On the Ukrainian front, the fearsome drone geeks

April 10, 2023

In a Ukrainian training camp near Bakhmout, amid soldiers bent under the weight of their equipment and training with deafening weapons, a man briskly crosses the field, glasses on his nose.

Oleksandre, camouflage-colored cap on his head and small neat beard, only wears an anthracite pocket square.

“My weapon is much more discreet,” he smiles. “In there, there are the eyes of the army”.

The 30-year-old soldier is the commander of an air support unit for the fifth brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces.

His mission, to fly drones over Bakhmout, the epicenter of fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in the east of the country and the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.

When he is not on a mission, Oleksandre trains or tinkers with his devices.

“We carry out both reconnaissance and surveillance, we identify the enemy and we can escort the assault groups,” he explains, clearing the branches of the take-off area with his toes.

The use of drones has become essential to the point that on days of poor visibility, the artillery pieces remain largely silent so as not to waste ammunition.

“Before, to adjust a mortar shot, you needed a surveyor posted on a hill, with a tripod, binoculars? He had to give the angles of correction to the gunner, now, thanks to the drone, the person who directs the shot adjusts it in real time,” explains Oleksandre.

A truth also valid for the other side, so that the droneists are also working to neutralize Russian drones.

Viktor thus uses a large briefcase containing an interceptor. He points to his screen with a carnivorous smile: “Look, we see them all! The Mavics and the others! All the drones”.

He is all the more delighted that the device he uses is a “gift from the Russians”. It’s “a war prize! In Ukraine, we don’t make such a machine, we stole it from the enemy”.

Oleksandre insists that there is nothing easy in these drone units where you have to be ingenious and tweak to succeed in your mission.

“It’s a lot of work, the operator must know everything. How to maximize the range of his device, how to create a take-off point on complicated terrain, dig his trench, hide his presence…”, lists the officer .

And “you can’t be a drone operator by accident. You have to have a handyman’s mind”, he adds.

Indeed, the drones of the Ukrainian army are very often commercial models. It is therefore necessary first to hack their software to “make them invisible to Russian radio-surveillance”, explains the drone operator, showing his device of about twenty centimeters which fits in the pocket.

The young thirty-year-old also modifies his devices so that they can drop grenades or improvised explosives.

For this, 3D printed clamps are attached “to the photovoltaic cell of the drone, it is activated from the joystick, the motor pulls out the pin by which the grenade is held. It falls and that’s it!”.

If the technique is acquired today, it has not always been the case. At first “we groped, we used the battery of soldiers’ vapers to power the gripper system for the grenades”, says Oleksandre.

He remembers his first success. Three months after first grabbing the remote control, he managed to destroy an MT-12 Rapira anti-tank gun by dropping a grenade.

However, the losses remain high, said the soldier, estimating at around a hundred the number of drones lost on the battlefield.

The one he’s holding there is emblazoned with the kanji word “Kamikaze”, named after Japanese pilots carrying out suicide missions during World War II.

According to him, it is in particular thanks to the dronists, that Bakhmout still holds.

“The attacks of the (paramilitary group) Wagner on Bakhmout were repelled mainly thanks to the drones dropping grenades”, explains Oleksandre with a vague movement towards the front line, where the outnumbered Ukrainians have been resisting for months human waves.

“It’s a bit like the revenge of the geeks,” he says.