Corn grows unchecked in fields; villages are ruined and empty, burnt-out cars sit by the roadside. There are no open firefights, yet the area near the Russian border in Kharkiv region has an eerie stillness.
Reconnaissance drone feeds and fixed cameras stream constantly to monitors in a Ukrainian command post. From a basement control room a few kilometers north of Kharkiv, the National Guard’s Khartiia Brigade watches the frontline on those screens.
The battalion commander, known as “Thunder,” keeps his eyes on the images. With clear skies, surveillance must be meticulous. “If the enemy gets close to our positions, then we’ve overlooked something somewhere,” he says.
Traditional trenches and shelters no longer offer sufficient protection. Thunder says infantry on both sides are digging into underground tunnels to avoid drone strikes. To spot the enemy, brigade soldiers have learned to “read signs on the ground from the sky,” searching for subtle clues: discarded trash on empty streets, recently disturbed soil in gardens, or a small stack of wood in a yard.
Pilot Oleksiy guides a drone toward a house and sees tracks near a well. “It looks like animal prints, but someone could have stopped to fetch water,” he says. He also notes a civilian vehicle that had briefly stopped by a clump of trees earlier. “The enemy is constantly supplying its infantry,” he adds.
When the brigade identifies a suspected Russian hideout, combat drones are sent in. “Russia does the same,” Thunder says. “Whoever has the best hideouts and the upper hand with drones dominates.”
To keep underground shelters from being discovered, Ukrainian units increasingly rely on unmanned ground vehicles instead of cars to move supplies, clear mines and evacuate the wounded. Those robotic platforms can carry between 200 and 700 kilograms of cargo.
Enemy forces actively hunt these ground robots. Commander “Scrooge” describes a midnight operation on the Kupiansk front: on the steppe outside a village, his unit rushed to load quadcopters, combat gear, provisions and fuel onto platforms. They moved urgently because enemy combat drones had been spotted about five kilometers away.
The ground robot named “Dream” went out first, piloted from roughly 40 kilometers away and followed by a reconnaissance drone from about 20 kilometers off. Halfway to its destination, Dream had to stop after an enemy combat drone was sighted. About an hour later the platform was attacked and its cargo was seen burning back at the company control point.
Scrooge calls Dream an “experienced fighter” that took two “wounds” and may be repairable. Other deliveries that night got through, and for him the loss is acceptable. “It’s just a machine,” he says. “The main thing is that no people die.”
Scrooge says Ukrainian ground robots are advancing faster than Russia’s. In the company workshop he shows a combat platform fitted with a large-caliber US Browning machine gun. The platform can engage enemy troops and equipment, and its batteries support long standby times.
Yuriy, the company mechanic, points out the psychological effect: “If a robot with a machine gun can attack the enemy from a distance of one and a half kilometers, that alone is psychologically difficult for those under attack.”
Scrooge, from a military family, predicts a future where robots and drones replace soldiers on the battlefield. “People will be sitting 100 kilometers away and controlling them,” he says, adding that many of the night operations they run could be controlled from anywhere in the world.
Originally published in Ukrainian.