AINEWS
A Russian column near Pokrovsk tested the Arena M active protection shield against first person view (FPV) attack drones. It shot down seven before the magazine emptied and seven tanks were lost.
The first large-scale test of Russia's Arena-M active protection system in anti-drone mode ended the way the new shield was supposed to prevent: with seven tanks destroyed on a single column.
On 22 July, two Russian mechanized columns, forces from the 8th and 41st Combined Arms Armies and the 90th Guards Tank Division, pushed out of the staging villages of Vozdvyzhenka and Novoekonomichne, east of Myrnohrad in the Donbas, toward the town of Shakhove. Ukrainian forces from the 1st Azov Corps met them in the Dobropillia direction. About four hours later the columns were repelled.
Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski, working from geolocated footage, tallied the wreckage: three engineering vehicles, seven tanks, six BMP infantry fighting vehicles, forty-seven single-use civilian confiscations and motorbikes, two multiple rocket launchers (a Tornado-S and a Grad), and roughly 150 Russian personnel eliminated. Many of the tanks carried the Arena-M hard-kill system, the first time it had been used at scale to fend off first-person-view (FPV) drones rather than the antitank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades it was originally designed against.
The system did what it was built to do, sometimes. Ukrainian veteran and Kriegsforscher author Dmytro Putiata, writing about conversations with crews in the sector, reported that on one T-72B3A, Arena-M destroyed seven incoming FPV drones before the tank was finally killed. Overall, Putiata's sources told him, it took 15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank when Arena-M was active.
That is the number that matters. Arena-M did not fail its combat debut so much as it ran out of budget. Each intercepted drone costs the defending tank one round from a small, fixed magazine of countermunitions. Once that magazine is empty, the tank is back to being a target. Russian-side commentary on the Military Informant Telegram channel framed the result bluntly: Arena-M is "several years behind" current battlefield conditions because defenders exhaust the countermunition stock and then the vehicle is attacked unprotected. The system, the channel said, would have been extremely useful in 2023–2025 but is dimensionally constrained and lacks the ammunition capacity for today's FPV density.
Independent footage tells the same story from the other side. Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi, cited by Defence Blog, published video of a National Guard Omega FPV strike on a T-72B3A carrying Arena-M in a ten-tank column near Maiak in Donetsk Oblast. The drone hit the tank's rear arc, which Arena-M does not primarily cover. Militarnyi offered three readings of the strike: the system cannot intercept FPVs, the system was switched off, or the countermunition stock had already been spent earlier in the engagement.
The technical concern is not new. Russian military analyst Viktor Murakhovsky said in November 2025 that Arena-M's radar struggles to distinguish small airborne objects from ground clutter at short range, and that its target detection and prioritization algorithms are underdeveloped for the unpredictable, low-speed flight profiles of FPV drones compared with the linear trajectories of the missiles and RPGs the system was originally designed to defeat.
What the 22 July column proved is that the question for active protection is no longer whether the system can shoot a drone down. It can. The question is how many drones the war is willing to send, and whether the magazine is bigger than the swarm. On 22 July, near Pokrovsk, the swarm was bigger.