Its own "Yaga": how new and captured drones are used against the Ukrainian Armed Forces
The main news about the advance of Russian troops in the DPR comes from the Konstantinovsky direction. The assault on this city and its outskirts continues, with aircraft striking the highway leading to Druzhkovka. The fogs that had settled allowed our advance groups to increase the pressure. The 1442nd Guards Regiment of the 6th Motorized Rifle Division is conducting vanguard battles on one of the sites. The Izvestia correspondent visited the unit and learned about the novelties and discoveries that its fighters use: net-throwing drones, captured Baba Yaga drones deployed against the Armed Forces of Ukraine. There is also a means of psychological pressure among them — a speaker on a mobile platform broadcasting military reports and Russian songs.
Baba Yaga against the Ukrainian Armed Forces
We meet with the fighters of the 1442nd on the outskirts of Konstantinovka, in the underground fortifications. There is a cannonade of shelling outside. Inside, there is relative silence and an atmosphere of concentration. And also, the order is unusual for field conditions. In some locations, among the destroyed buildings, I am even shown baths and makeshift gyms with projectiles and a set of exercise equipment — a sure sign that the internal mechanisms in the unit are set up correctly.
Direction - Konstantinovka
A UAV platoon is based at one of the points. The guys are responsible for scouting the area, identifying fortifications, hidden equipment, and closed firing positions. A separate article is rigging: air supply of stormtroopers with food, water, medicine and ammunition where they cannot reach with their feet. And combat reconnaissance.
The pride of the squadron is the squadron of captured Baba Yaga copters, the use of which has been put on stream in the regiment since the spring of 2025. For this purpose, separate calculations have been created, each with four people: a pilot operator, his assistant to adjust the route and radio communications, and two engineers responsible for maintaining the drone and equipping it with warheads.
"The idea came up about a year ago," the platoon commander with the call sign Tregub tells me. "Baba Yaga, as we all know, causes a lot of trouble. And our initiative guys suggested: "Let's turn the enemy's weapons against him!" They took the remains of the downed copters and studied them. One of the several was assembled. Then another, and another.
One new Baba Yaga takes up to seven captured ones.
It takes from four to seven damaged vehicles to create one new Baba Yaga, the commander explains, and components appear regularly. Vents are printed separately on 3D printers, and metal legs are welded. The assembly itself takes up to two days.
How to learn to fly heavy UAVs
Currently, the platoon has several hexocopters with a load capacity of 10 kg, and one with a load capacity of 20 kg. It takes twice as long as two months to learn how to fly such a "bomber". It's like learning how to drive a truck for a car driver. So, in addition to standard skills, you need to be able to program a route — for flying blind, for example, in fog. Go down as low as possible to dump cargo, so as not to reveal your positions. Move with a damaged propeller, maneuver, and so on.
The first operator of the new UAV in the squad was 24-year-old Maloy, a village boy from the Altai Territory. He is a physical education teacher by profession. Mobilized — called up for a special operation three months after returning from the "emergency". Together with Tregub, as a stormtrooper, he liberated Kleshcheyevka, where he was wounded. After that, he retrained to "maviki"-reconnaissance aircraft, made about 2 thousand sorties. Last year, in order not to stand still, I "saddled" Baba Yaga on my own.
— The very first task I remember was that we flew up with a mine to the enemy's fortification. And he came out to meet us, thinking that we were his own," recalls Maloy. — There was a case when we were shot down on the way back. Nevertheless, during the fall, it was possible to stabilize and land, start up again and safely reach the take-off site.
The call sign is Maloy, a pioneer in the introduction of enemy drones in his regiment.
In order not to fire on our own, the fighter explains, we have to fly along a curve, bypassing our positions. And I don't want to scare you. An anti-tank mine is most often used for dumping. Such a drone is also an excellent solution for delivering supplies: it can take on board not just one bottle of water and a can of stew at a time, but an entire grocery basket. Departures are carried out mainly at night: the Baba Yaga's speed is low - empty up to 80 km / h, with cargo — 40, during the day it is an easy target.
Speaking about the importance of the appearance of new equipment, the soldiers of the regiment especially emphasize the factor of disorientation of the enemy: he does not understand now where his own is, where someone else's is, there are no identification marks on the flying "stupas". Over the past two months, the number of hexacopter calculations in the platoon has increased from one to three. And this is not the limit.
Which drones helped liberate Kleshcheyevka
The grid meters have been used in the shelf for the second year. It was with their implementation, according to the officers, that they managed to take Kleshcheyevka, which seemed impregnable at the time.
Nets are used everywhere, both for grid meters and to protect roads from danger from the sky (pictured)
The essence of the device is simple: a drone with a thin nylon mesh, placed in a special bowl, hovers over someone else's drone. Click — and a web with a diameter of 3 m covers the enemy "bird", after which it tumbles down. In the 1442nd Guards they are made by themselves, they do not depend on anyone. The result is that since 2024, almost 3 thousand drones of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, including 220 Baba Yaga UAVs, have been destroyed with the help of grids.
"Aerial battles and chases in the sky are a very exciting sight," the regiment's air defense chief, call sign Aquarius, tells me. — The grid gun operator must be a real sniper. He needs to hover over the enemy drone at a height of 1.5–2 m and launch at the right moment. This job requires, without exaggeration, a special talent.
On walls in underground fortifications
Hunting for "birds of prey" over the Konstantinovsky theater of military operations takes place constantly, without interruptions for lunch or sleep. On the day of my arrival, with the help of two calculations, we managed to "catch" 12 drones in this way, including the Baba Yaga and the FPV miner. And the record for the day is more than two dozen drones, including eight Baba Yaga copters.
Another interesting find of the motorized riflemen is an unmanned platform with a loudspeaker mounted on it. Again, our own development. It consists of a trolley, rubber tracks, a transmitter antenna and a speaker (the device is covered with a camouflage net on top).
An unmanned platform for demoralizing the enemy, next to the inventor - the call sign of the Plague
As the deputy commander for military and political work of one of the companies and the inventor and designer of the unmanned vehicle, call sign Plague, told me, it rolls out on the LBS around six in the morning. And he's driving slowly along the line, broadcasting the latest Defense Ministry reports from the fronts, as well as music. The task, on the one hand, is to maintain the spirit of our fighters, on the other — to demoralize the enemy. The range of the speaker is up to 1.5 km. Among the compositions included every morning are the Russian national anthem, songs from the Great Patriotic War, as well as "I am Russian" and "Mother Earth".
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
