“Debris caused a small fire at MILITARY FACILITY” versus “Russia attacks to CIVIL RESIDENTIAL BUILDING killing 12”. Who cares where the weapons Ukraine uses to defend their cities were made originally. If Russia doesn’t like that their military is under attack there’s a very easy solution to stop that.

Amount of lithium in a single drone battery is minuscle. Quickly googled answer says that there’s about 7% from weight lithium in a battery, so your average drone cell might have something like 10-20 grams of lithium in it (altough that 7% is for Li-Ion and drones tend to use LiFePo, so that number might be wrong). In a single electric car there’s tens of kilograms of lithium inside. So a single car fire anywhere in the world “wastes” more lithium than hundreds and hundreds of drones in Ukraine.

Sure, it would be nice to recover that small amount too, but in practise we need a better material than lithium for our batteries. Also there’s things like single-use vape-pens which use perfectly fine li-ion cell but it was manufactured without any means to charge it, a handful of those discarded on a nearest trash can (or more likely to the street next to it) is comparable to a single drone battery and people throw those away without concern every day.

It’s and SMD led on a main board of the drone (at least on DJI ones) and the whole board is quite a complex computer with a ton of RF tech, power limitations and whatever is included to make those things both safe and fun for your average consumer. For a skilled operator it’s not a problem to pull out the led and wire it to a transistor, but you need to pull the whole drone apart, somewhat sophisticated tools to solder wires to the led contact points, reassemble the whole thing excactly as it were and then connect that to the external harness.

Or, you can just bend the frame out of chicken wire, twist wires together and secure them with a tape or hot glue, zip-tie that to a drone and you’re good to go. I think in Ukraine they use a ton of 3d-printed stuff which makes it more reliable and even easier to assemble. That way you don’t risk breaking the drone and you can prefab pretty much the whole thing and just send them out to the field where practically anyone can assemble it even on standing in a mud puddle and have successful results within minutes from pulling a new drone out of a box.

While you are of course correct on this, the amount of waste and environmental damage Russia is causing by blowing up dams and pretty much leaving a trail of garbage where ever they go combined with the pollution and wasted resources on burning fuel (both in engines and otherwise), destroying buildings and everything else going on, the couple truckloads of small LiFePo batteries on drones aren’t even a rounding error in the equation.

I’m not an expert on what residual materials come from burning batteries, but I’m willing to bet that plastic from pretty much everything on the field has a bigger environmental affect, even the drones themselves are mostly just a plastic shell with very little of anything else in them.

It’s not even electrical output. They mount harness to the drone carrying payload with a 9V battery (or whatever) with a light sensitive resistor positioned over the auxiliary light. When the light turns on the payload is released with a motor/solenoid/something running from that battery on the harness and it doesn’t require any modification to the drone itself.