“I would argue that it’s now the most famous drone of them all.” “In recent years, the Bayraktars have scored some really famous successes,” says Tony Osborne, the London bureau chief of Aviation Week, a publication focused on the aerospace industry. In the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020, Turkish drones proved decisive in the Azeri victory against Armenia – a Russian ally. Last year in Ethiopia, a rebel force was bearing down on the capital Addis Ababa before the government repelled them with the drones. In the last two years, Turkish Bayraktar drones have appeared not only in Ukraine, but also Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Libya and Syria. And Turkey is now the preeminent supplier. But the technology has become more commonplace in recent years, and is now a fixture of many 21st century battlefields. Reliable and accurate military drones were once the exclusive purview of the U.S. “The footage is also very useful for PR and psychological warfare.” “The footage released by the Ukraine military shows serious defects in Russian air defense cover, which is a surprise for many observers,” says Arda Mevlütoğlu, a Turkish military and aerospace analyst. Even so, the drones are unlikely to change the long-term course of the war, analysts point out. Perhaps more significantly, analysts add, the videos are also becoming an increasingly prominent part of Ukraine’s information war – giving Russian invaders a reason to fear their enemy, and providing a vital boost for Ukrainian morale amid fears of a coming military onslaught. Ukraine’s drone campaign has contributed to its early successes in slowing the Russian advance, and is revealing unexpected weaknesses on the part of the Russian army, U.S. The impact of Bayraktar drones in Ukraine Each drone can each carry four laser-guided missiles, according to promotional material from Baykar Technologies, the company that produces them. military’s Reaper drone,) with a 12-meter wingspan that allows them to remain in the sky for up to 30 hours at a time. The drones are small and lightweight, (around seven times lighter than the U.S. In other videos shared on Twitter, Bayraktar drones, in use by the military since at least 2021, are shown blowing up what appears to be a Russian fuel convoy and a group of supply trucks. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian military said that Bayraktar drones had destroyed one tank and two surface-to-air missile systems overnight. The star of this video and others circulating on Twitter is the Bayraktar TB2-a type of Turkish drone that the Ukrainian military has increasingly deployed against Russian forces in recent days.
“Have fear, enemies! There will be no peace for you on our earth!” the Ukrainian armed forces wrote in the video’s caption. The video racked up more than 3 million views on Twitter in two days.
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