High-tech warfare in Ukraine’s 'death zone'
The corn in the fields stands several feet tall — it hasn’t been harvested in a long time. Villages are destroyed and deserted. Burnt-out car wrecks line the roadsides. There is no sign of fighting — the area in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border looks downright eerie.
Tall corn stalks rise from unharvested fields. Villages lie in ruins and are largely empty. Burned-out cars sit along the roads. On the surface there is no active firefight — the area north of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, feels unnervingly still.
Inside a basement command post in an abandoned building a few kilometers from the front, operators from the National Guard’s Khartiia Brigade monitor a constant feed of images from reconnaissance drones and fixed cameras. The battalion commander, who uses the callsign "Thunder," watches multiple screens without taking his eyes off them. With clear skies, every flight and shadow must be scrutinized. "If the enemy gets close to our positions, we’ve missed something," he says.
Static trenches and makeshift shelters no longer guarantee safety. Soldiers on both sides are moving underground, tunneling to avoid being exposed to drone strikes. To detect enemy activity, brigade members have learned to "read signs on the ground from the sky." They look for tiny indicators: discarded trash in deserted streets, freshly turned soil in a garden, a small woodpile in an otherwise empty yard.
A pilot named Oleksiy steers a drone toward a house and spots something near a well. "It looks like animal tracks, but someone might have been there to fetch water," he says. Nearby, reconnaissance had earlier noticed a civilian car that had stopped briefly beside a stand of trees. Little pauses like that can signal resupply or reconnaissance by opposing forces. "The enemy constantly supplies its infantry," Oleksiy adds.
When the brigade confirms a Russian hideout, armed drones are sent to strike. "Russia does the same," Thunder says. "Whoever masters concealment and drone tactics gains the upper hand."
Shielding underground shelters from detection has led to another change: Ukraine increasingly relies on unmanned ground vehicles to move supplies, clear mines and evacuate wounded soldiers. These robotic platforms can carry between roughly 200 and 700 kilograms of cargo.
The enemy actively targets these ground robots, says a commander who goes by "Scrooge." At midnight on the steppe near the Kupiansk front, DW met him as his unit prepared unmanned platforms for a supply run. Quadcopters, combat gear, rations and fuel were loaded quickly — all while enemy attack drones patrolled about five kilometers away.
Their first platform, nicknamed "Dream," was sent with a two-hour ETA. A pilot controlled it from 40 kilometers away while a reconnaissance drone flew overwatch at about 20 kilometers. Halfway along the route, Dream halted when an enemy combat drone appeared. About an hour later it was hit; at the company control point they watched its cargo ignite.
Scrooge calls Dream an "experienced fighter" that had taken two previous hits and will likely be repaired. Other deliveries that night made it through, so losing Dream was not a disaster. "It’s just a machine," he says. "The main thing is no people die."
Scrooge believes Ukrainian ground robots are evolving faster than Russia’s. In his company workshop he shows a combat platform mounted with a heavy-caliber Browning machine gun. He says such platforms can destroy enemy troops and equipment, and their batteries support long standby times. "If a robot with a machine gun can engage from 1.5 kilometers, that alone is mentally taxing for those under fire," says Yuriy, the company mechanic.
Scrooge, who comes from a military family, predicts a future in which robots and drones shape the battlefield. "People will sit 100 kilometers away controlling them," he says. "All the operations you saw tonight could be supervised from anywhere in the world."