Additional Documentation Of "FPV" Multirotor Drone Attacks Against Gas Stations In Russia-Ukraine War
🇷🇺 🇺🇦 Commentary
Commentary-themed posts tend to deal with recent developments. These will typically be much shorter and less detailed than my analysis-themed posts.
Ukraine and Russia are targeting gas/petrol stations located on the opposite side of the frontlines/international border with increasing regularity. These attacks notably involve the use of armed “first-person video” (“FPV”) multirotor drones. As I’ve explained in many recent posts, armed “FPV” multirotor drones and similar are best characterized as miniaturized strike munitions that can be used to undertake highly surgical strikes against an incredibly diverse array of targets that were previously beyond the practical reach of militaries for want of a sufficiently large arsenal of suitable high-accuracy munitions. Gas/petrol stations are among the targets that militaries can now readily attack with quite accurate but inexpensive munitions that are built from commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force recently claimed responsibility for an attack that targeted two tanker trucks at a gas/petrol station in Russian-occupied territory. The resulting inferno appears to have rendered the entire gas/petrol station unusable. It goes without saying that the destructive effects of quite inexpensive uncrewed aircraft-turned-munitions that are restricted to carrying a fairly small and light explosive payload are ordinarily quite limited. By attacking loaded tanker trucks, the Ukrainian military personnel involved in this attack selected targets that would result in far greater secondary destructive effects than the primary destructive effects resulting from the detonation of the fairly small and light warhead.
Another recent attack that took place in Russia’s Belgorod province draws attention to a different dynamic: the potential for civilian casualties. Most of the videos that I have come across of attacks targeting gas/petrol stations in the Russia-Ukraine War document attacks on fuel pumps and storage tanks at a time when no civilians are around. The same cannot be said of the following video of what appears to be a Ukrainian attack that targeted what amounts to a functionally ~inert roof of a Russian gas/petrol station for unknown reasons.
