The latest missile to join the Russian terror campaign is one of the weirdest: a target drone that the Russians have modified for a one-way attack.
The Dan-M is a 350-kg jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle that Russia’s Sokol design bureau designed for air-defense training back in the early 1990s. Launched from the ground or air, a Dan-M is capable of flying at very low altitude and high subsonic speed for as long as 40 minutes. It essentially mimics the flight characteristics of the US-made Tomahawk cruise missile.
On or before Thursday, Russian forces in Crimea launched three Dan-Ms at Ukraine. The Russians had modified the Dan-Ms into a kind of “attack UAV,” according to drone expert Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov. The modifications included repainting the drones from their normal bright red to a more subtle color, Beskrestnov wrote—and presumably also included the addition of a warhead.
It’s unclear whether the Dan-Ms struck their targets. “For information security reasons, I cannot report the fate of this group of attack UAVs,” Beskrestnov wrote.
Taking aim at Dan-Ms pretending to be Tomahawks, Russian gun and missile crews can prepare for the real thing—shooting down actual Tomahawks in the event Russia and the United States, or some other Tomahawk-armed country, ever go to war.
If a Dan-M survives its training sortie, it pops a parachute and floats back to the ground for repairs and reuse. A single Dan-M is usually good for up to 10 training flights before it wears out.
It should be pretty easy to convert the target drones into cruise missiles: simply add a warhead and maybe omit the parachute.
Indeed, the Ukrainians have performed similar modifications on their 1970s-vintage Tupolev Tu-141/143 reconnaissance drones. Swapping out their cameras for warheads, Ukrainian forces fired several old Tu-141/143s at targets in Russia’s border oblasts early in Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine.
But the Ukrainians were, at the time, desperate for deep-strike munitions. They hadn’t yet ramped up development and production of purpose-made long-range strike drones. The explosive Tu-141/143s were an expedient—one Ukraine no longer needs.
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What’s the point?
Why does Russia need to arm its Dan-Ms? Even Beskrestnov doesn’t know for sure. “We did this because we did not have cruise missiles and long-range attack UAVs,” he wrote. “And why Russia made this modification is unclear.”
One possibility is that the Russians “have a large number of these UAVs,” Beskrestnov proposed.
Russian air-defense troops get plenty of practice shooting at actual Ukrainian missiles and drones. The wider war may have rendered potentially substantial stocks of Dan-Ms redundant—so why not add warheads and shoot them at Ukraine?
The most obvious explanation—that Russia is running low on purpose-designed deep-strike munitions—seems unlikely. If anything, the Russian strike arsenal is expanding as the Kremlin finds more ways around foreign sanctions and, with growing stocks of high-tech components, ramps up production of munitions, including Kh-101, Kh-555, Banderol cruise missiles, KAB glide bombs, and Shahed attack drones.
The two biggest Russian air raids of the wider war took place on the nights of May 24 and 25, each involving more than 350 missiles and drones. The munitions rained down on cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.
“Russian strikes against Ukraine continue to disproportionately impact civilians and civilian infrastructure,” noted the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C.
The intensifying raids are “part of a cognitive warfare effort to weaken Ukrainian resolve and to undermine Western support for Ukraine,” ISW explained.
Adding Dan-M drones to the Russian arsenal only slightly expands the terror campaign. But for the Russians, every weapon they can fire at Ukrainian cities is a weapon well-spent.
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