- Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service says its Phoenix unit destroyed a Russian Buk-M3 launcher with a single low-cost drone
- The strike is one of many rather than a first, with Ukraine claiming that dozens of Buk systems of this type have been damaged or destroyed
- Drones are increasingly being used to take out high-value military targets at a fraction of the cost
Ukraine’s decision to use drones as part of its main asymmetric warfare doctrine against Russia continues to pay dividends for the country on multiple fronts, with its recent success on the battlefield centered around a Russian Buk-M3 launch pad that, based on independent estimates, cost between $40 and $50 million.
This is not the first, and likely not the last, Russian Buk-M3 launcher Ukraine has targeted recently, with Oryx, an open source intelligence blog, putting the number at over 40 confirmed Buk kills since the conflict began.
Despite being relatively routine, Buk-M3 systems are relatively expensive to replace, and Ukraine claims to have done so with an FPV drone that cost them “only several thousand dollars.”
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An increasingly fierce conflict for expensive military equipment
Ukraine’s and Russia’s turn toward drones has produced a fairly obvious casualty: expensive military equipment that costs millions of dollars to build, and the Buk-M3 missile is no exception.
The Buk-M3, also known as Viking in its export form and designated SA-27 by NATO, is Russia’s newest medium-range surface-to-air missile system. It entered Russian service in 2016 as the successor to the Buk-M2 and occupies the middle tier of Russia’s tiered air defense, sitting above short-range systems such as the Pantsir and Tor and below the long-range S-300 and S-400.
The M3 fires the 9M317M, a single-stage solid-propellant missile with a more powerful dual-mode motor than the M2’s round. This gives it a range of about 70 km, a ceiling of about 35 km and a top speed of almost 1,550 m/s. The launch pad carries six missiles compared to four on the M1 and M2, and upgraded electronics are credited with reducing the time to bring the system to readiness.
That makes it a valuable target for Ukrainian drone operators, and ironically, since the Buk-M3 is built in part to shoot down aerial threats. However, its minimum effective engagement range is approximately 2.5 km, so a small drone closing within that distance is below the floor of what the system’s own missiles can engage.
Ukraine has developed a number of methods to reach Russian airfields, armor and artillery positions, among them Operation Spiderweb, which Ukraine’s security service estimated destroyed about $7 billion in Russian military hardware, including aircraft no longer in production.
The Ukrainian border guard says this system was hit in transit, moving towards the front and hidden. That detail means more than it seems. Air defense vehicles are most vulnerable on the move as they cannot engage effectively on the move and their shielding is degraded, making the transit window a predictable target rather than a lucky one.
The goal behind Ukraine’s systematic dismantling of Russian medium-range air defenses is to open corridors through radar coverage for long-range strike drones and manned aviation, which is why the pace has increased and why attacks are now reaching deep into Russian territory.
A Buk-M3 lost to an FPV drone is the kind of incident that illustrates the broader problem Russia faces against a maturing Ukrainian drone industry, in a war that has settled across multiple fronts.
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