Cheap but lethally accurate: how drones froze Ukraine’s frontlines
For four months, Russian troops have been trying to seize the eastern Ukrainian village of Synkivka. On a map, this looks easy. Their forward position is on the edge of a forest. It is a mere 500 metres away from the Ukrainian frontline and a shattered collection of cottages.
Every few days the Russians attack. Their forays across open ground end in the same way: complete disaster. Armoured vehicles with men perched on top, speed across a landscape of moon-like craters and splintered trees. Soon it goes wrong. Some blow up on mines; others panic and reverse. The Ukrainians pick off fleeing infantry with drones and artillery. Typically, all the Russians die.
“It’s really fucked up down there,” Gleb Molchanov, a Ukrainian drone operator said, showing video he took from above the battlefield four miles north-east of the city of Kupiansk. The images are gruesome. Bodies can be seen lying in a zig-zag trench and frozen hollows. Nearby are the burntout carcasses of BMP-1 fighting vehicles, at least 10 of them. Despite this, the Russians keep trying.
Almost two years after Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion, Ukraine has abandoned its offensive. Instead it is employing a strategy of active defence: keeping the Russians back, and waging the occasional counter-punch. Moscow, meanwhile, wants to go forward. It has mobilised tens of thousands of troops in the Kupiansk area. Many are former prisoners, recruited directly from jail and serving in “Storm-Z” units.
The Kremlin has two immediate goals. One is to take back Kupiansk, the gateway to Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv. Another is to capture the salient town of Avdiivka, not far from the occupied regional capital of Donetsk. So far Moscow has been unable to achieve either military objective. In the process it has lost spectacular numbers of troops, tanks and equipment.
The difficulties experienced by Russia in Synkivka point to a wider problem facing both armies. “It’s a war of armour against projectiles. At the moment projectiles are winning,” Molchanov said. The Russians had some tactical success, flushing out Ukrainian soldiers from the forest and a few villages. But a significant breakthrough was almost impossible, he said, in an era of cheap and lethally accurate drones.
The result of Ukraine and Russia’s extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a kind of warfare that makes traditional Nato doctrine “pretty much obsolete”, Molchanov said. Firstperson view kamikaze drones cost $400 (£315) each. They are bought from the online Chinese marketplace Alibaba, he said. “Nobody really knows how to advance right now. Everything gets smashed up by drones and artillery,” he said.
Kupiansk was captured by Russia on day three of the invasion but lost seven months later. Putin has reportedly ordered his generals to seize back by the spring territory along the east bank of the Oskil River on which the key railway-city sits. That includes Synkivka, a one-time hamlet of three roads and a clubhouse , as well as the neighbouring villages of Petropavlivka and Kucherivka.
Andrii Besedin, the head of Kupiansk’s military administration, said: “Their plan does not correspond with our plan.”
From his windowless basement office, he pointed out that previous
Russian deadlines to take Ukrainian territory had come and gone. Moscow’s “meat grinder” tactics were ineffective, he said, adding: “They don’t care about human life, including their own people. Or us.”
What happens next depends on whether Kyiv gets more weapons from the “civilised world”, Besedin said. “We have enough to defend, maybe. But it isn’t enough to beat the enemy.” He said arguments in Washington – where Republicans in Congress have blocked $61bn in security assistance to Kyiv – had a huge effect on Kupiansk and the fate of the 3,500 people who remain there.
With its troops stuck, a vengeful Russia pulverises the city. Last year, it destroyed Kupiansk’s museum, killing its director, and the apricot-painted palace of culture. It bombed the hospital, polyclinic and hilltop administration building. The market, meat processing factory, and universal fish company have been hit too. The latest civilian victim, 53-year-old Olena Lashkova, died in a strike on Thursday at her home in Kupiansk-Vuzlovy.
Besedin said Kupiansk was once a “sweet” place, with factories, jobs and schools. In summer, couples strolled in its landscape park while children swam in the river and played under willows. He said his predecessor as mayor had given up the city without a fight and then vanished, presumably to Russia. Asked whether Kupiansk had a future, Besedin answered: “Yes. We can help when the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are liberated.”
Despite Moscow’s onslaught, Besedin said some local residents refuse to leave. “We ask them every day. We have a hotline. But it depends on them,” he said. In September and January, the authorities carried out a forced evacuation of parents with children from under-fire villages. There are no civilians left in Synkivka but a few inhabitants – most of them elderly – cling on to their homes in nearby settlements, defying S-300 missiles and aviation bombs.
Many become casualties. Inna Diakiv, a neurosurgeon at Kharkiv’s regional hospital, said patients from Kupiansk and the surrounding district told her they wanted to be self-reliant. “They say they are guarding their properties or are unable to leave because of pets.” A tiny number are waiting for the Russians to come back, Diakiv believed. “They don’t say this openly. You can guess. Russia is why they got shrapnel wounds. It’s crazy,” she said.
Bohdan Voitsekhovskyi, the deputy head of the radical-right Freikorps volunteer unit, said Russian politics explained recent doomed attacks. In
March, Putin is standing as president for a fifth time. “The elections are an imitation exercise,” said Voitsekhovskyi. “Nevertheless, the regime still needs to persuade people to vote for Putin and to show support. And so they capture a few hundred metres with enormous losses. They need to achieve something and to sell it as a success.”
Predictions that Russia would launch a massive offensive in early January against Kupiansk turned out to be wrong. The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Syniehubov, said the enemy was regrouping. Last week, Russian forces had launched two to five attacks a day, compared with 15 to 20 over new year. They had not assembled a strike group in the area and winter conditions were making operations difficult.
Molchanov said Moscow had yet to come up with a plan that would allow it to breach Ukraine’s defensive line. “We are in a kind of technological stalemate right now,” said the drone operator. Asked whether the Russians could break through, he replied: “The game is with them. They decide where and when to attack. But I don’t think they can get Kupiansk. Neither side can win without a trick or innovation.”
Last week, Molchanov and his team noticed footprints in the snow, outside Synkivka. They led to an underground hideout. It had been dug beneath the metallic skeleton of an abandoned Russian armoured vehicle. Molchanov zoomed in with his drone camera. Then he dropped a bomb. It was unclear whether anyone was inside. “My job is to kill Russians. They shouldn’t have come here. I don’t feel sorry for them,” he said.