Tim Mak, Oleksandr Matviienko, and Mariana Lastovyria
February 8, 2025
Counteroffensive News
KHARKIV REGION, Ukraine — In the early dawn hours, as the sun rose in the first week of December 2024, a symphony of drones began to sound. But this was no ordinary drone wave.
In fact, this one was the first attack of its kind: a successful, all-drone assault on Russian positions. The assault, deserving of a place in the history books, took place near Lyptsi, in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
It was a test – initially expected to fail – of whether multiple units could orchestrate a mission with dozens of FPV, recon, turret-mounted, and kamikaze drones all working in tandem on the ground and in the air.
The Counteroffensive is the first news outlet to publish a detailed play-by-play of this milestone in drone warfare, following interviews with some of the unit’s military officers.
True to his nickname, a military officer with the call sign ‘Happy’ grins in front of the Khartiia Brigade emblem. ‘Happy,’ the call sign for a soldier from Mykolaiv Oblast, is known for his ever-present smile and a moustache groomed to evoke the facial hair of a Zaporizhzhian Cossack – he wanted a style that stood out. He asked to be identified only by his call sign for security purposes.
At just 22 years old, he is the commander of a platoon known as the Ground Unmanned Robotics Unit, which has the informal nickname ‘Deus Ex Machina,’ or literally in Latin, ‘a God from a machine.’ “We will be here until the end, we will defend our land, and we will move forward to victory with confidence,” the young military officer told Counteroffensive earlier this week. He graduated from a military university in Kyiv, becoming an officer, and sometime after that moved to the Khartiia Brigade. His background is in military engineering, mostly involving demining and emplacing mines, he explained alternating between curling his Ukrainian-styled mustache and taking drags from his cigarette.
He began commanding the platoon this past summer. Within just months, he and his unit have had to become fast experts in using, innovating with, and repairing Ukrainian ground drones – to say nothing of establishing a set of tactics and procedures to use them effectively with other types of weaponry. “When we felt discomfort, we developed. We did not [previously have expertise in] drones, it was uncomfortable for us,” ‘Happy’ explained. “And it forced us to work more intensively on ourselves and with drones.”
Planning the first successful all-drone mission:
The unit itself has a less-strict culture than the rest of the Ukrainian military, one that reflects its role as laboratory for cutting-edge military innovations. “It doesn’t really matter what your rank is. It depends on people. If you have people who can do stuff efficiently, we don’t care about your rank. It can be some [random] soldier who does better work than some very high-profile officer. So we don’t care about this,” said ‘Mathematician,’ the call sign of an officer who advises units in the brigade about how to use drone technology for maximum tactical effect.
The units involved in this assault were tasked by the Khartiia Brigade commander with an experiment: could they organize an all-drone assault within a week – and actually pull it off? “I was skeptical and didn’t expect at all some [level of] success,” ‘Mathematician’ said.
The higher-ups were half-expecting that they would very quickly get word that the drone force had been decimated early in the mission.
To do this right, they would have to invent a new playbook entirely. After all, it was a completely novel approach to an assault. As part of the planning, they established checkpoints, routes and designated communications channels.
The assault was rehearsed on three occasions, with one of the main concerns being that the Russians would spot the incoming wave of Ukrainian drones, and move to destroy them before they could be effectively deployed.
Because of the significant amounts of ordinance being deployed with the ground drones, an early Russian counter-attack could cause the kamikaze drones to explode and destroy the rest of the assault elements.
Forty-eight hours before the mission began, drones began being moved to their starting points. Success was defined in the mission planning as all drones arriving on target and striking their designated assignments.
How the mission went down:
The mission itself involved complex logistics and communications requirements. No drone swarm technology was used, which meant that each individual drone was piloted by an individual pilot.
Less than 100 soldiers were involved in the operation, including pilots, logisticians, planners and support staff – all to launch an assault of around 30 drones, ‘Mathematician’ said.
About a half a dozen kamikaze and machine-gun-mounted ground drones were used. Also involved in the assault were several FPVs, including one with a mounted assault rifle. Large copter drones dropped munitions, while dozens more surveillance/recon drones provided battlefield awareness.
Multiple units were involved in the attack, although the Ukrainian military declined to specify which units or how many. They also declined to say how the troops communicated with one another.
What we do know is that ground and aerial drones were working together, with pilots spaced out in different locations, coordinating the mission while watching the battlefield context simultaneously from a common video feed.
What took days to plan took just one or two hours to play out, along a heavily-fortified Russian position near a large forest.
The waves of drones from air and ground simultaneously took the Russian position off guard – and inspired a sudden panic. While aerial drone attacks are common along the frontlines, the use of ground drones in tandem is not.
Ukrainian units intercepted Russian communications that showed chaos and fear among Russian troops, who were fighting machines with no human troops in sight, ‘Mathematician’ said. This was its intended effect: to create some pressure on the Russian lines and suppress the enemy.
Due to careful planning, they didn’t lose any drones to Russian electronic warfare, which often disrupts communications between pilots and drones. A number of Russian FPV drones tried to strike the attacking Ukrainian ones, but were unsuccessful.
Terrain, it turned out, was a major challenge. Ukrainian mud is famous for its thick, sticky texture. The black ‘chernozem’ soil has been the source of the country’s ultra-productive agricultural sector, but also causes incredible challenges for cars, tanks and ground drones alike.
The conceptual tradeoff between air and ground drones fundamentally comes down to payload. Air drones can largely fly free of the constraints created by obstacles, but they can carry far less than ground drones can; ground drones can carry much more, but have to contend with Ukraine’s famously thick mud, foliage, and other surface-level impediments.
In fact, during the mission, one of the Ukrainian ground drones got stuck in the mud (one of the unit’s planners brightly noted that it was never destroyed and was eventually recovered from the field by Ukrainian forces).
What’s next for all-drone warfare
The mission succeeded beyond expectations: right after the ground drones finished their mission, infantry rushed into the area and secured the positions, ‘Mathematician’ told Counteroffensive. In fact, he said, Ukrainian troops still hold this particular position today.
It’s obvious that the innovators in these units want first and foremost to save Ukrainian lives. Using more drones for more missions means less blood shed. “The advantage is obvious: that
robots do it, not people. And, let’s say, if robots are destroyed, it will not feel pain. It’s just a tin can. It is much better to lose a drone than the life of a human,” said ‘Happy,’ the platoon commander.
The success of this mission will likely mean more iteration, more tinkering, more missions, and experimentation with different scales of attacks. “This is just the beginning of the process. We will work to do more and more similar missions — and even better ones,” ‘Happy’ said.
When not working with drones, the officer is a devotee of Stephen King novels – so he’s no stranger to the horror of unintended consequences.
In particular, he said he’s scared about how artificial intelligence may merge with drone technology. As of yet, drones cannot make most decisions on their own without humans – yet. “I think it’s a matter of time before a person makes a big mistake,” he said.
Still, the officer lives up to his nickname, and is optimistic about the immediate next steps. He’s also quite happily disinterested in his role during a significant achievement in military technology.
In the meantime, he isn’t sure how to put this achievement in context. Maybe he will only understand the significant years from now, with the passage of time, he mused.