As the US increasingly withdraws the intelligence it shares about Russia with Ukraine, Ukrainian UAV combat units are forced to come up with creative solutions to refine their plans for strikes against strategic Russian industrial infrastructure, according to French intelligence agencies.
The 14th Separate Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Regiment’s UAV strike planning relies on open-source intelligence (OSINT), led by a 28-year-old OSINT expert nicknamed “Clover.” The team uses a variety of algorithms and artificial intelligence tools to scan Russian Telegram accounts. They compare them with geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) files for each specific Russian industrial facility, provided by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. This allows them to verify the effectiveness of the strike, make necessary adjustments, and, most importantly, anticipate where Russian forces might reposition their air defenses.
Daily Ukrainian airstrikes are causing damage to several Russian defense facilities, oil refineries, and, most recently, the Engels Air Base.
Russian citizens living near or along the flight paths of Ukrainian drone strikes post images and comments daily on the messaging app Telegram. Thousands of accounts rebroadcast or use these messages to conduct detailed analysis of the strikes. The content, obtained by Ukraine’s OSINT research unit, provides crucial information needed to plan drone strikes and assess their success.
Russian users comment on everything from drone engine noise to tracer rounds and sightings of explosions in the sky. This information provides clues to the presence of Russian anti-aircraft systems. Analysts can quickly extract valuable metadata from these videos and photographs to locate them along the flight paths of Ukrainian drones.
They also use the data found on Telegram to assess damage to target infrastructure. If a strike misses its target, they can alter the flight route and radar jamming settings. The Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) highly values the damage assessments conducted by the OSINT unit, which it uses to statistically estimate the decline in Russian oil production.
Ukrainian analysts have several tools at their disposal for automated data collection. One of them is TelegramCrawlerBot, which was made freely available by the collaborative software development platform GitHub. The bot daily collects all Russian Telegram content related to nighttime drone strikes.
Ukrainian OSINT analysts also modified the coding of the free online artificial intelligence tool Crawl4AI to sort this data. By combining the two tools, they can collect most public messages, including those deleted by Russian cyber units that closely monitor Telegram.
The Russian side, for its part, is constantly working to remove records of damage to its critical infrastructure.
