This One Chart Shows the Devastating Impact of Drones in Ukraine

We have been talking about drones since Putin’s pointless war of aggression began almost two years ago. Now, one simple chart puts the nature of this conflict in perspective.

It started with Ukraine’s once-vaunted Bayraktar TB2 drone — “Bayraktar” being the namesake of a baby lemur at the Kyiv Zoo — that helped deliver Ukraine early successes against Russia and its weak air defenses.

As Russia continued to bolster its air defenses in 2023, the Bayraktar became less effective.

On the flip side, Russia’s Iranian-made Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones once terrorized Ukraine; that is until Ukraine bolstered its own air defenses with Western aid.

Now, a new threat has emerged that has completely changed the maneuver dynamic on the battlefield for both sides: The first-person view drone, or FPV drone.

These drones are flown by an operator wearing a set of goggles where the operator sees what the drone sees.

These things are too small to be taken out with traditional air defenses and are so ubiquitous (each side estimated to have numbers in the tens of thousands) that it makes any potential advance a nightmare scenario.

Take a look at this chart by X user Andrew Perpetua that represents a single day in Ukraine: