- calendar_today September 1, 2025
This month Ukraine’s 58th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade destroyed two bridges inside Russia’s Belgorod region in an operation that used cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones to great effect. The bridges had been mined by the Russian military and used to conceal ammunition and a stash of anti-tank mines, according to Ukrainian officials. The devices were found using an FPV drone, which the brigade then detonated by remote control.
The attacks, captured on video by the unit, demonstrated both the growing use of inexpensive remote-controlled drones on the battlefield and the ingenuity of the Ukrainian military, which has used drones in recent months to target Russian positions inside Russian territory. FPV drones have become one of the most successful weapons of the conflict, in part because they are very low cost for an effective weapon and can be procured in large numbers. On this count alone the Belgorod strikes are significant.
Mass Attacks on Bridges
On June 10, the 58th Brigade first targeted a bridge in the border area between the Belgorod region and the Kharkiv region in Ukraine. The Russian military had mined the bridge itself and planned to blow it up in the event of a Ukrainian counterattack, according to a unit statement. It was only through the discovery of ammunition under the bridge that the unit became aware of what was under the bridge.
“I saw people on the bridge. I thought there was a threat there,” a 58th Brigade spokesperson told CNN of the initial attacks. The brigade became suspicious after the first drone spotted activity around the bridge. “We saw something fishy going on there,” the spokesperson said.
The mines underneath the bridge, likely anti-tank mines, were obscured from view of conventional reconnaissance drones because they lost the signal to the drones when getting too close. To resolve this, the 58th Brigade deployed an FPV drone with a fiber optic cable that gave it greater distance.
The drone “returned and said: I have something.” The Brigade said it then “sent a man in a drone to confirm, and it was confirmed.” The unit said the drone then “dropped in, struck and left.”
Photos and video of the second strike, released by the brigade on June 18, show the same drone in flight, approaching a different bridge in the area and then exploding in a cloud of smoke. In a video shot from a second camera nearby, the strike is seen from a distance. CNN geolocated the bridge to Russia’s Belgorod region and near to the border with Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. CNN has also located the other bridge from the June 10 strike in the same general area, inside Russia.
A drone made by Ukrainian firm WYLMIN was among those used in the strikes on the Belgorod bridges. It costs just 25,000–30,000 Ukrainian hryvnias or $600–$725 each, about the same as an Apple iPhone. Under ordinary circumstances, it would take a missile or bomb to destroy a bridge. High-precision drones can do the job too, but most of those used by Ukraine are Western-supplied, and are of greater use against other targets. Ukraine used U.S.-supplied HIMARS rocket artillery to attack bridges in Russia’s Kursk region, for example.
Value on the Battlefield
The HIMARS system costs in the millions per launcher, with each rocket also in the tens of thousands of dollars. The strikes on the Belgorod bridges were conducted with drones that cost less than an iPhone, making for a cheap operation. One has to assume the drones lost in the attack are also being replaced. Strikes by the 58th Brigade have drawn international attention and could provide an important propaganda boost to Kyiv at a time when Russian forces are pushing hard in the east and hitting Ukrainian cities with near-daily drone and missile strikes.
Asked about the operations, military expert Mykola Bielieskov told CNN that FPV drones are making a significant impact on the battlefield. “They are capable of both intelligence-gathering and targeted attacks,” Bielieskov said. “Affordable, simple drone use can be of extraordinary effectiveness.” FPV drones, in Bielieskov’s words, are not only offering a technological edge to Ukraine on the battlefield, but are also solving a crucial problem for Ukraine in that they are a low-cost way to meet Russia’s overall advantage in numbers.
Analysts like Bielieskov have made the point before that drones offer Ukraine important asymmetric advantages. In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said drones represented a “revolution in military affairs,” according to Russian media. At the time, Kyiv said it had destroyed 52 Russian military airfields, a large number that many in Ukraine have attributed to FPV drones, which are easy to smuggle to the front lines. In late June, Russia said it had destroyed dozens of Ukrainian FPV drones, underscoring their impact. The units themselves have been assembled with civilian parts and modified using commercial off-the-shelf parts by volunteer groups.
“If you have a drone for a few hundred hryvnias that can do reconnaissance and destruction work on equal terms with a $1,000 weapon, that is real success,” a representative of the 58th Brigade said. “They help us be several steps ahead.”
