A Ukrainian unit is hunting down dozens of Russian drones with a flying double-barrel shotgun

• A Ukrainian battalion has published a video of a shotgun-mounted drone destroying dozens of targets.
• It's one of the biggest footage collections of drones shooting down other drones.
• The tech is likely based on a World War I recoilless gun, which fires from both ends of a barrel.

Propellers whirring over the frost-laden landscape, the Ukrainian drone approaches, twin barrels creeping toward the enemy bomber.

A flash erupts on its attached first-person view camera, and the target — a DJI Mavic drone — falls lifelessly to the ground.

Dozens of other attacks play in rapid succession, each showing the ends of two barrels blasting Mavics out of the sky.

The video was posted on Sunday by the 2nd Motorized Battalion of Ukraine's 30th Mechanized Brigade, which is fighting near Bakhmut. Its accompanying caption was simple. "Shooting down enemy drones is one of the priorities of the 2nd Battalion of the 30th Mechanized Brigade," the battalion wrote on its Telegram channel.

These clips form part of one of the largest recorded collections made public of a relatively novel concept in action — drones shooting down other drones.

The practice also carries implications for how battlefield technology is evolving more broadly in the war, as Ukrainian and Russian units have experimented with attaching firearms and even molten thermite to drones, essentially creating flying guns and flame-spewers.

In Sunday's post, the double-barreled shotgun drone primarily targeted what appear to be Mavics. These lightweight, commercial Chinese-made drones are expensive and, therefore, typically reserved for scouting or bombing missions by both sides.

Inspiration from World War I

Ukraine's Presidential Brigade, which has units fighting in Luhansk, publicized an identical creation to the shotgun drone in early March.

Footage showed a recoilless gun concept, where a quadcopter is fitted with long barrels designed to fire from both ends. One side aims at the target, while the opposite end fires to provide counter-recoil and keep the drone stable.

"The impact factor is strong. You don't need precision; the spread effect is what matters," a brigade member told the camera.

The brigade published a clip of the drone firing at a target board, its twin barrels roaring. Since the drone was not seen with a reload mechanism, the shotgun will likely have to return for manual reloading.

The same idea was seen in Ukraine as early as late December, when a Ukrainian charity, LesiaUA, posted clips of what it said were shotgun-mounted drones it had helped to fund. Visually, the drone appears to be the same type as the 30th Mechanized Brigade's.

Russian drone manufacturers had already been testing the concept as early as September. State media outlet RIA Novosti published an article that month covering the design of a single barrel mounted on a drone that could fire in both directions simultaneously.

"It operates on the principle of the Davis aircraft cannon from World War I," the outlet wrote.

Designed from experiments by US Navy Commander Cleland Davis in 1910, the gun provided militaries with a way to reduce recoil but was cumbersome to reload. It saw limited use in World War I.

Drone development moves quickly in Ukraine largely due to the industry's decentralized nature. Volunteers, units, and manufacturers typically work on individual projects and promote them to each other.

Many creations, such as fiber optic drones, have increasingly featured legacy technology used to beat more modern equipment. In the West, it's prompted concerns among some defense analysts that the NATO military-industrial complex has placed too much emphasis on developing advanced weaponry, without considering the need for quantity or the possibility of lower-tech solutions.