Ukraine to help down Iran’s drones: How Russia’s war rewrote the playbook

Ukraine’s Drone Warfare Experience Draws Global Attention

Kyiv, Ukraine — Few countries have as much experience countering Iranian-made or Iranian-designed drones as Ukraine.

Since 2022, tens of thousands of these drones have been used in attacks across the country. Now Ukrainian specialists are expected to help Gulf nations defend themselves against similar threats. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Sunday that Ukraine will assist with counter-drone efforts in the region.

Ukraine’s growing drone industry is also expanding abroad. Ukrspecsystems, one of the country’s largest drone manufacturers, recently opened a factory in the eastern English town of Mildenhall. The facility is expected to produce up to 1,000 unmanned aircraft per month.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi — Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and current ambassador to the United Kingdom — attended the opening ceremony, according to the BBC.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, some Western analysts initially expected a conventional war between two former Soviet militaries using outdated tactics and equipment.

Four years later, however, the conflict has become a testing ground for new technologies and battlefield strategies. Military planners in China, the United States, and Europe are closely examining the innovations emerging from the war — including a mix of advanced technology and improvised solutions that make weapons cheaper, faster to produce, and often more lethal.

Nikolay Mitrokhin of Bremen University in Germany said NATO forces, including Germany’s Bundeswehr, are carefully studying these developments.

He explained that Western militaries face several key tasks: modernizing their equipment based on lessons from the war, testing new systems such as air defenses and drones in real combat conditions, and learning how to operate on battlefields dominated by unmanned systems.

Ukraine’s Military Ingenuity

Ukrainian troops have often relied on improvisation to compensate for shortages of equipment and manpower. One U.S. military official compared their approach to the fictional television character MacGyver, known for solving problems with creative engineering and limited resources.

U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Ukrainian forces frequently adapt whatever tools they have available to achieve their objectives.

One example is Army SOS, a Kyiv-based volunteer group that initially raised funds to supply soldiers with protective gear. Front-line troops repeatedly requested better maps, prompting the group to develop software that turns ordinary smartphones or tablets into targeting tools for artillery.

The system can calculate distances to targets, transmit coordinates, direct fire adjustments, and incorporate weather data that may influence the accuracy of a shot.

But Russian forces often copy Ukrainian innovations and scale them up, according to Andrey Pronin, an early developer of drone warfare techniques in Ukraine. In some cases, he said, it takes only weeks for Russian units to replicate new ideas.

For instance, Ukrainian engineers experimented in early 2023 with drones connected by thin fiber-optic cables to prevent radio-signal jamming. Although commanders initially rejected the concept, Russian forces later adopted and expanded the technology.

Today, forests along parts of the front line are covered with strands of fiber-optic cable used to guide drones.

Russian fiber-optic drones have reportedly reached cities such as Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city located about 40 kilometers from the Russian border, and Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine.

Across the front line, drones of many types operate constantly. Their presence has dramatically changed battlefield tactics.

Early in the invasion, Russian forces attempted to advance using large columns of armored vehicles. One such column was stopped near Bucha, north of Kyiv, during the first days of the war.

Ukrainian serviceman Bohdan Yavorsky said his unit ambushed dozens of Russian tanks and armored vehicles before relaying their location to Ukrainian air forces, which destroyed the column shortly afterward.

By 2026, Russian forces rarely mass large groups of troops in the same way. Instead, soldiers are often deployed in small teams that move carefully, transport supplies, and wait for additional units to join them.

Many use inexpensive smartphones equipped with the Alpine Quest mapping app, which allows navigation using coded coordinates without relying on internet access or GPS.

Both sides also use camouflage designed to hide heat signatures from drones, stretch nets across roads, and use fast vehicles like electric scooters or snowmobiles to avoid explosive drones.

Naval Innovation

Ukraine’s navy suffered heavy losses in 2022 when most of its small fleet was destroyed. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Crimea, then gained control over much of Ukraine’s coastal waters and launched attacks on the port city of Odesa.

But Ukraine later developed maritime drones that successfully struck several Russian vessels.

By mid-2023, these sea drones — combined with aerial attacks — targeted Russian naval facilities, including a major shipyard in Sevastopol that had long been used for ship repairs.

Kyiv-based analyst Ihar Tyshkevich said the damage to shipyard infrastructure was particularly significant, forcing Russia to relocate many Black Sea Fleet vessels to the port of Novorossiysk.

China Studies the Conflict

Analysts say China is also closely monitoring the war and the technological lessons emerging from it.

Temur Umarov, a China specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Chinese researchers, military officials, and analysts are paying close attention to developments in Russia’s war effort.

China’s interest partly stems from historical ties dating back to the 1950s, when the Soviet Union helped build China’s early military and defense industry.

However, some analysts argue that certain lessons from the war may be difficult for authoritarian systems to implement.

Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said modern warfare increasingly relies on rapid data sharing across units and decentralized decision-making.

He noted that these “horizontal” systems — where battlefield information moves quickly between units — can be harder to implement in highly centralized political structures.

According to Luzin, the war’s biggest challenges may not be technological, but organizational: coordination, logistics, and the ability to delegate decisions quickly on the battlefield.

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