The use of drones in the war in Ukraine has marked a notable change in the rules of the battlefield. So much so that the country’s industry has strengthened in this area with companies developing increasingly advanced unmanned aircraft capable of carrying explosive charges. The latest example is the recently incorporated Palianytsia, a “long-range rocket drone” which has just made its debut on the battlefield and for which Spain has no equivalent.
On August 24, he had his first “successful combat performance”as Zelensky pointed out through the social network X. “It was designed internally to destroy the enemy’s offensive potential,” he continued, in a record time of a year and a half.
“The production of rocket drones will grow, as will our production of long-range attack drones, whose effectiveness we see almost daily“. The announcement was accompanied by a promotional video showing some of the qualities of the new weapon and which was recorded by United 24the official fundraising platform for Ukraine.
New Ukrainian drone
The word Palianytsia refers to a typical Ukrainian type of bread and that Russians, due to linguistic differences, “don’t know how to pronounce it correctly,” as the promotional video states. “But now they’re going to learn this word from a completely different angle.”
The Ukrainian state has launched various programs for the development of rocket projects by private companies, investing in design offices and promoting deregulation to stimulate the industry. “And here are the first results” in the form of a drone.
Over the past two and a half years of full-scale war, Russia has launched about 10,000 missiles of various types and more than 33,000 gliding bombs on Ukraine. It is possible to stop attacks on our cities by targeting the carriers of these weapons – Russian aircraft stationed on military bases… pic.twitter.com/mzisamRWd8
– Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 25, 2024
Most of the The technical characteristics of the Palianytsia are classifiedas they explain, in order to prevent the disclosure of capabilities to the enemy. However, they emphasize that two dozen Russian military air bases are within their range. From the westernmost zone bordering the Baltic countries to the eastern zone near the Black Sea.
The production team is made up of specialists in different fields, including people who “have never worked with defense-oriented technologies.” However, as the video says, with “enemy aggression took charge of the development of Palianytsia“.
The work was conditioned by two unusual aspects within the conventional military industry. The first is that The development took only a year and a half“To achieve this, the team worked without days off or vacations during this entire period,” they emphasize, believing that a delay would result in the loss of Ukrainian lives.
The second peculiarity of Palianytsia is that the developers They did not consider the profitability of the projectwhich is not at all common within defense companies. The only priorities “are reliability and efficiency” on the battlefield.
Palianytsia long-range drone
On the other hand, the Structural features also remain classified and we only know that this new drone is launched from a platform on land and that it “uses a turbojet”. This is where a very significant inconsistency comes in compared to what has been announced.
According to the diagrams published in the video, the unmanned aircraft uses a jet engine more similar to that of an airplane conventional than anything else. A rocket engine must have a propellant – solid or liquid – that carries out the exothermic chemical reaction, which the Palianytsia lacks, since it will use traditional aviation fuel and take atmospheric air.
Palianytsia engine diagram
Beyond the more commercial names, United 24 They also indicate that it is equipped with electronic countermeasures which allow it to fly in airspace with compromised radio spectrum, one of the specialties of the Russian forces.
“He the drone connects directly to the satellite to know its exact position.” But if connectivity is lost, “there are other systems that maintain the trajectory required” by Ukrainian military operators.
Regarding the unit cost, they indicate that it is “much lower than its counterparts”. In addition, work is underway to further reduce costs while increasing the manufacturing rate.
One of the reasons for the development of Palyanytsia is that “the United States and the United Kingdom still do not allow the use of their ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles against Russian airbases.” The ban on using NATO-supplied weapons to attack Russian positions was one of the red lines that remained since the beginning of the invasion.
Protection against interference from the Palianytsia drone
These air bases are where Russia keeps bombers and fighters ready for attacks large radius. That is why the Ukrainian armed forces attack these military facilities whenever they have the opportunity. The latest revealed incidents took place on August 14 at the airfields of Khalino, Baltimor, Savasleyka and Borisoglebsk. A week later, on the 21st, they carried out an attack on an airport near Moscow.
Storm Shadow
The aim of this new and unusual Ukrainian rocket drone would be to replace the Storm Shadow (Storm Shadow in Spanish), a cruise missile based on French Apache projectiles. It was developed from 1994 by the French manufacturer Matra and British Aerospace, and is currently manufactured under the aegis of the European consortium MBDA. Its name corresponds to the British name, while in French it is known as SCALP-EG.
The missile It has a range of between 250 and 300 km. and has a 450 kg tandem warhead. It is powered by a turbojet reaching a speed of Mach 0.8 (nearly 1,000 km/h) and has been adapted to be launched from different aircraft, such as the Tornado IDS, the Dassault Rafale or the Eurofighter. According to several reports, the delivery to Ukraine was delayed precisely because of the difficulties encountered in equipping these missiles with Soviet-origin MiG fighters, the only ones that the Ukrainian air force had to date.
The BROACH warhead is equipped with an initial penetrating charge for penetrate the ground or pierce the exterior of a bunker then a variable delay fuze to control the detonation of the main warhead. The missile weighs a total of about 1,300 kilograms, has a maximum diameter of 48 cm, a wingspan of 2.84 meters and a length of 5.10 meters. The targets for which it is designed include command, control and communication posts, reinforced bunkers, airfields, critical infrastructure, surface ships or bridges.
It’s a “Fire and forget” missileprogrammed before launch. Once launched, the missile cannot be controlled or ordered to self-destruct, and information about its target cannot be changed. The missile follows a trajectory semi-autonomously, in a low-altitude flight guided by GPS and terrain mapping to the designated area. Once close to the target, the missile makes an upward trajectory and then collapses, similar to the suicide drones that Ukraine and Russia have been using since the beginning of the conflict.
