Buntar-3 Showed What Donbas Arena in Occupied Donetsk Looks Like

The crew of the unmanned aerial vehicle Buntar-3 worked in the Donetsk sector and the military unit shared with Militarnyi what the key facility of the city occupied in 2014 looks like.

Donbas Arena

The main photo of the article ‘Donbas Arena’ shows the captured main sports arena of the Ukrainian football club Shakhtar.

This is the first Elite stadium in Ukraine and Eastern Europe designed and built in accordance with UEFA standards. It was opened in 2009 with a capacity of more than 50,000 spectators and a construction budget of €175.8 million.

Since the start of Russian aggression in 2014 and the occupation of the administrative center of the Donetsk region, the facility has not been used for its intended purpose.

In 2015, there was information with photo evidence that the Russian occupiers used the stadium’s parking lot as an ammunition depot at that time.

Due to the sensitivity of the information, the aerial reconnaissance men did not show all the objects known to the media before, although the flight recorded a number of others.

A Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter was also shown operating near the front line, firing unguided missiles in the direction of the positions of the Security and Defense Forces of Ukraine.

Buntar-3 Reconnaissance System

Buntar-3 is an electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone that has satellite-independent navigation and is capable of performing missions lasting up to 4 hours, which is a record for electric VTOLs.

The unmanned complex was created to search for targets and adjust fire at operational and tactical depth, so, according to the developers, a significant part of the resources was focused on the reliability of communication systems – the range of reliable operation reaches 100 km.

The drone’s range is expanded due to high-quality optics, which allows it to work on targets at a distance of 15 km – outside the potential area of destruction.

The developers of the complex point out that the strong point of the unmanned system is the Buntar Copilot software component developed from scratch with deep integration of artificial intelligence elements. It provides a high level of automation and is designed to minimize operator errors, which is one of the main causes of losses of reconnaissance UAVs.

Now it’s not just a ‘point-to-point’ flight, but a full-fledged scenario planning, taking into account battery life, wind, altitude, and communication fault tolerance. It predicts the return time of the drone and calculates when to launch the next one so that there are no gaps in monitoring the object of interest.