Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region is flat, open, and streaked with cloudy skies, terrain that Western officials believe has already limited Russia from carrying out the withering air and missile strikes that characterized the first two months of the war in Ukraine. And as the battlefield shifts east, drones are becoming a dominant—if not the dominant—feature of the conflict, former U.S. officials and experts told Foreign Policy.

With persistent clouds likely to make flying Russian and Ukrainian fighter jets out of missile range more difficult, both sides are turning to a two-pronged drone strategy: using cheap, off-the-shelf drones to keep a watchful eye in the sky and to flag targets for artillery to take out tanks. Experts believe the U.S. provision of hundreds of kamikaze-like loitering drones that can hunt targets for hours before dropping down to detonate a deadly munition, complemented by a fleet of drones that can be bought off the internet as low-cost eyes in the sky, could give the Ukrainians a one-two punch from above.

Yet the fighting could become stalemated in the Donbas. Ukraine has largely stopped posting footage from Turkish-made Bayraktar drones in recent weeks—and a few have been confirmed to be lost—a sign to some experts that Russia has begun to shut down that capability in the Donbas as it begins to try to centralize control over the region’s airspace. The provision of new drones could provide a respite for the Ukrainians. The United States is providing Switchblade drones and a close cousin, the Phoenix Ghost, which function as one-shot drones, hovering over the battlefield for hours before diving down to hit their targets. The Biden administration first provided the Phoenix Ghost as part of an $800 million military aid package to Ukraine announced last week.

And some experts believe that Ukraine could put a chink in Russia’s armor—literally—with the new class of drones that can loiter over their targets for hours and detonate right over tanks and armored vehicles. It could “create a situation where the Russian military will have to expend its resources, conducting anti-drone warfare on a scale it probably hasn’t done before,” said Samuel Bendett, an advisor with the CNA think tank and a member of the organization’s Russia Studies Program. But the battlefield impact of the new capabilities isn’t yet clear. The United States will soon begin training small batches of Ukrainian forces on Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost drones at a remote location in Europe.

Based on the Bayraktar drone performance indicators analysis, identify other UCAVs in the same class and perform a comparative analysis.