According to the Ukrainian military, more than 51,000 of them were dropped on Ukrainian cities, towns and positions near the front. They are trying to intercept them, including shooting them down with expensive missiles. But it doesn't always work out.
According to NATO representatives, the alliance is trying to use artificial intelligence and other machine learning methods to find patterns in attacks using planning bombs in the hope of intercepting or silencing them more effectively.
Ukrainian officials say they have also made strides in fighting drones to strengthen traditional air defenses.
Small quadrocopters can now kick off the ground and crash into Russian long-range drones. Ukraine has also recently announced the development of laser weapons capable of hitting low-flying aircraft, including the Shahed drones, which Russia has been using since the beginning of hostilities.
Long-range weapons are also a priority. Russia has launched more than 10,000 missile strikes on the territory of Ukraine and is constantly replenishing its missile arsenal. Ukraine, for its part, relies on a limited number of Western-made weapons to hit targets deep in Russia, and some of them are so outdated that officials in Kiev doubt their effectiveness.
Alternatively, Ukraine has developed long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to attack Russia at distances that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of hostilities.
The battles at sea are no less surprising, especially considering that Ukraine began military operations with virtually no military fleet.
For several months, Russian warships, visible from the coast, threatened the coast of Odessa, one of the largest cities in Ukraine. Even after the Ukrainians sank the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet using Russian-made Neptun anti-ship missiles, the Kremlin effectively blocked Ukrainian ports.
Ukrainian robotic vehicles packed with explosives sail hundreds of miles through rough waters to hit enemy ships. The Russian fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol is now equipped with buoys and barriers to protect against naval drones.
Ukraine often sends its drones to hunt in "wolf packs", hoping that the lead drone will pave the way for subsequent ones.
Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, commander of the Ukrainian Navy, said that while traditional naval weapons and warships are still needed, drones have "opened a new era in naval operations."
"This is not just a tactical tool, but a strategic transition in the approach to conducting naval warfare," Admiral Neizhpapa said in a statement, attributing the drones to "changing the balance of power in the Black Sea." American military leaders have drawn attention to the Ukrainian approach to see if there are any lessons in it if China attempts to attack Taiwan.
Collectively, what happened in the first three years of the war has led some Western leaders to question long-standing military principles.
"I think we are moving towards a technological war," Finnish President Alexander Stubb said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. "Not only are Ukrainians one step ahead of us, which I think is wonderful, but Russians are also adapting to the new situation."
"Therefore, we really need to think about collective defense comprehensively,— he said. —Progress is so fast that we all need to be vigilant."
