Ordinary-looking objects are strewn across two wooden tables in a cramped warehouse in eastern Ukraine: double-sided tape, gloves, an allen wrench (with a hexagonal-shaped tip), a soldering iron, 3D-printed plastic, bearings, a digital scale. Next to it is a German DM51 fragmentation grenade.
All items are fundamental for Ukrainian troops, who are trying to solve a puzzle: how to create a grenade that weighs almost nothing and can be launched from a drone to destroy a 40-ton Russian tank?
“War is a market. It’s money,” says the burly, bearded Ukrainian soldier Graf, who is in charge of his unit’s drone team. “If you destroy a $3 million tank with a $3,000 drone and a $200 grenade, you’ve got a good deal.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago, technological advances on the battlefield have focused on small drones operated remotely by both countries. These are of increasing importance in almost every aspect of warfare – including reconnaissance, artillery correction and so-called kamikaze attacks.
Now Graf and his team, who specialize in killing Russian soldiers with munitions dropped from the air, are looking to increase the drones’ effectiveness by using them to fire what they consider the perfect grenade. The challenge is to build this grenade.
“It’s our main objective,” says Graf at his headquarters in the city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region, surrounded by the various components needed to turn a flying toy into a lethal tool at the front. Like other Ukrainian soldiers, he uses his nom de guerre to identify himself to reporters.
The tests in the workshop are an example of how the army of the invaded country adapts as the war progresses, seeking to innovate technologically in the face of a superior Russia in terms of the number of troops and long-range weapons.
According to Graf, the ideal grenade would weigh around 500 grams, the maximum load that a DJI Mavic 3 drone can carry without the flight being too impacted. In order for it to have the desired weight, the team has been using a 3D printer, with which they are trying to create a casing that is both light and capable of carrying the necessary explosives. The arduous task involves trying different shaped grenades, clamped in a vice in the workshop, and working the explosive mechanisms to adjust them.
The grenade has to be able to penetrate the hull of an armored vehicle or a tank – something that is currently not possible with ammunition that weighs around 500 grams, according to Graf. For now, your best grenade is the German-supplied DM51, an explosive that, with the addition of stabilizing fins, weighs something close to that limit. But the DM51 is built to kill people, not blow up tanks.
“Every day, we study, we experiment with grenades, bombs and drones, and we perfect our work”, says Graf.
For him and other legions of Ukrainian drone experts, the quest for an improved grenade is part of a larger arms race. Like the team at the workshop, the Russian military is looking to make its small unmanned vehicles deadlier, with varying degrees of success.
The Chinese-made Mavic 3 has become the backbone of Ukraine’s drone forces. It’s small, portable, has decent battery life and range, and can be quickly equipped to launch grenades. Russian forces also use it.
Russian military drones — including the Shahed-136, a kamikaze drone produced in Iran and frequently launched against Ukrainian infrastructure — are larger and used in a different way compared to small Mavics, launched against troop concentrations and trenches. Mavics are quadcopters, meaning they can hover like a helicopter directly over the target before dropping their lethal payload.
Ukraine has stayed ahead in the drone arms race just as it has had success on the battlefield: Lower-level commanders have more freedom in how and when to use them, and drone units like the one commanded by Graf face less bureaucracy. to test and use your weapons.
“Ukraine’s drone effort is more dynamic, and the military works directly with them,” says Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russian drones and other weapons at CNA, an Arlington-based research and analysis organization. “The Russians are just getting there now.”
This means that inventions by Graf and his comrades can be quickly shared with other drone units in chat groups before being used in the field, without much supervision.
Bendett says Russia, on the other hand, has taken a more industrial approach to the drone arms race, preferring mass-produced munitions, although some volunteer groups are making progress with testing and sending drones to the front lines. The problem is that everyone has to navigate a bureaucracy reminiscent of the Soviet era to send their soldiers the right equipment, continues the expert.
“There’s a lot of this back-and-forth,” he says. “One side has a technological breakthrough, and the other needs to catch up.”
Hidden on a shelf in Graf’s workshop is evidence of Moscow’s industrialized attempts to compete with Kiev: a Russian factory-made OFSP — a tiny 40mm grenade intended to be dropped by an Orlan-10, a reconnaissance drone whose noise resembles that of a a lawn mower. The grenade had the manufacturing date stamped on the side: March 2022.
“They are releasing a standard modification of this grenade,” says Iliia, one of the engineers working with Graf. “We’re releasing everything we can find.” The main thing to consider, he says, “is the weight of the grenade a drone can carry.”
Graf says that none of his team was killed while working on the grenades, but that the process is dangerous for troops on the front lines. “A lot of guys get killed because they don’t understand how these things work.”
Despite the risks, Graf and his team continue to work in the workshop full of different explosives, getting closer and closer to the tank-destroying grenade. Today, they have ammunition that they say can penetrate Russian armor, but it weighs 220 grams more than the limit. “We make grenades from garbage,” he jokes. “But if you can destroy a tank with a Mavic, you are the best in this war.”
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
