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Ukraine says Russia is trying to make naval drones by learning from fragments of Ukrainian drones.
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An expert on drone warfare said this is unlikely to help much and could be a waste of Russian resources.
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Ukraine has been heavily attacking the Russian fleet, but the country does not have a real navy that could target Russia.
Russian attempts to copy Ukrainian naval drone success will not help his invasion and it could be a waste of resources, one drone warfare expert told Business Insider.
Ukraine’s homemade naval drones have been instrumental in helping to contain Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. And Ukraine warned last year that Russia was trying to use salvaged parts from its drones to launch its own, The Telegraph reported.
According to British intelligence, Russia is also trying to “bridge the capability gap with Ukraine”.
Meanwhile, Yevhen Yerin, a representative of the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Service, said said this week that Russia will try, but it will fail.
But according to one expert, Russian attempts to copy the technology may be futile, at least in the short term.
According to James Patton Rogers, a drone expert at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute, this could be a waste of resources since Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy that can target it.
Patton said Ukraine’s drones have been successful, as they have been launched against manned Russian naval vessels. But Ukraine has no warships, only smaller vessels, meaning Russian drone strikes would be relatively insignificant.
“Simply put, Russia might be able to use the parts and information to build maritime drones, but the question is, ‘Would this be the most effective use of Russian resources?’”
Naval drones played a key role in Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
Earlier this year, the Ukrainian military claimed having destroyed a third of the fleet, and in March the British Ministry of Defence declared it is “functionally inactive.”
Ukraine said this month that Russia withdrew its last Black Sea Fleet patrol ship from Crimea.
Rogers said “there is no denying that Ukrainian engineers have had great success building a maritime drone force from scratch.”
He added that their ingenuity in the early stages of the war had resulted in “jet skis, speedboats and commercial technologies being transformed into useful and essential defensive weapons, seriously hampering Russian naval operations.”
Drones, both on land and at sea, have been used more in the Russian invasion than in any other conflict to date.
They are used to attack soldiers, weapons and infrastructure, but also to gather information to control other weapons.
Drones and drone jamming equipment are also constantly being improved, with both sides trying to surpass and learn from each other’s technology.
Rogers I described this to BI earlier like a ‘cat and mouse game’.
Yerin said in comments earlier this week that it is unlikely that Russia will copy Ukrainian technology because Ukrainian engineers are so skilled.
He said Ukraine had been working on it for years and that it was “unlikely that the enemy could copy something like this.”
However, Rogers said Russia could be successful.
“The fact that Ukraine is a leader in the development of maritime drones does not mean that Russia would not benefit from capturing and analyzing parts of captured Ukrainian drones,” he said.
He added that Russia “has extensive experience in naval engineering and can use elements of it in their own maritime drone designs if necessary,” and that it can rely on its relationship with Iran, which support for Russia’s drone efforts and has worked on sea drones himself.
But that still doesn’t make them very useful in the current conflict, he said.
However, Russia may be thinking about future wars, such as one with NATO..
Many European countries say that Russia could attack elsewhere on the continent if not defeated in Ukrainewhich could lead to a bigger conflict.
Still, it is not clear to what extent naval drones would have a significant advantage in such a war.
Read the original article at Business insider
