Is the Russian Military Adapting Effectively to the Drone Age?

Current and former commanders, analysts and military bloggers are having a surprisingly open debate about whether drones have made Russia’s longstanding approach to battle obsolete.A damaged Russian tank near the village of Sulyhivka, in the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv, in 2023. Ukraine increasingly relies on drones to neutralize Russian armor.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York TimesIs the Russian military Adapting Effectively to the Drone Age?Current and former commanders, analysts and military bloggers are having a surprisingly open debate about whether drones have made Russia’s longstanding approach to battle obsolete.A damaged Russian tank near the village of Sulyhivka, in the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv, in 2023. Ukraine increasingly relies on drones to neutralize Russian armor.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York TimesSKIP Neil MacFarquharNeil MacFarquhar was the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times from 2014 to 2019, and has reported extensively on the Ukraine war since it began in 2022.Jan. 17, 2026A recent combat video from Ukraine features what military analysts call a Russian “Frankenstein tank,” surrounded by a protective shell of roughly welded metal plates. The tank survives two dozen drone strikes before a last one ignites it and forces the crew to evacuate amid a hail of shellfire.The video captures a profound shift in modern warfare, with relatively cheap drones neutralizing much more expensive weapons, not to mention troops. It was released in late October by DeepState, a Ukrainian organization that monitors battlefield developments, and its location in southeastern Ukraine was verified by The New York Times.Skirmishes like the one involving the Frankenstein tank, highlighting the power of drones, have prompted a roiling debate among senior Russian military officers, military bloggers and other analysts about how the war is being waged. The discussion comes as Russia finds itself locked in a war of attrition in Ukraine, and touches on a broad array of military issues including equipment, training and, most of all, tactics. Many are asking whether Russia has adapted effectively to the way drones have transformed the battlefield.For a century, Russia relied on a steamroller of troops, tanks and artillery to smash through enemy lines. In this war, because of drones, Russia has resorted out of necessity to using small teams of three to five troops to try to take territory. But that tactic has not allowed the military to take very much land. It is barely inching forward, amid heavy losses.“What’s going on in the Russian-Ukrainian war is very new to all military experts, who are trying to adapt,” said Aleksandr Golts, a veteran Russian military analyst now with the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. “There is a lot of innovation.”The argument over how the war is being waged is playing out in military journals and online forums, often couched in careful language or historical examples to avoid running afoul of Russian laws barring criticism of the war.Military analysts, much like combat bloggers, are given certain leeway if they avoid attacking the premise of the conflict. They “cannot blame the Kremlin directly” for any problems, Mr. Golts said, so they blame “military science.”Some propose ideas outside of the box. For example, two well-regarded military thinkers, Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, a former chief of the general staff, and Ruslan Pukhov, a prominent analyst, recently wrote an obituary of the tank in the journal Russia in Global Affairs. Now that drones dominate combat, they questioned the value of “a vulnerable vehicle with limited weapon abilities, approaching the cost of a fighter aircraft.”Russia started the war with around 10,000 tanks, Mr. Golts said, but that has dropped to somewhere over 3,000. It can produce only about 200 per year.Criticism directly from soldiers has also resulted in equipment changes to render those on the front less vulnerable, experts said. More than 190 weapon systems have been modernized, according to newspapers published by the Defense Ministry. For example, troops driving transport trucks used to be easy targets because the cabs were not armor-plated, but they are now.Some Russian analysts find it safer to use historical analogies, noted Krisztian Jojart, an expert on the Russian military at the Swedish Defense University. He cited a recent article attributing the poor performance of Soviet forces after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan to a lack of training specific to the battlefield. Military readers, he said, would understand the subtext in the current war — soldiers not being trained for the conditions in Ukraine.More than a decade ago, Russia began developing smaller, well-trained tactical groups of 600 to 800 men that could act as rapid-reaction forces, but the high-intensity warfare of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine decimated them. That prompted the military to revert to larger forces. Then came the drones, and the smaller groups of three to five men to try to neutralize them.Massing forces near the front line has become a death trap. A roughly 20-mile-wide stretch between the opposing armies has become what military analysts call a “transparent battlefield,” where drones can detect, track and attack virtually anything that moves, crippling attempts to maneuver the combined forces needed for a large-scale offensive.VideoSoldiers from the Ukrainian unmanned systems regiment known as Achilles flew weaponized drones in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine in September.CreditCredit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York TimesThe most significant recent change in Russian tactics has been deploying small detachments of two to five soldiers on motorcycles or in all-terrain vehicles, trying to penetrate deep behind enemy lines to kill drone operators.“The current tactics are a road to nowhere,” Mr. Golts said. “So you can break through Ukrainian defenses — then what?”A team of five men on motorbikes cannot seize territory. When Russia tries to assemble a large strike force to follow them, Ukraine rushes in reinforcements and the cycle repeats, experts said.The Russian military wants to figure out an effective counter for the drones in order to resume massing large enough concentrations of troops and armaments to take and hold more territory, Mr. Golts and others said.The Russian military specialists writing about the war have surmised that the way the forces are organized cannot keep pace with the way the war is being fought, said Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. But it is not clear what comes next.Some experts question how much the Russian defense establishment really wants to change, with short-term combat fixes considered more likely than a thorough overhaul.A study published in August by the Center for Naval Analyses, a national security research organization in Arlington, Va., concluded that Russia had not carried out any fundamental shift in military doctrine.ImageThe remains of a destroyed Russian drone in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in October.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesRussian military thinkers often subscribe to a “technology will solve the problem” attitude, the study said. In other words, they expect that some technology will eventually neutralize drones so that the military can again dominate the battlefield by maneuvering large forces. “There is little thinking about alternative operational concepts,” the study said.Russia established a specialized unit to deal with drones in 2024, but in November, under a special order from President Vladimir V. Putin, it expanded its efforts by establishing a separate branch of the military called the Unmanned Systems Force. Drones on both sides now execute myriad battlefield tasks, including reconnaissance, radio-electronic warfare and attacks.Drones have become the primary weapon against soldiers and equipment, with 70 percent of Russia’s combat deaths attributed to them as of early 2025, according to Russian statistics cited in a policy journal, Russia in Global Affairs.Training is another issue that has come up. Many of the first civilians mobilized in 2022 were given the chance to fire off a few rounds before being thrust onto the battlefield. Now, at least, many are taught how to distinguish the sound of different types of drones, experts said. But discipline and professionalism are sorely lacking.Apart from drone attacks, Russian forces struggle to execute complicated joint maneuvers of different types of forces because soldiers lack the training needed to understand their orders, said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London.A new soldier in the West typically gets about 20 weeks of training, he said, while a new Russian soldier gets about three weeks.Absent training, some soldiers and military bloggers have assembled lengthy “survival guides” to advise troops on everything from clothing and weapons to confronting a drone attack. (One technique is to run in a zigzag toward the sun in hopes of blinding a drone’s optical system.)ImageA Russian tank destroyed by Ukrainian forces in 2023 during a battle to retake the town of Sviatohirsk, in eastern Ukraine.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesIf the front line remains stalled, military experts believe that the Russian military will be forced to recalibrate its overall tactics and training.Tanks might resume a central role once anti-drone tactics are refined, said Dmitri Kuznets, a military analyst for Meduza, an independent news site published outside Russia. But, he said, “the time when Russia constructed an armored fist at the front has passed.”Milana Mazaeva and Aric Toler contributed reporting.Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.SKIP