For four months, a Turkish drone was the most photographed weapon in the world. By the spring of the year after, almost none were flying.
In the opening weeks of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine's two dozen Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2 drones racked up dramatic kills on Russian armoured columns advancing on Kyiv. Grainy black-and-white video of an exploding T-72, narrated by an off-screen Ukrainian, came to stand in for the war's first improbable success. A pop song was written about the airframe. Lithuanians crowd-funded one for Kyiv.
By the middle of 2023 the TB2 had effectively disappeared from frontline use, killed by Russian S-300 and Buk surface-to-air systems that had not, in the chaos of the first month, been competently arrayed. As soon as they were, the Bayraktar was a slow, expensive aircraft flying through a sky that knew where it was.
In a high-intensity war between approximate peers, large, slow, expensive drones cannot survive without air superiority — and there was, on either side of this front, no air superiority to be had. Everything that follows in this atlas is in some sense a footnote to that sentence. The decisive uncrewed weapon would not be a five-million-dollar airframe; it would be, by an order of three, smaller, cheaper, faster, more disposable. The Bayraktar's heir was the racing quadcopter.
The American equivalent, the MQ-9 Reaper at roughly thirty million dollars per airframe, is essentially absent from Ukraine for the same reason. It is too expensive to lose. A weapon that cannot be lost is a weapon that cannot fight a war like this one.