In remote farmland in eastern Ukraine about 60km from the Russian border, soldiers watch a small mud-spattered vehicle trundle out of the brambles and set off at surprising speed down a rutted country road.
When it disappears around a bend, an aerial drone whirrs off after it and starts beaming back video of the land drone to the hand-held console of its controller, demonstrating a double act that dramatically extends its range and versatility.
Europe’s biggest conflict in 80 years, triggered by Russia’s all-out attempt to occupy Ukraine in 2022, has changed the way war is fought, planned, budgeted for and broadcast to the world, all because of the extraordinary rise of the drones.
On the battlefield, countless tanks, artillery guns, armoured personnel carriers and missile and air defence systems have been destroyed by bomb-carrying drones – big, powerful and often high-tech weapons worth millions, reduced to burning scrap by small and fragile-looking devices that can cost only a few hundred euro each.
In the Black Sea, Russia’s navy has been forced to move its warships from ports in occupied Crimea due largely to the threat from Ukrainian marine drones – five-metre-long, satellite-guided craft that can carry nearly a tonne of explosives for hundreds of kilometres. Last December, Kyiv released footage that it said showed a missile-equipped sea drone shooting down a Russian military helicopter for the first time.
Land drones like the one demonstrated by members of Kharkiv’s 113th territorial defence brigade have drawn less attention, although a different Ukrainian unit said late last year that it had launched its first “fully robotic” attack on Russian positions, combining flying drones with ground vehicles fitted with guns and explosives.
The dynamics of the drone war mirror those of the entire conflict, with Ukraine hoping that innovation and quality in its weaponry will overcome or at least hold back Russian forces that have a big quantitative advantage in personnel and resources.
“We use it to help protect the lives of soldiers, to take less risk with our people. We’re moving more and more to methods like this,” Vitaliy, a military drone operator and technician, says of the Volya-E robot that his unit is demonstrating in the Kharkiv fields.
Ukrainian officials said last December that the Volya-E, which can carry a 150kg payload, had already helped to evacuate dozens of injured soldiers from the front line, sparing their comrades from having to enter the line of fire to take them to safety.
It can also deliver food, water, medical supplies and ammunition to troops in dangerous areas, and can travel for up to about 25km on one charge of its batteries.
“Now it’s set up for remote mine laying,” Vitaliy says as the Volya-E crawls along the roadside carrying four large anti-tank mines, which it drops at intervals on the command of its controller.
“It has some Chinese and other parts but it is a Ukrainian creation. There are other similar ones, some with wheels and others with tracks. And also small ‘kamikaze’ ones that can carry an anti-tank mine and will go into a trench and explode.”
The pace of change is relentless in the drone war, with Ukraine tending to field new developments first before being quickly matched by Russia, which has a population four times larger than Ukraine, has put its much bigger economy on a full war footing and can still source key components from China and even from the West via states that turn a blind eye to sanctions.
“In bomber drones we have the advantage, but in kamikaze drones the enemy has an edge. We have better quality but they have many more, they have huge resources,” says Vitaliy, recalling experiences near the front line in Donetsk region.
“I was in the Kurakhove area recently and we were using about eight kamikaze drones an hour, while they used 40. They are not very effective, thankfully, but they have huge resources in personnel and equipment.”
[ Ukraine’s military fights fires on many fronts amid battlefield setbacksOpens in new window ]
Both sides plan to make well over a million remote-controlled aerial drones this year, most of them kamikaze or “first person view” (FPV) models that send drone’s-eye video of the battlefield back to an operator and explode on impact with a target.
Ukraine also wants to produce tens of thousands of deep-strike drones, which have repeatedly evaded Russian air defences and hit military bases, airfields, weapons factories and fuel facilities up to 1,000km inside Russia.
At the same time, Russia has inflicted severe damage on Ukrainian power and other infrastructure – and killed and injured hundreds of civilians – with thousands of “Shahed” kamikaze drones imported from Iran and now also made in Russian factories.
Russia has a clear advantage in long-range, high-flying surveillance drones that help its artillery units launch quick and accurate fire, but Ukraine is now countering them with fast and relatively cheap FPV interceptor drones that allow it to save powerful and costly air defence rockets for use against incoming ballistic and cruise missiles.
Wild Hornets, one of Ukraine’s top drone-making teams, posts footage every day on social media of its interceptors taking down Russian reconnaissance drones, and its FPVs and bombers attacking Russian armour, positions and soldiers on the battlefield.
“We started out in 2022 as volunteers collecting money to buy commercially available drones for our military. We soon saw that they weren’t ideal for warfare, so we started making our own drones,” says a member of the team who goes by the nickname “Dykyi” (Wild).
“We sent our drones to the front and they quickly destroyed some Russian armoured vehicles, including tanks. We saw that by raising relatively small amounts of money we could inflict millions of dollars of damage on the enemy.”
Wild Hornets, which operates as a non-profit charity, has now delivered tens of thousands of drones to Ukrainian military units and estimated last year that for every $1 donated, its creations had destroyed or damaged $160 in Russian equipment.
Slick social media and branding help the Wild Hornets raise money, and donors can pay to have a name or a message stamped on the video sent from “their” FPV as it hunts down and strikes its target: drones have been dedicated in this way to fallen soldiers, to places attacked by Russia and to Ukrainian schoolchildren who collected money for a drone and called themselves the “Wild Students”.
Dykyi and other experts say it is a constant challenge to overcome Russia’s powerful electronic jamming, and that an urgent priority now is to counter the enemy’s growing use of FPV drones flown for kilometres via thin but strong fibre-optic wires rather than radio signals – making them impossible to jam and very hard to detect.
“Ukrainian teams are also working on drones that use artificial intelligence. But while they might work well in testing, there are many more factors at play on the battlefield. So there’s no ideal solution yet,” he says.
Wild Hornets staff work without weekend breaks and must sometimes build and deliver drones urgently to a front-line unit that has run out and is under heavy attack.
“It keeps us motivated when we see results on the battlefield,” Dykyi says. “And when we know that we’re making things that are helping to stop Russian attacks, and helping to bring closer the time when all of this can stop.”
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