Russia Needs More Commercial Drone Pilots For Its War in Ukraine

“In this sense, the main goal of the ‘Dronnitsa’ meet is to initiate the formation of such an instructor corps, to establish, in fact, a new specialty—an instructor in the combat use of UAVs, and to create a system for training such specialists,” a translation of the post provided by Samuel Bendett on Twitter said.

Bendett studies drones and military robots at the Center for a New American Security think tank. He’s the co-author of a paper on the use of commercial drones in the war in Ukraine and has been watching the war unfold with a specialist's lens on the use of drones. According to Bendett’s paper, off-the shelf drones are a huge player in the war.

“Currently, both Russian and Ukrainian forces are using military drones to strike targets on the ground, along with numerous surveillance models—both civilian and military—that provide situational awareness of the battlespace,” he wrote in the study. “A key evolution of today’s commercial drone technology as relatively cheap and easy to use resulted in its widespread use in numerous conflicts around the world, including the ongoing war in Ukraine.”

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