Russia lost 61 artillery systems and at least 200 drones in just 24 hours, Ukraine's military said on Wednesday, as the gap between the two key capabilities deployed on the battlefield appears to narrow further.
Moscow's military has lost a total of 9,008 artillery systems since its forces crossed over into Ukraine 23 months ago, including 61 in the past day. Kyiv's armed forces said on Wednesday.
Separately on Tuesday, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, who heads up Ukraine's "Tavria" group of forces covering the embattled town of Avdiivka, said Kyiv had intercepted 200 different Russian drones over the previous 24 hours.
Russia lost nearly 400 soldiers, five tanks and 15 artillery systems as it launched 919 artillery barrages across this section of the front line in the past day, Tarnavskyi said.
Newsweek could not independently verify Ukraine's tally, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Artillery and shells underpin both Russian and Ukrainian operations, vital capabilities Moscow and Kyiv have gone to pains to sustain as the war grinds on.
Ukraine has maintained calls for supplies of ammunition and shells from its allies for its artillery systems. On Tuesday, NATO inked contracts to buy $1.2 billion-worth of 155mm artillery shells to replenish the alliance's stocks after funneling shells to Ukraine.
"Artillery has been hugely important in this war," Davis Ellison, a strategic analyst with the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Newsweek in August 2023.
Since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022, Ukraine has spent the many long months of full-scale war amassing its "drone army," constantly developing new airborne vehicles and fundraising for more. The drones cover nearly every aspect of the fighting, from helping out with reconnaissance to suicide drone strikes and guiding artillery fire.
One of the best-known types are first-person-view (FPV) drones. Earlier this week, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of Russia's space agency and a Moscow-installed official in the annexed Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, said Kyiv was using FPV drones to carry out unrelenting raids on Russian strongholds.
"This is a new type of artillery—high-precision aerial art," Rogozin added in a post to Telegram. "It will gradually replace conventional cannon and rocket artillery, since it is much more accurate and cheaper, and the recording of target hits is visible to the operators of these UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)."
In early December, Mykhailo Fedorov, Kyiv's minister of digital transformation, who is at the helm of Ukraine's drone efforts against Russia, told Newsweek that FPV drones were now becoming more useful to Ukraine's front-line fighters than artillery.
The FPV uncrewed vehicles have quickly become "a game-changer" on the Ukrainian battlefield, taking out masses of Russian hardware, Fedorov said.
"They work sometimes even more efficiently than artillery," he commented. "So, FPV drones are indeed a tech revolution, even though the tech itself is quite easy. But it turned out to be very efficient."
Ukrainian fighters deployed around the Donetsk town of Avdiivka told Newsweek in mid-December that Russia had upped its use of FPV drones around the settlement it has been attacking since early October.
"The Russian drones are cheap, so Russians can use them 24/7," said Yevhen, a major in Ukraine's National Guard; "24 hours a day, they are in the air."
But a Ukrainian commander said in mid-December that in terms of overall numbers, Kyiv has just one drone for every five to seven Russian FPV hardware in key battleground sectors of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Russian FPV drones fly into Ukraine's airspace and search for any targets they can find there, Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of Ukraine's Achilles drone company, which is within the country's 92nd Assault Brigade, told Ukrainian media.
Although Ukraine had initially dominated FPV manufacturing in 2023, Russia has ramped up its programs and sent large numbers of the unmanned vehicles to the front lines, Samuel Bendett of the Center for Naval Analyses, a U.S. think tank, previously told Newsweek.
Moscow has certain drone types which Ukraine doesn't have yet, Fedorov told Newsweek, adding, "They have more money" to funnel into development and production of high numbers of drones.
"It's hard to compete with Russia on quantity," he added.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
