In nearly a year since Moscow began marching on Pokrovsk, Russian troops have failed to capture the city, despite huge advantages in manpower and artillery. Their slow progress is a testament to just how difficult drones has made attacking. The war has become mainly a contest between Russian foot soldiers and Ukrainian explosive drones. In more rural areas, Ukrainian drone pilots can almost defend the line on their own. (Ukraine's units) send out at least 60 a day and can afford to use them on severely injured Russians. The Russians are suffering 7 casualties for every Ukrainian injured or killed. Many surveillance drones are now equipped with thermal-vision cameras, making it easy to spot Russian attacks at night.
In the flat farmland and shattered mining towns surrounding this eastern Ukrainian city, the war has become mainly a contest between Russian foot soldiers and Ukrainian explosive drones.
After nearly three years of fighting, Ukraine is desperately short on infantry to man the trenches. They are outnumbered at least 5-to-1 along most of the eastern front, and the men they have are mostly older, recently conscripted, and lacking motivation and experience in battle, Ukrainian officers said.
What Kyiv’s forces have in abundance are drones—which Ukraine is now relying on to compensate for the lack of infantry.
Surveillance drones police the 600-mile front line, having all but entirely replaced human reconnaissance. When Russian soldiers advance toward Ukrainian positions, explosive aerial drones are dispatched to pick them off, while larger drones drop bomblets onto them. Infantry fire their weapons only when the occasional Russian soldier manages to slip past the phalanx of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The strategy has worked, up to a point. In nearly a year since Moscow began marching on Pokrovsk, Russian troops have failed to capture the city, despite huge advantages in manpower and artillery ammunition. Their slow progress is a testament to just how difficult the proliferation of drones has made attacking. Neither side sends large armored vehicles all the way to the contact line much anymore—they are easy targets for drones. Instead, infantry usually hike the last few miles on foot, often in groups of just two or three soldiers, which are harder for drones to spot.
But the age of front lines patrolled by drones instead of humans isn’t here yet. The Russians are still advancing, albeit slowly. To halt their progress, Ukraine would need a large influx of troops, according to several officers fighting in the area—something that is unlikely in the near future.
“Drones can’t replace men,” said a battalion commander who has been fighting just south of Pokrovsk for the past two months. During that time, his battalion has retreated about a mile. “They can disrupt an enemy attack, but not fully stop it.” The same dynamic is playing out across the eastern front, with Russian forces putting undermanned Ukrainian brigades under intense pressure across a broad swath of territory. Moscow recently seized the city of Velyka Novosilka, southwest of Pokrovsk, and is now threatening Chasiv Yar to the north.
In some more rural areas, Ukrainian drone pilots can almost defend the line on their own.
Late last month, The Wall Street Journal visited an aerial-drone battalion from Ukraine’s 60th Mechanized Brigade, which was trying to beat back Russian assaults near the northeastern village of Terny. From a command post, the battalion’s commander, a senior lieutenant who goes by the call sign Munin, watched live surveillance-drone feeds as Russian soldiers rushed forward across the flat, marshy fields around Terny toward a river. One of Munin’s deputies spotted two Russians sprinting across a bridge, and Munin dispatched an explosive drone to hunt them down. As the Russians heard the drone approaching, they dropped to the ground. Then a huge blast lit up the screen. One man lay still, his leg blown off. The other struggled to get to his feet, then fell again.
“I think they’re dead,” a drone pilot, who was in a bunker several miles back from the front line, said on the radio.
“Go finish him so we know for sure,” Munin responded.
A second drone hit a minute later. “Plus two,” said 38-year-old Munin, meaning two more Russians killed, bringing the battalion’s total that day to eight. The nearest Ukrainian infantry hadn’t needed to leave their foxhole.
Munin said a massive increase in the quantity of drones at his disposal has allowed his battalion to take pressure off infantry.
A year earlier, his team might have launched 15 first-person-view drones, or FPVs, on a busy day. Now, Ukraine is producing roughly 200,000 drones a month. Munin sends out at least 60 on a normal day—and can afford to use them on severely injured Russians. In addition, many surveillance drones are now equipped with thermal-vision cameras, making it easy to spot Russian attacks at night.
Still, the Russians are slowly advancing around Terny and now control most of the village. Though they have taken more than 1,000 casualties in their assault on the village, Munin said, they seem to have “unlimited manpower” and continue to send men forward in small groups, which can more easily slip past surveillance drones. Sometimes, Russian jammers down Ukrainian drones. On rainy or foggy days, most drones can’t fly, which gives Russian forces the chance to make larger assaults with armored vehicles. Once leaves cover the trees again in spring, Russian infantry will be harder for drones to spot.
And once they spot a Ukrainian position, they hammer it with every type of weapon they have until the Ukrainians are forced to withdraw.
“Artillery, glide bombs, everything,” Munin said. “Until you can’t use the position as cover anymore.”The Russians also have their own drone army, which is the foremost menace for both Ukrainian infantry and civilians in front-line cities. A medic working around Pokrovsk said roughly 70% of the Ukrainian casualties in the area come from drone strikes. Any military vehicle entering the city is equipped with an array of electronic jammers, but Russians are also using drones that are connected to the pilots by fiber-optic cables and can’t be jammed. When soldiers spot them, the only reprieve is to shoot them down.
The enormous volume of drones in the air has changed the nature of combat over the past year, according to Ukrainian soldiers.
Last spring, when a 25-year-old infantry platoon commander first arrived in the area south of Pokrovsk, there was lots of close infantry combat, he said. Within a month of the brigade’s arrival in the Pokrovsk area, he said, 80% of the infantry had been injured or killed and were no longer fit to fight. Since then, he said, the brigade had retreated about 19 miles in the area west of Pokrovsk. They are now outnumbered by the Russians about 10-to-1, but the growing supply of drones—plus small influxes of new soldiers—have allowed the brigade to continue fighting the Russian advance. The Russians are suffering at least seven casualties for every Ukrainian soldier injured or killed, he said, but added that Kyiv would need 10 times as many troops here to stop Moscow’s troops entirely.
“We just don’t have enough people to defend Pokrovsk,” he said.
In open fields, it is relatively easy for drones to spot Russian foot soldiers trying to advance. But in the towns and villages around Pokrovsk, where there are more buildings for the Russians to take cover from drones, infantry are irreplaceable. Several weeks ago, Russian forces advanced into a village south of Pokrovsk, first occupying one house on the main street, then another. To properly defend that village, the platoon commander said, Ukrainian forces would have needed men in all eight houses on the street. But they didn’t have enough, and three weeks ago had to withdraw from the village.
Russian forces as of Feb. 4
Russian forces as June 1
Kramatorsk
Kyiv
UKRAINE
Bakhmut
Area of detail
Chasiv Yar
T0504
Horlivka
Pokrovsk
Mezhova
Avdiivka
Selydove
Donetsk
10 miles
10 km
“We don’t have enough reinforcements,” he said. “We just kept moving back.”
Commanders around Pokrovsk say the quality of reinforcements has also become a problem, with most of the new arrivals recent conscripts in their 40s and 50s with little motivation to fight. Some abandon positions, they say, or refuse to go to first-line trenches. One brigade commander said 30 men of the quality he had early in the war would be more effective than 100 of the men he has now.
A major in the 68th Jaeger Brigade, which is fighting south of Pokrovsk, said that new recruits need time to adjust to the reality of life at the front line before they are thrown into a trench.
“But in the current circumstances, we don’t have time to let people adapt,” said the major, who goes by the call sign Barracuda. “There’s a shortage in every position, especially in the infantry.”
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