The commander of Ukraine’s lethal drone unit unites homemade technology with the legacy of the Lubavitcher rebbe
By Vladislav Davidzon
December 01, 2024
Tablet Magazine
In the three-month period from August to October, Russian forces rained over 4,000 suicide drones on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure. In November, the number of attacks only increased. In one 24-hour period on Nov. 10, Russia launched 145 drones while Ukraine sent 34 in the direction of Moscow.
Once home to the admiralty of the Russian imperial fleet, the port city of Mykolaiv has established itself as the capital of Ukraine’s drone force. After the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, what few naval assets Ukraine had left were transferred to Mykolaiv, where they were sunk by Russian missile strikes during the opening week of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The three shipyards located in the city’s harbor have been left in disrepair and disuse. Yet from this unlikely base, Ukraine has deployed drones to decimate at least a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, which has now been pushed to the farthest corner of the southern Black Sea.
Mykolaiv is now home to one of the many experimental drone construction units that have sprouted across the country. Ukraine’s amateur producers and independent drone startups have helped close the gap in production capacity against the industrial capacity of the better-financed Russians, providing the Ukrainian armed forces with much of its short- and medium-range drone reconnaissance and attack fleet. In June, the Ukrainian army established its first ever Unmanned Systems Force as a separate division within its armed forces. This year also saw the government earmark $2 billion to produce a million so-called first-person-view (FPV) drones, which transmit video footage.
Easy to make and cost effective, at around $500 a pop, these FPV drones have proved to be an invaluable weapon in the war, providing the Ukrainian forces with critical reconnaissance, retargeting, and attack capabilities. The Ukrainians are continuously customizing FPV drones, enabling them to carry explosive payloads and, more recently, thermite spray—an incendiary mixture used to expose Russian units under dense tree cover. Thousands of Ukrainian volunteers, including in Mykolaiv, assemble FPV drones in their garages after work.
“The production capacity of the Ukrainian drone industry increased more than 10 times in 2024 compared to 2023,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation claimed in October, adding that in 2024, there was some $50 million in investment, compared to the $5 million invested in 2023. Among the most innovative and ambitious of these initiatives is the so-called “Birds of Fury” (better translated as “Angry Birds”) unit, which is headquartered in Mykolaiv. Started in
May 2022, the Angry Birds became one of very few units in the Ukrainian military to design and manufacture their own long-range fixed-wing drones.
In addition to decrepit shipyards and Angry Birds, Mykolaiv is also home to a book-shaped black granite monument, inscribed in Hebrew, English, Russian and Ukrainian, commemorating the 1902 birth of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The great rabbi and leader of the Chabad movement had come into the world in a modest house here and the family had spent several years in the city before moving to Dnipro.
The small cement office that replaced the rebbe’s house was a symbolically apt place to meet Illia Shpolianskyi, the charismatic commander of the Angry Birds. I met up with Illia on a broiling day in early July, at the monument in the Mykolaiv city center. After pausing for a moment at the monument, we continued our stroll to another part of town to pay a visit to the secret research and development lab and production facilities of the Angry Birds drone collective.
In his early 40s, Illia is an energetic man of medium build. A pair of twine bracelets encircle his tanned wrists and his right hand is weighed down with a massive Magen David ring. Illia’s Jewish mother had married his father, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest of Jewish descent, and they became active in the life of the Russian Orthodox church after the Soviet dissolution. His father would go on to serve as a priest in the Russian aligned-Moscow church patriarchate in the region.
Illia exhibits all the classic traits of a spiritual seeker—including the compulsion to engage in lively argumentation about ideas and spiritual practice, which is not uncommon here, as the dissolution of Soviet civilizational values led to a concomitant explosion of interest in traditional religiosity. The Jewish priest’s son founded a spiritual printing press and spent several years in his 20s traveling between Moscow and Ukraine feeding the new religiosity with his newly published and classic works of Russian Orthodox theology. He told me that the period in his life deeply involved in church life had contributed to his deep revulsion for the values of the so-called “Russian world”—the chauvinist term for the Russophone civilizational sphere over which Moscow claims volition.
In his early 30s, Illia became interested in his Jewish heritage and began studying Jewish texts. He attended synagogue services in addition to praying in Greek Orthodox and Protestant churches. The god of the Bible could be convened within any of the monotheistic temples, he opined. The family had moved to Germany several years before the war but never assimilated to German life. Illia’s mother informed me that she could not wait to go back to Ukraine.
Along with tens of thousands of Ukrainian men throughout Europe, Illia, a veteran of the original Russian invasion a decade ago, returned to Ukraine a week after the start of the Russian full scale war in order to take part in the defense of his country. He became engaged in sourcing arms and medical supplies for the defenders of Mykolaiv.
Over the past year, Illia has worn a black velvet kippah which he tops off with a baseball cap. It had been recovered along with a half-burned Hebrew prayer book by Ukrainian troops who had taken cover in an abandoned house during the battle of Bakhmut, the scene of one of the most gruesome and grinding battles of the war. Afterward, the Ukrainian officers reverently returned to Kyiv and stopped with the holy relics in Kyiv’s central Brodsky Synagogue. They arrived on a Saturday afternoon. The rabbi of Kyiv’s main synagogue thanked them courteously but was forced to explain that he could not accept the objects on the Sabbath day.
Illia was attending services that day. Being far less stringent in theological matters than the rabbi, he quickly volunteered to receive the sacred artifacts. For the last year and a half of the war he has worn the recovered kippah in public, making him one of a vanishingly small portion of active Ukrainian service members to wear it on duty. He joked to me that more senior officers in the Ukrainian army had become much less harsh with him after he began wearing it.
After visiting the rebbe’s monument, Illia ushered me through a courtyard and led me into the Angry Birds unit’s experimentation and construction facility for the unmanned long-range strike drone, the “Backfire.” A messy underground bunker full of long tables and bookshelves, it was simultaneously neat and chaotic. The lab was filled with the scraps of killer drone construction: bolts, electrical tools, plastic cases, stacks of microchips, and loose wires. A back room was filled with brand new 3D printers of various models. Several unpainted plastic prototypes of the fixed-wing drone were arrayed around the main table in various states of completion. They resembled miniature gray versions of World War II-era fortress bomber jets. Metallic circuitry and short lengths of red, black, and white wire spooled out of their exposed underbellies. Green crates full of ancient surplus Soviet-era ammunition were stacked in the corridor.
Angry Birds encompasses both active duty soldiers and drone operators, as well as specialized engineers and IT programmers on the civilian side. Half a dozen members, in a mixture of military khakis and civilian attire, sauntered around the lab tinkering and peering at computer screens.
The Ukrainians revealed the signature Backfire K1 drone last fall and entered serial production in April. A catapult-launched fixed-wing drone, the Backfire has a combat range of up to 35 miles and can carry payloads up to 13 lbs. The Backfire provides a more cost-effective option to augment the U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) for midrange strike capability. “The HIMARS blast range is of course more powerful, but they are also easily enough shot down by the Russian anti-air defense systems,” Illia explained to me. “And most of the HIMARS that go up are indeed shot down, which is why drones are much cheaper in a war of attrition.” Moreover, the Russians have had some success in electronically jamming HIMARS’ targeting, damaging its accuracy.
However, Illia also underlined that building the fixed-wing drone aircraft was infinitely more technically complex than simply creating hovering quadcopters—which is why the number of units specialized in constructing fixed-wing drones that launch munitions can be counted on two hands across the country. “The physics and ballistics of launching a missile or guided munition is much complex when you are not launching from a copter which can fire from a stationary position. The plane drone not only fires from a higher altitude but also has to make complex measurements about where it will fall and from what ballistic angle. All of which is a difficult feat of technical and engineering prowess.”
Meanwhile, Russian industrial plants have been mobilized for total war and Russian factories are buzzing on round-the-clock production shifts. This has allowed the Russian army to rapidly replenish its forces and to manufacture drones on an industrial scale that Kyiv simply cannot compete with. “In their total and centralized organizational approach the Russians really do get some things right,” Illia admitted glumly. The purchase of drones on international markets—notably from Turkish manufacturers—and Western military provisions have only somewhat ameliorated the situation for Kyiv.
The Russians, too, have relied on foreign suppliers to build their drone arsenal, forging a partnership with Tehran to transfer Iranian UAVs. The Iranian supply began in summer of 2022, which is also when the Russians first received training on drone technology in Iran. The first shipment of Shahed and Mohajer reconnaissance and attack drones took place on Aug. 19, 2022. The Russians reportedly then flew a plane with cash and choice British and American anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Iran. The partnership has grown exponentially since. Iranian drones are now assembled in the Tatarstan region by imported African workers.
In addition to Iran, Russia is also cooperating with China to produce the Chinese designed and developed Garpiya long-range attack drones. The engines and various parts for the drone are Chinese made. On Oct. 17, the same day as the drone attack on Mykolaiv, the U.S. government imposed additional sanctions on private companies and individuals for their involvement in the development and production of the Garpiya drones. According to the Treasury Department’s press release, the Garpiya is “produced at PRC-based factories in collaboration with Russian defense firms before transferring the drones to Russia for use against Ukraine.” According to the head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Russian drones now outnumber Ukraine’s six to one.
Both sides are constantly innovating, but the feedback loop is such that no particular addition or technological tweak proves itself useful for long, as both armies quickly develop countermeasures. The Russians have been effective at electronic jamming and counter-drone warfare, as evidenced in their successful thwarting of Ukraine’s Nov. 10 drone attack on Moscow. Ukrainian drone operators have lost many more over the last year than they would care to admit to, and will often lose more drones to Russian jamming than they do to small arms or anti-drone fire. (YouTube and Telegram channels are replete with videos of Russian soldiers surviving kamikaze drone attacks with a luckily aimed shotgun blast.)
The Angry Birds’ Backfire drone is intended to overcome signal jamming. The drone operates autonomously, with preset navigation that obviates the need for constant communication with its operator. “The Ukrainian civilian drone community is full of different projects competing against one another,” Illia told me. “Projects that are in various stages of development—the research or prototype stage, the creation of serial models and construction phase, the transitioning from serial to mass production phase that is needed to receive state funding. Ukrainian units are all in competition with one another for talent, and the Angry Birds are no different.”
Illia also pointed out that the latest wave of mobilization in Ukraine was on the verge of bringing in a new cohort of experienced IT programmers and engineers into the army. Many of these professional class men might have hoped to sit out the draft. But, realizing that the war is likely to continue for a long time, they may now be lured to work on drones if the alternative was to storm trenches or serve in front-line artillery. Ukrainian television has over the last few months filled up with mobilization ads with the slogan “be yourself,” featuring shots of gamers transitioning from blowing up tanks in video games to blowing up Russian tanks in the field. The Ukrainian army is hoping to attract many more computer programmers and engineers into its units. Many of those civilians would very likely prefer to be in a unit that resembles a tech startup.
“We have to innovate to survive,” one of Ukraine’s most effective FPV drone pilots recently explained. “The work we do hasn’t changed our war. It has changed all wars forever.”
The Iranian drone attacks against Israel, be it from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon, attest to this fact. After Iran’s combined drone and missile attack in April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted, “Shaheds in the skies above Ukraine sound identical to those over the Middle East. The impact of ballistic missiles, if they are not intercepted, is the same everywhere.” Lamenting the lack of full support from Ukraine’s partners, Zelenskyy added, “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles. Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.”
On my last night with the unit, Illia graciously invited me to his family dacha in a regional village to share a night of barbecue along with members of the unit. Meeting his family, including his brothers who are also fighting in the Ukrainian army, I learned from his mother of the remarkable fissure that the war has caused within Illia’s family. On his mother’s side Illia is a second cousin of the prominent Odessa-born Russian Rabbi Boruch Gorin, one of the most visible rabbis inside Russian officialdom. The Moscow Yeshiva-educated Gorin is the founder and editor of Russia’s most high-brow Jewish publishing house as well as the chairman of the board of Moscow’s Tolerance Museum and a former spokesman for Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar. One of the more surreal facts of this war is that Gorin, one of Russia’s prominent rabbis, has two cousins currently carrying arms in the Ukrainian army.
Illia informed me that his cousin knows full well that he has been serving in the Ukrainian armed forces, and has never bothered to contact him since the start of the Russian invasion, though Illia’s mother informed me that Gorin has kept up cordial relations with the female members of the family.
For Illia, his cousin’s decision—and the support of Russian Jews for their country’s invasion—which he regards as a betrayal of Ukraine, has not diminished his sense of identity. Quite the contrary. “It is important for me to identify myself as a Jew,” he said simply.
Vladislav Davidzon is Tablet’s European culture correspondent and a Ukrainian American writer, translator, and critic. He is the Chief Editor of The Odessa Review and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.