A battery of Russian 122mm howitzers, the use of which is banned by the Minsk Protocol, launched fire on Ukrainian positions in the Donetsk Region. One Ukrainian soldier was killed and the other two were wounded.
According to the news media, the Russians, assured of their impunity, deployed the unsheltered battery 15 km from the line of division, right in the middle of the road.
An UAV Bayraktar was sent to the war zone for the first time to suppress bombardment from heavy guns. The Russian anti-aircraft defense system and electronic warfare means not only failed to prevent the drone from striking but were unable of detecting it.
In the course of a military operation, the UAV Bayraktar without crossing the division line destroyed one howitzer by a guided bomb. The teams servicing all other Russian heavy guns scattered in different directions. The battery never opened fire again.
Serhiy Harmash is a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) for the peaceful settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine. So, according to Harmash, Russian Orlan-10 UAVs have long been used against Ukrainian troops. That’s why there’s been nothing new in using the Turkish Bayraktar in Donbas.
Harmash claims that Ukraine is forced to make use of drones because of military escalation there which has resulted in the death of several Ukrainian servicemen in the past two days. He stressed, “To cool down the aggressiveness of the enemy and to avoid more casualties, we have used a Bayraktar which with surgical precision demolished a heavy gun of the enemy.”
According to the recent media reports of Turkey, the fact of using the Bayraktar drone by the Ukrainian troops came as “a big shock to Putin.” Dmitri Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian President, made a statement saying that deliveries of Turkish drones to Ukraine would destabilize the situation in Donbas.
For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recommended those who “arm the Kyiv regime” to think about what’s next. It was made public that the following day, October 27, the sanitary authorities of the Russian Federation promptly banned the import of Turkish tangerines allegedly because of “an unacceptable concentration of pesticides in them.”
Information: In 2019, Ukraine bought from Turkey four drones Bayraktar. The Ukrainian government plans to buy 48 more Turkish UAVs of this model.
Besides, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and the Bayraktar company signed this summer a memorandum about the construction of a joint test and training facility for the maintenance and exploitation of Turkish Bairaktars. It is also planned to launch the Ukrainian-Turkish production of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV). The Bayraktar company is intended to finance the construction in Ukraine of a plant for building drones. Ukrainian specialists will work at the plant.
The newspaper Voice of Ukraine
