Ukrainian armed forces first used Turkish Bayraktar combat drones in Donbass

2023: Construction of the Bayraktar UAV production plant in Ukraine begins

In Ukraine, they began to build a Bayraktar UAV production plant, the Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries said in July 2023.

Earlier, the general director of the Turkish company Baykar Makina said that they expect to start production there in 2025.

2022: Turkish UAVs in Ukraine: how reputational costs overshadowed financial profits

In October 2022, revelations of the head of the Association of Defense Enterprises of Ukraine Serhiy Pashinsky about the widely publicized Bayraktar TB2 drones appeared on the network.

In interviews with Russian prankers, he voiced that Turkish drones "are not a miracle weapon" and added that almost all of them were lost in just a week of fighting.

Pashinsky's words again raised the issue of the inefficiency of Turkish UAV drums during a special military operation in Russia.

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

There are dozens of photos of downed Turkish UAVs online. 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fell on the territory controlled by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation: due to censorship, Ukrainian resources do not publish data on drones affected in the areas occupied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

After the outbreak of hostilities, dozens of Bayraktar TB2s were delivered to Ukraine, which theoretically should have replenished the losses of the devices. However, the intensity of their sorties remained low relative to other conflicts involving Turkish drones.

The use of 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 protect the resource of the devices and further limit their use.

So the Bayraktar TB2 is completely useless? No: in certain conditions, this is a quite formidable weapon that can effectively solve problems on the battlefield, the Rybar telegram channel noted.

The Turkish UAV is equipped with a Canadian high-resolution camera, which produces a clear image of objects at a distance of over 40 km. This allows the use of a drone for reconnaissance and target designation without entering the coverage area of ​ ​ Russian medium and short-range air defense systems.

In conditions of suppressed or insufficient air defense, Turkish drones can also be used in an attack version. In May 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine used UAVs to attack the garrison of Zmeiny Island, where there is only a pair of air defense systems, and it could stand for a long time without ammunition in anticipation of the supply of missiles from the mainland.

In the absence of a threat from the ground, Bayraktar TB2s can leave the enemy without artillery, supplies and armored vehicles, as was the case in Karabakh or Libya. But the course of the SVO of the Russian Federation demonstrated: in conditions of echeloned air defense and the lack of dominance in the air, 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 only spoiled the reputation of the drones. And also finally broke the halo "wunderwaffe," which they have been intensively created by the media for years.

And if the export of shock UAVs to other countries gave the Turkish military-industrial complex dividends, then supplies to Ukraine brought them only anti-advertising. There were much more costs than profits.

2021: First use in Donbass

At the end of October 2021, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for the first time used Turkish Bayraktar drones in the Donbass. The video, which captures the use of the drone, was published by the General Staff of the Armed Forces.

According to Vesti.ua, citing journalist Yuri Butusov, the positions of the 93rd mechanized brigade near the village of Granitnoye in the Donetsk region were fired upon by the self-proclaimed republics. The APU sent a Bayraktar TB2, and a bomb-controlled Russian howitzer was destroyed. The enemy could neither detect nor shoot down the drone, the reporter said.

Ukrainian armed forces first used Turkish Bayraktar combat drones in Donbass

The Ukrainian military clarified that the drone did not cross the contact line between the forces of official Kyiv and Donbass. The drone was used to "force the enemy to cease fire." It is specified that the enemy's weapons were destroyed using a guided drone bomb. After that, the shelling of the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stopped.

Ukraine purchased Bayraktar TB2 drones from Turkey in early 2019. They were planned to be equipped with MAM-L precision bombs, which are manufactured by the Turkish company Roketsan. Bayraktar TB2 is equipped with laser guidance systems. Its combat load consists of four missiles with a range of up to 8 km (in some modifications - up to 16 km). It is known that these combat unmanned aerial vehicles fought in Syria against Kurdish formations, in Libya, in 2020 were used by the Azerbaijani army during the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense signed a memorandum with Turkish Bayraktar on the construction of a joint center for the maintenance and modernization of drones near Kyiv. The center will be engaged in the arrangement of a general training and testing center for service. Also, current repairs and upgrades of UAVs will be carried out there.^[1]

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