Russian drones dominating the front lines as Ukraine’s early aerial advantage overwhelmed

CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — In the early hours of a cold November morning, a worn-out pick-up truck barrels down a potholed road in the region of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Dawn is still a couple of hours away. A thick fog shrouds much of the surrounding countryside.

Yet, the car’s headlights are turned off even as it swerves wildly to avoid potholes and incoming armored vehicles. It’s the new reality as the danger from Russian drones has increased in both quantity and lethality along the perilous front — being spotted here can quickly mean being dead.

While the Ukrainian army was an early proponent of drone warfare, and initially boasted both a qualitative and quantitative advantage in the nearly 22-month war, Russian forces have quickly adapted their tactics. The Kremlin’s UAV production now far outpaces that of Ukraine.

In a recent interview with German media Deutsche Welle, Giorgi Tskhakaia, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, said that Ukraine had increased domestic drone production “100-fold, in some cases 150-fold, possibly even more,” yet the country’s armed forces still remain in critically short supply.

Russian drone use, plus a more sophisticated defensive array involving trenches and redeployments, is credited with effectively blunting a highly touted Ukrainian counteroffensive this year. Ukrainian commanders reported that any significant offensive movements were instantly picked up by Russian surveillance drones.

According to Maksym Sheremet, founder and CEO of UAV manufacturer DroneSpace, Ukrainian companies are only able to produce approximately 50,000 FPV drones a month — Russian companies can churn out six times that number, at a cost of less than $1,000 per drone.

“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing,” respected Ukrainian Commander Gen. Valerii Zaluzhny wrote in The Economist last month.

The result: Ukrainian forces, who took back nearly 8,700 square miles of territory in a stunning offensive in the fall of 2022, have reclaimed just 200 square miles of land from the Russians in 2023.

Russia emboldened

Clad in bulletproof vests and helmets, the pick-up truck’s four passengers — drone operators of Ukraine’s 28th Mechanized Brigade — are silent, occasionally glancing at their phones or taking a drag of their e-cigarettes.

This morning, they are headed toward the small town of Chasiv Yar, which has become over the past months a flashpoint of the fighting as emboldened Russian forces step up their efforts to capture the entirety of the Donetsk region, a region that President Vladimir Putin has already unilaterally declared is now part of Russia’s sovereign territory.

As the pick-up gets closer to the front, the rumble of artillery grows increasingly louder in the distance, each detonation followed by the orange glow of an incandescent projectile tearing through the night sky: Ukrainian air defenses are hard at work, though their target remains unseen.

After a 30-minute drive through ruined villages and barren, frozen fields, the pick-up finally comes to a halt near a snow-covered tree line, located about 500 yards away from the nearest Russian positions. Without missing a beat, the soldiers jump out of the truck and grab their gear — a relay connecting to the constellation of Starlink satellites overhead, four commercial drones and a black suitcase labeled “FPV,” adorned with hand-drawn smiley faces.

One of the men curses upon discovering the position, a rudimentary trench snaking across the tree line. The once-frozen ground has thawed and turned into a thick layer of treacherous black mud. “You start setting up the drones, I’ll find the bucket,” orders 25-year-old Andrii (by custom, Ukrainian troops on the front lines are identified only by a first name), as he removes his bulletproof vest and starts shoveling mud out of the trench.

Another soldier takes up position in the dimly lit dugout and begins carefully strapping fragmentation shells to their drones, fastening the payload with zip ties. For the past months, Andrii’s team has been using the set-up to drop explosives on Russian armored vehicles, infantry positions and — on at least one occasion — a Soviet-built T-64 tank.

“As you can see, we now have to drive at night, under the cover of darkness, to avoid Russian drones,” says Andrii, a veteran of the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. “They’re absolutely everywhere.”

Ubiquitous threat

Cheap, easy to maneuver and lethal, FPV drones have become a ubiquitous threat on Ukraine’s sprawling frontline.

According to Evguenii, an officer of the 28th brigade interviewed a couple of days earlier in the center of Kramatorsk, the Russians are using FPV drones to devastating effect to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines and target troop concentrations.

“They’ve basically rendered entire portions of the front line inaccessible. I’d say that now 90% of the casualties are from FPV drones — on both sides of the front,” he observes.

The lack of air-defense systems has left Ukrainian artillery crews especially vulnerable to Russian drones.

“We simply don’t have enough air defense to cover all of the frontline, and that has seriously impeded our work,” says Andrii, a captain of Ukraine’s 47th brigade fighting near Kupyansk, in the Kharkiv region, gesturing toward a charred portion of the tree line in which his unit has taken position.

A couple of weeks earlier, a Russian FPV drone had destroyed one of their 2S1 self-propelled howitzers, though the crew had escaped unscathed.

“Even traveling at night might not be an option for much longer,” says Bohdan, a soldier of the 10th “Edelweiss” Mountain Assault Brigade. “More and more of [the Russian drones] are now outfitted with thermal imagery cameras, or night vision.”

Near miss

Just days prior to our conversation, Bohdan and another officer only narrowly survived an encounter with a Russian FPV drone: “They spotted us as we were getting to the position, so we had to jump into a nearby basement. The pilot tried to fly the drone through the door but he missed, and it exploded about 10 meters away from us.”

As the sun finally rises on Chasiv Yar, a firefight breaks out a couple of hundred yards away from the tree line.

Automatic gunfire and the distinctive crack of outgoing mortar rounds echo all around, yet Andrii and his fellow soldiers have more pressing issues: In spite of the rain and the mud, they’ve finally managed to set up the Starlink satellite connection, and have just received the coordinates of a target.

But despite their best efforts, the drone won’t take off.

“When it’s cold, the batteries don’t last as long, and the humidity interferes with the signal,” says Andrii, as another soldier climbs out of the trench to move the antenna.

“I’ve got it,” the pilot exclaims triumphantly as the drone finally takes off and roars toward the Russian positions — before promptly crashing in a nearby field.

Cursing loudly, the dejected soldiers head back inside the dugout. They can’t afford to lose another drone to the weather, so their work for the day is over.

Now begins the long, dull wait until night, when they’ll finally be able to make their way back under the cover of darkness.