Denys, a soldier with Ukraine’s Khyzhak brigade, describes a new kind of war. Standing in a barracks workshop with piles of basic Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) drones behind him, he says simply: “There are fewer gunfights because there are more drone fights.”
Frontlines that were once a gunshot apart are now a killing zone several miles deep, as Russian and Ukrainian drone squads, hidden about one- to three miles behind the frontline, target each other’s forces with simple aerial attacks. “Back in 2022, we were still running around with machine guns from the tree lines,” Denys says, almost with nostalgia.
Another brigade member, Dima, whose call sign is Khimik (the chemist), demonstrates an example with a video on his phone. Because an FPV drone explodes on impact, the video ends abruptly in a flash of white noise, and the consequences of the explosion are invisible, as in so many videos released by both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries online.
A Russian soldier several miles away had been spotted looking out of an upper floor of the building. Though FPV drones are relatively plentiful, the Khyzhak brigade (mostly police patrol officers who have volunteered to fight) tries to use them sparingly and patiently; the film shows the drone hovering and readjusting as its pilot tries to find the right angle to strike. “It’s like the job of a sniper,” Khimik says.
There remains no shortage of artillery or mortar shelling in the war in Ukraine but the spidery seven inch FPV quadcopter, capable of carrying a kilogram of explosive, and operated with goggles and a handheld controller, has become ubiquitous. In the words of Samuel Bendett, a drone expert with the Center for Naval Analyses, the weapon has evolved from being “a novelty in 2022, to one of the weapons of choice in 2023, to roaming the entire tactical space”.
Patient solo attacks are not the only tactic, as usage evolves. As the numbers increase, simple swarm attacks are often deployed. Denys describes “an artillery bombardment by drone” on a Russian position near the frontline town of Toretsk, in the eastern Donbas. “We dropped 1.5kg of explosives every eight minutes for three hours – by the end they had retreated.”
The whirring sound of an unexplained small drone near the front terrifies. Oleksii, an infantryman training near Sumy, says: “It is impossible to outrun them – you have to shoot them down.” Oleksii, who was a butcher near Kherson in the south before being called up, recalls a moment where he was nearly killed by a drone. “It had begun to dip – I had started to run. Then I tripped over a branch and the drone carried straight on, through where I would have been.”
Small FPV drones travel at around 37mph(60kmh), quicker than Usain Bolt’s 27.8mph top speed. They force armoured vehicles to drive rapidly to and from the frontline, ferrying troops or casualties, and thermal cameras mean they can operate as effectively at night. “The ability to strike has been democratised, to where nothing can be safe on the battlefield,” Bendett says.
Battery life limits flight time, though a kamikaze FPV drone in good weather can travel as far as 20km. But a priority is to save money by deploying returning bomber drones, so an effective operating radius is closer to 5km.
An FPV drone is one of two types dominant on the battlefield. The others are commercial Mavic quadcopters made by a Chinese company, DJI. But the FPV is simpler and designed in Ukraine (or Russia) although as Denys says, many of the components still come from China, theoretically aligned to the invader. “Ukrainian company, China elements,” the soldier acknowledges, though efforts are being made to source components from elsewhere.
Ukrainians describe their drone effort as a civil society initiative, initially organised and funded outside the state, with soldiers, their friends and family paying for the aerial craft through fundraisers. It is not uncommon for Ukrainians living miles away from the front to part assemble drones in living rooms and garages. They are delivered to brigade workshops, like the Khyzhak brigade’s barracks near Lyman, where final modifications are made.
The balance, however, has been changing. Ukraine’s defence ministry has stepped up supply, reporting that it delivered 1.1m one-way FPV drones as of mid December, as well as 100,000 more sophisticated craft. Russia, meanwhile, has supplied “1.2m to 1.4m”, according to Bendett, so there is “something of a parity in numbers” even allowing for the invader’s greater size. Technologically, there is little difference between the sides – as each copies promptly from the other.
Learning to fly is involved. It takes, Khimik says, “70 hours in the simulator and 70 hours with a drone”. Courses run in Kyiv and elsewhere, though a Briton living in Kyiv describes the effort to learn as challenging. Even after a week’s practice, it remains tricky to follow a vehicle around a dirt track course, he says, though thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have little choice but to master the controls in a war where small drones amount to most of the country’s frontline air power.
Serhii Sternenko, a Ukrainian activist, is one of the country’s most popular bloggers, with 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Now much of his effort is directed towards fundraising to supply FPV drones for Ukrainian troops – “I have helped buy 120,000 FPV drones as of today, 100,000 in the past year” – and developing new types of drone. “I always hated physics at school, now I’m learning engineering and happy to be doing it,” says Sternenko, who trained as a lawyer.
The blogger says the progress in developing FPV drones could not have happened without efforts like his. “Our drones are used in every direction and it is a lot less of a bureaucratic process to supply them,” he says, adding that he can help get drones to any unit within 24- to 48 hours. An outspoken critic of military failings, Sternenko was briefly placed on a wanted list in November for allegedly ignoring a conscription summons, though the dispute was resolved after he met the chief military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, the same month.
It is just as well, as the drone effort remains central to Ukraine’s war effort, even if, as Sternenko observes “the highest military commands of Ukraine sometimes don’t take objective criticism well”. Sternenko is closely involved in efforts to use FPV drones as a cheap form of air defence taking out far more sophisticated Russian attack craft.
Ukrainian FPV pilots have been able to knock out Russian Orlan and Lancet drones at higher altitudes for several months, reducing the invader’s long range reconnaissance capability, as several videos released by Sternenko show. “Air defence is very expensive – it could cost $100,000 to $1m for one hit – but a drone might only be a few hundred dollars,” he says.
Increasingly, the focus is on developing FPV drones that can reliably knock out Russian helicopters (two hits were claimed in the summer) and large Shaheed drones, which would require a drone that can fly over 100mph at over 10,000 ft. A particular challenge, Sternenko observes, is how a small drone can contend with the turbulence produced by a Russian-made Shaheed as it flies across the country, pulling out his phone to show how an FPV drone struggled to reach its target.
There is talk about the better use of artificial intelligence in piloting and targeting in 2025, and on the development of land or “non-flying” drones. But it is likely that the scale of production as well as incremental improvements in range and design will dominate if the war continues. Jamming, though always a threat, is energy intensive and difficult to maintain as electronic warfare requires sending stronger, disruptive signals.
With Donald Trump soon to occupy the White House, amid concerns he could halt US weapons gifts to Ukraine, homegrown technology is likely to become even more important to Kyiv. “Ukraine is fighting against an enormous country with several times more population,” says Sternenko. “That’s why we are calling for more weapons and more technology, because you cannot just fight with people. Drones demonstrate we can be much more efficient.”
