Ukraine's Drones Are Breaking Russia's Defenses. The Kremlin Has No Answers

Gone are the days when Ukraine's drone forces consisted of amateurs with commercially sourced Chinese hobbyist drones. Now, thousands of expert operators aim tens of thousands of aerial and ground drones - many designed and built in Ukraine - at targets ranging from hapless Russian troops in the kill zone to industrial targets hundreds to thousands of kilometers deep within Russia. 

The effect has been devastating. At the front, Russian advances have all but ceased. In the rear, logistics and reinforcements have been forced back beyond their ability to respond to Ukrainian counterattacks for fear of drone strikes. And in Russia, 70% of the population and most of the country's industrial and energy capacity is now vulnerable, if not already damaged. The results of these developments are, quite literally, war changing. And the Kremlin has no answers. JL

Steve Hendrix and Serhii Korolchuk report in the Washington Post:

As a fifth summer's fighting begins, dozens of Ukrainian operators fly thousands of drones from underground command centers that looks more like a tech start-up than a forward bunker. High-definition monitors line insulated walls, showing a drone’s-eye view of a doomed Russian soldier in a foxhole, an enemy supply truck, or a ground robot delivering food and ammo to a forward unit. After a year in which Ukraine resisted White House pressure to cave to Russian demands, tens of thousands of drones now blanket 200 miles behind the front, targeting supply lines, command centers and air defense batteries. Along the front, aerial drones attack anything moving, a gauntlet Russians cross at tremendous cost. The deep-strike drones Ukraine launches each month grew 20 to 30 times. Mid-strike drones have expanded 1,000%. Ukraine is starting the summer with mounting confidence. "They will be in very big s---. We are going to increase the quantity of hits even more.”

As a fifth summer fighting season begins in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Vladyslav Tovstyi directs dozens of operators flying thousands of drones from an underground command center that looks more like a tech start-up than a forward bunker. 

High-definition monitors lined the insulated walls, each showing a drone’s-eye view of a doomed Russian soldier in a foxhole, an enemy supply truck, countryside striped with trenches and razor wire. On one, a ground robot was delivering food and ammo to a forward unit — a Ukrainian soldier gave a thumbs-up to the camera. 

From his ergonomic Secretlab gaming chair, Tovstyi monitored his team’s efforts along the front lines. His laptop connects him with other units sending drones further into Russia, some disrupting rear supply lines, and others striking oil refineries closer to the Arctic Circle than to the front lines.

It’s a remarkable evolution from the day Tovstyi experimented with one of Ukraine’s first drones, an off-the-shelf quadcopter with a one-mile range and a half-hour battery.

The new three-range strategy he is part of and this setup, at a secret location in the Donetsk region that Russia is desperately trying to conquer, helps explain why Russia’s war, predicted to last mere days, has now continued for more than four years — and how Ukraine suddenly seems to have the stronger hand.

For his first drone, in the conflict’s early weeks, Tovstyi was squatting in the dirt and thunder of the front lines, his platoon about to be surrounded by Russian soldiers. Desperate, they unpacked a store-bought Chinese drone and joy-sticked it into the sky.

“We were blind like kittens,” Tovstyi said. “Then we sent the Mavic up, and we could see 50 pieces of enemy equipment. We directed the artillery fire at them.”

Tovstiy sits in the command post. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

A tally of successful recent drone strikes against Russian targets hangs in the command post. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

Now, Tovstyi is among the high-tech soldiers directing an ever-evolving drone strategy. And after a year in which Ukraine lost territory, resisted White House pressure to cave to Russian demands and endured months of blackout, the latest drone warfare has set the stage for something few predicted during the bitter winter — a summer that begins, for once, with something resembling an edge.

Russia’s progress at the front has ground almost to a halt. The Kremlin is losing tens of thousands of soldiers a month while suppressing growing public anger at home. And with European funding, Ukraine has become an increasingly formidable arms manufacturer in its own right. 

Ukraine’s comeback flows mostly, military experts say, from how it continues to rewrite the capabilities of its remote-controlled air force.

A homegrown approach to warfare that started with a few hobby shop quadcopters has evolved into a sustained, three-tier strategy of short-, medium- and long-range drone programs.

At the far end, a new generation of Ukrainian strategic long-range UAVs is reaching deeper into Russia than ever, rattling civilians and forcing a military superpower to defend territory it never imagined would be at risk.

In February, one drone slammed into an oil refinery located in Russia’s far northern Komi Republic after a flight of 1,100 miles — setting a record that is not likely to stand for long.

More critically, tens of thousands of operational drones are now blanketing the middle ground — up to 200 miles behind the front — scrambling supply lines, targeting rear command centers and hunting the air defense batteries Russia needs to protect everything else.

And along the 750-mile front, Ukraine is shrinking the number of human soldiers in the kill zone using remote-controlled combatants. Tactical aerial drones spot and attack Russians, while ground robots resupply Ukraine’s own troops and evacuate the wounded, turning what was once a brutal exchange of infantry and artillery into a technological gantlet that Russian forces cross only at tremendous cost. 

Russia, which was capturing an average of 150 square miles a month at its peak last year, has slowed to a fraction of that pace. In April, for the first time in nearly two years, it lost more ground than it gained, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Yevgen Karas, who commanded some of the first experimental longer-range drone missions in 2022, has watched the number of deep-strike drones Ukraine launches each month grow 20 to 30 times since then. Even more critically, the monthly number of mid-strike drones has expanded by more than 1,000 percent, Karas estimates.

“I think they will be in very big s--- this half of the year because we are going to increase the quantity of hits even more,” Karas said in an interview at his operations center in Dnipro. “For Russian officers, it will be hard times.”

Maj. Yevhen Karas commands the "Raid" regiment of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

Karas launched one of Ukraine’s first behind-the-lines strikes in September 2022, hitting a Russian fuel depot 50 miles away with a drone that had to take off and be guided so close to the front lines that its operators were stationed amid machine gun fire alongside teams firing mortar shells.

Now, they hit hundreds of targets a month from secret control centers all over Ukraine, access to the grid more important than proximity to the front. On Wednesday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced a new $112 million “logistical lockdown” program to fund even more midrange strikes. 

“There is a serious slowdown in the Russian offensive,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin Russian political analyst, told The Washington Post.

The midrange attacks in particular have disrupted the delivery of supplies and fighters to the front, Markov said. “They are forced now to keep more than 150 kilometers [93 miles] away from Ukrainian positions. This is reducing the capability of Russian forces to maneuver operatively.”

Ukraine still faces constraints that have hampered it from the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Kyiv is short on soldiers, short on air defense interceptors that it gets from the United States and heavily dependent on European funding.

The European Union finalized a loan worth 90 billion euros (about $105 billion) last month, funds that had been blocked by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban before he was voted out of office in March — but that still leaves a reported $60 billion gap.

Marines set up a drone for transport at a training site May 7. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

Marines attach training bomblets to the drone. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

But in a way that seemed unlikely a year ago, conditions now seem to favor Ukraine. Moscow wants to seize more of Ukraine, and Kyiv wants to hold the Russians off. Russia needs to be dominant; Ukraine needs to be durable.

“This is a war of exhaustion,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Come Back Alive, a nonprofit organization that raises money for the Ukrainian military. “It’s like a boxing match with unlimited rounds,” Bielieskov said. “We just need to stay on our feet until the last one.” 

The past year in some ways was the worst yet for Ukraine.

President Donald Trump, after berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, had been pressuring Kyiv to make a deal on Russian terms, including surrendering territory. 

Russian and North Korean units were advancing. Relentless attacks on Ukraine’s power grid left millions freezing through the coldest winter in years. Moscow had the momentum.

Now, the Russians are still advancing in places, but only by yards and at a shocking cost of fatalities, up to 25,000 a month (about as many as the Soviets lost in their entire 10-year war in Afghanistan).

The new dimension of war that Ukraine has opened with its deep-strike drone campaign is rattling Russia’s public, dinting its oil economy and forcing commanders to defend assets far from the front.

Ukrainian drones and missiles have logged more than 1,500 verified strikes in Russian territory since last summer. Attacks on midrange logistics networks and air defenses are opening the skies for ever-deeper strikes on petroleum facilities and other strategic assets from occupied Crimea to Russia’s sub-Arctic, according to open-source intelligence analyzed by the Kyiv Independent newspaper.

Ukraine launched 7,000 in March alone, the first month in which the country fired more drones into Russia than Russia sent into Ukraine, according to data reviewed by ABC News.

Barricades against potential Russian offensives this month. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

Anti-drone nets cover a road in a Ukrainian village. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

The attacks have both material and psychological impact, bringing the war closer to Russians who for most of the past four years had watched only a sanitized version of the fighting on state TV.

This month, Russian President Vladimir Putin curtailed the country’s annual Victory Day commemorations, acknowledging that the central-Moscow parade route was well within range of Ukrainian strikes. 

Both countries cut down on air attacks for an informal three-day ceasefire during the commemoration of Soviet losses in World War II. But days later, Ukrainian drones struck Moscow in the largest attack on the Russian capital yet, killing at least three.

Putin, seeking to tamp down mounting bad news, has restricted internet access, including the ubiquitous use of the Telegram messaging platform, drawing anger from an increasingly skeptical public.

Russian analysts say grumbling about the war is growing in the populace and among the president’s elite supporters alike. The country’s general happiness index fell to a 15-year low in April, as measured by state-controlled surveys.

“You begin to wonder whether Putin’s aura of omnipotence isn’t just beginning to waver slightly,” said Tim Willasey-Wilsey, senior fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a security think tank based in London. “If Ukraine suffered its worst moment over the winter, I think Russia is suffering its worst moment just about now.” 

Ukraine’s show of strength does not mean it is on the verge of prevailing, analysts say. The front line, if largely unmoving, remains white-hot. Ukrainian officials recorded 233 combat engagements on a single day last week.

Russia also launched one of its biggest aerial assaults of the war Saturday, pounding Kyiv with attack drones as well as ballistic and cruise missiles, including an Oreshnik hypersonic missile. Russian forces still occupy roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, and neither side is anywhere close to a decisive military victory.

The tools Ukraine is using to stay on its feet have evolved almost beyond recognition since the war’s first weeks, particularly its drones.

With strategic, long-distance strikes ever farther into Russia, Ukraine is trying to force Moscow to divert resources from its frontline invasion to defending refineries, weapons factories, airfields and oil-export terminals across its huge territory.

Russian bombers have been pushed thousands of miles from the front. Black Sea Fleet vessels relocated from Crimea to Novorossiysk after systematic drone strikes. Air defense batteries have been redeployed to ring Moscow, pulled from the front to protect the capital.

“We are using Russia’s vastness against Russia,” said Bielieskov.

A monument to soldiers killed in World War II is seen through anti-drone netting in a Ukrainian village. (Brendan Hoffman/For The Washington Post)

The drones fly both ways, of course. Russia continues to pound Ukraine’s energy grid, and in April killed at least 238 civilians and injured 1,404 injured, according to United Nations monitors.

Zelensky, in virtually every public statement, hammers on the need for more air defense help. Ukraine is bracing for shortages of U.S.-supplied Patriot interceptors amid the Iran war and the need to replenish batteries across the Middle East.

Still, Ukraine is starting the summer with mounting confidence.

“It’s very cautious,” said retired Gen. Gordon B. Davis Jr., a former deputy assistant secretary general of NATO and senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “But yes, there is optimism.”