Drones And Dirt Bikes > Tanks And Armored Personnel Carriers

On August 7, 2025 at about 6 a.m. local time (the link is to an eleven minute video summary of the attack from the Ukrainian military), a Russian column of one hundred and twenty vehicles, including heavily armored 48 ton modern T-90 Russian main battle tanks, and infantry fighting vehicles with heavy 20-30 mm cannons carrying six hundred troops, together with support and supply vehicles with ten days of supplies, advanced along a road from a portion of occupied Ukraine near the Black Sea coast between the Russian border and Crimea advanced north with an objective of establishing a forward operating base further inland which was 120 km away from their base (about a four hour trip for an uninterrupted convoy).

The 3.4 kilometer long Russian convoy was advancing at the slow speed of tracked vehicles (about 28 km per hour), easily visible, noisy, and smelly with 65,000 horsepower of diesel engines running at once. The major advance was promptly identified by Ukrainian surveillance and reconnaissance resources. Ukrainian officers gathered in minutes to devise a counterattack plan.

Within minutes, Ukraine dispatched twenty long range, fixed wing reconnaissance drones with six foot wing spans and high quality visual and thermals sensors transmitted in real time to Ukrainian command centers (which cost about $4,000 each), flying low at about sixteen feet above the ground at 140 km per hour until almost reaching the convoy, to avoid Russian radar, to gain detailed information about the Russian convey, characterizing each vehicle. The Russians failed to notice them.

Within a half an hour, a plan had been formulated and the counterattack force was deployed. 

By air, eighty shorter range quad copter drones, each carrying the 12 kg shaped charge warhead of an anti-armor shell or missile, or an anti-tank mine, flying low to avoid detection. 

By land, two hundred military grade dirt bikes with two riders each - a driver and a gunner, some with assault rifles, and others with a mix of not very sophisticated anti-armor weapons from rocket propelled grenades to a Soviet anti-tank missile similar to the U.S. TOW missile, broken up into three groups targeting the beginning, middle, and rear of the armored column. The dirt bikes advanced off paved roads through forests and hills through narrow tracks, parallel to the paved road upon which the Russian convoy of armored vehicles was advancing. 

Allegedly, the counterattack was devised and directed from a deep heavily fortified Ukrainian bunker not all that far from the front lines. Each drone was monitored and controlled from a computer screens and VR goggles, by a remote operator. The image quality on the FPV drones, which cost about $500 reach, is far inferior to that of the reconnaissance drones.

The Russians tried to strike the incoming drones with cannon fire from the infantry fighting vehicles and machine guns, but didn't have electronic warfare jamming resources that worked against the incoming drones, or dedicated anti-drone weapons, and only took out a few of the incoming drones.

The Ukrainian drones struck carefully chosen targets in the convoys: tanks and armored vehicles at the front and rear of the convoy to bring it to a halt and deny it an opportunity to retreat, the most heavily armored tanks, a lightly armored supply truck carrying a large load of mortar rounds that produced secondary explosions. 

Moments after the simultaneous attacks from the drone swarm hit, the Ukrainian soldiers on dirt bikes, who had been undetected, fired anti-tank weapons at the remaining vehicles and killed the Russian soldiers who abandoned their vehicles.

The main strike takes place half an hour after the Russian advance is detected and lasts less than fifteen minutes, followed by clean up fire by the soldiers on dirt bikes.

There may have been a few Ukrainian casualties, but all of the one hundred and twenty vehicles in the Russian convoy were neutralized, and almost all of the close to a thousand Russian soldiers, between the vehicle operators and the six hundred troops carried in armored vehicles, were killed or grievously wounded.

Ukraine's tactics aren't new. Ukraine has used infantry on dirt bikes with anti-tank weapons to strike Russian armored vehicles traveling in convoys along civilian roads since February 24, 2022 when the latest phase of the Ukraine War began. Warhead carrying quadcopter drones have been the mainstay of the war on both sides for at least a couple of years now. But apparently, the Russian are slow learners sticking to obsolete Russian army tactics that have been discredited for years now.

The Russian convoy had radar, either integrated into its unit or at nearby bases, but the radar couldn't detect small, low flying drones, advancing at more than 140 km per hour from not many kilometers away. And, any air defense systems in the convoy were among the first targets.

The Russian convoy didn't have reconnaissance drones of its own flying overwatch to detect the incoming drone swarm and dirt bikes in time to give them more time to prepare to respond to the attack. Even if it had had those resources, only a few minutes passed from the launch of the Ukrainian drone swarm to its arrival at the convoy. The dirt bikes, likewise, were hidden under tree cover and behind hills until shortly before the drone swarm struck and diverted attention from them.

The Russian convoy didn't appear to have effective electronic warfare resources to jam the remote control signals for the incoming drones, even though other Russian units have been known to use them. The Russian convoy didn't appear to have purpose built anti-drone weapons sufficient to take down the incoming quad copters at a moment's notice and instead relied on infantry fighting vehicle cannons and machine guns for their largely ineffective effort to take down incoming drones before they were hit. Russian "turtle tank" and anti-drone nets, for the vehicles that had them, weren't very effective. If a first strike from a Ukrainian drone failed to neutralize a Russian armored vehicle, a second or third drone strike would.

The Ukrainian response, and its outcome, should have been entirely predictable at this point to Russian army officers. It isn't as if Ukraine's tactics are a closely guarded state secret. Ukrainian forces regularly upload video of its attack on Russian positions to the Internet for all to see. The Russians had plenty of time to plan an attack that would be less vulnerable to this kind of attack.

There may have been some innovations that weren't disclosed. 

For example, maybe the Russian convoy did have electronic jamming in place, but the Ukrainians were using new innovations to keep its radio signals from being effective or used fiber optic cables that can't be jammed to direct its drone swarm. Maybe the Russians thought there was strength in numbers because it didn't believe that Ukraine could mobilize so many drones and dirk bikes on short notice, so that it least some of its forces would survive and decimate the Ukrainian soldiers sent in to finish the job. 

Maybe the Russians just didn't think it through and defaulted to tactics that they were taught in the pre-drone era. Like a large share of American military strategists and planners, they still don't seem to have come to terms with what they are up against, and have failed to make the dramatic changes necessary to respond to the tactics like Ukraine has pioneered. 

Russia's tactics in the Ukraine War resemble the way that military officers on both sides of World War I resorted to huge human wave attacks (and even horse cavalry charges) long after it had become clear that machine guns and artillery had mad it clear that those tactics were obsolete and futile. Indeed, in many places on the front of the Ukraine War, it appears that Russia is still resorting to World War I style human wave attacks with similar results: gaining control of tiny amounts of territory at a staggering cost in the lives of their own soldiers.

Whatever the reason, three and a half years into the war, on very short notice, Ukrainians with a hundred cheap and crude drones loaded with anti-tank warheads, two hundred dirt bikes, and several hundreds soldiers with a decent supply of anti-tank weapons, managed to defeat a large, heavily armored two battalion sized Russian convoy and neutralize it.

Admittedly, this is being recounted in a propaganda video. There are no doubt operations by the Ukrainian forces that aren't nearly so successful that aren't publicized, where Russians inflict heavy casualties on Ukrainian forces and aren't obliterated.

But the big picture statistics in terms of casualties, equipment destroyed, territory gained, and the proportion of the damage done by drones, bear out that while not all Ukrainian strikes are as large scale and flawless, on balance, cheap drones and light infantry with heavy weapons are superior to heavily armored, large, more conventional military forces.