First-person view drones are thought to be responsible for 80% of battlefield deaths in the Russia-Ukraine war. Photo / Dmytro Smolienko, Ukrinform, Future Publishing via Getty Images
In a post-apocalyptic sprawl of overgrown foliage and derelict buildings, we are being chased by drones.
They circle overhead, tracking our movements, poised to dive if we venture outside. They stalk through buildings, hunting us from room to room.
They lurk in long grass, concealed from view – their unblinking eyes fixed on entrances and windows.
Some of us carry Chuika drone detectors, which can intercept first-person-view (FPV) feeds, so we can watch them watching us. The rest resort to eyes and ears.
Hearing the drones is not difficult: they emit a hellish shrieking sound, which becomes deafening as they approach and is said to haunt troops long after their deployment. Escaping them is another matter.
This taste of the “kill zone” was experienced by the Telegraph as part of a simulation hosted by the 2402 Foundation, a Ukrainian frontline organisation providing safety training to journalists, non-governmental organisation workers and others.
As one of the few programmes calibrated to the realities of working in Ukraine, it offered a brief and sobering snapshot of the lethal airborne threat that is a daily reality for people living and fighting on the frontline.
The Russia-Ukraine war was expected to hinge on artillery and tanks but has become a contest of drones and electronic warfare, extending tens of kilometres beyond the front in both directions. This zone is constantly expanding as drone technology improves, giving them longer ranges.
High in the sky, long-range reconnaissance drones monitor every twitch of movement from the troops below.
Kamikaze and precision bomber drones lurk underneath for targets, some tethered to fibre-optic cables capable of evading detection and electronic warfare, which lace the fields and buildings.
Roads are pockmarked with craters and littered with the burned-out husks of vehicles. Those that still dare to traverse the highways encase their cars and trucks in metal cages or spikes.
Bodies often cannot be retrieved. The wounded often cannot be evacuated, except by using robots that trundle across the pitted terrain.
As for troops, they are most likely to travel in small groups, under the cover of fog and in anti-thermal clothing to avoid detection. Drones are thought to be responsible for around 80% of frontline losses on each side.
An FPV model costs from about £320 ($740), which is a small price to pay to take a human life. The kill zone has become an ever-evolving test ground for the technologies designed to take it.
Media workers can easily become targets. A few months ago, Russian drones killed three reporters and injured several others. In recent weeks, Ukrainians have been debating whether journalists should be allowed to carry weapons capable of downing drones.
In the absence of such measures, the instructors at the 2402 Foundation offered us some key rules.
Rule one: When confronted head-on with an FPV drone, scatter. Clustered, you can all be taken out in a single strike. On your own, you are a less valuable target. The drone is forced to choose. Then it comes down to chance – a roll of the dice.
Rule two: If there is no cover, reduce your silhouette; if there is cover, run for your life. Stay in the shadows. Camouflage yourself as best you can. Look for walls to hide your heat signature, or foliage to reduce your visibility.
Rule three: If you survive, pray that now you have been seen, more are not coming.
None of these rules is guaranteed to save you. We are not being taught how to survive, but “how to try to survive”.
For drone operators on both sides, this is no abstraction. Every day, their camera-carrying, bomb-laden drones traverse Ukraine’s invaded land, seeking enemy targets.
Under an overcast sky on a vast field kilometres from the capital, Kyiv, the Telegraph visited Ukrainian drone operators testing quadcopter FPVs (models with four rotors).
They belong to Drone Fight Club, an academy founded by Vladyslav Plaksin, a professional pilot. The club has trained more than 7000 drone pilots and develops unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology in dialogue with manufacturers and frontline troops.
Its instructors, developers and test pilots regularly travel to the front to ensure their work keeps pace with rapid battlefield innovation. The expansion of drone technology has led some to invoke the idea of a “robot war” across Ukraine’s frontline.
The reality is that human skills are more important than ever. Russia and Ukraine are racing to train highly skilled drone operators, with Moscow aiming to have a million by 2030.
Plaksin, who compared piloting a drone to “controlling a tiger”, said that although anyone can be trained to fly UAVs, the skills that make a particularly successful operator may be unexpected.
He told the Telegraph that there was a misconception that good reaction times were the most important trait, but in reality, “when you’re flying, you need to think in the future. Everything you’re doing now is already in the past.
“You need to know where your drone will be in two, three seconds – that’s why musicians make great operators.”
In a portable cabin, a frontline drone operator and instructor with the call sign Girya, who has trained more than 1500 drone pilots, is steering a drone with a thermal imaging camera through the fields. A screen shows bodies, car tyres and other warm objects in blinding white.
It is a relief to be on the other side of the camera this time, but watching Girya’s movements lays bare how new developments are making it harder and harder to hide in the kill zone.
Girya, who has more than 1000 hours of experience piloting drones, said: “Previously, we mostly used thermal cameras at night. Now we use them in the day, especially in winter, because it helps you to find people hiding in white clothes against the snow, which is hard to see with an optical camera.
“And when somebody tries to hide in the field or in the treeline, the thermal camera gives you a really good chance of finding them.”
High demand for pilots and elevated danger near the frontline have led to innovations in training, too. Drone Fight Club founded the Ukraine Fight Drone Simulator, which allows pilots to gain realistic experience hundreds of kilometres from the front.
The academy has developed two versions of the software. A streamlined version is available to play for a modest fee on Steam, a gaming platform. The other is a restricted, military-grade iteration supplied exclusively to Ukraine’s armed forces to ensure it cannot be repurposed by Russia’s military to train its own pilots.
The Telegraph was granted access to the military version of the software, which Plaksin said had been used by 15,000 pilots to accumulate more than 500,000 combined hours of training, at the Drone Fight Club’s office in Kyiv.
On screen, we are armed with a tactical bomber and whisked to Snake Island, a small outcrop in the Black Sea near the Danube Delta, where, as Plaksin puts it, “the Russian warship went and f***ed itself” in 2022.
The exercise proves resistant to beginner’s luck. My efforts to navigate the drone through a sequence of training hoops towards its target are far from the smooth-sailing FPV footage I am used to seeing on social media feeds.
Eventually, Plaksin is forced to intervene, deftly navigating the Lucky Strike through the obstacle course in a few fluent strokes and positioning it neatly above a Russian logistics vehicle marked with the militarist symbol Z.
“Now, you can bomb,” he says politely, leaving me to flick the switch that sends the drone’s payload sailing onto the head of the truck. We watch as the hyper-realistic vehicle abruptly bursts into flames, sending animated smoke into the air.
The evolving logic of the war has made drone operators high-value targets who are systematically hunted by Russian forces.
Chief among them is Rubikon, a formidable unit made up of the country’s foremost technical specialists who track and try to eliminate Ukrainian pilots.
Plaksin said: “When the war began, priority targets for the Russians were artillery forces because they inflicted the most damage on the Army. Now, FPV operators have this medal. I think 95% of countries don’t understand that because they still think like before.”
In March, Ukraine’s armed forces struck 151,207 targets with drones, a 50% increase on February, according to Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Army chief. The result of these changes has been a fast-paced race between the two sides to achieve drone supremacy on the battlefield.
Last week, the Institute for the Study of War declared that Ukraine had achieved a “drone advantage over Russian forces”.
Plaksin said there was little use in comparing the two sides, which are asymmetrical in terms of resources, manpower and development. He said: “Imagine two guys running. One has huge, long legs and the other one trains more. But they’re both running at the same speed, for different reasons.”
His long-term assessment was more sober – and a warning.
“We’re training [the Russians]. We give them a good sparring partner who trains them to intercept different types of drones. And they’re becoming more professional.
“So it will be very simple to attack other European countries. Because they have this knowledge.”
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