In a warm bunker, lined with wooden logs, it is Dmytro’s job to monitor and help the drone crews on the frontline. Perhaps a dozen video feeds come through to his screen on an increasingly hot section of the front, running roughly from Pokrovske to Huliaipole, 50 miles east of Zaporizhzhia city.
Dmytro, 33, is with the 423rd drone battalion, a specialist unit only formed in 2024. He cycles through the feeds, on Ukraine’s battlefield Delta system, expanding each in turn. The grainy images come from one-way FPV (first person view) drones; clearer footage, with heights and speed, from commercially bought Mavic drones; at another point there is a bomber drone, available munitions marked in green.
It is a common sight across Ukraine’s front, though as Dmytro and his commander, Kostya, a captain, point out, the terrain below is distinctive. This is not the more defendable Donetsk, with its towns and slag heaps. It is flat, farming land punctuated by destroyed villages, the meeting point of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
While Vladimir Putin’s most recently stated goal is to take all Donetsk, by diplomacy or force, it is near here that the line yielded in November. The geography makes it tricky to defend, Kostya observes: “There are a lot of fields and if we lose a height advantage, we have to retreat for kilometres.”
An opportunistic Russian attack east of Huliaipole caught the Ukrainian defenders short. The area had been held since 2022 by a war-weary 102nd territorial defence brigade, soldiers from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, but they could not withstand the sudden pressure. A battalion gave way completely. In November about six miles was lost.
The difficulties were caused partly by Ukraine’s intense defence to the east, said Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre. “Because of the big concentration of forces in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, the reserves were exhausted and that’s why this offensive was possible.” Troops from the 225th assault regiment, were redeployed to stabilise the situation by the end of the month.
Though the Ukrainian Mavic drones have an extraordinary reconnaissance ability, with experienced pilots able to pick out movement from a couple of hundred metres away, the Russian invaders have been able to exploit frequent late autumn fog. “They take advantage of our lack of visibility because of the weather,” Kuzan says, and allying it with 250kg glide-bomb strikes.
The Russian airforce still operates about 300 jets and can launch the munitions from 50 to 75 miles away, beyond the range of Ukrainian air-to-air missiles. Though planes and missiles can be tracked on radar, the defenders only have four minutes’ notice. Electronic countermeasures can divert their path, a process that Ukrainian soldiers estimate is effective 70% of the time.
When the weather is clearer, the drone crews work on an unceasing defence. Russian soldiers head forward in ones or twos to pre-assigned points, to try to avoid deadly drones above, often with little food and water, and sometimes even without arms, the weapons to be picked up later if they can survive. But if the weather is clear, the flat terrain and the lack of foliage means that it is not difficult to spot the infiltrators.
Maksym, 29, and Serhii, 24, have just returned from five days on the front, part of a mixed crew of FPV and Mavic pilots. Now they are resting, one playing a video game, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a post-apocalyptic shooter set in the exclusion zone surrounding the destroyed nuclear power plant – raising the obvious question of whether there is any similarity to their frontline work.
“It helps us do our job,” Maksym says, smiling. “If you are flying a jet in one of the battlefield games, it’s basically the same as flying a Mavic. It’s good practise.”
Rest for pilots in position depends on the level of Russian activity. “You can always have enough [time] to sleep 15 minutes and you are OK,” Maksym claims. Both FPV and Mavic drones have up to 20 minutes of battery life, and they can be deployed one after the other if needed, striking at up to 9 miles (15km) – and farther, to 18 miles if an FPV is launched from a second “mother drone”, which also acts as a re-transmitter.
The pilots struggle to recall their most recent deployment, but Maksym brightens and says “on the previous time there was one day when we killed seven Russians and wounded three”, which was “a regular, normal good day”. What does it feel like to kill Russians? “We feel joy because you killed your enemy,” he says, such is the reality of the war.
The statistics make stark reading. In November, the 423rd battalion reported it had killed 418 Russian soldiers, in line with other specialist Ukrainian drone units, their casualty totals publicly reported, part of an established points system, where extra supplies are given to those with the most enemy killed.
Russia’s military suffered an estimated 1,033 casualties a day in November, and 382,000 during 2025, according to British estimates. Drones account for 60% of Russians killed and wounded, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s chief military commander, said, with the country’s pilots flying 10,000 combat missions a day in November.
Vitaliy Hersak, the commander of the unit, speaking from a large bunker near Zaporizhzhia, emphasises that the battalion was created last November, such is the relative novelty of drone warfare. His claim that “we are destroying one and half battalions of the enemy a month” may be a slight exaggeration, but it is not far off the mark. The problem is that Russia seems to have “infinite numbers” while Ukraine is “basically out of infantry” making sectors of the line harder to hold.
Farther east along the front, two experienced drone pilots from the Da Vinci Wolves battalion, in Dnipropetrovsk region, wonder how long they can keep defending with the intensity required. How many of the enemy they have killed? Each wonders if it could be as many as 1,000, though they have no idea, and on an official count the unit’s most successful pilot has more than 400 kills. “I think I could do it for another six months, that’s it,” says one, although the war may well last longer.
There is little sign of any desire to stop resisting, though maintaining an active defence will require new pilots and longer breaks from the frontline. Sasha, whose call sign is Lego, because he was a 3D artist and student, is 23, and learning how to fly FPV drones. He signed up three months ago, telling his father “just before I was going to jump on the train” because he wanted to avoid an extended family conversation.
The softly spoken young man does not know how he will fare. “I haven’t been on a position yet,” he says, but reasons he has to try: “There was a moment when I realised: I can’t sit and do nothing and just live.” Sasha is also reluctant to comment on the ongoing peace negotiations, arguing he has no right to do so, because has had never been in the front. Instead he says, simply, that for Ukraine “the first thing is just survive”.
