There is a whirr, a flurry of dust, a pause as the grainy image recalibrates, and then a devastating blast.
Underground, dozens of miles away, veterans of the most brutal urban battles in Ukraine , of Avdiivka and Bakhmut, are commanders in a new kind of killing - one they cannot feel, smell or see up close. An entire mission directing six blasts against three Russian frontline targets in eastern Ukraine will involve no Ukrainian troops on the ground, the battle instead directed from gamer chairs, observed from reconnaissance drones above, run over dedicated livestreams.
Ukraine, suffering for months from manpower crises and uncertain backing from the United States, has undergone a remarkable evolution. Large parts of its war effort are now unmanned, the robots, drones, and remotely piloted tanks giving it a sudden, albeit fragile, edge over a lumbering and strained Russian invader. In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the first capture of a Russian position purely by robots and drones and added that since January unmanned machines had conducted 22,000 missions.
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Survival is the mother of invention, under the orange glow of computer processor fans and subtle overhead lighting. The unit here has learned from Russian prisoners of war that their enemy calls these robots – each carrying a huge payload of explosive on a four-wheel chassis – “silent death.” They can only hear their approach when they are 10 meters away – well within their blast radius.
The first robot stumbles on aluminum debris, its wheels furiously trying to get traction and move around the obstacle. Eventually, it navigates around the crater in its path and from the observation drone above, the white heat of a small mushroom cloud flares up – the thermal footprint of the first blast. A second follows. The opening salvo of the assault is intended to distract the Russians and permit four other robots to get behind enemy lines.
The calculations here are simple: over 164 assaults, the “NC13” unit of the Third Assault Brigade has calculated they would have needed 2,300 troops for the same effect as their robot attackers. They would expect to have lost half their unit – dead or wounded – in the attacks, meaning the unmanned, doddering bombs on the screen in front of them are a technological advance that has saved a thousand Ukrainians.
“I couldn’t even imagine such a thing, back then”, said Bar, the unit’s deputy commander, of his time in brutal urban combat in Donbas. “But I realize that if such equipment had been available at the time… more of my comrades would have survived.”
For Mykola “Makar” Zinkevych, the unit’s commander, the new world is lacking. “Back then, war was somehow more, shall we say, masculine. It was your skills that mattered there – how well you’d trained, how disciplined you were, and so on. Now, technology decides everything. There is no going back.” It is simply a case of who can adapt and evolve faster in the world of unmanned, remote killing.
The Ukrainian approach is born of a manpower crisis, where a smaller population has been ravaged by a devastating toll from four years of Russian invasion. But Kyiv’s early embrace of drones, and the mass-industrialization of their accuracy and power, has begun to exact a defining toll on Moscow.
Ukraine’s policy now is to kill or injure 35,000 Russians a month, something they have achieved this year, the goal being to force the Kremlin into uncomfortable and unpopular recruitment from the urban center and the middle classes. An estimate from the British spy agency GCHQ released Wednesday put the total Russian death toll at 500,000, citing new information.
This new warfare has new heroes. Here, one is Gora, aged 22, who rapidly corrects herself when she says she is just a “software engineer.”
“I am an embedded hardware and software engineer,” she insists, sparking up the live stream from their control hub to the body shop where the robots are repaired and built. Aged 18 when the war began, Gora tired of being kept awake in eastern Kyiv by Russian drone strikes, and knew her IT flair was the new frontline.
“The key is not the vehicles, the key is minds and how they plan it,” she said, “how they connect communication between vehicles, between operators.”
The challenges evolve too. “The Salamander 6 has been spoofed”, says an operator to his commander. “We’ve roughly plotted a course and are navigating without GPS.” Across the battlefield, control over location data is paramount, and sometimes they must feel their way using daytime recorded drone feeds and painstaking research of the best route over a pockmarked farming field.
Two other robots approach an indistinct tree line, and devastating blasts follow, the unit saying Russian positions had been spotted there earlier. The fifth robot is less effective, rolling onto its side in a trench, and the sixth intercepted by the Russians.
Above ground, robots are replacing even the most basic of infantry tasks. Ciber ’s team work quickly under netting to mount a huge Browning heavy machine gun onto tank tracks. The vehicle has an array of cameras, offering a wide lens on its targets. They clean dried mud from the tracks, and blow off dust. The machine can hide in the foliage for days, awaiting its prey. It does not need water, food, or get cramps in its legs. The only limit that needs resupply, Ciber says, is ammunition. When 400 rounds are spent, it has to return to base. “When we deployed the robot against the enemy, they simply panicked; they were crawling around, pressing themselves against the ground, and simply didn’t know what to do.”
Ciber’s unit has five such machines, used sparingly, and is preparing another, faster robot, capable of covering 10 miles an hour, to carry Kalashnikov small arms into battle. The speed and scope of Ukraine’s automation is staggering. In a matter of months, unmanned vehicles have gone from rare frontline curiosities to standard issue. Robots that rescue the wounded, or resupply frontline troops.
Under ubiquitous Russian drone assault, even the task of reloading a resupply robot is perilous. The 93rd brigade race around the town of Druzhivka to deliver ammunition, food and water to robot resupply units hiding under trees. The town itself is still populated, but the accuracy and penetration of the Russian drones mean Ukrainian troops cannot blend into civilian life.
One load is delivered in a non-descript farmhouse, where five boxes of ammunition are strapped onto a robot. It whirrs to life as its remote pilot takes control from a bunker miles away, and trundles down the tiny mud path between two cottage fences, past incurious locals, beginning its 10-hour journey to the frontline.
These deliveries are urgently needed, with Ukraine’s frontline troops often pushed to the limits. Hours later, we meet two devastating indications of how Kyiv is really struggling to find enough military-aged males.
Crow and Creepy, the call signs of two soldiers from the 24th Mechanized Brigade, have spent 344 and 334 days respectively, non-stop, in frontline dugouts. Crow’s slight stagger and long stare speak of his ordeal, which ended at dawn this morning, when he began his 12 hour, 20 mile walk to safety. “The only thing keeping me going was my children and my wife; otherwise, I would have lost my mind long ago,” he said.
He will soon be home, missing his nine-year-old son’s birthday by a day. But he has yet to have a conversation with his wife since he went to the position. “I would record a message for her on the radio and send it over,” he said.
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Creepy compliments his acrid smell with an air of invincibility. The drone assaults were constant, exhausting their ability to even build defenses fast enough on what he recalls as the worst day of fighting. “We couldn’t keep up with filling the sacks with earth and laying them out,” he said. “We were running out of sacks. We used whatever was to hand to cover ourselves, so that we wouldn’t get hit and so that we wouldn’t be killed.”
As the two men drink their first soda for nearly a year and wistfully speak of clean clothes, another first-person view drone is heard overhead in the city of Kramatorsk, sending locals scattering. Machines are omnipresent, and are redefining this war.
