AI is playing an ever-greater role in the Ukraine war but the basic principle remains the same: kill or be killed
Anthony Loyd
May 17, 2024
The Times
The Ukrainian drone crews kill Russian soldiers in different ways, and say different things as they do so.
In the darkness of a summer night, the remote operators of the Vampire hexacopters follow a precise set of instructions before dropping their bombs on the enemy’s infantrymen. Yet when the kamikaze FPV drone teams kill, there is a heated rush of words as they send their explosives-packed craft hurtling down onto the Russian forces. “Yes, yes, yes! Over here, over here! Yes, yes, yes! Let’s go, yes!” urges a co-pilot, as his pilot finds the target. The final second of the Russian’s life — he had stood up in his foxhole, hearing the drone, and had grabbed his rifle — is captured in a grainy transmission before the video abruptly fizzles out. Mission complete.
Whatever the differences in the lexicon of killing among the crews who operate the Vampires and the smaller FPV drones — first-person view — on Ukraine’s eastern front, every soldier there, Ukrainian and Russian alike, is now accustomed to the threat of death from above.
Lieutenant-General Oleksandr Pavliuk, Ukraine’s commander of ground forces, recently confirmed that medium- and short-range strike drones now kill more soldiers on both sides of the conflict than any other weapon; a grim milestone in the history of warfare and a testament to the accelerating efficiency of a weapon that has the potential to become deadlier still. “The biggest losses on the enemy side are caused by our drones,” said Pavliuk, 53. “The assault strike drone is the most effective weapon for now.”
But he added: “On the Ukrainian side it is the same. Most of our casualties come from Russian drones, then from their artillery, then aviation.”
This is not only the first full-scale drone war in history, with thousands flying every day across the 600-mile front line, observing or killing soldiers, but a race of drone evolution too, as each side seeks to outwit the other’s electronic jamming defences and develop more efficient AI models.
‘Like robots fighting wars’: the kamikaze drones
The Times was given access to one of the newly formed Ukrainian strike drone companies, known by the acronym RUBpAK, in the elite 95th Air Assault Brigade. They are fighting a Russian advance on the front line east of Lyman. “As a kid I watched sci-fi movies of robots
fighting wars,” said Andrii, the commander of an FPV drone team at the entrance to his bunker in the woods. “That future is becoming our today.”
In the bunker, a pilot called Vadim was engrossed in his task, hunting Russian troops through his FPV immersive goggles. The zone was already littered with drone kills. The area covered by each FPV team in this sector of the front line is about a mile wide and three miles deep. By the unit’s own detailed accounting — which has to be backed by video footage and submitted to the military’s “Delta” situational battlefield awareness system — no fewer than 130 Russian military vehicles, including tanks, have been destroyed in their area over the past three and a half months.
Drones have been involved in the destruction of almost every one of these vehicles; either direct hits from strike drones, or surveillance drones guiding artillery fire, or by mine-laying drones. “Nobody counts the infantry we kill,” said Andrii, a former landscape gardener from Kyiv. “Sometimes we fly a drone right into a group of soldiers. Or into a bunker. We have no idea how many Russians are dead and how many are wounded.”
Conversation ceased for a moment as Vadim spotted a group of six Russians scuttling from a trench into the woods. He steered his FPV drone, a model nicknamed “The Russian Cutter”, armed with a 1.5kg warhead, in their direction but missed the main group by seconds. Not all escaped the blast, however: a screen feed from an observation drone flying above the target showed one Russian soldier lying motionless on the ground.
Anton, the co-pilot and navigator — a former geography teacher — was not too disappointed. “For me, killing the enemy is easy,” he said “If I don’t kill him, he’ll come and kill me or my relatives.”
When the 95th Brigade’s RUBpAK company was formed in March last year, its FPV pilots were always in a rush to strike Russian vehicles. Now that they are more experienced, they pick their moments carefully: once a target has been identified by an observation drone, they choose which explosive to use and take their time to work out where best to deliver it.
“With something like a BMP [armoured personnel carrier] we know to mount an RPG warhead on an FPV, then fly it front-on into the driver’s hatch,” said Anton. “Hit at the right angle, all the ammunition detonates inside the vehicle and it all goes up. Recently we flew an FPV right into a driver’s head. There was a group of infantry on top and the whole thing went up. Bodies everywhere.”
By its nature, drone warfare has a huge wastage rate. The Royal United Services Institute think tank estimated last year that Ukraine’s armed forces were getting through about 10,000 drones a month. Some are electronically jammed and crash, or are shot down. Others are the one-way kamikaze FPVs which, in just 15 months, have emerged from prototypes based on hobbyists’ drones to dominate the forward edges of the front.
The commander of the 95th Brigade’s RUBpAK company, a 26-year-old veteran captain known as Khan, estimated that his own unit gets through 300 to 500 FPVs a month. “The reason FPVs are so widely used is because they are cheap,” he said. “That is what is effective about them. They can be replaced easily. We need the cheapest way to hit targets with replaceable systems.”
Cost, sustainability and a shortage of artillery ammunition were all factors that drove Ukraine to take the lead last year in strike-drone development. Short of artillery munitions and money, the Ukrainian army realised that it could destroy many more Russian armoured vehicles using FPV drones that cost perhaps $500 to make, than with GPS-guided artillery shells from the West that cost $100,000 each, or Javelin anti-tank missiles that cost $80,000.
“These drones are not a replacement for artillery,” cautioned Khan. “Drones do not have the same power. They are an addition to artillery, a cheaper alternative, with a specific role. Trenches can be a good place to take cover from artillery but not such a good place to hide from a grenade dropped by a drone. That’ll kill you.”
Since realising the drones’ capability in closing the firepower gap with Russia, Ukraine has thrown itself into their manufacture. In December President Zelensky pledged to produce one million this year and in February he announced the creation of a new department in the armed forces, the Unmanned Systems Forces, to multiply and maximise Ukraine’s drone capabilities.
Though FPVs are the most accomplished precision killers, other civilian drones have been repurposed with equal lethality. Optimised for night operations, the 95th Brigade’s hexacopter Vampire drone, known as Baba Yaga after a witch in Slavic folklore, was originally built for farmers. Now it acts as a medium-range bomber.
The size and power of the Vampire, as well as the accuracy of its strikes, has earned it a sinister reputation among Russian infantry. “We know from intercepts that some of the Russian soldiers are so spooked by Baba Yaga that they think some models have mechanical claws,” said Maksym, 36, the engineer of a Vampire team in a frontline bunker east of Lyman. “They think it is used to snatch wounded soldiers away for experiments in laboratories.”
His Vampire team killed two Russian soldiers that night by dropping mortar rounds, but the drone performed other missions too, ferrying anti-tank mines to the front to shield Ukrainian infantry from the approach of Russian armour. Carrying an optimum 12kg payload, the Vampire can also be used to deliver grenades, water and even medical supplies.
The drone crew said they felt no pity for the two they killed that night, nor any other Russian soldiers. “They came into our country and started harming our women and children,” said Timor, 32, the Vampire pilot, formerly a technician for an oil company. “They cause so much grief. Why would we feel pity for them, when they have no pity for us, and when they have come to capture our land?”
Killing has become familiar, but the drone crews still see things that surprise them. At dawn, in another underground bunker close to Russian advancing units, we visited a two-man team from the 95th Brigade tasked with dropping grenades over the Russians.
The two soldiers were young and their eyes were circled with tiredness. They said they were existing on barely two hours of sleep between missions. The sounds from above ground included the thump of artillery, fire from a helicopter gunship, and the whine of a suicide drone — whose, they couldn’t tell.
On their control tablet, we watched their drone fly over a vista of churned earth and sprawled Russian bodies. They spotted a soldier’s spider hole and dropped a grenade at its entrance. “There’s an ocean of them hidden out there,” said Bohdan, 28, a former handyman and artist. “It starts with one small assault group but if they manage to capture one of our posts, then others emerge and rush forward to it in a swarm.” He added, in an aside, that only two of the 16 soldiers who completed the drone course with him 18 months earlier were still alive.
Fear of the Vampires is such that some Russians have gone to extreme lengths to avoid them. Bohdan described how one infantryman they spotted in a shell hole without his rifle had pulled out a knife and slashed his own throat as their drone hovered above him. “We saw him die,” said Bohdan. “He was hoping to end his pain fast but he took about an hour to die. He deserved to die like that, coming to our land.”
How AI drones will change the future of war
Beneath these angry, buzzing skies, Ukraine’s battlefields have already been altered by drones. Soldiers’ positions are more dispersed and the men spend longer underground. Transport is minimal within the “grey zone” on either side of the front line, a belt of destroyed territory that widens by the season. The infantry are netting their trenches against FPVs; the tankmen fitting more elaborate cages to their turrets; electronic warfare jammers are everywhere.
Tactics have changed too. Every platoon now operates with drones flying in support. The days of large-scale armoured columns are over and even the depth from the front at which armoured units can safely gather is increasing.
“Last summer we broke up a big Russian attack that was gathering five miles away,” said Andrii. “With 13 drones, maybe worth $7,000, our brigade broke an armoured attack before it started. I see a future when vehicles will not be able to move within a 12-mile grey zone.”
Ukraine’s drones gave it an undeniable early advantage last year — but Russia quickly recovered and is now outproducing them. Both sides are churning out hundreds of thousands of drones a month, and are keen to enhance them with AI to defeat jamming measures.
Essentially, by pre-programming navigation, target recognition and strike options into a drone’s AI algorithms, operators can make them less vulnerable to electronic warfare systems that can easily scramble drones reliant on GPS signals.
AI is increasingly being used. Six months ago the Saker Scout drone, with integral AI navigation and target-recognition capabilities, came into operation with Ukrainian forces, who were already using AI with drone models such as the Autel EVO Max 4T to respond automatically to movement on the ground.
The US Switchblade 300 loitering drone, and Russia’s Ovod, both of which include AI target-recognition systems, are also flying over the front line. Yet these systems come with a hefty price tag: the Switchblade 300 costs around $80,000, which undermines the ethos of Ukraine’s low-cost drone strategy at a time when the war has become as much an economic struggle as a clash of armies.
Some Ukrainian commanders believe that the advent of AI in the drone campaign will one day effectively freeze the front lines, making all overground movement near impossible. Others suggest that the cost of AI will make its widescale use prohibitive.
In the war’s grey-zone future, both armies are endeavouring to gift their killing drones with as much artificial intelligence as is economically possible to defeat the human soldiers across no man’s land. “We don’t know the borders of AI,” said Andrii. “But we know we are close to a future in which AI decides which targets we will hit. It is not a question of fearing AI or not fearing AI. It is a reality. War is a driver of progress, good and bad.”
Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’. Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents.