We have already seen many instances of FPV drones with either primitive or elaborate explosive devices used for attacks on military equipment used in Ukraine and said many words about Ukrainians' proficiency in putting them to good use.
Still, the following video is interesting in many ways. It was initially published by the TORO_ua community with reference to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the equipment in the video was identified by the Ukraine Weapons Tracker OSINT community.
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For starters, this is the first time we see one of the new russian inventions being damaged in combat, a BTR-80 equipped with two UB-32 pods with S-8 unguided aircraft rockets, plus a slat armor cage on top to protect from droppable grenades or vertical drone attacks.
Previously, this type of vehicle only appeared in the open media in the photos published by russians themselves, the first one was spotted this month.
There is a chance this exact vehicle may have become the target for the Ukrainian explosive drone operator since there is no data on how many such hybrids were created. And so we approach our second interesting detail about the video.
As we can see and the captions in Ukrainian suggest, there is also a motorbike with a slat armor canopy together with the combat vehicle. In the first seconds of the video, we can see it moving in front of the rocket launching system. The FPV drone was initially flying toward the motorbike. But the operator managed to identify the target seconds before contact and avoid wasting the explosive charge on a less important target, then directed it on the hybrid rocket system instead.
By the time the second FPV drone arrived for the second strike, Ukrainian artillery joined in shelling the russian position. As a result of the hit, rockets detonated inside the pods. Although the amount of damage inflicted cannot be estimated by just that, it will likely need repairs before going into battle again.
Generally, an FPV drone is a relatively cheap weapon against enemy combat vehicles effectiveness of which depends directly on the skill of the pilot. That said, training for camera drone operators is anything but easy.
Earlier Defense Express learned from the Kruk UAV operator training center that while ordinary quadcopter control courses are successfully completed by 90-95% of students, on the other hand, only 60-70% percent of the group manage to get through the training on FPV drones. The basic Mavic learning course is five days, whereas an FPV drone operator studies for at least two weeks.
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