Ukraine is using its small fleet of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones to devastating effect, carrying out attacks against the huge Russian military convoys advancing through the country. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that the TB2s played an “incredibly important role in slowing or blocking the Russian advance”.
Turkey sold at least 20 of these armed drones to Ukraine in 2019. Others have since been delivered by Ankara, some of them in recent weeks. Moscow claims to have destroyed at least four Bayraktar drones and one of its launch bases.
A TB2 costs around US$5 million while US-made drones cost 20 million or more. The Chinese are offering a combat drone for as little as $1 million, but its crash rate and operational malfunctions make its reliability questionable.
The Bayraktar TB2 has been tested in recent conflicts from North Africa to the Caucasus Mountains to the Middle East. Ankara has used them against Kurdish insurgents in Iraq, Syria and Turkey. They contributed greatly in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war to Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan’s victory over Moscow-backed Armenia, where they already had Russian-made vehicles as targets. This Caucasus conflict confirmed the importance of drones in the wars to come, as I noted in a 2020 blog post.
Turkish TB2 drones have strained relations between Putin and Erdogan. In Ukraine, Bayraktar drones opened fire for the first time in October to destroy a mobile artillery piece of pro-Russian secessionists in Donbass.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov then warned Ankara to take “as seriously as possible” Moscow’s concerns about Turkey’s “militarization” of Ukraine. In a phone call with Erdogan, Putin condemned Ukraine’s “provocative” deployment of attack drones.
Impressed by their use against Russian ground forces, several countries are considering acquiring Turkish TB2s. Poland became the first NATO member to order 24 Bayraktar TB2s.
These drones are much cheaper to acquire, maintain and operate than combat aircraft, and their pilots cannot be killed or captured: they are guided from land-based mobile installations. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, they have destroyed rocket and missile launch systems, armored vehicles, troop carriers and mobile command posts.
The Ukrainians have posted numerous videos showing the destruction of targets by TB2 drones. Also used for reconnaissance and surveillance missions, they are difficult to detect: they can fly very low, under Russian radar coverage.
The airspace over Ukraine is guarded by Ukrainian and Russian surface-to-air missiles, making air operations risky for both sides.
That Ukraine can so successfully strike Russian ground forces with TB2s suggests that Russian forces are advancing without adequate air defense and/or that the drones are equipped with advanced electronic countermeasures systems.
The Bayraktar TB2 drones were designed to be powered by Bombardier Rotax engines, variants of the company’s snowmobile engines.
Informed in the fall of 2020 that its engines were used for military purposes, Bombardier claims to have taken all necessary measures to strengthen its internal controls and prevent their use in conflict situations.
Contacted by email, Bombardier replied that the Rotax 914 engines are for civilian use only and are “certified by the applicable civilian regulatory authority”. BRP-Rotax stresses that it does not supply motors directly to drone manufacturers and has no contractual agreements with any of them. Engines are sold through a worldwide network of independent distributors.
Bayraktar TB2 drones are so popular with Ukrainian fighters that a song to celebrate their feats of arms has been posted on the Facebook page of the Ukrainian Land Forces“We took on those orcs (repulsive monsters). These Russian bandits are turned into ghosts by the Bayraktar.
Reference-www.journaldemontreal.com