A little country sends a little drone to war

 

Ten thousand people turned out to cheer Vanagas, a Turkish-built combat drone that was crowd-sourced by the Lithuanian public and is now on its way to war. The campaign raised $3,360,000 from the public. Baykar, the Turkish company that builds the unmanned warplane, was so moved that it refused the money and donated the drone to Lithuania, which will use the fund for humanitarian aid instead. 

This tweet actually brought tears to my eyes, a new experience for me. Good luck, Vanagas! May you bring misery to some of Putin's butchers!

Ukraine adopted the Bayraktar TB2 (designed by a former MIT student!) in 2019, and since February has used it to launch guided missiles against Russian tanks, fuel depots, radar stations, and even ships at sea. (Apparently two TB2s were used to decoy the defenses aboard the flagship Moskva in the Black Sea so it could be successfully hit and sunk by land-based Neptune missiles.) It won't be a walk in the park for Vanagas, however: at least three TB2s have been lost to Russian anti-aircraft fire.