U.S., French intelligence lets Ukraine map drone routes into Russia — report

“Ukrainian military planners, drone operators and energy specialists say Kyiv’s goal is no longer simply to start fires at refineries or destroy storage tanks, but to keep plants offline for longer and make each strike more costly for Moscow,” the FT wrote.

According to the report, intelligence provided by the United States and France is instrumental in routing swarms of strike drones through gaps in Russian air defenses.

“Ukrainian officials said intelligence provided by the U.S. and France had helped map Russian air-defence deployments and identify routes that allowed drones to evade them and reach targets deep inside Russia,” the article said.

Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said the campaign also depends on “systematically elimination” of Russian air defenses, radars and electronic-warfare systems to open corridors for drones. Once those corridors exist, he said, selecting targets becomes “a matter of pure mathematics,” weighing production volumes, domestic consumption, export flows, and shipping points.

Andrii Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister who now heads the Center for Defense Strategies, told the FT the European part of Russia and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory are now within reach. “Eighty million people — roughly two-thirds of Russia’s population — live in the European part of the country, in a strike zone that is no longer considered and will not be considered a safe rear,” he said.

Zahorodniuk said U.S. and French intelligence also improved target selection by helping Ukrainian long-range drone units “learn where to strike.” Ukrainian planners have mapped Russia’s energy network to identify critical nodes whose destruction would disable far larger parts of the system, and to target equipment that would be hardest to replace.