(August 2023) (Shallowly) Diving into RU-Ukraine War Drone Losses

Aviation-safety.net maintains a wiki of aviation accident reports. This evening, I noticed that there was a category for UAS/UAV and decided to dig in. There are reports going back to the 50s (!) for the craft meeting the earliest definition of drone.

I wanted to dig in a little, so I scraped all the pages of UAV entries into Google Sheets. Quickly realized that this would be an interesting way to analyze (high level, low precision because of user-submitted data) the unmanned aircraft dimension to Russia's aggressive war on Ukraine. Much has been written about this, so I don't want to belabor the point.

But most pieces on this topic highlight the rapidity-of-adoption and the pure mechanical variety of Ukraine's drone efforts, versus Russia using (mostly) legacy platforms.

Preponderance of legacy materiel, of course, is a theme you run across a bunch when you read about what the countries left in the wake of the USSR's dissolution (including Ukraine!) have to work with- and I think that's what makes this all so interesting.

Putin's Russia - populated with the Old Guard, infatuated with old ways of thinking, dreams of early-modern imperial reclamation, saddled with a janky economy and just a bunch of old stuff, frankly, put up against, for better or for worse, the proxy darling of the neoliberal West, Ukraine- who also are afflicted with most of those problems.

So I got to thinking- what could these UAV loss numbers show us- about the technology at play and the things I mused about above?

I filtered the data to start right before the declared beginning of the "Special Operation", by a few days. Then spent several hours sanitizing the data and crosschecking the makes and models et cetera... I'm also making a pretty big assumption here in some of my analysis that the distribution of UAV hull losses is representative of deployment. I feel safe enough about assumption, so keep that in mind, I guess.

The grand totals scoreboard, as of 30 August 2023:

Russia - 115      Ukraine - 116

Remarkably even, right? It's hard to say, again, how accurate any of this is, because freely editable wiki and fog of war and rampant disinfo, but this feels right! (Nobody said I was doing science here). It might be interesting to dig in to see how many of these were the let's use this UAV as a ersatz cruise missile hull losses, but that would take some doing that I haven't yet done.

Make and Model w/ Operator, Losses, Country of Origin

Here are the top dozen or so- takeaways here? Look at how many damn Orlans the Russians are burning through! Totally overrepresented relative to the whole list. 30% of this data set were Orlan-10 losses.

Also interesting - Ukraine fielding those Tupolevs, none of which are likely to be younger than 33 years old.

You may also note Russia's use of the IAI Searcher, Israeli designed but Russian built under license as the "Forpost".

Many of the other platforms represented here for Ukraine are small, more in common with consumer craft than with anything big/military/durable. But a glance at the news shows that has had a tendency to work pretty well for recon.

Didn't make this screenshot, but there are a few reports of simple quadcopters with grasping arms carrying bombs (probable) or spiriting away wounded Russian fighters (less probable)- leading to the obvious-choice nickname Baba Yaga.