Savage drone warfare engulfs Ukraine’s front line

“ANTOSHKA” WAS seconds from striking before being taken down by a Russian drone. At the front for just three days, Antoshka had already flown 20 missions. Timon, its pilot, started cursing, along with ten others participating in the mission via Google Meet on his iPad. On a feed on his laptop Timon could see the wreckage of Antoshka, the nickname he had given to his Ukrainian-made Vampire, a bomb-carrying hexacopter. What upset him more than losing the drone was that he had not managed to drop its two bombs on the Russian bunker it had been hovering above.

Timon and his team, part of the 44th Mechanised Brigade, were hunkered down in their own bunker, in a settlement they asked not to be identified. It is on the outskirts of the beleaguered eastern town of Kostiantynivka, a few kilometres north of the front. The bunker in their sights had been Ukrainian until six months ago. Russian troops had aimed to capture Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk, two big towns in the Donbas region, over the summer, according to Ukrainian intelligence. With the autumn leaves now falling, stripping both sides of cover, it is clear that the Russians have failed. But they have pushed the Ukrainians back on both fronts, albeit with enormous casualties.

Timon and bunker-mates Tsigan and Picasso did not mourn Antoshka for long. Tea was made on a tiny camping stove, and within 40 minutes a new $13,000 Vampire drone had arrived. The mighty beast was hauled off the back of a pickup truck so that Timon and his comrades could have it airborne as soon as a new target was selected.

With the new drone successfully offloaded, the delivery team in the truck were keen to leave in order to avoid being spotted by Russian surveillance drones. Within minutes they were hurtling back to their base at 120kph, trailing strands of fibreoptic drone-guidance filament that had got snared on their vehicle. Two soldiers sat in the back scanning the sky. The pickup, topped with an anti-drone jamming system, sped past bombed-out villages, angry abandoned dogs, the twisted remains of cars and kilometres-long anti-drone net tunnels, some parts in shreds.

The fighting here is unrelenting. The sound of outgoing artillery and mortar fire echoes across the fields. Positions are dug below ground level so that muzzle flash cannot be seen by the Russians. The dugouts are then hidden beneath foliage-covered trap doors. On the order to fire, one soldier hoists the door so his comrades can fire their weapon; the door is then dropped immediately.

Kostiantynivka is in no real danger of falling in the near future, says Major Viacheslav Shutenko, the commander of the 44th Mechanised Brigade’s drone unit. But the situation has “changed dramatically” in the last few months: the Russians have crept much closer and are systematically “destroying its civilian infrastructure”. That was already true in Pokrovsk in early summer. Gradual Russian advances mean nearby Druzhkivka is also coming under heavier fire, and since October 6th the town has been under a 20-hour curfew. A section of the main road to Izium has become vulnerable to drone attack, so traffic is being diverted via backroads.

Despite these successes, Russian forces face an imminent setback of their own. In August their constant probing attacks found a weak point in Ukraine’s defences near Dobropillia, 20km north of Pokrovsk. Troops punched a gap, surged through and advanced more than 13km in a few days. This was faster than their logistics, drone and other teams could keep up with. If the seizure of the new salient had been consolidated, they could have wheeled round to encircle Pokrovsk. Instead, Ukrainian forces halted their advance, and now the Russian soldiers are themselves surrounded in two pockets.

Lieutenant Colonel Arsen “Lemko” Dimitrik of the National Guard’s Azov Corps, which was dispatched to lead the Ukrainian counter-offensive, says the Russians have incurred some 10,000 casualties in this battle since August. That figure is impossible to verify. He would not say how many Ukrainians have been lost, though  he said their casualties had been far lower. The battle has been a “textbook example of good co-ordination”, he says, involving dozens of units. In the past, poor co-ordination has been blamed for Ukrainian losses.

In the past week, Lemko says, the Russians have lost 50 tanks and armoured vehicles. On his phone he shows a screen grab from a drone feed of what appeared to be a dozen or more scattered corpses, killed the day before. He claims that Russian troop numbers in the area had been reduced from hundreds a month ago to less than 100 today, and that they are trapped in the two pockets. He did not expect the Russians to hold out much longer.

On the war’s diplomatic front there has been a bit of movement recently, with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin speaking by phone on October 16th and agreeing to meet in Budapest within weeks. Mr Trump called the phone call “productive” but provided no details that would suggest the upcoming talks will achieve anything more than previous rounds have. On the war’s military front, the bloody shoving match continues, all along the front line. ■