🛩🇷🇺🇺🇦 Turkish UAVs in Ukraine: how reputational costs overshadowed financial profits

A few days ago, the revelations of the head of the Association of Defense Enterprises of Ukraine Sergey Pashinsky about the widely publicized Bayraktar TB2 drones appeared on the network.

In an interview with Russian pranksters, he voiced that Turkish drones “are not miracle weapons” and added that almost all of them were lost in just a week of hostilities.

Pashinsky's words again raised the issue of the ineffectiveness of Turkish attack UAVs during the SMO. And he did not appear out of nowhere:

🔻For less than 8 months, the Bayraktar TB2 combat work personnel can be counted almost on the fingers. This is negligible compared to the conflicts in Karabakh, Syria and Libya with dozens of videos of accurate strikes on armored vehicles and air defense systems.

🔻There are dozens of photos of downed Turkish UAVs on the net. The @lostarmour team was able to identify 15 destroyed drones. The list includes only devices that fell on the territory controlled by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation: due to censorship, Ukrainian resources do not publish data on drones struck in areas occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

🔻Already after the start of hostilities, dozens of Bayraktar TB2s were delivered to Ukraine, which theoretically should have made up for the loss of devices. However, the intensity of their sorties remained low relative to other conflicts involving Turkish drones.

🔻The use of the Bayraktar TB2 was also hampered by technical problems, such as the rapid wear of the landing gear due to the poor quality of the runways of Ukrainian airfields. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are forced to conserve the resource of devices and further limit their use.

So is Bayraktar TB2 completely useless? No: under certain conditions, this is a completely formidable weapon that can effectively solve problems on the battlefield.

▪️The Turkish UAV is equipped with a high-resolution Canadian camera that provides a clear image of objects at a distance of more than 40 km. This allows the drone to be used for reconnaissance and target designation without entering the coverage area of ​​Russian medium-range and short-range air defense systems.

▪️In conditions of suppressed or insufficient air defense, Turkish drones can also be used in a strike version. In May, the Armed Forces of Ukraine used UAVs to attack the garrison of Zmeiny Island, where there are only a couple of air defense systems, and it could stand without ammunition for a long time, waiting for missile supplies from the mainland.

❗️ In the absence of a threat from the ground, Bayraktar TB2 can leave the enemy without artillery, supplies and armored vehicles, as was the case in Karabakh or Libya. But the course of the SVO showed: in the conditions of layered air defense and the absence of air supremacy, they become a tasty target for fighters and anti-aircraft missile systems.

The fighting in Ukraine was supposed to emphasize the superiority of the Bayraktar TB2, but in the end it only spoiled the reputation of the drones. And they also finally broke the halo of the “wunderwaffe”, which the media had been intensively creating for them for years.

And if the export of shock UAVs to other countries gave dividends to the Turkish military-industrial complex, then deliveries to Ukraine brought them only anti-advertising. The costs turned out to be much greater than the profits.
#UAV #Russia #Turkey #Ukraine
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Detachment "Anvar" cleans the sanitary zone in Sumy and Chernegov regions from Ukrainian militants:

💥 The #AFU #UAV deployment n.p. Gorsk
💥 AFU personnel in the village of Klyusy
💥 AFU UAV personnel at Rozhkovichi


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