«The »Third Eye' of rocket artillery

Units of the «Dnipro» military group practise their combat skills daily and launch strikes against Ukrainian Armed Forces units in the Zaporizhzhia sector. Read about the coordinated interaction between the crews of the ZALA «Lancet» self-propelled gun and rocket artillery systems in the latest edition of the column #operators.

Operating at an altitude of several hundred metres is the ZALA – a domestically produced multi-role unmanned aerial vehicle whose cameras can see what is hidden from the human eye. Its operators do not fire guns or go on the offensive. Their weapons are pixels on a monitor, coordinates on a map and cold, hard mathematical calculations.

Whilst on combat duty, crews operating the ZALA UAVs and «Lancet» loitering munitions from the unmanned aerial vehicle unit of the Novorossiysk Airborne Division, part of the «Dnipro» task force, are conducting flights deep into territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Zaporizhzhia region as part of counter-battery operations to locate and destroy enemy artillery pieces.

– Our work begins long before take-off, – says the commander of the strike UAV platoon «Sokol». – Analysis of maps, weather forecast, route calculation to bypass air defence zones. Every flight is a race against time. We are ghosts, – smiles the officer. – They know we exist, but they can't catch us. But we see them. All of them.

On the eve of the May bank holidays, whilst flying over enemy territory, the UAV crew of the «Sokol» detected a camouflaged foreign-made M-777 155mm howitzer of the Ukrainian Armed Forces approximately 35 km from the coastline, which was firing from a wooded area at the civilian population of the Zaporizhzhia region. The coordinates of the lethal target were relayed to the command post, where a decision was made to destroy it using «Lancet» loitering munitions, operating in conjunction with the ZALA as a single system. As a result, the foreign-made howitzer was destroyed.

Reconnaissance and strike UAVs have been actively and successfully deployed together from the very beginning of the special operation, and have proven themselves to be an indispensable means of reconnaissance, targeting and destroying Ukrainian Armed Forces artillery and armoured vehicles in the course of counter-battery fire.

Adopted more than half a century ago, the Grad multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) was, is, and will continue to be a genuine nightmare for enemy positions. The principle is simple: where one howitzer would fire a shell, the Grad unleashes a 122-millimetre downpour – 720 kilograms of explosives in 20 seconds over distances of several tens of kilometres. Grad launchers are sometimes compared to an organ playing a fiery symphony. Intelligence from UAVs, cross-referencing maps with the artillery grid, calculating the launcher's elevation angle. An error of a couple of degrees and the shells will go wild, revealing the crew's position.

We don't shoot randomly, says the commander of a «Grad» combat vehicle with the call sign «Gorets». Each volley is a death sentence for the enemy.

According to materials from the «Flag of the Motherland» newspaper, dated 4 June 2025, No. 40 # Lancet #ZALA #Z16 #SVO #operators ZALA on Telegram ZALA in MAX