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I'm personally skeptical that Ukraine ever had any advantage in terms of drones. It was just a convenient narrative to distract from Russia's massive artillery advantage.
Now that Russia massively expanded drone production the disparity is so huge that it's no longer possible to pretend that Ukraine has any advatagthere either.
Extremely fair point. Honestly I really appreciate your threads on these articles because you find good sources and Hexbear is a safe and even productive place to gab about the news.
But in all sincerity we aren’t knowing jack shit about what really is going down in that war for years or decades, it’s always been difficult to assess things in the thick of it and right now the air is just thick with propaganda, making the difficult into the impossible.
For sure, it's very difficult to tell what's really happening on the ground in the short term. However, we can see the general trends in the conflict. The main things I try to pay attention to is the rhetoric and how things have been developing up to this point. The west becoming ever more shrill is a strong indicator that things aren't going the way the west hoped. Western admissions about stuff like shell production are also very telling, because it's now becoming accepted even in western media that Russia has the upper hand in terms of military production. On the other hand, Russia has been acting very calmly and doesn't react to provocations.
We also see that Russia has basically been on the offensive since they broke the big Ukrainian offensive in 2023. The overall pattern seems to be that Russia is using their numerical advantage to create a huge front, and push whenever they identify a weak point. This forces Ukraine to run their elite units to plug holes which in turn creates new ones for Russia to exploit. Ukrainian units continue to be attrited as a result, and they never have a chance to rotate and rest. The big question is how long the AFU can keep this up. I very much underestimated Ukraine's capacity to keep the war going, and at this point I really don't know when the breaking point will come.
Ukraine did hold the advantage in FPV drones for a long time, because Russia had focused on heavy drones and artillery, neglecting lighter drones.
I mean that's the narrative we've read in western media, but I have yet to see any concrete evidence to support this story.
There were a lot of complaints from the Russian media that the Russian army has too few light drones. I think the end of Ukrainian dominance in FPV drones was when Russia started to deploy fiber optic drones en masse, after which Russian offensive significantly quickened (even if it still pretty slow).
Complaints from Russian media doesn't tell us much about the ratio of drones between the two sides. It's entirely possible for Russians to feel they didn't have enough drones to do what they needed while still having parity with the Ukrainians. The speed of the offensives is also a bit of a red herring because Russia is not fighting a war for territory. The goal is destruction of the enemy army. The speed up in offensives is largely a reflection of the degrading capability of the AFU due to attrition. It's not simply due to Russia having more drones now.