DONBAS AND KYIV, UKRAINE—A Ukrainian soldier dressed in camouflage fatigues sat on the couch with a controller in his hand. He would have looked like he was playing a video game if the house he was in had doors or windows. Instead, it was a blown-out wreck, its floor covered in rubble and broken glass. It’s a familiar sight among the houses in the town of Soledar in the Donbas region of Ukraine, which has been under relentless Russian assault for over six months.
Above the house, a small drone—probably a DJI Mavic II—zipped over the roof toward the battlefield beyond. Around us, we could hear the constant boom and crack of gunfire and artillery. These small, inexpensive, and easily disposable drones have become indispensable for Ukrainian troops attempting to spot Russian positions on the frontlines.
“We can buy them for just $1,000 off Amazon,” Stanislav Krasnov, a 35-year-old Ukrainian soldier, told Popular Mechanics during a visit to the Donbas front lines earlier this year. Each morning, when the nightly artillery barrage had slowed down, he and his wife Oksana, 26, would get out their drone and zoom it across the sky.
Ukrainian military operates drone from the control panel on November 11, 2022, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Among its many activities, the local volunteer center has also organized a drone school, which teaches the military aerial reconnaissance and drone control in conditions as close to real as possible.
Global Images Ukraine//Getty Images
As we looked through the viewfinder on the controller, you could see endless rolling plains, each pock-marked with holes from thousands of artillery impact strikes. It came as no surprise to the Krasnovs that Russian forces would regularly shoot down their hobbyist drones. But at such a low cost, they’re simple to replace; the couple regularly sets up fundraisers for them on Facebook, where they also post regular photos of their military units in action.
At the beginning of the war, Western military analysts—and even the Ukrainian military—expected the Russian air force to quickly achieve air dominance in the skies as it had in Georgia in 2008 and Syria in 2015. The Ukrainian air force was, in the words of one report, “totally technically outmatched and badly outnumbered.”
In fact, the first major Russian operation was meant to land a large group of elite VDV paratroopers at the Hostomel airfield on the outskirts of Kyiv, and secure it as a staging point to airlift regular troops for a lightning strike on the capital. But due to some elaborate deceptions and maneuvering—assisted by detailed U.S. intelligence of incoming strikes— the Ukrainians managed to protect their air defenses, and shoot down many Russian aircraft, keeping their own air force alive.
“Russian jets rarely enter Ukrainian airspace anymore,” according to Justin Bronk, an airpower expert from the Royal United Services Institute. In an interview with Popular Mechanics, he explained that the man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS), portable rocket launchers that individual soldiers could carry, made the cost of flying traditional sorties over Ukraine impossibly costly.
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