Clément Molin, an analyst at think tank Atum Mundi, told BBC Verify he had confirmed the destruction of 150 vehicles more than 20km (12 miles) from the front line, although he said this likely accounted for about half of all incidents.
The strikes mean Russia has been forced to shorten convoys on supply routes as a “quick coping mechanism to reduce potential damage”, Cristian Vlas at conflict monitoring group Acled told BBC Verify.
He suggested Ukraine’s main objective was not only to strike the assets “important to Russia’s image of grand power”, but to disrupt key logistical convoys, command posts, and communication towers. These “feed, fuel, and inform Russian units at the front line and form the basis for capacity to fight in the battlefield and launch long-range drone and missile strikes from occupied territories”.
Robert Tollast, land warfare expert at the Royal United Service Institute, told BBC Verify that some brigades were estimated to need up to 1,000 tonnes of fuel, food, ammunition and other key supplies every day. He said Ukraine had previously used a long-range strike campaign against Russian air defence units, but the new drone strike ranges “are something else”.
“If you are cutting resupply, for example ammunition trucks 100km or more from the front using small drones, and then longer-range drones are going after larger logistical sites, this is a very serious problem for the Russians,” he said.
Ukraine’s Hornet drones are equipped with an AI-targeting system which has been trained on thousands of hours of videos of Russian military targets gathered over the last four years, Nick Brown, a weapons expert from defence intelligence company Janes, told BBC Verify. They can also access the Starlink satellite network to connect to operators over longer distances, a system that is also more resistant to jamming by Russian forces.
“Ukraine can launch hundreds of these loitering munitions towards a rough target area over 100 miles away and then use AI to detail them on to Russian military targets as they find them,” he said.