Denys, a soldier with Ukraine’s Khyzhak brigade, describes a new kind of war. Standing in a barracks workshop with piles of basic Ukrainian First Person View (FPV) drones behind him, he says simply: “There are fewer gunfights because there are more drone fights.”
Frontlines that were once a gunshot apart are now a killing zone several miles deep, as Russian and Ukrainian drone squads, hidden about one- to three miles behind the frontline, target each other’s forces with simple aerial attacks. “Back in 2022, we were still running around with machine guns from the tree lines,” Denys says, almost with nostalgia.
