Of Killer Drones and Car Bombs: Nasty New Fronts Open in Ukraine War

‘Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred’ unmanned aerial systems.

AP/Susan Walsh
The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, at the White House May 18, 2022. AP/Susan Walsh

As Russia’s war on Ukraine lurches toward its fifth violent month, it is increasingly taking on the dimensions of a hybrid conflict that underscores how a lot more is happening than a pitched artillery battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the east. On top of incessant Russian rocket strikes, the White House’s announcement Monday that Iran is likely providing Moscow with weapons-capable drones to use in Ukraine is a telling sign that the combat zone is in no way confined to the ground.

The American national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said it was unclear whether Iran had already provided any of the unmanned aerial systems to Russia, but he told reporters the U.S. has information that indicates Iran is preparing to train Russian forces to use them as soon as this month. “Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAVs, including weapons-capable UAVs on an expedited timeline,” Mr. Sullivan said. 

According to the AP,  the Iranians are pioneers of so-called loitering munitions, the “kamikaze” drones like the Switchblade that Washington has sent to Ukraine. The military analyst Samuel Bendett of the CNA think tank said that Iran has “a proven track record of flying drones for hundreds of miles and hitting their targets,” including penetrating American-supplied air defenses and striking Saudi oil refineries. He told the AP that the Iranian drones could be very effective at striking Ukrainian power stations, refineries, and other critical infrastructure.

Iran’s malign activities outside its borders are hardly a secret and some of the Russian rationale for drone-shopping in Tehran will likely remain opaque. It is clear, though, that the situation in Ukraine is metastasizing, as competing interests enter the military or strategic fray and then as quickly recede — case in point, Turkey. Russia maintains friendly ties with Turkey, and Ankara has resisted sanctioning Vladimir Putin’s regime, but at the same time Turkey has been supplying Ukraine with Bayraktar TB2 drones. According to the Telegraph, these “have provided Kyiv with some of its most decisive victories against the Russian army.” A report in the British newspaper said that “with a 39-foot wingspan, the Bayraktar TB2 drone can carry four laser-guided bombs and has been credited with stalling Russia’s advance on Kyiv, demolishing tanks and armoured vehicles moving towards the capital.”

To make matters even murkier, the head of the company that manufactures the Turkish drones, Selcuk Bayraktar, is the son-in-law of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan. Each drone costs between $1 million and $7 million. While it is not clear how many drones Baykar Tech has sold to Ukraine, chances are good that if Moscow is laying out the rubles for Iran’s lethal hardware, Mr. Bayraktar’s drone factory will be humming at full tilt.

Mr. Putin is scheduled to travel to Tehran next Tuesday for a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Iran and Turkey; on the agenda — officially, at least — is Syria.

In the meantime the Ukrainian response to the violence that Moscow has exercised on its cities is veering into urban guerilla tactics that bode well for Kyiv’s efforts to eject Russian occupying forces. They also spell much more violence ahead. Russian and international media reported on Monday that a pro-Russian leader of a Ukrainian village near Kharkiv, Yevgeny Yunakov, was killed when his car was blown up. In recent weeks Ukrainian sabotage groups have stepped up lethal attacks against officials who are deemed sympathetic to the Kremlin line or indeed those who are actively imposing it, and it is a take-no-prisoners approach. 

Such attacks are occuring most frequently in areas where Moscow has been trying to establish Russian administrations, such as in the occupied southern region of Kherson and in the region of Zaporizhzhia that is partially occupied. This comes as Mr. Putin expands a fast-track procedure for obtaining Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians, which is just an acceleration of his ongoing effort to swallow Ukraine piece by piece. The Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said Mr. Putin’s signing of a passport decree, which also applies to stateless residents in Ukraine, was an example of his “predatory appetites,” the AP reported on Tuesday. 

As the battle lines harden in the eastern Donbas, even as the arrival of more high-tech weaponry from the West like the HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems helps tilt some battlefield action in Ukraine’s favor, the way they are shifting in the center of the country will bear watching. Moscow is doing whatever it takes to win loyalties, but in the process of doing so some will be divided. That is how a war being fought in the trenches, in the air, and at sea could also, at least in some key contested pockets, degenerate into civil war.


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