Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have long been an essential element of military power, but the Russia–Ukraine War that began in February 2022 has seen these weapons become a game changer that is reshaping the battlefield and changing the balance of power between the two belligerents.
UAVs fall into two broad categories: fixed-wing systems, in effect unmanned aircraft, and rotary-wing systems—unmanned helicopters that in Israel are known as drones. Surprisingly, it is drones, originally developed by commercial firms largely as children’s toys, that have done more than any other unmanned system to shape the war. They have helped turn it from a war of maneuver into a static conflict reminiscent of World War I. Ukraine’s military drones have largely offset Russia’s material and numerical superiority, denied Moscow major battlefield gains, prolonged the war, and in doing so placed the stability of the Russian regime at risk. Terrorist organizations have used drones against Israel before, but the fiber-optic-guided explosive drones that have recently appeared on the northern front—clearly inspired by the war in Ukraine—create a new and serious threat. Israeli decision-makers should study the lessons emerging from Ukraine’s battlefields and prepare accordingly.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine began more than four years ago as a “blitzkrieg,” but it has become a bloody static war in which fire has overtaken maneuver and every advance on the battlefield carries an almost unbearable cost for both sides. Military commentators have described this as “World War I with artificial intelligence.” Yet, the battlefield stalemate is not the product of artillery and machine guns, as it was in World War I, rather, at this stage of the Ukraine war, it stems from the massive use of unmanned aircraft by both sides. On the front, large numbers of remotely guided explosive drones destroy anything that moves on or near the battlefield; in the rear, vast swarms of cheap “suicide” UAVs act as “poor man’s cruise missiles,” striking military and civilian infrastructure on both sides. This battlefield paralysis creates a “stalemate.” Ukraine cannot liberate territory captured by Russia, but Russia has also so far been unable to translate its quantitative advantage in manpower and traditional weapons systems into victory on the battlefield.
Unable, at least so far, to achieve victory, both sides have turned to an indirect strategy: defeating the enemy through air attacks on the rear, with an emphasis on striking and paralyzing strategic national infrastructure. The theory advanced in the 1920s by the Italian general Giulio Douhet, who argued that future wars would be won not by armies or navies but by air forces that destroyed the enemy’s infrastructure, appears to be coming back into fashion. That theory was disproved in World War II and in every war since, large and small. Yet the war in Ukraine may have produced the formula that allows the belligerents to pulverize each other’s infrastructure with masses of precision attack UAVs whose low cost enables mass production on almost unimaginable scales. In other words, it may have found a way to apply Douhet’s theory at reasonable cost, without bankrupting the national economy and with almost no loss of life among the attacking force.[1]
As noted, the war in Ukraine began as a classic land campaign involving a combined air and ground maneuver, with Russia attempting to collapse Ukraine’s political and military leadership by encircling and capturing its capital. After that Russian effort failed, the fighting evolved into a series of intense ground battles along a front of more than 1,000 kilometers, marked by maneuvers of armored and infantry forces backed by barrel and rocket artillery. UAVs played only a minor role on both sides during this phase. Ukraine’s initial advantage in UAV warfare, reflected in its squadrons of Turkish Bayraktar attack UAVs, eroded fairly quickly because these large, slow systems were easy prey for Russian air defenses. Despite the extensive publicity given to the Bayraktars by the Ukrainian propaganda apparatus, they lost their effectiveness within about four months of the outbreak of the war. The Russians lagged behind the West and Ukraine in the development and use of UAVs and entered the war with a fairly negligible UAV force.
The weight of UAVs in the campaign appears to have grown after the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. That failure marked the freezing of the front lines and the shift from mobile warfare to “World War I–style” trench warfare, in the words of Ukraine’s then chief of staff, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.[2] The quasi-static phase that followed demanded manpower and financial resources beyond the capacity of both sides. Each therefore looked for ways to advance its war aims at the lowest possible cost in lives and weapons. Unmanned systems offered a veritable solution with their combined lethality, low cost, and the ability to spare the lives of pilots and aircrews.
It is useful here to clarify the terminology used in the media to describe unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. The term “UAV” covers a very wide range of unmanned aircraft. Foreign media often use “drones” for all types of UAVs, thereby blurring the essential differences between two main types of unmanned aircraft. The first is fixed-wing UAVs: in effect, pilotless aircraft flown remotely, whether by software or by human pilots on the ground exercising remote command. Fixed-wing UAVs are powered by piston engines and, in some cases, jet engines. Some approach the size and weight of manned aircraft. The American Global Hawk (RQ-4), for example, has a takeoff weight of more than 14 tons, a wingspan of about 40 meters—greater than that of a medium-sized passenger aircraft such as the Boeing 737—and a range of more than 22,000 kilometers, exceeding that of a large passenger aircraft such as the Boeing 777. Most fixed-wing UAVs are smaller, though some are still quite large. The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 attack UAV, which has gained attention in several recent wars, has a wingspan of 12 meters—greater than that of an F-16 fighter jet. Even so, most fixed-wing UAVs are smaller. What they all share is the need for horizontal takeoff, whether from a runway in the case of the larger systems, from a catapult, or with the help of booster rockets. Their flight altitude can range from several hundred meters above ground to several kilometers. The second family unmanned aircraft is rotary-wing UAVs—that is, unmanned helicopters. These systems tend to be small and electrically powered, which limits both their payload and their range. Unlike manned helicopters, rotary-wing UAVs have at least four rotors, and sometimes more. They do not resemble the classic helicopter. Their advantage is that they take off and land vertically, without runways, catapults, or booster rockets. Another defining feature is their low production cost. Because these systems began as toys and hobbyist devices, they are built on a commercial consumer-product base, manufactured in the millions worldwide, and therefore have and extremely low per unit cost. They fly at very low altitudes, from several hundred meters down to just a few meters above the ground. In Israel, these UAVs are known as “drones,” and their low-altitude flight profile is referred to as “near-ground altitude.”
These two unmanned aircraft families differ sharply in configuration, performance, operational capabilities, wartime uses, battlefield impact, and the adversary’s ability to detect and destroy them. At the same time, the average reader following the issue may find it difficult to distinguish between them because, as noted, popular media refer to all of them simply as drones. In more professional literature, the second family—unmanned helicopters—is sometimes called Rotary Wing Drones (RWD). For the purposes of this article, the distinction will be as follows: unmanned fixed wing aircraft will be referred to as “UAVs”, and unmanned helicopters as “drones.”
As noted, the widespread use of both families of unmanned systems began immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022. Their main missions were real-time visual intelligence, fire control, and strikes against ground targets on land and at sea. Their use accelerated after Ukraine’s failed summer offensive in 2023. The Ukrainians appear to have driven the more sophisticated and expanded use of UAVs, as they searched for “out of the box” solutions to stop the Russian steamroller. They needed to increase their firepower in order to neutralize the Russian army’s ability to maneuver. Given Ukraine’s numerical inferiority in manpower and artillery, they turned to commercial drones converted into military systems. At first, these drones provided continuous observation of the line of contact between the two armies, creating a transparent battlefield. With thousands of drones constantly roaming the front line day and night, any Russian movement anywhere along the 1,200-kilometer front can be detected in real time by Ukrainian command-and-control centers, enabling an effective fire response within a short time. The Russian army quickly copied this Ukrainian innovation. As a result, forces could no longer be concentrated for an attack without being detected almost immediately and destroyed by precision fire. Fire thus overcame maneuver, and the front was effectively frozen. The Russians claim that they are advancing and capturing Ukrainian territory on several fronts, yet a comparison of front-line maps between September 2023 and September 2025 suggests that over those two years they advanced at isolated points by no more than about 75 kilometers—an average of roughly 1.5 kilometers per month. According to an analysis by a prestigious U.S. research institute, the Russian army’s rate of advance over the past year has been no more than several dozen meters per day, far slower than the pace of armies on the Western Front in World War I, and this at the cost of thousands of dead and wounded and the loss of large quantities of weapons.[3]
Drones that initially served as real-time observation platforms quickly became loitering munitions. To make that possible, they were fitted with explosive payloads. At first, these were improvised munitions taken from other platforms, such as RPG rounds, but the Ukrainians rapidly developed dedicated anti-personnel and anti-armor warheads for the drones. The Ukrainians also developed flamethrower warheads to burn and clear wooded areas.
Attack drones, like observation drones, originated in the toy and entertainment industry. Over the years, drone racing emerged in the West as a sport built around especially fast systems fitted with forward-facing cameras. These FPV (First Person View) drones are highly maneuverable, and , in gaming, competitors fly them through winding courses that include obstacle fields. The drone operator uses a communications link to “see” the area in front of the drone through virtual-reality goggles and steer it with a control stick. Such systems are exceptionally well suited to fast, low-altitude flight through obstacle-dense battlefields such as forests and built-up areas. Once fitted with a warhead, they can maneuver into enemy trenches and hit the soldiers inside them. These drones are fairly small, so their payload is limited to a few kilograms. When used against armored vehicles, the operator steers the drone toward the less protected parts of the vehicle. The hit usually destroys the vehicle or causes severe damage requiring evacuation to repair workshops. The effect on the war appears dramatic: drones are rendering armor largely irrelevant.[4]
The Russians quickly copied the Ukrainian attack drone tactics and today, neither side can mass significant forces for an assault. Any concentration of armor and troops beyond a small number of fighters is detected almost immediately and destroyed within a short time. The Russians shifted from armored assaults to infantry attacks and developed a combat tactic in which individual soldiers are dispersed some distance behind the front and then moved one by one toward the objective on foot, on bicycles and motorcycles, and even on horseback, so that the attacking force concentrates only just before reaching the target. Using this tactic, the Russians have been able to capture positions and small areas of Ukrainian territory, but at a heavy cost in casualties. Recently, the Ukrainians also appear to have adopted this method, with similar local successes in the form of small areas liberated from Russian occupation.[5]
The dramatic effect of drones on the battlefield has set off a technological race on both sides to defeat them. Kinetic defense, meaning a physical strike on the drone itself, is uneconomical given the enormous numbers both sides are fielding. In practice, two methods are now in use: soft defense through electronic warfare that disrupts the communications channels between operators and drones, and passive defense, including camouflage and physical protection of high-value targets with cages and metal fencing. The scale of the current investment in passive defense is visible in the protection of Ukraine’s transport arteries, through which reinforcements and supplies move to the front. After the Russians began using FPV drones to disrupt these supply routes, the Ukrainians responded by protecting dozens of kilometers of roads in the rear with nylon nets stretched over wooden scaffolding, creating “protected tunnels” that enable vehicles to move along those roads.
To overcome soft defense—namely, the disruption of wireless communications between operators and drones—the Russians shifted to fiber-optic communications, and the Ukrainians soon followed. In this method, the drone carries a spool of fiber-optic cable several dozen kilometers long. The fixed end of the cable is connected to the operator’s communications device, while the moving end is connected to the drone’s systems, with the cable unreeling during flight. Fiber-optic communication is not vulnerable to electronic warfare, but it limits both the size of the drone’s warhead and its range. To overcome the range limitation, both sides have developed “mother ship”: fixed-wing UAVs that carry fiber-optic-guided FPV drones under their wings, with the fiber connected to the UAV rather than to the operator in the rear. This can double or triple the drones’ effective range. Both sides may soon find ways to disrupt the communications channels between the “mother ship” and the rear-based operators, and the technological race will continue. For now, however, the fiber-optic-guided drone is the dominant weapon on Ukraine’s battlefields,[6] and neither side has found a way to definitively to neutralize its threat.
Drones terrify soldiers on both sides because a skilled operator can fly one into protected buildings through entrances or other openings and, if the operator chooses, single out specific targets. One video released in Ukraine shows an FPV drone “tormenting” two Russian soldiers as they run from it and fail to shoot it down with their Kalashnikov rifles. They survive only after one of them throws his rifle at the drone, causing its explosive charge to detonate at a safe distance.[7]
Two main factors make drones difficult to defend against. The first is their low signature. Drones are small, quiet, and cold (because they use electric motors), and they fly at treetop height or even lower, making standard detection systems, including radar and optical sensors, not particularly effective against them. Even when drones are detected, their small size and high maneuverability make them extremely hard to hit and bring down. The second factor is their negligible cost. They can be procured and deployed in the thousands, which means that shooting down a few individual drones makes little difference as they simply be replaced and the attack will continue.
Ukraine relies on two main methods to counter the threat from fiber-optic drones: passive defense and active defense. Passive defense, mentioned above, involves stretching nylon nets above and around concentrations of weapons and troops, as well as along access routes to the front. A drone is a small and fairly slow aircraft, and it lacks the momentum to break through reasonably strong nylon netting, such as fishing nets. By erecting net “tents” over targets that need protection, the defenders force drones to hit the net and detonate prematurely. Since their explosive payload is usually small—only a few kilograms—a net placed at a reasonable distance from the target can provide effective protection. Images from Ukraine show nets protecting soldiers and field headquarters.
To exploit this vulnerability, the Ukrainians have begun placing rotating barbed-wire obstacles around specific targets. The idea is to stretch barbed wire close to the ground between the protected target and the direction from which the drones are likely to approach. One end of the wire is attached to a small electric motor and the other to a bearing,[8] causing the wire to rotate. Fiber-optic drones leave their optical cable on the ground behind them as they fly. When such a drone crosses the wire line, the trailing cable drapes over the rotating barbed wire; the spinning barbs snag and tangle it until it breaks. The operator then loses the video feed and control of the drone, much as electronic warfare severs control of non-fiber-optic drones. This is a fairly new measure, and there is little information available as to its effectiveness
Ukraine has also invested in active detection and defense against drones of every kind. Early detection remains the hardest problem, because the threat can be intercepted and destroyed only once it has been found. One of Ukraine’s more original answers is acoustic detection. Drones with electric motors are not very noisy, but their rotors produce a distinct acoustic signature that sensitive microphones can pick up, and advanced AI-based signal processing can identify. According to Ukrainian reports, such systems can detect drones at ranges of several kilometers. The cost of a single such warning station is only a few hundred dollars.[9] Ukraine also uses optical observation systems and specialized radars. Once a drone is detected, the means of destroying it range from simple shotguns issued to frontline troops to interceptor drones, which are essentially especially fast FPV drones. Ukraine has released video footage of interceptions employing these methods.[10]
These creative solutions reduce casualties and damage, but they have not solved the drone threat, as evidenced by the battlefield itself, which has remained frozen since observation and attack drones began appearing at the front in large numbers. Some observers see unmanned aircraft—and drones above all—as a battlefield revolution no less significant than the machine gun in the early twentieth century.[11] The machine gun froze the battlefields of World War I and made maneuver almost impossible until the tank provided an effective countermeasure. As of this writing, there is still no indication whether effective countermeasures against unmanned aircraft in general, and drones in particular, will emerge, or what form they might take. The fact that drones began as children’s toys and have become a game changing weapon illustrates the growing flow of civilian commercial technologies into modern-day battlefields.
In addition to drones, the Ukraine war has also seen both sides use cheap UAVs as an alternative to cruise-missiles for strikes against the enemy rear. Russia adopted this approach after it failed to achieve air superiority over Ukraine at the start of the war. To hit military targets and critical infrastructure, including the railway system and the power grid, it began launching ballistic and cruise missiles from aircraft operating outside Ukrainian airspace. Those missiles, however, are expensive to produce, and Ukraine’s strategic depth forced Russia to invest enormous resources to manufacture them in sufficient numbers. Moscow soon found a much cheaper alternative: it purchased from Iran the production rights to the Shahed-136 attack UAV, which gained prominence after Iran’s successful strike on Saudi oil fields in September 2019. The Shahed-136 is very cheap to produce. According to media reports, the average unit cost of a Shahed-136 is about $35,000, compared with several million dollars for a standard ballistic or cruise missile. Its warhead is relatively small—about 20 to 40 kilograms—but its high accuracy compensates for that limitation and allows it to cause substantial pinpoint damage.
Russia built a dedicated UAV production plant in Yelabuga, about 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow. According to media sources, Russian production of Shahed-136 UAVs, known locally as Geran, now exceeds 5,000 units per month. Russia has also developed a decoy UAV, known as Gerbera,[12] whose shape and signatures resemble those of the Geran, but is much cheaper. Russian strikes on the Ukrainian rear now come in waves of hundreds of these UAVs. A typical wave consists of roughly 60 percent attack UAVs and 40 percent decoys, and its purpose is not only to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure but also—and perhaps above all—to drain Ukraine’s stockpile of interceptor missiles. These attacks inflict heavy damage on Ukrainian infrastructure and cause civilian casualties, but so far, they do not appear to have significantly weakened Ukraine’s combat capability or its will to resist. Russia nevertheless continues to launch massive UAV attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, even though Ukraine usually manages to shoot down about 80 percent of them before impact. The Russian attacks are illustrative of modern warfare: Moscow is substituting cheap unmanned weapons in place of expensive cruise missiles and manned bombers, using them in massive quantities that nevertheless do not impose an unreasonable burden on the economy and also do not expose attacking personnel to risk.
Ukraine has responded to the Russian UAV threat with layered defenses, from electronic warfare systems that interfere with navigation to ground-based and airborne interception. In the electronic-warfare sphere, the contest is continuous: one side tries to harden UAV systems against disruption, while the other develops more sophisticated means of jamming them. Interception proved to be a more complicated problem. Ukraine first tried to use fighter aircraft armed with air-to-air missiles to destroy Russian UAVs in flight, but the economics quickly proved unfavorable. An air-to-air missile can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a Russian UAV costs only tens of thousands. Ukraine also faced the problem of “magazine depth”—the number of air-to-air missiles still available in storage. Production of such missiles is too slow to sustain the interception of hundreds of Russian UAVs every night, and stocks eventually run down. The method also exposed the intercepting aircraft to the debris of the UAV it destroyed. In at least one known case, a Ukrainian fighter jet successfully intercepted a Russian UAV, but debris struck the aircraft and killed the pilot.
The Ukrainians have also shown their usual improvisational creativity. They brought old training aircraft back into service for UAV interception, using methods reminiscent of the early days of World War I. A sniper with an assault rifle sits in the rear seat; once a UAV is detected, the pilot flies alongside it at the same speed, and the sniper tries to shoot it down. One Ukrainian skydiving instructor went further, mounting a rotary multi-barrel cannon in the light transport aircraft from which civilian skydivers jumped in peacetime. The cannon is installed in one of the doors and fires perpendicular to the aircraft’s axis. When a Russian UAV is detected, the pilot brings the aircraft onto a parallel course, and the gunner fires at the target. These methods are colorful, but their effectiveness is limited. They work only in daylight and in favorable weather.
Ukraine has gone through a similar learning process in ground-based interception. Its initial use of interceptor missiles depleted its stocks and forced it to shift to simpler means. The most effective system so far has been the Gepard, a Cold War–era radar-guided antiaircraft gun. Germany gave Ukraine its entire stock of Gepards, which had been kept in storage since the end of the Cold War, and reports indicate that the systems have been highly effective. Their numbers, however, are too small to defend Ukraine’s vast territory. Ukraine has therefore set up volunteer units whose members finish their regular workday and then go out at night to defend against UAVs with machine guns mounted on pickup trucks equipped with powerful searchlights. Ukrainian detection and tracking systems send alerts to these machine-gun units when targets approach, and the volunteers do what they can to illuminate the UAVs with searchlights and shoot them down with machine-gun fire.
Ukraine has also recently introduced unusual ground-launched systems for intercepting UAVs. These are essentially fast drones designed to pursue and intercept Shahed/Geran UAVs at low and medium altitudes. Several types of these interceptors are already in use. In the simpler models, an operator guides the interceptor all the way to impact, much like a standard FPV drone. Models with AI-based autonomous interception capability are now under development. One major advantage of these systems is that if they fail to intercept the target they can land back on the ground and be used again. These “anti-UAV drones” are relatively cheap, at about $1,000 per unit. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, about 70 percent of Russian UAV interceptions are now carried out by such interceptor drones. Ukraine also intends to supply them to Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which were hit by Iranian UAVs during Operation Epic Fury.[13]
Ukraine has not remained on the defensive. Using a range of domestically developed long-range UAVs, it has carried out its own strategic strikes against the Russian rear. The first such strikes were recorded in December 2022, during the war’s first year, when Ukrainian UAVs hit a strategic air base in central Russia about 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Since then, Ukraine has struck Moscow several times, shut down the city’s airports, and even hit the Kremlin itself (in May 2023). It has also expanded the campaign to industrial sites, especially refineries, as well as residential buildings and remote air bases near St. Petersburg and in the Far East. The boldest operation in this strategic campaign was Operation Spiderweb in June 2025, when Ukraine struck five strategic air bases deep inside Russia at the same time. The targets included Ukrainka, near the Chinese border, some 5,000 kilometers from Ukraine, and Olenya, near Murmansk inside the Arctic Circle. The strike used FPV drones concealed in commercial trucks and controlled from a command post in Ukraine. They hit about 20 strategic bombers, heavy transport aircraft, and early-warning aircraft; roughly 10 were destroyed outright. Repeated UAV strikes deep inside Russia also prompted President Vladimir Putin to scale back this year’s Victory Day parade on June 9, reducing the temptation for Ukraine to launch explosive UAVs at the armored columns in the parade.
UAVs in general, and drones in particular, represent a genuine military revolution. Their effectiveness rests above all on their low cost, which allows both sides in the Ukraine war to sustain an intense and prolonged campaign without bankrupting their economies. Drones and UAVs have changed the equation. They enable Ukraine to prolong the war with no forseeable limit. The longer the war continues, the greater the pressure on Putin’s government and the threat to its stability.[14] Many observers once assumed that Russia’s victory was ultimately assured because of its enormous size, abundant natural resources, and large population. That is no longer a clear-cut conclusion. Modern technology, in the form of UAVs and drones on Ukraine’s battlefields, has changed the character of the war and given the weaker side a real chance to deny its opponent victory.
Israel’s political leadership and defense establishment should study the changes in the conduct of war emerging from the Russia–Ukraine conflict and draw the necessary conclusions.
[1] During World War II, the United States and Britain adopted Douhet’s strategy in an effort to achieve victory by bombing the German rear, including its infrastructure and population. The attack on the German rear did not end Germany’s ability or will to fight, as Douhet’s theory had predicted, but it undoubtedly weakened Germany’s capacity to resist in the ground war. At the same time, the attacking forces paid a very high price: between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. Air Force lost more than 8,000 bombers and 36,000 aircrew members in the bombing of Germany. The Royal Air Force paid an even higher price: more than 8,300 bombers and more than 55,000 aircrew members.
[2] A. Wilk and P. Zochovski, “Ukraine Confirms Its Counteroffensive Has Failed,” Center for Eastern Studies, November 3, 2023, https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2023-11-03/ukraine-confirms-its-counter-offensive-has-failed-day-617-war
[3] S. G. John and R. McCabe, “Russia’s Battlefield Woes in Ukraine,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 3, 2025, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-battlefield-woes-ukraine
[4] Reuters, “Drones Sideline Tanks as Ukraine War Enters New Phase of High-Tech Combat,” Jerusalem Post, February 24, 2026, https://www.jpost.com/international/internationalrussia-ukraine-war/article-887712.
[5] M. Hunder, “Ukraine Touts Recapture of Eight Settlements in Rare Battlefield Success,” Reuters, February 23, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-touts-recapture-eight-settlements-rare-battlefield-success-2026-02-23
[6] V. Sutea, “Fiber-Optic Drones Have Emerged as Critical Kit for Both Russia and Ukraine,” Atlantic Council, February 24, 2026, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/fiber-optics-drones-have-emerged-as-critical-kit-for-both-russia-and-ukraine
[7] YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL_8VxdE_Tg.
[8] YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3ddY7FDqw&t=132s
[9] D. Shumliyanski, “Ukraine Develops Acoustic Detector for FPV Drones,” Militarnyi, January 22, 2026, https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/missile-dialogue-initiative/2026/04/turkiyes-missile-odyssey
[10] YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nO_gfCwaQ&t=58s
[11] M. Brown, “Drones Are the Biggest Military Revolution in a Century,” Forbes, April 26, 2026, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikebrown/2026/04/26/drones-are-the-biggest-military-revolution-in-a-century
[12] Somewhat humorously, both names are those of flowers: “geranium” and “gerbera.”
[13] YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okQlmZJkbBk
[14] W. Dixon and M. Beznosluk, “The Putin Regime Faces Mounting Pressure but Is Still Far from Collapse,” Atlantic Council, February 9, 2026, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-putin-regime-faces-mounting-pressure-but-is-still-far-from-collapse.
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