Ukraine’s New Way of War

Since entering office in January, President Donald Trump has pressed for a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, largely on Russian terms. “You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their infamous February Oval Office meeting—suggesting that Ukraine could resist a Russian takeover only with continued American military backing or Russia’s voluntary restraint.

And yet, despite flagging U.S. support, Ukrainian forces continue to hold the Russians off, and their resilience points to Kyiv’s growing autonomy from the United States. In fact, the conflict’s front line, which extends for about 1,900 miles and features intense combat along 700 of them, has not moved much since Trump took office in January. What’s keeping Ukraine in the fight is not Russian mercy, or even solely American arms: It’s innovation.

In just three years, Ukraine’s military has evolved from defending itself with leftover Soviet weapons to pioneering a new kind of warfare. In 2022, observers described combat in Ukraine as 20th-century-style trench warfare, dependent on tanks. Ukrainian soldiers had little choice but to fire whatever old shells they could find. The nature of the battlefield had changed by 2023 once the United States and other Western allies began supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons systems, including HIMARS rocket launchers and ATACMS long-range missiles. Recently, however, the U.S. president has thrown the future of American military aid to Ukraine into question. Last month, he even suggested that the U.S. might hesitate to sell Ukraine Patriot missile systems.

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Fortunately for Ukraine, American weapons are not the only factor that has rebalanced the battlefield in the past three years. Starting in 2024, Ukrainian-made drones definitively changed the way both sides waged war. For Ukraine, the adjustment was not just tactical, but a broader, doctrinal evolution in how its military fights.

In March, I embedded with three different frontline brigades to see firsthand how they were engaging the enemy, and what the new technology they employed could mean if Ukraine loses access to American weapons systems. Drones now guide artillery, deliver payloads, resupply units, and even map out minefields. They’re fast, cheap, adaptable—and built right at home. Brigades across the front use them daily, and unlike tanks or long-range missiles, these systems can be updated weekly to meet changing battlefield demands. They are what’s keeping Ukraine in the fight—and they may just be changing the face of warfare more generally.

The 13th Khartiia Brigade, a combat unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, is fighting in the North Kharkiv region. At the time of my visit, the front line was relatively stable, as the Ukrainians slowly pushed enemy troops closer to the Russian border. (Full disclosure: I have family serving in the Khartiia Brigade.)

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Reconnaissance drones survey the front line 24 hours a day. Nothing that happens within 20 kilometers on either side escapes their view. In the early spring, the trees were bare, and after a year of active combat, most buildings had been destroyed. The sight lines were clear, and the drones could pick up the slightest movement.

Khartiia had managed to cut off the logistics of some Russian units in the area, and early on the morning of March 19, several soldiers indicated that they were ready to surrender. Four of them followed a Ukrainian drone that guided them out of the forest—only for a Russian drone to strike two of them. Ukrainian soldiers later told me that the surviving two said they’d spent more than eight months in the area, including more than a month in a tiny dugout. They’d surrendered primarily from hunger.

At one of the brigade’s tactical operation centers, a room where one battalion monitors its territory across a multiscreen display with maps, I watched black-and-white aerial footage of Ukrainian attack drones striking a Russian dugout in the forest. A battalion commander who went by the call name Zhyvchyk—“Zest” in Ukrainian—told me that more than 18 Russian soldiers had surrendered to his battalion in the previous month. In one incident captured on video, a Russian soldier threw a grenade into his commander’s dugout before surrendering. He told the reconnaissance unit that his commanders were receiving air-dropped food parcels that they weren’t sharing with subordinates.

The Ukrainian military has developed a battlefield-management system called Delta, which integrates information from reconnaissance, drones, satellite imagery, and intelligence. Khartiia is considered one of the most technologically savvy units, with the best analytics: Its Delta map is marked with symbols and colors that differentiate among active Ukrainian and Russian dugouts, showing which have been smashed or overtaken so that drone pilots can make quick decisions and avoid wasting drones.

As sophisticated as the combat zone looks on-screen in the tactical operation center, in real life, it is very primitive. For more than a year, the Ukrainian and Russian militaries have avoided using heavily fortified trenches, because they are too visible from the sky. Instead infantry soldiers squeeze into foxholes in groups of two or three. To defend themselves from drone strikes, both armies seek to jam the signals that link drones to their operators, often using portable electronic-warfare systems. Those mounted to the tops of vehicles cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand U.S. dollars.

The drones themselves run a gamut of cost and lethality. FPV (or first-person-view) drones, informally known as kamikazes because they destroy themselves, are the cheapest, starting at $350. Among the more expensive drones are bombers, which drop explosives for air strikes or remote land-mining and can be used multiple times. Operating them is more dangerous than the kamikazes: They need to return to their pilots for reloading, so the operators’ positions risk being spotted.

Ukrainians speak with particular pride of their heavy bombers, or Vampires. Russians have nicknamed these “Baba Yaga,” after a mythological Slavic witch who flies in a mortar and pestle. Vampires cost anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 and are mainly used in fights, but also for logistics: They can deliver ammunition, medicine, and food to the infantry and to other pilots. A Vampire can carry as much as 33 pounds and fly more than six miles. Khartiia commanders claim that Russian delivery drones can carry no more than a pound.

During the week of my embed, the Russian military identified and destroyed a few of the Vampire pilots’ positions. Still, I was permitted to visit one pilot position where a team of three soldiers stayed up at night, sending Vampires out with parcels of ammunition, food, and medicine from dusk ’til dawn.

I asked Zhyvchyk to summarize how Ukraine’s war-fighting had changed over three years. He gave me a handwritten essay, literally titled “How the War Has Changed Since 2022.” A 28-year-old from a predominantly Russian-speaking part of the Donbas region, he had been working with a tutor to improve his written Ukrainian. That essay was his homework. It read, in part:

My next embed was with the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, Kholodnyi Yar, one of Ukraine’s largest and most legendary brigades. Before the current war, it was involved in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Lebanon, and it is known for winning battles with infantry vehicles and heavy artillery. Nevertheless, drones have changed the way it fights.

The 93rd was in a part of Donbas, in the direction of Toretsk, that had seen intense engagement over the past three years. A kamikaze-drone pilot by the call name of Yenot, or “Raccoon,” told me he’d participated in some of the war’s most brutal battles, including near Bakhmut.

We drove to his position at 4 a.m. at high speed, passing obliterated villages. Once we’d settled into the dugout, I watched a live video feed of the territory and was struck by the wasteland Donbas had become. What soldiers called “gardens” were trees burned to ashes. Not even the skeletons of houses remained, only rubble. But Yenot still found targets: some movement near a dugout, a Russian observation drone, a vehicle.

Yenot, now 36, served in the 93rd Brigade during the first Russian invasion, in 2015 and 2016. Back then, he was wounded in a fight near the Donetsk airport, by a sniper who shot him from less than a quarter of a mile away. He told me he could no longer imagine fighting at such close range. Now, from a basement, he could kill a Russian soldier several kilometers away with greater precision than that sniper.

A Russian soldier appeared on Yenot’s screen, riding a motorbike. He was most likely delivering ammunition to one of the dugouts, Yenot told me—“a suicide mission,” in his estimation. He dispatched a drone to strike the Russian man, but the explosive did not detonate. Then he sent a second, which struck him dead.

To compare drone warfare to a video game is a cliché, Yenot told me, that doesn’t begin to capture the tension of knowing that the enemy is constantly searching out your position for attack. When a soldier leaves his dugout to launch a drone strike, or even to use the bathroom, he first checks with neighboring units and scans interactive maps to see if an enemy drone is nearby. In the summer of 2024, a dugout where Yenot was piloting observation drones came under attack. For more than eight hours, he ran between dugouts seeking shelter as the foxholes were smashed one by one.

Before joining the army, Yenot studied marketing and worked at a bank in Dnipro, a large city in the South. He had never studied to become a drone pilot. On the job, he learned to be one of the best in his battalion.

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The day I spent watching Yenot, his work was unremitting. He fought and communicated with other units continuously, making innumerable high-pressure decisions about how much ammunition to use when. His only breaks came when the battery for the observation drones that support the attack drones needed to recharge. He didn’t have time for a proper meal—he did drink six or seven energy drinks that day, which he told me was typical.

At one point, Yenot spotted a Russian tank moving through his terrain. Tanks are tough to destroy with kamikaze drones, and Ukraine had no nearby artillery unit for support. But if he could pull it off, he’d be removing a $1 million piece of Russian equipment from the field. Yenot ordered his subordinates to experiment with the different types of explosives their drones could deliver. Some payloads might not be effective; others might be lost because of signal jamming. He expended five drones, each costing $500 to $600, then agonized over whether to keep going. He had to hold some drones back, until the next shipment, for self-defense. In the end, he decided he’d done enough damage to the tank—the soldiers in it probably survived, but the tank now had some vulnerabilities that a more powerful Ukrainian weapon could successfully exploit.

The brigade’s press officer suggested to me that a drop-off in Western weapon supplies might not be as devastating as once thought. At this point, some 40 percent of weapons on the front line are produced in Ukraine. And foreign supplies have never been a cure-all. During the grueling battle for Bakhmut, Yenot told me, Ukraine had too few shells, and those it did have had been produced by a hodgepodge of foreign companies. This made precise targeting difficult to calibrate, because every shell was different. Today artillery shells are still in short supply—but the 93rd mainly uses them when drones need to be recharged.

My last visit was to the area around Pokrovsk, in the region of Donetsk, where I embedded with the 68th Jaeger Brigade. The 68th was formed in early 2022, from civilians, and is not as well known or resourced as the tech-savvy Khartia or the legendary 93rd.

The soldiers in the reconnaissance squad had worked before the war in commerce, construction, and even car smuggling. They were initially in infantry reconnaissance, but now they were all pilots. Not one I spoke with had ever flown in a passenger plane. The unit commander went by the call name Zmiy, or “Snake.” When I visited, his squad was testing the mobile launch of a Ukrainian-made observation drone, called Leleka, from a field by a forest to avoid detection. A Leleka drone can fly up to 62 miles round-trip and provide both a livestream and a recording. It costs more than $38,000—a significant expense for this team, so the unit was extremely careful handling it.

Milka, the commander of one of the 68th’s infantry squads (his call name means “Chocolate Bar”) told me he was tasked with preparing teams for a battlefield surveilled constantly from the air. When infantrymen arrive at their positions, they have less than an hour to dig foxholes that can accommodate two or three men for a period of days. What they can’t carry on their backs is delivered by drones. Exiting the foxhole for any reason is dangerous. On the worst days, soldiers relieve themselves into plastic bags. The brigade rotates its infantry only on days when fog, rain, snow, or heavy wind limit the enemy’s visibility. On some occasions, infantrymen have been stuck in their positions for weeks or even months.

Drones are “the scariest weapon ever,” Viktor, a medic with the 68th Brigade, told me. In years past, medics could hope to evacuate wounded soldiers in time to save their lives. That’s rarely practical now. When the 68th first arrived in the Pokrovsk area a year ago, its predecessors told the medics not to drive anywhere, because their ambulance didn’t have electronic-warfare capabilities that could help it evade drone strikes. Even retrieving the dead has become risky. The medics have taught soldiers how to treat themselves and one another. Infantrymen and women carry medicine with them on their missions, and their medics often guide them remotely, learning as much as they can about the types of injuries sustained and sending needed equipment by drone.

Oleksandr Pipa, a Ukrainian rock musician of the 1990s, runs a workshop in Kyiv that makes drones. The drone sector is full of such people from creative fields, particularly filmmaking. A young worker I spoke with in Pipa’s shop—a veteran of the battle of Bakhmut—knew nothing of his boss’s fame.

As many as 150 Ukrainian companies now produce some 100,000 drones a month, Oleksandr Kamyshin, an adviser to President Zelensky and a former minister for strategic industries, told me. Pipa’s outfit is relatively small, but it is in regular contact with frontline soldiers and upgrades its products almost every other week to suit their needs, Pipa told me. Because Ukrainian drone production is highly diversified, the Russian military never really knows what specific product it will be confronting. This confers an advantage on Ukraine—Pipa compares the country’s drone producers to an “army of ants.”

Modern military doctrine is all about controlling the airspace, Andrii Zagorodniuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense, told me. And what Ukraine lacks in missiles and airpower, it has partly made up for with drones, such that Russia can’t fully control the airspace in its war with Ukraine.

Of course, Russia is adapting its technology, too. It has started using fiber-optic drones, which are tied to the ground by thin fiber-optic cables that unwind as the drone flies. This makes them impossible to jam, but they have to fly low and can therefore be tangled by physical nets.

Photos: Ukraine’s battlefield drones

Ukraine’s innovation in unmanned aerial systems is a homegrown response to an asymmetrical war. Drones will never eliminate the need for other kinds of weaponry. If Ukraine had more long-range weapons and aircraft, it could destroy Russian command and control centers farther from the line of contact and hinder approaching enemy infantry. But without enough such military capabilities, the Ukrainian army has been forced to find other solutions, even at a cost in lives. Its inventiveness is now its best insurance against an uncertain future.

In early March, the United States briefly suspended the military aid and intelligence that the Biden administration had promised Ukraine. After some delay and confusion, the delivery flights resumed. But Trump has made clear, repeatedly, that he has little interest in continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons, and that what he wants is a peace deal, which has so far eluded him.

I asked soldiers and army press officers how the military was responding to the changing winds from Washington. Most said a version of the same thing—that war has taught them to focus on the assignment in front of them and not to worry too much about what’s beyond their control.

“Never, never watch the news, that’s what I tell my people,” Milka, from the 68th Brigade, told me. “I am very practical. If I’m invited to eat borscht, I do it if I see it on the plate in front of me. Yet if someone tells me that we might go and eat borscht somewhere tomorrow, I won’t even bother about that.” Yenot, from the 93rd Brigade, offered a different analogy: “Any soldier can see as far as his gear allows, whether it’s binoculars, a Mavic drone, or satellite. The commander in chief may know the whole situation: He knows whether we have no ammunition and no money left to continue fighting.”

As Ukraine’s partners speak of peace deals and security guarantees, Ukraine’s armed forces are adapting in every way they can to continue carrying out their mission: to defend a stretch of border, to hold off Russian advances on a particular town. They cannot afford the luxury of counting on American commitments or Russian concessions, because for most Ukrainians, what matters above all is physical safety. And the only force protecting human lives in Ukraine is the Ukrainian military.