Maritime drones shoot down Russian helicopters 📹

Hello,

As a variation from my usual newsletters, I have made a special members-only video this week. I talk about how Ukraine has shot down at least two Russian helicopters with anti-air missiles from maritime drones. This is a monumental development for the maritime war in the Black Sea. It means that Ukraine now might have an effective countermeasure against Russia's most important anti-drone capability. Helicopters are also just as important a target as a surface warship, so it opens up a whole new category of targets that Ukraine can go after.

I have included a transcript below the video if you prefer reading instead of watching.

Best,
Anders

Transcript:

Hello everyone and happy new year. The sun is out here in Denmark for the first time in like a month and I thought I'd go out and enjoy it a little bit instead of sitting inside and writing a newsletter. So I therefore decided to record a video and it's of course not going to be as polished as my videos on YouTube but still the conversation might be hopefully good.

What I want to talk about is the fact that Ukraine has successfully managed to shoot down a couple of Russian helicopters with surface-to-air missiles from a maritime drone. This is the first time they have managed to do that. They've been trying for quite a while but not very successfully.

We know that at least two helicopters with 16 crew members have been shot down and there is a possible third one that might have been hit or also be lost for the Russians. So I think it was the 31st of December that this happened and it's absolutely a devastating blow for the Russian Air Force. I think it's the day where they have lost the most crew members on aircraft in any one single day during the full-scale invasion so far.

It's an interesting example of how all this back-and-forth cat-and-mouse game functions in military innovation. So the Ukrainians really come up with this concept of the maritime drones and they managed to make it work really well. It's a huge problem for the Russians. They can't really deal with this new threat that the the maritime drones are but then after a while they figure out some procedures for how they can actually use helicopters to alleviate some of this threat and it's been working quite well for the Russians. The helicopters have been the most important anti-drone measure that the Russians have been using during the last many months in the Black Sea. So it's been quite successful for the Russians and clearly we have also seen that the the number of successful drone attacks by maritime drones has declined.

The Ukrainians were very quick to try to then put these surface-to-air missiles on the drones but they have so far not been able to really hit any targets with it simply because it's really difficult. It's a difficult challenge. The drone can't actually... it's remote-controlled so it's some operator sitting far away just launching this surface-to-air missile while this drone is wobbling back and forth in the sea so it's really difficult to control anything about the launch and send the missile in the right direction. But apparently now the Ukrainians have managed to solve that question and this opens up a lot of new opportunities or possibilities for the maritime warfare.

So on the one hand if this is something that the Ukrainians can do now sort of regularly, systematically, then it opens up the possibilities that the Ukrainian drones will become an even bigger problem for the Russian Navy again simply because they will be able to get through the defense lines and maybe approach something like the Kerch Bridge. But another thing that is also really important to keep in mind is that these helicopters are just also in themselves really important targets. These are absolutely worthy targets of a Ukrainian drone. If a drone can take out a helicopter that's an extremely good trade.

So I think we might be going into an interesting period again where there is a bit of movement in the maritime war in the Black Sea simply because apparently the Ukrainians now have the ability to strike these helicopters.

All right that's what I kind of wanted to mention in this brief video. I hope you like this format and if you do let me know in the comments. And also one thing I've been wondering about is if I do this more often, if I make these videos, how important is it that there are transcripts? Is that something you would want as well as I do with my YouTube videos where I make a transcript? Is that something you think would be useful for these types of videos as well? But okay thanks for watching and listening.