At 0249 local time, a Ukrainian drone commander in the Zaparicia all blast is 40 seconds away from launching his 16th luty.
15 already in the air, screaming southeast toward the Tuapse or refinery on Russia’s Black Sea [music] coast 640 km out.
Unknown to him, 90 km east, a Russian rocket launcher has just rotated onto a bearing through his position and the first round is already in the air.
His first round impacts at 0253, 180 m off the road in a plowed field.
The second hits 60 m closer.
The third hits the road itself.
The whole salvo lands inside 40 seconds.
Exactly enough time for the Ukrainians to throw themselves into ditches and drainage culverts as the rounds geyser dirt and frozen earth into the air around them.
They’re trained for this.
They survive.
The unwa drones do not.
Three hooties cook off sequentially over the next 90 seconds.
Fuel tanks on the trucks ignite and the launchway turns into a 200 meter debris field that lights up the infrared for 50 kilometers.
When the smoke clears and the commander counts heads in the dark, [music] eight guys all moving.
The youngest member of the unit is doing the math in his head and not liking the answer.
He makes the call before anyone has caught their breath.
Split up.
Three vehicles, three routes now.
Two men peel off towards a logging road northwest with the unit’s spare control gear.
Two more grab the medical kit and run for an orchard a few kilometers north where the unit has a barn ready for exactly this kind of night.
The commander himself climbs into the third truck, the medical truck, and pushes east toward a fallback point 22 km away.
The vehicles are still moving when he figures out he should already know who fired on them.
If you were to look at what just hit them, this is a 9A52-4 Tornado S.
A posts Soviet Russian upgrade of a 1980s rocket artillery design with GPS and tail fins bolted on.
12 300 mm guided rocket tubes mounted on a commage truck accurate to 30 m at 120 km.
A garden sprinkler with a laser pointer taped to the nozzle.
It knows exactly where your lawn chair is, but it’s going to soak the entire patio just to make sure.
The Russians aimed at a 2 kmter ellipse and let volume do the work of precision.
Now the ellipse, that’s the interesting part.
Every looty pings a satellite uplink during launch to confirm its route.
And Russian signals intelligence units along the front line are listening.
Imagine texting your wife from the couch every time you grab a beer from the fridge.
By the 15th text, she knows exactly which cushion you’re sitting on and how many empties are on the table.
by drone 15.
Russian SIGN [music] had the launch site narrowed to a 2 km circle and a tornadoes s battery 120 km away.
Rockets already loaded.
The Ukrainians spread the launches over 3 hours, hoping the Russians would not thread it together fast enough.
Off by 10 minutes, 200 kilometers behind the front line, a Russian operator sitting in a windowless ground station swings his Orland 30 toward the impact, and his camera’s iris steps down twice as three secondary explosions wash the frame in white.
He doesn’t have to find the launch site anymore.
The launch site is on fire from horizon to horizon in the infrared.
He logs eight separate heat sources peeling away from the wreckage [music] in three directions.
Then he does what good spotters do.
He watches them and waits.
That was an Orland 30, the heavy lift variant of Russia’s most built reconnaissance drone.
7-hour flight time and infrared resolution sharp enough to read a vehicle from 4 km up.
If the Tornado S was the guy who threw the brick through your window, the Orland is the Ring doorbell camera across the street that watched you run.
He picks the truck with the most heat in the cab, the medical truck.
Four people inside and pushes the coordinates not back to the tornadoes s battery, which is displaced and is reloading in a tree line 40 km away, but to a Lancet team waiting at a Russian forward post with different gear and a different way to finish the job.
8 minutes of head start.
The Lancet team needs 12 to launch.
The trucks don’t know they’re already losing the math.
The Lancet operator on the receiving end is not in a hurry.
He’s watched dozens of Ukrainian dispersals turn into ghost hunts.
The only way to flush a hidden truck is to wait until they think they got away and then catch the transmission when they break radio silence.
The mistake will come.
They always do.
300 km southeast of the burning launch site.
The lead luty crosses the front line into occupied southern Zaparizia at 110 m above the ground.
Behind it, [music] 14 surviving lutis fly in a loose three-wave formation with eight decoys mixed in.
And for about 90 seconds, everything goes to plan.
Then the lead luty’s collision avoidance system picks up a fastmoving thermal contact at 3 m.
And another and another.
The drone climbs 10 m and banks 4° south to dodge the contact.
The next luty follows the leader track and the whole formation drifts south of where it’s supposed to be.
Those are not interceptors.
[music] Those are Russian Giran twos heading the other direction into Ukraine on their own one-way mission.
The Jirean 2 is Russia’s licensebuilt version of the Iranian Shahed 136.
50 kilos of warhead in a delta-wing airframe.
Lawnmower engine 200 km per hour, 1,800 km range.
$20,000 per drone built in a factory in Terasan that cranks out 100 a day.
The cheap end of the same kind of weapon Ukraine is flying the other direction tonight.
The Black Sea corridor in 2026 is the most drone saturated airspace in human history.
Jerans heading northwest out of Kranadar and Crimea.
Lutis [music] heading southeast on counter tracks.
Lancets and Orleans loitering at an intermediate [music] altitudes.
None of them talking to anything outside their own network.
The standard move is to climb a few meters and bank away from any thermal contact rather than risk the math.
It’s like driving the highway where half the other cars are invisible and the other half might be carrying explosives.
By the time the looty formation finishes dodging traffic, it’s 30 km south of its planned track.
The decoys lagging minutes behind kept the original heading.
The real looties are flying straight at the ship the planners didn’t know was there.
200 km of open water still sits between the Luty formation and TuPS.
The lead [music] luty drops to 90 m above the water as the formation crosses the Sea of Azov.
And at 0317, a missile screams off a rail on a ship the Ukrainians didn’t know was there.
It climbs to acquisition altitude.
The seeker takes over and the lead drone is scrap at 12 km.
6 seconds later, the next missile launches and by the third launch, three luties are gone.
By the sixth, the survivors are inside a 30 millimeter cannon’s reach, and the cannon shreds one more before its tracking can’t keep up at close range.
Just two luties from the lead group make it through.
Once bolted to her deck is a Pancer M, the navalized version of the air defense system Russia uses on land, mounted on a Vasili BOV class patrol ship.
Eight interceptors loaded and ready out to 20 km.
Two 30 mm cannons inside five.
Russia upgraded these specifically because Ukraine had been making patrol chips disappear.
Same teeth as a land version, smaller box surrounded by water.
What just got chewed up by the Panzer is the AN1 196 Luty, Ukraine’s long range strike drone built around a propeller engine that sounds like a lawn mower 40 km off.
About 3 m of wingspan, 200 kilos at takeoff, 25 kilo warhead in the nose.
Enough to open a fuel tank like a soup can.
Top speed 200 km per hour, range, 1100 km.
Boston to Atlanta on a tank of fuel with a bomb where the cargo should be.
The whole airframe cost Ukraine somewhere around $200,000, which is roughly the price of a moderately optioned Tesla.
Tonight, Ukraine is throwing 16 of them at a refinery worth $4 billion.
The Bov was not supposed to be there.
The route the Ukrainian planning team built came off commercial satellite imagery 5 days [music] old.
imagery that showed the old BCOM patrol box two boxes ago.
Her actual patrol box had shifted south 3 days earlier when a sister ship went home to Nova Rosisk for refit.
The new box turned out to be exactly where the looty formation drifted when it dodged the Garan traffic.
Her captain watched his magazine empty.
Six missiles fired.
Four hits, two luty still flying.
Two more waves coming.
Hold position with two interceptors left and absorb whatever the next wave brings.
or run and let the next wave [music] fly past untouched toward the refinery.
He gives the order to come right and open distance.
Same math you do when you’re down to your last 20 bucks at the gas pump with 50 mi to drive.
200 km behind the drone formation, the Lancet team that just got the truck’s coordinates is finishing its launch checklist.
The truck is now on a forested logging road southeast of the launch site.
Engine off, coasting downhill.
The new guy is on lookout, watching the sky through the windshield.
The signals officer has the unit strike feed running on a tablet between his knees.
Even Luty still in the air.
The first ones inside their target run in at about 20 minutes.
No contact warnings.
38 minutes since they ran.
The first Luts in 19.
They’re starting to think they got out clean.
They haven’t.
25 km behind them and 4,000 m up.
The Orland 30 is still circling and now it’s earning its second paycheck as a relay.
The Lancet the forward team catapulted 12 minutes ago has flown the distance on its own motor and is starting a search pattern over the roads the medical truck is using.
Every command from the ground operator bouncing down through the Orland overhead.
The commander catches the shadow first, a flicker across the windshield at the wrong angle.
Up.
He pulls off the road into heavy tree cover, cuts the engine, and lets the truck coast into the deepest part of the canopy.
The new guy is out of the cab before [music] it stops moving with a thermal blanket in his hands.
heavy with reflective material and gets [music] it spread over the cab in 11 seconds.
The signals officer drops his tablet to the lowest brightness setting and tucks it under a coat.
They wait.
What’s hunting them is Aala Lancet 3, the drone Russia reaches for when it wants to take out a high value target precisely.
3 kg shaped warhead, small until you remember it was designed to punch through tank armor.
40 minutes of lord time and an AI seeker that can lock onto a vehicle without anyone holding the joystick.
The Lancet is what happens when your GPS and your car keys become the same thing.
It finds you, then it is the thing that hits you.
Except this Lancet shouldn’t be there at all.
The Ukrainians had planned the dispersal route to keep the medical truck outside the Lancet’s normal reach, 40 km from any Russian post.
The truck is 110 km away.
Look at the Orland circling above.
The Orland’s job is to loiter overhead as a flying signal tower so the ground operator keeps a clean control [music] link 100 plus kilometers past where his radio would otherwise quit.
It’s the cell booster you’d haul out to the deer [music] camp so your phone still shows bars in the middle of nowhere.
And this isn’t the 40 km Lancet the Ukrainians planned around.
It’s the extended range variant Russia started [music] fielding in 2025.
Redesigned antenna, longer reach, catapult launch plus relay, plus the new airframe is how a [music] drone that used to top out at 40 km is now hunting a truck 110 clicks behind the line.
Exactly 70 km deeper than the Ukraine’s [music] drew it on the map.
Hiding from a 40-minute loitering drone is like hiding from your mother-in-law at a family reunion.
She hovers and never blinks.
Thermal blankets help against optical and infrared sensors, but you can’t drive fast under one.
Engine off coasting is silent and invisible, but only works where the road slopes down.
And hiding under tree cover stops working the moment the seeker climbs to a new angle.
The truck is doing all of them at once.
It buys 10.
2,000 m above them.
The lancet seeker scans the canopy and twice locks onto something.
A deer in a clearing.
Then a stream pushing warm runoff across cooler ground.
and the operator at the ground station overrides each lock.
The truck stays cold.
It has 38 minutes of fuel left and nowhere else to be.
While the truck waits it out, the surviving looies pushed toward the coast.
They cross the Russian coastline at 0341 with the TuPSay 40 km east.
And at 0344, a missile screams out of a track vehicle on the refinery perimeter.
Straight up, no aim.
The seeker takes over the incident clears the silo.
Flee Luty of the second wave.
foam at 12 km.
Five more launches in the next 90 seconds and five more drones go down.
Three looties make it into the final approach by hugging the dirt under the radar’s effective floor 3 m off the ground over flat terrain.
If you look here at what just punched a looty out of the air at 12 km, this is a Tour M2, the late Soviet design Russia kept producing because nothing newer does it better.
Built specifically for the fixed target air defense [music] job that Pancer keeps failing at.
12 km reach, four simultaneous targets without [music] breaking a sweat.
If Pancer is a guy trying to catch water balloons one at a time to is the dad who set up four sprinklers pointing in different [music] directions.
Everything that crosses the lawn gets hit whether he’s paying attention or not.
Russia didn’t put one to two obs, they put three.
The three surviving lutes cross the refinery [music] perimeter fence at 3 m altitude.
One drone through the close-in defenses and a 50,000 cubic meter tank goes up.
A six barrel cannon with a fixed pad swings onto the lead drone and rips a half a second burst and the drone shatters into fiberglass confetti before its [music] shadow is caught up to it.
The mount snaps to the next target.
Second drone gone.
The third luty punches through a corridor a different gun on the perimeter was supposed to be covering.
Except that gun is still swinging back into position after chasing a decoy 15 [music] minutes earlier.
The drone survives.
What shredded the first two? An AK630.
Originally a naval close-in weapon, now bolted onto a fixed pad on the refinery perimeter.
Six barrel rotary 30mm cannon.
5,000 rounds per minute.
3 seconds to swing onto a new target.
The answer to the question of what you put around a refinery when the missiles fail.
A chainsaw made of bullets.
The kind of home security system your neighbor would install if the HOA didn’t exist.
Unsuttle, but it works.
The surviving drone dives toward its program target, a 50,000 cubic meter storage tank in the Eastern Tank farm.
The targeting came off commercial satellite imagery the unit bought 4 days earlier.
And on imagery from April 16th, the tank was clearly full to the rim.
The Lut’s warhead detonates on impact with the roof and the small fireball blooms above the tank farm.
Way smaller than what 75 kg of warhead opening up a full tank should look like.
No secondary fire.
The tank is empty because somewhere in late 2025, Russia figured out how Ukraine was picking targets.
Russia learned the satellite imagery refresh cycle learned which tanks Ukraine was hitting and started moving the actual oil between tanks every time a satellite passed overhead.
A shell game with three tanks where one has oil in it.
The player keeps moving them and the player is the only one who knows which is which.
At Tuapsi, the rotation runs on a 72-hour cycle.
The tank Ukraine sees full on Tuesday is empty by Friday’s strike.
Ukraine was basically using password 123 for three years and wondering why the Russians kept getting in.
The signals officer in the truck, still under the thermal blanket, still hidden.
The Lancet, still searching above, watches the small fireball bloom on his tablet and figures it out in 30 seconds.
He pulls a thermal imagery from a different commercial provider, an American satellite outfit selling the same data to Ukrainian intelligence that the Pentagon buys for its own analysts, and looks for the opposite of what Ukraine had been hitting.
Tanks that stayed cold [music] while everything around them heated up and cooled down with products cycling through refrigerators in a row of ovens.
Three [music] candidates, two luties from the late wave, still in the air and still programmable.
The catch is the secondary uplink.
That’s the only channel that can send Aluti new coordinates in flight, and it’s loud, slow, and traceable.
The second commander keys it.
The Lancet circling 2,000 meters overhead gets a strong, clean signal pointing straight down at the truck.
The signals officer says it loud anyway.
The rest of the mission cost them nothing if they do not transmit.
Two lutis hit empty tanks.
The Russians keep their refinery.
The unit lives to launch tomorrow night.
the kind of quiet where you can hear yourself think and you wish you couldn’t.
He looks at the map and transmits anyway.
200 km south, two luty still in the air pick up the new coordinates and start banking into fresh headings.
The corrections are small.
The targets are only a couple of kilometers from where they were already going.
At 0354, the first drone slams into a tank on the eastern edge of the farm and detonates the secondary explosion that defines the rest of the night.
A 50,000 cubic meter tank of refined fuel erupting in a fireball that punches 200 meters into the pre-dawn sky and turns the horizon orange for 15 km in every direction.
The second drone slams into a neighboring tank 30 seconds later.
The firewall between rows erupts and the fire leaps.
If you enjoyed this video, then watch this other video on Ukrainian drones destroying another Russian oil depot.
Bye for now.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
