A Ukrainian captain operating near kyiv said his platoon shot down every Russian drone it encountered, despite what he called “antiquated” guns.
“We are using obsolete weapons because we don’t have new ones,” Oleksandr Zhygun, a platoon captain in the 241st brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine, told the Guardian.
Zhygun’s Kalashnikov assault rifle was made in 1989, he said, the same year the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Yehven Dolin, a soldier in the brigade, uses an M2 Browning machine gun designed during World War I and mounted on the back of a pickup truck, according to the media outlet.
“It may be old, but it works,” Dolin said of his weapon, adding that it makes no sense to deploy a US-supplied Patriot missile worth $4 million of dollars, to target a $20,000 drone.
Ukrainian troops have resorted to old weapons, including machine guns from the First World War, anti-aircraft guns from the 1940s and rocket launchers from the Cold War, to try to stop Russian drones and compensate for the lack of missiles and missiles supplied by the West. ammunition.
But in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops are battling Russian night vision drones, a Ukrainian soldier told the Kyiv Post last month.
The task of protecting kyiv’s skies has also become more difficult since Russia painted its drones black, making them harder to detect, Zhygun told the Guardian.
Ukraine is expecting significant resources from the United States after congressional Republicans agreed to a $61 billion military aid package.
Meanwhile, Russia is exploiting Ukraine’s weakened air defense systems before supplies reach the front lines, according to an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War.
The effect was felt on the battlefield, with Ukrainian soldiers struggling to hold the line and suffering heavy losses on the main battlefronts of eastern Ukraine, forcing them to withdraw from the city strategy of Avdiivka.
Asked if Ukraine could still win the war, Zhygun told the Guardian that it was a “difficult” question and that it needed more air defense systems.
“For now we have to ration our bullets. A lot depends on our Western partners,” he said.
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