Inside an overnight mission with a Ukrainian drone unit stalking Russian troops

The soldiers drove up to an abandoned holiday home, somewhere along the Oskil River in northeast Ukraine in late February. The night was clear and still - a sharp contrast to the daylight hours filled with the nearconstant boom of artillery fire.

The only interruption to the darkness was the flash of a Russian airstrike some‐ where in the near distance, painting the horizon with a flood of orange light for a brief second.

The slow whir of a de‐ scending drone overhead broke the silence. "Is that one of ours?" one of the soldiers asked another. The reply: "I sure hope so."

As Ukraine sits outgunned and outnumbered, these men - part of an elite drone unit searching for Russian troops in the dead of night are playing an ever greater role in its defence.

Ukraine is now using an enormous amount of drones - by some counts, it is acquir‐ ing as many as 50,000 firstperson view (FPV) drones per month.

Ukraine on Tuesday launched a series of longrange drone attacks into eight regions of Russia, hit‐ ting at least two oil facilities, according to Russian officials.

The country's minister of digital transformation stated recently that Ukraine aims to build one million drones this year, in addition to those it buys from abroad.

Last month, Canada's de‐ fence minister, Bill Blair, an‐ nounced that the federal gov‐ ernment would be donating 800 drones to Ukraine.

But Russia has ramped up its drone production even further: the highest esti‐ mates placing its monthly ac‐ quisitions at 300,000.

Russian advances

It's no secret that the past few months have been diffi‐ cult ones for Ukraine. As Western aid has lagged, with a U.S. military package held up in Congress for months, Russian forces have pressed the advantage.

They recently conquered the fortress town of Avdiivka, in Ukraine's southeast, forc‐ ing the beleaguered defend‐ ers to withdraw in the face of overwhelming firepower and handing Moscow its most sig‐ nificant battlefield victory since the capture of Bakhmut last May.

All eyes are now on what will be the next Russian target.

One likely candidate is Ku‐ piansk, a previously occupied town in Kharkiv province, where the Russians have al‐ legedly amassed over 40,000 troops and 500 tanks for an assault. The intensity of Russ‐ ian attacks in the area has steadily ramped up in recent weeks, portending a larger battle to come.

It's against this back‐ ground that Ukraine's drone operators, like the unit along the Oskil River, have grown in importance.

Drone manoeuvres in the dark

As the half-dozen men under his command began their silent preparation for the night's first mission, Roman, the unit's commander, pointed across the river.

"Just down there, maybe a kilometre away, are the Rus‐ sians," he whispered. "They are close enough that it is dangerous to even smoke a cigarette out here. There are snipers working, and they can see the light."

All of the Ukrainian sol‐ diers interviewed only identi‐ fied themselves by their call sign or first name, as per the army's restriction for activeduty military personnel.

Roman's men steadied the drone on a clearing out‐ side an abandoned home. This particular drone, sport‐ ing six rotors, is known as a "Vampire" for its night vision optics. Four bombs - three 82-mm mortar rounds and an incendiary grenade - were affixed to it before it quietly whirred into the air.

"We must head to the bunker now," Roman said, gesturing to a cellar entrance a few metres away. "The Rus‐ sians will send their own drones soon."

In the cellar, four men sat fixed on an array of tablet computers. Each one dis‐ played a different video feed, flittering between live drone imagery and satellite maps of the location being surveyed.

"One of the other drones working in the area has spot‐ ted a Russian trench," Roman said. "Now we will go to work on it."

Inside a drone attack

The art of drone warfare is a subtle one. The operators must contend with a host of obstacles, from Russian small arms fire to inclement weath‐ er and electronic counter‐ measures, particularly signal jamming. With each Vampire drone carrying a price tag of $30,000 US (around $40,500 Cdn), conditions have to be carefully prepared to mini‐ mize losses.

In the bunker, one of the drone operators called out to his squad mates when the smaller reconnaissance drone he was operating found the trench in question. His black-and-white video feed showed several bright figures in motion: Russian soldiers taking cover.

A call crackled in from the radio: orders from headquar‐ ters to strike the targets. Ro‐ man issued commands to his men before turning with a grin.

"I hope this can be anoth‐ er one for our highlight reel," he said, referring to several videos from his phone shown to CBC, each depicting graphic black-and-white scenes of precise strikes on Russian positions obliterating a half-dozen enemy soldiers each.

With the Vampire drone in position, it dropped the first mortar bomb, which spends 20 seconds falling to earth before missing the trench by a few metres. While the Rus‐ sians hunker down, a second mortar bomb is dropped another miss.

"Plan B. Light them up," Roman ordered. The drone dropped the incendiary grenade engulfing the trench in a blaze of fire. There was no visible movement when the flames subsided.

Their first mission com‐ plete, the drone began its re‐ turn flight to the base. It will conduct anywhere from 12 to 18 missions over the course of the team's 12-hour duskto-dawn shift.

'Eyes in the sky'

Vitaly, one of the drone oper‐ ators, has been in Ukraine's military for nearly two full years now. He has watched the evolution of his role - and its importance - in real time.

"In 2022, in the beginning, it was a normal war: artillery, tanks and all that," Vitaly said. "But over time, we came to understand how necessary drones are. Now, it's a war of drones and artillery: We cor‐ rect their fire, spot targets for them, even drop bombs our‐ selves."

Artem, in his early 20s, joined the unit after living un‐ der Russian occupation near Kyiv at the start of the war. He went even further in de‐

scribing the crucial impor‐ tance of Ukraine's drones.

"We [drone operators] have to be the eyes in the sky for the infantry," Artem said.

"Without us, they can only sit in the trenches and wait to die. We can tell them if they have a window to attack, if Russians are coming at them, if they have Russian tanks on top of them, everything."

Once the Vampire drone had arrived back at base, an‐ other mission for it had al‐ ready been queued up: a Russian tank had been spot‐ ted manoeuvring along a road nearby. The Vampire was loaded up with an antitank mine, to be placed along the tank's likely path.

As it lifted off again, Ro‐ man expanded on his squad mates' comments - and the unsaid implications of Ukraine's declining ammuni‐ tion stocks.

"They are right that this is a drone and artillery war," he said. "Our part of this is still working well. But without the other element, we will strug‐ gle."