The fighting in Ukraine no longer resembles the trench warfare of World War I - instead, drones have obliterated solid front lines, creating a death zone, writes "Politico".
The skies above the battlefields are now blackened with drones. Some carry cameras and thermal detectors, others are equipped with bombs and weapons; some simply lie on the ground by paths and roads until they are revived by a passing soldier or vehicle. They use electronic signals or are controlled by unjammable fiber optic cables. Counter-drones aim to block them while hunting their pilots, who are hiding dozens of kilometers from the front.
The result is a gray zone of chaos stretching about 20 kilometers from the front, where drones hunt soldiers, the wounded are left to die because it is extremely difficult to evacuate, and the delivery of ammunition, food and water to the troops is almost impossible.
"We have now moved to a drone-on-drone war," said Colonel Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential administration and a former battlefield commander. "Drones can now ambush, intercept enemy logistics and cut off supplies. They also make it difficult to hold positions: If you are detected, every weapon in the area will immediately rush to destroy you.
A new way of waging war
Drones have played a key role in the fighting since the earliest days of the war in 2022, when Ukraine celebrated the successes of Turkish "Bayraktar" drones against Russian armored columns. However, both Ukraine and Russia initially prepared to fight a classic war marked by artillery duels, mechanized columns and defensive trenches, Palisa explained.
In 2023-2024, however, the war changed and trenches began to disappear, said Ivan Sekach, spokesman for the 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian army, which is fighting in the eastern part of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Instead of long trench lines, the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian army created support and observation posts and relied on drones to compensate for the shortage of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition. In response, the Russian military has begun to reduce the size of its assault units as Ukrainian drones have proven capable of locating and destroying larger concentrations of troops.
Instead of the large-scale "meat wave" attacks that characterized earlier Russian offensives, when large numbers of men were thrown at Ukrainian defenders, Russia is now attacking in small groups, said Colonel Vladislav Voloshin, a spokesman for the Ukrainian army's southern command.
"The Russians need time to assemble an assault group. They crawl, they hide. It takes them two to three days to assemble a group capable of storming our positions," he noted.
Usually two Russian soldiers pave the way, but only one survives, Voloshin added. Smaller groups are harder for Ukrainian drone operators to spot, especially during fog or rain.
"As a result, we have a deep gray zone where Russians infiltrate behind Ukrainian positions, hide there and grow in numbers if they are not spotted and destroyed," Sekach explained.
Bad weather helped Russian soldiers break through Ukrainian defenses in Pokrovsk in Donetsk region earlier this month after a year of trying, as well as at other points along the front, such as the village of Novopavlovka in Dnepropetrovsk and in Zaporizhia region in the central part of the country.
"Fog or rain hinders drone flights, which creates the opportunity for safer logistics, rotation or local operations. Therefore, time windows are used to deploy or reposition forces," Palisa pointed out.
Russia is working to make Ukraine's defense even more difficult.
"The Russian army is trying to expand the kill zone as much as possible, destroying all buildings and shelters with pinpoint strikes to turn it into a completely bare wasteland where it is impossible to hide," Voloshin explained.
A supply nightmare
Drones force artillery away from the front and make it almost impossible to use armored vehicles to supply troops.
"Drones have become useful when it comes to supply and evacuation, combat reconnaissance and remote mining - tasks usually performed by people at war before," Palisa explained.
However, with the increase in drones, even using them for these purposes is becoming increasingly difficult, which turns the front into hell.
Drones make evacuation and rotation, as well as logistics, deadly exercises. "Most soldiers are currently dying during rotation," Voloshin said. "Any type of delivery carries serious risks. So we are using drones more often."
As a result, commanders are forcing soldiers to spend weeks at the front - also called the zero line - without rotation.
"Usually during a rotation, a car moves 5 to 6 kilometers away from the positions. "The soldiers have to walk the rest of the way, hiding in the terrain from drones," Sekach explained.
This creates problems for morale.
"An infantryman who has once spent 60 to 165 days in a hole will not go there again," said Mykola Beleskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at the Center for "Come Back Alive" Initiatives.
Video medicine
It is most difficult for the wounded, as drones critically hinder front-line medicine and evacuation, explained Darina, an anesthesiologist from the "Da Vinci Wolves" battalion of the Ukrainian army.
"Today, a wounded soldier often has to walk, be carried, or even crawl up to 5 kilometers from his position until he is picked up by an armored evacuation vehicle," she noted. "The evacuation vehicle then has to navigate through swarms of Russian drones that can reach up to 20-40 kilometers from frontline positions."
Furthermore, the drones are forcing Ukrainian combat medics to move their medical posts further from the frontline, extending the time it takes to stabilize the wounded. Wounded soldiers must remain in their positions for days or even weeks awaiting evacuation, sometimes carried out by ground-based robotic systems.
Their inability to reach the wounded has forced Ukrainian combat medics to resort to telemedicine, using a Mavic drone to talk to stranded soldiers. "On video, we can see how the tourniquet was applied. Then we can contact the wounded soldier's fellow soldiers and guide them on how to properly help him," Darina said. "Drones are also useful for delivering necessary medicine to positions".
There are reports from open-source researchers that Russia is abandoning wounded troops instead of trying to evacuate them.
Enemy drones make life much more dangerous for pilots who fly them behind the front.
"I remember the days when you could safely go and smoke in a 10-kilometer zone from the contact line. Now we don't enter the zone without a rifle. "Drones with fiber optic cables now reach up to 15 kilometers, so you have to be extremely careful," Sekach explained.
For now, there seems to be no quick fix for the death zone created by drones.
"There is currently no doctrine on how to build a defense in depth when you have very few infantrymen on the front line, and the enemy is engaged in deployment and at the same time cuts off your connection between the front line and the rear and actively eliminates drone operators on the front line," Belieskov pointed out.
"This is the recipe for a slow Russian offensive - the squeeze effect.".