© Lord Bebo/XAn area cluttered with "fiber optics cables" near Orekhov.
Drones have become the most lethal weapons in the Russia-Ukraine war, from small user-quality quadcopters dropping bombs, up to sophisticated attack drones like the Iranian Shahed (called by Russians 'Geran') flying in swarms.
The inexpensive devices have all but retired the million-dollar tanks, and a technological EW race was on to find ways to jam the frequencies of the drones, disturbing the operator's control and crashing them off-target.
That was going on for a while, until small, unjammable drones controlled by fiber-optic cables began dominating the battlefields.
They have become so integral to Russian and Ukrainian operations that they leave massive trails of cabling everywhere, turning the battlefield into a tangled web.
Business Insider reported:
"As a counter to extensive electronic warfare, fiber-optic drones are becoming increasingly prevalent on both sides. And with sprawling cables stretched across the battlefield, soldiers are moving with greater caution.After the missions, the cabling from the drones adorns the battlefield like some eerie fairy land.
'You see the little webs, and you never know — is it from the fiber-optic drone? Or it's a part of a booby trap', Khyzhak, a Ukrainian special operator who for security reasons could only be identified by his call sign ("Predator" in Ukrainian), told Business Insider. Mines and traps have also been prominent threats in this war."
"In response [to massive EW jamming], Russia and Ukraine began developing fiber-optic FPV drones that connected to their pilots using spools of long, thin cables. The cables preserved a steady link and made the quadcopters resistant to traditional electronic warfare tactics.
The best chance that soldiers have to stop the fiber-optic drones is by shooting them out of the sky, but that requires precision, quick reaction times, and a lot of luck."
"Soldiers can't always tell right away if it's a harmless fiber-optic cable or something far more dangerous, like a booby trap. This forces them to think carefully about whether they should call an engineer, destroy the web with explosives, halt, or proceed forward."
Comment: Cleaning up after Ukraine's idiotic, self-destructive actions will be the work of decades, and probably will be shouldered by Russia, at least in the territories it will claim in any peace deal. The Banderites in Galicia and other western provinces will likely have to appeal to the EU for aid. Problem is, those EU countries are almost as broke as Ukraine.