A soldier named Dima from Ukraine’s 68th Jaeger Brigade holds an explosive device next to a vampire drone, which is used to drop explosives or food. Photo / Ed Ram, The Washington Post
The troops huddled around their drone in the dark, carefully fastening the 18kg payload to the bottom before launching it into the clear August sky.
From an underground base, a commander named Viktor watched on a fuzzy screen as the drone homed in on a cluster of trees along the front line near Pokrovsk, where a fire was already burning from a recent hit, and then released its payload.
Packages tumbled down and a Ukrainian soldier – glowing white on the thermal camera – scurried out of his trench to collect them.
“Yeah, guys! Great work,” said Viktor, who is being identified only by his first name in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol. “Mission complete.”
In a wartime sky congested with drones from both sides, this was not a typical attack mission to destroy enemy troops or their equipment.
Instead, the Ukrainian drone unit had dropped food and water to their own foot soldiers who, under constant surveillance by Russian drones, could not be resupplied by the usual means.
Such missions have become increasingly common across Ukraine’s front, where ground troops often deploy with enough supplies to hold a position for only a few days but – facing relentless drone threats – can easily end up stuck for a month or more.
These troops, typically armed only with assault rifles, a machine gun and grenades, are living through trench warfare that is similar in many ways to the miserable conditions of World War I.
To keep the troops alive, Ukraine is deploying its own drones as a lifeline – dropping everything from ammo, cigarettes and calming herbs to rations that taste like home: borscht, cabbage rolls, roasted chicken.
These supply drops help Ukraine preserve its most precious resource: the soldiers holding back the constant Russian advance.
Their task has become more urgent than ever as Russia continues its violent quest to seize more Ukrainian land as United States President Donald Trump seeks a peace deal.
The outcome of the war depends on these trenches scattered across hundreds of kilometres of Ukraine’s east and south, deep inside the grey zone under constant drone scrutiny.
The soldiers in these trenches often must survive for weeks without being detected by Russian forces only a few hundred metres away. The goal is often not even to attack, but just to not retreat.
The drone deliveries come with their own risks: each one could reveal a Ukrainian position and expose them to counter-strikes.
In a small village house a safe distance back from the front, soldiers from Ukraine’s 68th Jaeger Brigade put together care packages for their fellow troops holding the line – wrapping food, water, cigarettes, power banks and ammunition supplies with plastic and tape. Everything must be carefully packed to avoid damage on the long fall – especially grenades, which troops drop separately from their fuses to keep them from exploding.
Every few days, packages like these travel to positions just over 1.5km from the front line.
There, the troops load them on to drones once designed for agricultural use and since adapted to bomb Russian positions.
Now they also drop packages on Ukrainian ones.
Mykhailo, 34, recently returned with three other men from a 38-day rotation in a fortified frontline position that measured only 12sqm.
The most dangerous task, he said, was just getting to and from the position.
Some brigades have armoured vehicles for their infantry, but his relies on just ordinary pick-up trucks.
The group was dropped off 350m from their position and then had to run the rest of the way.
Inside their backpacks, they had a small shovel, a few changes of underwear, shirts and pants, a dozen grenades, 500 bullets and one bottle of water.
“We don’t bring a lot because the boys will drop food later on,” he said.
Those supply drops serve as a tenuous link to the outside world during exhausting rotations on the front.
Soldiers know they will be stuck there until bad weather drives away the drones and creates an opening for a new group to rotate in.
Mykhailo asked for crossword puzzles to pass the time. His deputy company commander, Leonid, 38, said another soldier requested detective novels. The soldier was a native Russian speaker but complained when the team dropped Russian language books, saying he wanted to use the time to improve his Ukrainian.
Even in this more fortified position, which was built when Russians were still 25km away, the conditions are grim.
The soldiers defecate in plastic bags, then toss them as far as they can from their positions. They add chlorine tablets to puddles of urine to stem the stench.
In winter, they burn hand sanitiser to stay warm without creating smoke. They take turns sleeping and scanning the surroundings with binoculars or a periscope.
Radios are their only mode of communication. They send coded messages about Russian movements and make requests for drones to drop new supplies.
“At first, you just commit. You completely do your job the best you can,” Mykhailo said.
“But closer to 30 or 35 days, you start thinking about your life.”
As much as he tried to push the memories down, visions of simpler times would sometimes pop into his mind: the job in a grocery warehouse or his wife, Iryna, and their two kids – a boy, Yaroslav, who will soon turn 13 and a girl, Inessa, who is almost 4, waiting for him at home in central Ukraine.
Oleksandr, 39, also tries not to think about his family – but wears an image of them engraved on a metal tag around his neck.
Mykhailo’s fortified position was luxurious compared to the trench Oleksandr was assigned to defend, which he described as little more than a dirt hole attached to a hastily built tunnel.
He spent a month there this summer – aware that each time he or a fellow soldier stepped out of the position to collect a package of supplies, they risked detection.
Russia assaulted the line multiple times a day, searching for their exact position. The four soldiers holding the trench would shoot the advancing troops, then take turns dragging the bodies of the dead away to the tree line to keep the Russian drones from detecting their position.
After weeks, a large pile of corpses was rotting nearby, Oleksandr recalled.
Then one day, the Russians found them.
Their shelter was pounded by mortars and drones, burying Oleksandr’s friend, who went by the call sign Tarakan, or “cockroach”, under six feet of soil.
Oleksandr desperately dug for 20 minutes as the attacks continued but only managed to uncover his friend’s legs. Over the radio, the commander ordered him and the two other survivors to retreat. They had to leave Tarakan behind, buried alive.
“All three of us were thinking, ‘This is it. We will be here forever,’” he recalled.
Facing personnel shortages and extreme danger daily, Oleksandr’s deputy battalion commander Ira, 37, said, that she resorts to asking soldiers to “stretch their limits”.
“You need to kiss these people’s feet,” she said.
The least their fellow troops can do for them is deliver some flicker of normality.
Valerii, 41, who trained as a baker, recently returned from 32 days in a trench.
Each day, after midnight, he and the three other troops would take turns crossing off a day on a calendar. He tried not to think of his family.
“You just push that away,” he said. “Like every other soldier, your thoughts are to survive – and to hope the enemy doesn’t reach you.”
On July 25, he radioed his command point. It was his birthday, he said, and besides survival, he had just two wishes. The first was that someone call his mother and tell her he was alive. The second was for a piece of chocolate. “I just wanted to have something sweet with my coffee,” he said. “That’s all.”
That day, a drone flew over their position and dropped Snickers bars from the sky – enough for all four men in the trench.
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