How Ukraine turned hobby drones into precision killing machines

 Four years of fighting in Ukraine has ripped up the handbook on conventional warfare.

The days of long-range artillery duels and tank manoeuvres are long over, giving way to something perhaps more terrifying.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, recently said drones were responsible for 80 per cent of the 1,000 casualties Russia sustains on a daily basis.

They have turned the front lines of Ukraine into fast-expanding “kill zones” that stretch for miles, where any soldier caught in the open faces a death sentence.

An Australian volunteer infantryman for Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, who goes by the callsign “Chaplain”, told The Telegraph that it was almost impossible to move near the front line without hearing first-person view (FPV) drones, or the “cry of a banshee”, as he described the haunting sound.

“It’s very hard to move without hearing a drone… very, very hard,” he said.

Cheap off-the-shelf drones proved pivotal in some of the war’s early, most decisive battles, such as halting a 40 mile-long convoy of tanks and troops barreling through Kyiv in 2022.

FPV drones have evolved in the years since. They are used to drop heavy munitions or crash directly into their targets. Some have AI targeting capabilities, or are made to be unjammable with spools of fibre-optic cables that can stretch over 20 miles.

Kyiv and Moscow remain in an arms race to produce the next technological leap that will give their drones the edge over those of the enemy. Improved battery life, software capabilities and carrying capacity can mean the difference between victory or defeat.

The Tactical Shift

The war’s early struggle was characterised by Ukraine’s Aerorozvidka unit, which started out as a team of volunteer IT specialists and hobbyists.

The unit has been credited with helping to halt the convoy bearing down on Kyiv and thwarting the Russian attempt to capture Hostomel airport, just north-west of the capital.

They also used their unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot and direct artillery fire towards 200 Russian paratroopers at the airport during what was perhaps the most pivotal battle for Kyiv’s survival.

But its men also used drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras to drop bombs weighing 1.5kg on the convoy.

In the spring counter-offensive of 2022, similar tactics started to emerge on the battlefield.

Agile drones designed for racing and controlled by pilots wearing virtual reality goggles were transformed into potent, highly-manoeuvrable guided missiles.

By the summer of 2023, as Ukraine geared up to launch a major counter-offensive in the south, it was losing around 10,000 drones a month, including surveillance UAVs and single-use kamikaze munitions, according to the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think tank.

With Western generals still fixated on traditional manoeuvre warfare, Ukrainian commanders knew the tide was turning on how future conflicts would pan out.

FPV strikes were quickly found to be effective across both infantry and armoured targets, as well as providing real-time aerial video feeds to troops on the ground.

Drones, which cost less than £1,000, were credited with taking out Russian tanks, which were sometimes worth millions.

In the same year, Ukraine’s armed forces formed UAV assault groups, finally institutionalising the use of drones.

Russia joins the FPV drone arms race

But after more than a year of being battered by Ukrainian drones, Russia started to catch up.

In five months, Ukraine had only managed to retake just over 10 miles of territory.

Gen Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, admitted to The Economist that both sides had “reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate”.

Some of the world’s most sophisticated systems, which Western allies had donated to Ukraine, were suddenly vulnerable to a new threat.

In September 2023, footage shared by Russian sources appeared to show a UAV destroying a Challenger 2 tank, which Britain had donated to Kyiv.

It wasn’t until 2024 that Ukraine ramped up its drone production.

More than two million UAVs were produced domestically that year, according to a report published at the time by Georgetown University’s Security Studies Review.

With hundreds of Ukrainian firms pumping out drones, modifications began to creep in.

The main change was the size of the quadcopter chassis, the weapons’ framework designed to bear certain weights, scaling up from an average seven-inch frame in 2022 to 12 inches two years later.

This enabled the drones to carry larger batteries to increase flight time and, crucially, larger explosive payloads to target their enemies.

Both sides started experimenting with mothership UAVs, which would carry several smaller kamikaze drones closer to the target to conserve battery life and extend range.

But the most significant developments came in the electronic aspect of warfare, with both sides fighting it out to jam radio frequencies used by enemy drone operators.

Between 60 and 80 per cent of Ukraine’s drones failed to reach their targets, and often struggled against Russian armoured vehicles, Rusi said in a report last year.

Despite this apparent low success rate, the report added that between 60 and 70 per cent of Russian equipment losses were attributed to drone strikes.

The jostle over radio frequencies saw the introduction of drone technologies that were married up with artificial intelligence, leading to the creation of unjammable killer robots.

Specially–programmed chips were fitted to standard UAVs that could independently find a target should the connection with its pilot be disrupted.

For example, the Saker Scout drone, carrying a 3kg warhead, was designed to hover over the battlefield, sifting through various targets before automatically locking on.

The technology had originally been designed to sort and classify fruits.

Another invention was the fibre-optic drone, which uses hardwiring to keep the UAVs connected to their pilots, also making them immune to radio jammers.