‘We’re only a few months away from the first political assassination by drone’

‘We’re only a few months – perhaps years at most ­– away from the first political assassination by a drone’. That was the chilling verdict delivered by Francis Dearnley on this week’s episode of The Edition podcast from The Spectator.

The host of the award-winning Ukraine: The Latest podcast was speaking as Russia’s war in Ukraine reached a grim milestone: it has now gone on longer than the first world war. That Ukraine has been able to fiercely resist Russia for so long is due, in no small part, to advances in drone technology.

‘Ukraine is the cutting-edge drone superpower in the world’, Francis said. He explained that while around 80 per cent of Russian casualties in the first year of the war were down to ‘conventional’ artillery fire – much like in the first world war – now, around the same amount are caused by drones. These drones are ‘first-person view’, operated by small hand-held devices that look like video game controllers.

To explain the advance in drone technology, Francis takes the first world war analogy further. In the Great War, artillery shells were fired and troops sat and hoped that they landed on their intended targets. With new drone technology, ‘you fire the drone up into the air, it stops, it looks around – AI-trained – and finds the target that it has been told to pursue’.

The significance goes beyond the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have become such experts that they’re now liaising with the Pentagon about their drone technology, following America’s own recent experience with Iranian Shahed drones. For governments, there is a fear that drone technology could be used outside of warzones. This brings us back to Francis’s grim prediction of a political assassination. If a malign actor chooses to target a British building that is of military sensitivity, Francis asks, is the UK prepared for it? No, he says. 

On the frontline in Ukraine, the advances in technology are not just increasing casualties for the Russians, but also for the defenders. Francis argues that despite Ukraine being in its strongest position for more than 18 months, the Russians ‘have adapted’. The race is therefore on to end the war. The calculation of western countries and Ukraine ‘is what is the metric that we have to hit’ to stop Russia. Francis puts in another way. To destabilise Putin, ‘how many Russians do we have to kill a month?’