Mini-drones are the protagonists of the battlefield in Ukraine and also the most lacking tool in the Moscow arsenal. While the operations against jihadist terrorism of the last twenty years had been dominated by large remote-controlled aircraft, such as the American Predators, now in the Donbass to allow the firing of artillery or to hit the trenches from above are tiny drones, which escape the anti-aircraft defenses .
Ukrainians are buying them en masse on Western markets, using commercial models of all kinds for reconnaissance and often modifying them to drop grenades. Moscow, on the other hand, has very few and the embargo prevents imports.
But it turned out that even those produced at home are made with American, European or Japanese components. For this reason, the Russian secret services have been mobilized to be able to secretly import commercial drones, buying them through front companies in countries that have not adopted sanctions or – as the White House denounced when addressing Iran. At the same time, the Kremlin intelligence tries to obtain from Chinese industries those electronic systems that are essential to build them in Russia, always however triangulating supplies through companies of different nations.