Conversation

The Ukrainians barely use any drones anymore, as far as I can tell. A handful of tiny antipersonnel FPV drones barely moves the needle.

50 to 70 miles

That's 50 to 70 km, or 30 to 50 miles. And that's for heavy artillery with expensive rocket-assisted shells, like the Malva. Most artillery is in the 20-25 mile range or less, including the M777 and all the old soviet 152mm towed junk like the D20 and Msta. That's within Lancet range, and therefore sitting ducks. It's only a matter of whether Russia makes Lancets faster than the cannons wear out their barrels. And the bigger artillery is a lot more expensive then a Geran.

Mainly, at this point, Ukraine is fighting with whatever leftover last-gen junk that NATO nations are willing to dump on it, and a token amount of more recent weapons. Have they even been given a significant amount of JDAMs? Are the handful of old MiGs they have capable of dropping them? Ergo, Ukraine shoots lots of artillery and tries to target it with the handful of recon drones they can afford. Why? Well, what else do they have?

Russia also shoots a lot of artillery targeted with recon drones, but mostly because they have mountains of "free" cannons and shells laying around from the Soviet buildup, and this is one of the last wars where it will be usable, either due to age or obsolescence. More importantly, Russia has shredded Ukraine's AA systems with Lancets, and the Geran gives them a very hard time trying to use western MLRS systems. No long-range AA means there's nothing to stop FABs.

While Ukraine made a lot of strategic blunders, loss of AA was the worst one. Now they're just going to get FAB'ed to death and there's very little they can do about it. They lost the AA systems to drones and ballistic missiles, but mostly drones. Even if they didn't lose the launchers and radars, they burned way too many missiles trying to defend against missiles. Should have just taken the missile strikes on the chin and saved their ammo for the jets which are now a huge problem.