Ukrainian forces used British drones to destroy a Russian-held bridge over the River Dnipro in a breakthrough operation that will shape the future of warfare.

A two-month campaign involving repeated sorties by the Malloy T-150 heavy-lift drone played a central role in an operation that degraded Russia’s ability to strike the battered city of Kherson on the river’s right bank.

Ukrainian officers say it marks the first known case of a drone-led operation bringing down a bridge in combat history.

The mission – carried out early last year but not previously reported – was initially deemed impossible. Yet the bridge, which crossed a distributary of the Dnipro called the Konka, was a critical target. Its destruction would severely complicate Russian resupply efforts to river islands used to launch attacks on residential districts and Ukrainian positions in Kherson.

For months, Ukrainian forces tried to destroy it with air strikes and US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rockets without success. Commanders in Kyiv eventually handed the task to the 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment of the Ukrainian marine corps, a unit known for battlefield innovation.

“Bridges are relatively easy to destroy from underneath,” said Col Oleksii Bulakhov, the regiment’s commander. “But they are engineered in a way that makes them extremely robust from the outside.”

He passed the challenge to the regiment’s in-house research and development unit, led by a lieutenant with the call-sign “Journalist”. Such outfits are part of a growing ecosystem of front-line innovation that has accelerated the pace of drone warfare. Engineers embedded with combat units continually modify and adapt systems, often in response to battlefield changes that render technology obsolete within days.

The breakthrough came when Journalist discovered a Russian soldier had posted a photograph of himself beneath the bridge’s struts on Instagram, revealing its structural vulnerabilities.

The Malloy T-150, manufactured by Malloy Aeronautics, a subsidiary of British defence giant BAE Systems, was never designed as a weapon. Originally conceived by New Zealand-born inventor Chris Malloy as a flying motorcycle for herding cattle in the Australian outback, it has evolved into a logistics drone ferrying supplies to front-line troops.

But on Ukraine’s battlefield anything can be repurposed. Journalist’s team designed a 50kg shaped charge that could be lowered by cable onto the bridge’s weakest points, identified courtesy of the Russian soldier’s Instagram account.

“That’s what we do,” Journalist said. “We take existing technology and push it to the limit.”

The unit flew 30 missions over 60 days, delivering 1.5 tons of explosives and leaving the bridge structurally compromised. A final missile strike then brought it down.

Russia still controls the islands on the Dnipro, but without the bridge it has to resupply positions by boat.

“It’s a much slower way of doing it and the boats are easy to strike,” Journalist said.

The mission relied on a combination of Ukrainian ingenuity and the drone’s technical advantages. Equipped with anti-GPS jamming protection and powered by an electric motor with no thermal signature, the T-150 is difficult to detect. Its low acoustic profile made it especially effective in the windy marshes of the Dnipro, where it could approach unheard.

Neither the British Ministry of Defence nor BAE Systems would comment on the operation, in line with policy. But such operations offer western defence firms invaluable real-world testing.

“Western producers bring their drones and we test them in combat,” said Journalist. “It shrinks the feedback loop and accelerates innovation. We bring the ideas, they bring the financing and components we lack.”

But the operation also exposes a wider problem for Britain’s defence industry.

Ukrainian officials and defence entrepreneurs warn that British firms risk falling behind more agile European rivals.

Germany’s Quantum Systems and Portugal’s Tekever have emerged as leading suppliers of reconnaissance and interceptor aerial and maritime drones to Ukraine. An officer heading a strike-drone unit with the call-sign “Ram” praised not only Quantum’s Vector drone – widely regarded as a benchmark for mid-range battlefield intelligence – but the company’s close co-operation with Ukrainian units.

“Quantum understood very quickly that they had to be here,” he said. “They observe their products in action and respond fast. British companies are slower.”

That gap, says Andriy Dovbenko, founder of UK-Ukraine TechExchange, reflects a deeper structural problem. Britain should in theory have an advantage, given its strong backing for Ukraine, a favourable regulatory environment and the global dominance of the English language. But British defence companies have failed to translate that into meaningful industrial integration on the ground.

“I find it bizarre that no British company has matched what Quantum or Tekever have done at scale,” he said. “They both have large Ukrainian teams, people who understand how to work with the military. British firms don’t.

“If you send a representative into a brigade where no one really speaks English, you won’t build the same relationships.”

As for the Malloy T-150, its days as a bridge-destroyer may be at an end for now. With an effective combat radius of less than four miles, it struggles to operate in Ukraine’s expanding “kill zone”, a drone-saturated no man’s land where movement is increasingly impossible.

“But,” said Journalist with a grin, “we have other tricks up our sleeve.”