Ukrainian troops destroyed a strategically vital bridge held by Russian forces in the occupied Kherson region using British-made heavy-lift drones. The operation targeted a crossing over the Konka River, a tributary of the Dnipro, near the occupied town of Oleshky. This bridge had enabled Moscow's army to supply positions and bombard Kherson city on the Dnipro's right bank.

Ukraine's 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment conducted a two-month campaign last March, flying 30 missions over 60 days with Malloy T-150 drones manufactured by Malloy Aeronautics, a BAE Systems subsidiary. The drones delivered 1.5 tons of explosives, including 50kg shaped charges, lowered onto the structure's vulnerable underside points. A Russian soldier's social media photo from underneath the bridge revealed these weak spots. The repeated strikes exploded two sections, sending them crashing into the river amid a massive smoke cloud, with a final missile finishing the job.

The Malloy T-150, originally designed as a quiet electric 'flying motorcycle' for herding cattle in Australia, features anti-GPS jamming, no thermal signature, and low noise, making it hard for Russian defenses to detect. Previous Ukrainian efforts with airstrikes and U.S. HIMARS rockets had failed to fully disable the bridge, which experts once deemed impossible for drones alone.

Col. Oleksii Bulakhov, the regiment leader, explained the tactic's success: "Bridges are relatively easy to destroy from underneath, but they are engineered in a way that makes them extremely robust from the outside." The destruction shocked occupying Russian troops and severely hampered their logistics, forcing resupply by boat across the waterways.

Footage released by the regiment shows the bridge vanishing in a fireball and thick smoke, marking what sources describe as the first drone-led operation to take down a bridge. The strike degraded Russia's capacity to target Kherson, the only regional capital it occupied since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

This breakthrough highlights evolving drone warfare tactics in the conflict, with Ukraine increasingly relying on Western-supplied unmanned systems to counter Russian advantages.