The drone war unfolds on computer screens, deep in the recesses of a fortified underground dugout on Ukraine’s critical southeastern front line with Russia.
It is here that Russian forces are slowly grinding forward in a costly advance. And it is here that they are being slowed, and sometimes stopped, by well-practiced Ukrainian drone operators hunting for Russian troops and hardware – and even deploying robotic ground vehicles to supply front-line Ukrainian forces.
At one console before dawn, Dmytro Sadovets watches the drone’s-eye view on the screen, as he maneuvers a Ukrainian-made Gor reconnaissance drone deep behind Russian lines over the Donetsk region. Passing a column of smoke from another unit’s successful strike, he’s looking for prey over fields, forests, and roads.
Why We Wrote This
Despite Ukraine being outgunned and out-resourced by a far larger enemy, the increasing dependence on drones by both sides has largely leveled the battlefield. As Russian forces press forward, Ukraine’s drone operators are exacting a high price.
Senior officers radio a request for a closer look. Out of the predawn gray, the drone’s thermal camera picks up the heat signatures of Russian soldiers moving in a tree line – and then emerges the barrel of their artillery gun.
The Ukrainian platoon commander of the 148th Separate Artillery Brigade – tucked away in this subterranean hideout, thick with the rich scent of earth and sawed logs – sends back precise coordinates.
Within moments, Ukrainian artillery fires on the Russian position, then again, and again.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
“If we fought this war old school, the old way without these new technologies, we would be fighting somewhere around Lviv now,” says Mr. Sadovets, referring to his hometown in Ukraine’s far west, which has largely been spared the direct impact of the most lethal conflict in Europe since World War II.
Nevertheless, he says, there is a “huge risk” that Ukraine could lose all of the far-east Donetsk region, noting that “all the answers” can be found by looking at a map, and comparing Russia’s mammoth size with smaller Ukraine.
Despite Ukraine being outmanned, outgunned, and out-resourced by a far larger enemy, the battlefield evolution and its increasing dependence on drones by both sides has enabled Ukrainian fighters, in many ways, to bridge the gap.
Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project
|
Jacob Turcotte/Staff
Still, Russian tactics have evolved, too, and now render deeper swaths of territory behind Ukraine’s front line vulnerable to attack by Russian combat drones. This so-called kill zone is now 20 miles deep, prompting Ukraine to cover all key roads in the area with a latticework of nets to protect civilian and military traffic.
“The Russians are waiting, and thinking that we will just break at some point, that the front line will fall along the entire length,” says Mr. Sadovets. “But we are able to exact huge losses on them by retreating slowly from the positions that make no sense to hold on to anymore.
“This is our tactic now, but this is a tactic of exhaustion,” he adds, noting the unending need for fighters and arms.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
This is but a single slice of a front line that today spans nearly 800 miles, 3 1/2 years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war now affects the entire country in unprecedented ways, with a surge of Russian bombardments against cities employing as many as 800-plus explosive drones, decoys, and missiles in a single night.
Russia now controls about 70% of the Donetsk region. But in late September, Ukrainian military chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia’s spring and summer campaign to capture the key hub of Pokrovsk and all of Donetsk “has effectively been disrupted.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, in a pivot away from previous policies that appeared to favor Russia – including a praise-laden, mid-August summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska – stated last week that he now believes Ukraine could expel Russia from the roughly 20% of Ukraine that it now occupies. This week, he said he might give U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv.
But, so far, Ukraine’s drone teams are leading on the battlefield.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
“The forward advance line of the front is kept by [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] pilots. Now is the era of drones,” says Bohdan “Bandera” – he withholds his family name – a temporary platoon commander of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which works to the northeast, in Kostiantynivka.
That town is surrounded on three sides and has been pulverized for months by constant Russian strikes. It is critical to Ukraine’s defense of a security belt of cities in the Donetsk region, which includes Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk – all large population centers where Russian drones are an increasing threat.
“The main role of infantry now is just to hold ground, without sticking your head out – the drone pilots will do the main job of repelling enemies,” says Bohdan, speaking at a rear position in Druzhkivka.
“I’m not Russian; I can’t tell you all the details of what they are using,” says Bohdan. “But we can tell they have a lot more resources [and] a lot more money to upscale – a lot more than us.”
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
While Ukrainian soldiers hope to see additional American firepower and deep-strike reach, they are already managing a series of tactical retreats that have slowly eroded Ukrainian territory.
“Their main goal now is to destroy our logistics … to create conditions for us that we can’t support our troops on the front line in any way,” says Yevhen, who has been an officer in Bohdan’s brigade since 2019, and asked that only his first name be used.
“The whole war is like the beginning of the movie ‘Terminator 2’ … with people in trucks with guns and robots shooting at them,” he adds.
Indeed, his units in Kostiantynivka must run a gantlet of drones to enter the town, and remain under constant fire. Over the weekend, Paris-based photographer Antoni Lallican was killed and Ukrainian photographer Heorhii Ivanchenko gravely wounded in a Russian drone attack in the Donetsk region.
Russian forces now place drone crews as close behind their infantry as possible, to maximize their drones’ range on the Ukrainian side, says Yevhen. This explains the newly erected anti-drone nets.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
“When the Russians are trying to control the roads, it’s a mix of modern and old tactics,” says Yevhen. “It’s a Middle Ages siege, where it is not people surrounding and besieging, but drones. … That’s what the Russians are trying to achieve in Donbas, to control all roads so that no supplies are able to get in, and no soldiers are able to get out.”
One solution is to use garden-wagon-size, remote-controlled ground robots to carry ammunition, food supplies, and even to evacuate wounded from positions where infantry soldiers themselves may be stuck for months, unable to move.
They are metal carts equipped with thick treaded tires and a signal antenna. A Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign “Luh” instructs drone operators from his 68th Separate Jaeger Brigade how to operate the ground robots, at a tree line far from the front.
“The more [combat drones] our enemy has in the field, the more of these we need,” says Luh, as he describes the payload and range. He says this vehicle, 10 days earlier on the Pokrovsk front, had been carrying some 300 pounds of ammunition when a mine blew a hole in the tire. Soldiers stuffed it with sandbag sacking, and the robot completed the delivery.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
“That’s exactly why we need these ground drones,” says Luh, noting that the mine could easily have taken the leg of a soldier, instead. “Without this, we would need to use the infantry itself to move stuff.”
Russian forces nevertheless still attempt mechanized assaults. One this week against Kostiantynivka – which took advantage of bad weather to impede Ukrainian drones – reportedly failed, with the loss of a handful of armored vehicles. Other assaults have been much bigger.
“When 30 vehicles are moving onto you, we destroy a lot, but some of them will come through. That means there will be a contact fight,” says the drone commander, Mr. Sadovets.
“It’s more of them, always, so that means we will have losses,” he says. “That’s the reason they [Russians] are on the move, and they advance.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.
