It’s like the monster from your dreams, soldiers here say. The one you can’t escape, however hard you try. If you’re chosen as the target, well, that’s it for you, game over.
A favourite tactic of this recently introduced, but already widely feared, predator is to lie in wait in a field beside a road.
Only when an approaching vehicle is sighted does the ‘monster’ take off to manoeuvre for the kill. Recent films on Russian military social media showcase its successes: hit after hit on Ukrainian vehicles marked with the white triangle of the now largely abandoned Kursk offensive when Ukraine crossed into Russia last summer.
Welcome to the terrifying new world of the fibre-optic drone.
Over the past three years, here in Ukraine, Mail cameraman Jamie Wiseman and I have witnessed – and sometimes experienced – drone warfare’s deadly technology race.
Early on, we saw the widespread adoption of recreational Mavic-style unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as reconnaissance machines, hand-in-hand with their adaptation as bombers.
The advent of kamikaze first-person view (FPV) drones changed the battlefield situation again, quite radically. Today, they are the predominant weapon of this war.
The Mail’s Richard Pendlebury examines one of the ‘unjammable’ drones
Controlled by fibre optic wires 20km long, their signal can’t be jammed. No wonder one Russian unit is using them to rain death across Ukraine
But each advance in one side’s drone capability has encouraged an improvement in the other’s electronic warfare defences. That is, the defender will always try to find a means to ‘jam’ the radio signals with which an attacking drone pilot controls their machine.
But what if a drone could be piloted some other way? One that would prevent such enemy interference by making it un-jammable so that – like the shark in Jaws – there is no escape?
Since the autumn, the Russians have been fielding such a weapon. While likened by those on the receiving end to a monster, it’s more like a deadly kite. Because, until the point of impact, this new ‘wonder weapon’ is physically attached, via a control panel, to its pilot, by as much as 20km of fishing line-thin fibre-optic cable. Weighing as much as 3kg, this is gradually unwound from a spool carried by the drone.
During the collapse of the Kursk salient and retreat back across the border, Ukrainian forces were harried by these drones. One unit I have spoken to lost 70 per cent of its transport, though not just to fibre-optic devices.
But fibre-optic FPVs are being deployed in other sectors, including here in Donbas. The Ukrainians are rushing to catch up.
We were given exclusive access to one of the units which is already flying fibre-optic kamikazes against the Russians. We also visited an embattled Ukrainian marine battalion which has been targeted by enemy fibre-optic drones since last September.
But first, briefly, how do they work? Fibre-optic cables transmit data using light pulses through a thin strand of glass or plastic. This allows high-speed data transmission over long distances, with high bandwidth and minimal signal loss. Ideal for drone warfare.
Conventional drones are controlled by radio signals.
But these can be jammed, causing the drone to fail. A fibre-optic drone’s control transmissions aren’t vulnerable to electronic jamming, as they are relayed within a physical cable.
In a secret location a little behind the Donbas frontline, we meet ‘Fast’, a fibre-optic drone pilot of the Raroh unit of 24th Brigade. They’ve been using the new weapon to fight Russian advances in several sectors of this front.
He brings with him one of the weapons – a quadcopter mounted with a warhead, like a conventional kamikaze drone, but carrying a large cylindrical spool underneath. This contains 10km of cable. The whole rig – warhead excluded – costs about £1,100.
Fast says that, aside from being impervious to electronic warfare, fibre-optic drones have other advantages. ‘Conventional drones cannot fly very low, because the radio wave does not go around mountains or even houses,’ he explains. ‘Thanks to optics, you can fly this thing at a minimum altitude, regardless of the terrain.’ Which means that the drone can wait in ambush on the ground, rather than have to loiter aloft where it is vulnerable to air defences.
The fibre-optic drones are limited in range to the length of their cable – though the Ukrainians are testing 20km spools and there is talk of 40km. They are mainly used in areas of powerful Russian electronic warfare as a last line of defence against large armoured attacks on infantry positions.
I’m told it has to be flown smoothly. No jerky changes of direction. Again, a little like a kite in the park. One Ukrainian infantryman suggested to me the best way to escape was to take cover in forest or thick undergrowth – in which the fibre-optic cable might get snagged. That was more a hopeful guess rather than a proven fact. Among those who have been on the receiving end are the men of the 2nd Battalion of the 37th Separate Marine Brigade, an elite naval infantry unit entrenched in the Kurakhove sector, with the Russians on three sides of their position.
We were supposed to visit the battalion’s main casualty stabilisation point. But that morning it was badly damaged by two Russian artillery shells. For now, they will have to rely upon a single mobile casualty ‘pod’, positioned under camo netting by a tumbledown cottage. The tiny emergency room is a reconfigured shipping container, equipped with a single operating table. This is meant to service the entire battalion.
It is here we meet a remarkable young surgeon, Lieutenant Illia.
In the first two months after the full invasion he was a civilian doctor working just behind the Mykolaiv front.
During that time he conducted 184 limb amputations: an average of three every day. Since he signed up for the marines his fastest amputation time has fallen from 45 minutes to just 25.
As we talk, the crash of artillery falling on the Kurakhove pocket is incessant. Most of these marines are veterans – survivors might be a better word – of the vicious battle for Krynky, a village in Kherson Oblast on the otherwise Russian-held eastern bank of the Dnieper river.
The marines had to abandon their tiny bridgehead last July after months of close-quarter fighting against enormous odds, on a battlefield measuring one kilometre deep by 110 metres wide.
Lieutenant Illia of the 2nd Battalion, 37th Separate Marine Brigade, a young frontline medic who says he’s had to carry out over 180 limb amputations. He shows his ‘do not resuscitate’ tattoo
Officially, the Krynky operation cost the corps 260 dead with a further 800 missing, presumed killed, according to reports. In other words, 1,000 men were lost for a single village that could not be held. An expensive diversion at best, a bloody disaster at worst.
I remark on the number of stray cats and dogs that have already congregated around their temporary medical post. This provokes a very dark anecdote. ‘Yes, these pets are always attracted to human presence,’ says a marine. ‘In Krynky, all the civilians had left and if our drones saw such dogs or cats beside a building we would immediately check if our own troops were occupying it.
‘If they weren’t, that meant the Russians were there and so the building got taken out. Because of the tell-tale strays.’
He shrugs. ‘Yes, war is s****y.’
Drones are by far the biggest threat now, the new fibre-optic models the biggest of all. ‘The war has changed,’ says Illia. ‘At the beginning, casualties were mainly caused by artillery.
‘Here we are dealing with a game of drones. There are ten drones per square kilometre, unfortunately. If you are not killed immediately by the first drone, then you are bait for the second.’
He adds: ‘But a human being adapts to everything. One will always remain a human being. The main thing is to remember this.’
We move on, in the direction of Kurakhove, through a hamlet of wooden cottages, several of which have been demolished by direct hits. Eventually we pause on the edge of a vast, muddy steppe that stretches away towards the eastern horizon. At this point we have to leave what passes for a road and continue our journey across the fields.
Journey’s end is a treeline overlooking a shallow valley. Here, the artillery fire is louder still. But among the undergrowth lies refuge; a camouflaged doorway: the entrance to 2nd Battalion’s underground combat HQ.
A target is hit on the front line. Drones are by far the biggest threat now
Richard Pendlebury with a Fibre Optic FPV drone, technology which is now being used by both sides in the Ukraine Russia War
Major Anatolii, left, in his underground bunker, from which he and his men are defending their homeland
We descend into a claustrophobic maze of grey tarpaulin-lined tunnels until finally we emerge into a dimly lit room, where some half a dozen soldiers are sitting staring at a wall of monitors, on which drone-fed footage of the battle taking place above ground nearby is being played in real time. Unlike upstairs, it is a deceptively silent conflict.
‘Is that [one of] ours?’ an officer is asking, as a screen shows an attack drone’s live feed of its bomb dropping on a treeline.
‘No, it’s one of theirs,’ comes the reply. ‘And it’s close by.’
The 2nd Battalion is commanded by Major Anatolii. He is candid about the numbers game here, which much favours the invaders. ‘During the time that my battalion and indeed the brigade has been serving here, the enemy has [rotated] their own brigades three times,’ he says.
‘Meanwhile, we remain the same composition as we were, in the same places.’
The Russians have an almost unlimited supply of cannon fodder for their near-suicidal infantry assaults on the marine positions. The marines do not. For me, the loss of one soldier is huge. For them, the loss of ten soldiers is just a matter of “headquarters will send us more”.’
He says his men are holding on through sheer willpower. ‘The numbers of enemy concentrated here is much greater. And they have fibre-optic FPVs, which we can’t fight at all.’
The marines first encountered the weapon in Toretsk last September, when one of their logistics truck drivers had a narrow escape.
‘When the driver arrived he said that the road he’d travelled along was mined with trip-wire devices,’ recalls the major. ‘We said, “That’s stupid. If they’re going to mine the road, they wouldn’t use trip wire, they’d use anti-tank mines.” But he insisted, saying, “No, there’s a lot of wire wrapped around the wheels of my truck. Come and look.”
‘So we checked, and there was a lot of this wire caught up about the wheels. But then we spotted an FPV drone was stuck in the truck’s bar armour. Due to malfunction, it hadn’t exploded.
‘We’d never seen a drone like it before. There was a kind of round box underneath it. We contacted the specialists of the 28th Brigade and they told us that these were new fibre-optic cable drones that our opponents were now using.’
Here, on the Kurakhove front, they have become an omnipresent threat. One of the Russian units that uses them in this sector goes under the name Judgment Day.
The major says: ‘Our only protection is that an enemy operator is all thumbs, or there are bad weather conditions.
‘And if [by using fibre optics] the enemy take control of logistics, if we cannot deliver ammunition, food, and personnel there, then my guys can’t hold out for long. And if I cannot pick up the wounded or the dead, then the morale of the guys will be zero.’
The major shrugs. ‘But still, the marine corps holds on. And we will continue to do so to the best of our ability.’
It’s time for us to leave. The sky above is still ‘clear’. But the monster is out there, somewhere.
Additional reporting Oleksandr Kostiuchenko
