Ukrainian Soldiers Use Drones and Russian Language To Trick, Kill Enemy

As the front becomes more porous, ill defined and unstable due to troop shortages and omnipresent drones, Ukrainian soldiers are using knowledge of the Russian language - and the fact that many units from occupied Ukraine are serving at the front - to confuse and then ambush Kremlin forces. 

They are aided by increasingly sophisticated drone tactics which suppress enemy activity, forcing the Russians into hiding, where the sound of Russian speakers tricks them into identifying their whereabouts - and subsequent elimination. JL

 
Euromaidan Press reports:

The Ukrainian army’s 425th Assault Regiment's most important assets may be the creativity, courage and sheer aggression of its infantry. A 425th Regiment trooper recently posed as Russian, fell in with two Russian soldiers—and then gunned them down from a few feet away. One of the regiment’s drones observed the ambush from overhead. The porousness of the front makes deadly misidentification more likely. “There isn’t a coherent front line.” Instead, there’s a wide no-man’s land between areas of Russian and Ukrainian control. The 225th Assault Regiment is attaching FPVs to infantry squads to help clear buildings of Russian troops. Drones can suppress the enemy without even striking. “Soldiers begin to hide from the sound of UAVs and do not leave cover for a long time,” 

The Ukrainian army’s 425th Assault Regiment is about to deploy ex-Australian M-1 Abrams tanks, making it only the second Ukrainian unit to do so. But even after the 69-ton M-1s arrive, the regiment’s most important assets may be the creativity, courage and sheer aggression of its infantry.

Consider the 425th Assault Regiment trooper who recently posed as Russian, fell in with two Russian soldiers—and then gunned them down from a few feet away. One of the regiment’s drones observed the cold-blooded ambush from overhead.

Russian and Ukrainian infantry often wear similar uniforms—and identify themselves with colored armbands. Further complicating the identity crisis, Russian sabotage groups have been known to dress in captured or copied Ukrainian uniforms when they infiltrate Ukrainian lines.

In any event, the victims mistook that 425th Assault Regiment Trooper for an ally. The Ukrainian trooper may have encouraged this misconception by speaking the right language. Most Russians speak Russian, of course—but then, so do many Ukrainians.

Recall that, in May 2024, a squad from the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade captured a Russian radio during a bitter skirmish over a Russian-held gully somewhere north of Kharkiv. “We will now try to fuck them over,” the Ukrainian infantry leader said in the official video depicting the fight. “Who is a Russian-speaker?”

A Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldier hopped on the captured radio. “We’re 1st Company,” he transmitted—part of the same battalion as the Russians in the gully. The Russians shifted their fire to avoid hitting their “allies.”

“Let’s go,” the 3rd Assault Brigade infantry leader ordered. “Yell in Russian!” By the time the Russians realized the soldiers approaching them weren’t actually fellows Russians, it was too late. They were all but surrounded around Myrnohrad, just east of Pokrovsk. Surprisingly, the one-man ambush may have taken place in Boykovka, 15 km north of Myrnohrad in a zone many observers assume is largely under Russian control.

The circumstances are hazy. Was the ambusher a member of Ukrainian sabotage group infiltrating Russian lines the way Ukrainians routinely infiltrate Ukrainian lines?

The increasing porousness of the front makes deadly cases of misidentification more likely. “There isn’t a coherent front line,” American analyst Andrew Perpetua explained. Instead, there’s a wide no-man’s land between areas of clear Russian and Ukrainian control. That no-man’s-land is largely depopulated except for scattered—and carefully concealed—underground fighting positions for a few harried infantry doing their best to hide from the ever-present drones.

It’s that porousness that allowed the ill-fated 132nd Motor Rifle Brigade march right past undermanned Ukrainian trenches and extend their brief-lived salient northeast of Pokrovsk last month. The same lack of contiguous defenses may explain why a very dangerous Ukrainian and his supporting drone were wandering around Boykovka looking for gullible Russians to kill. Tiny first-person-view drones are everywhere all the time over the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 43-month wider war on Ukraine. But most of them are surveillance and attack assets. They scan for targets over or near the front line—and then zoom in and explode.

Now at least one Ukrainian unit is finding a new use for the ubiquitous FPVs. The 225th Assault Regiment, holding the line outside Vorone in southern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with its M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles, has begun attaching FPVs to infantry squads to help the squads clear buildings of Russian troops.

“Clearing buildings is deadly—an enemy can be in every corner,” the regiment explained. When the infantry must enter a structure, they can send an FPV “to scout ahead.” “If the enemy is found,” the regiment explained, “the drone strikes, keeping our infantry safe.” It’s delicate work requiring extreme precision on the part of the distant drone operator, who wears a virtual-reality headset to see what the warhead-clutching FPV sees. An FPV explodes on contact with any surface, so an imprecise maneuver can endanger the drone’s human squadmates.

To guarantee an uninterrupted signal between the operator and their drone, the 225th Assault Regiment uses fiber-optic FPVs for clearance missions. Fiber-optic drones send and receive signals via kilometers-long optical fibers, making them impervious to radio jamming and the signal dead zones created by buildings or hills.

Drones as suppressive fire

The Ukrainians aren’t the only ones innovating with their smallest drones. The Russians have new ideas, too. FPVs are so dangerous—and so terrifying—that soldiers tend to duck into their trenches as soon as they hear the drones’ distinctive buzzing. For that reason, some Russian regiments use the drones as suppressive fire.

Suppressive fire is an infantry tactic that’s as old as gunpowder. Basically, it means shooting at the enemy with something—rifles, machine guns, mortars or artillery—with enough intensity to drive the enemy underground for as long as it takes friendly forces to “breach” the enemy’s defenses … and advance.

 

Drones can suppress the enemy without even striking. “Soldiers begin to hide from the sound of UAVs alone and do not leave cover for a long time,” Russian blogger Unfair Advantage wrote.

“If the enemy is accustomed to being afraid of drones, then a UAV ‘carousel’—that is, the successive replacement of one strike UAV with another, can lead to the effect of suppressing positions, despite significant time intervals between strikes,” Unfair Advantage explained.

Infantry should begin their movement to contact with the enemy during an initial wave of drone attacks. “After the strikes are completed, the infantry takes cover and waits for the next wave of UAVs to arrive—or continues to move, but out of the line of sight of the defenders,” the blogger wrote. “This is repeated several times until the infantry reaches the immediate vicinity of the attacked position.”

There, the attackers wait for more drones before making their final push through the enemy positions. Drones should be overhead the whole time during the breach—”a mixed carousel of observation UAVs and attack UAVs,” Unfair Advantage advised.

To prolong the endurance of any turn of the UAV carousel, the operators can land some drones on the ground or on rooftops, idling their engines but keeping their cameras on—thus preserving the robots’ batteries. As long as at least one drone is audible by the defending infantry, the infantry should keep their heads down. They should, in other words, remain suppressed.

The respective new drone tactics belie deepening manpower problems on both sides of the wider war. More and more, both the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces are counting on robots to perform tasks most militaries still assign to human beings.

Ukraine’s manpower shortage is well-known. It’s possible Ukrainian brigades are short 100,000 trained infantry. But Russia has too few troops, too—despite generous bonuses and deceptive recruiting practices that lure or trap tens of thousands of fresh enlistees every month. Overall, Russian regiments probably have plenty of soldiers. But like Ukrainian brigades, they may specifically lack trained and experienced infantry.

Why risk them on a mission that a robot with a skilled operator can handle?