British-made drones have been used by the Ukrainian armed forces for deep-strike missions against the Russian economy for the first time, a report states, prompting Moscow to make one of its periodic allusions to the threat of nuclear war.
Drones built by two British companies have been successfully used for long-range deep strikes into the Russian hinterland against military and economic targets in recent months, a report in The Sunday Times states, citing both Ukrainian and British government sources. The report states one of the weapons transferred from Britain to Ukraine is the Callen-Lenz / BAE Systems developed ‘Nyan’ drone, which has been used on strikes said to include targets such as “oil refineries in Volgograd, southwest Russia, and Yaroslavl, near Moscow”.
The Nyan cited in the Times report is a compound delta-winged, jet-powered, carbon-fibre drone — also known as a “One-Way Effector (OWE) Uncrewed Air System (UAS)” — designed to do the job of a cruise missile at a fraction of the cost. Crucially for the Ukraine conflict, the design has some ‘stealth’ properties, it has backup navigation systems to find its target in areas where heavy radio jamming means guidance systems like GPS can’t be guaranteed, and it can be mass produced quickly to a price.
The drone has already been tested with the British military and flown from Royal Navy ships from a catapult launch rail. It is stated the British government is to give “over 150,000” drones to Ukraine this year, although presumably the majority of these will be inexpensive short-range drones, not the long-range attack drones made in Britain only now being used by Ukraine for the first time in recent months.
As per normal when the deployment of a new Western weapons system to Ukraine to assist in their national defence against the Russian invasion is revealed, Moscow has responded with dire threats, including allusions to nuclear war. Russian state media published the headline “UK moves toward nuclear war by allowing Ukraine to launch British-made UAVs against Russia” as it promulgated remarks by a Norwegian academic reflecting on the drone strike report, and the Russian embassy in London added further, more vague comments.
The Daily Telegraph states the embassy called Britain hypocritical for saying it wants peace in Ukraine while supplying Kyiv with weapons, and said this makes London an accomplice to what it describes as Ukrainian “terrorist attacks”. This is not a characterisation of Ukrainian strikes accepted by Western governments generally, but as is the case in how most nations tend to report their own military activity, Russian attacks are portrayed as strictly necessary, measured, and on war targets only, while Ukrainian ones are decried as barbarous, fascistic, and intended to spread terror.
Exactly what effects the United Kingdom might expect was not spelt out in the embassy statement, but it did promise: “London’s actions will inevitably have consequences, for which it will have to answer. The deeper its involvement in this conflict and the greater its support for the terrorist machine of Kyiv, the higher the price will be.”
While dire Russian threats have never been realised yet, and the United Kingdom has already supplies Ukraine with a host of systems including tactical-level weapons, armour and artillery, and sophisticated cruise missiles, London makes clear the pace of so-called “hybrid warfare” attacks has picked up with time. The Times states sources who express concern the fact British drone factories are now exporting to Ukraine now makes them a priority target for would-be Russian saboteurs.
And it is not difficult to believe that individuals, even without realising they were being recruited by Moscow itself, could be directed to launch even very low-sophistication attacks on weapons facilities in the United Kingdom. Several industrial sites associated with the Israeli armed forces have been targeted in Britain in recent years, often by smashers carrying nothing more complicated than sledgehammers and paint. One particularly notorious factory raid saw activists ram-raid the gates of the facility with a prison van, before dismounting and smashing up equipment, security officers, and then attending police with hammers. To the benefit of the raiders, a jury then failed to reach a verdict, prompting Palestine activists to declare “victory”.