Russia’s once-feared Lancet kamikaze drone is losing its edge

A Russian drone unit fired about 100 Lancet loitering munitions over three months and hit only three targets, according to pro-Russian militant Pavel Gubarev, who said Ukrainian air defenses brought down most of the rest. The account points to a sharp drop in the effectiveness of one of Russia’s most widely used strike drones, Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported.

Gubarev said the drones were launched by a team from the Russian “Sparta” unit commanded by Senior Lt. Kirill Ozerov, call sign “Nevsky,” over a three-month period that began in mid-June. He did not name the section of the front where the unit operates.

The three targets hit were a self-propelled artillery gun, an infantry dugout and a roadside shop, Gubarev said. Ukrainian air defenses neutralized most of the remaining drones, and Russian forces destroyed some of them themselves because of poor coordination between units.

Gubarev put the price of a single Lancet at 3 million to 5.5 million rubles ($37,000 to $67,000), meaning the unit spent roughly 300 million to 500 million rubles (about $3.7 million to $6.1 million) on the three hits. The Oryx open-source project has estimated the cost of a Lancet at about $35,000, in line with his figures.

He blamed the unit’s leadership rather than its operators, saying commanders used the expensive drones without proper preparation while sending reports of supposedly successful results up the chain of command.

“There are no questions about the technical side of the UAV launches: the fighters did their job conscientiously and properly. The questions are for the commanders,” said Pavel Gubarev.

Gubarev, who declared himself “people’s governor” of Donetsk during Russia’s 2014 seizure of parts of eastern Ukraine, regularly comments on the Russian war effort on social media.

The Lancet is a family of loitering munitions built by ZALA Aero, part of Russia’s Kalashnikov Group. The drone has two sets of X-shaped wings mounted along a composite fuselage, with an optical seeker in the nose, the warhead, battery and electric motor in the middle, and a pusher propeller at the tail. Crews launch it from a catapult and fly it from a briefcase-style control station.

The stated range is more than 40 km (25 miles), and estimates based on the distances to targets it has struck suggest a maximum range of about 50 km (31 miles). Some versions carry a KZ-6 shaped-charge warhead weighing about 3 kg (6.6 pounds), which, according to available descriptions, is fixed inside the fuselage with mounting foam even though the charge was not designed to be used that way.

For much of the war, the Lancet was among Russia’s most effective weapons against Ukrainian artillery and armored vehicles. Ukrainian forces have since shot down growing numbers of the drones, including with interceptor drones that hunt them in the air.