On Ukraine’s front lines, combat patches are currency. Soldiers trade their insignia for those of other units, mostly, but sometimes for alcohol and cigarettes. When I visited earlier this summer, I brought a stack of U.S. Navy patches from my time as an aviator, along with a rucksack that has featured a steady rotation of insignia from soldiers I’ve met in war zones around the world.
The latest addition is a camouflaged crab, the emblem of Ukraine’s 34th Coastal Defense Brigade. Even though the group was established less than a year ago, its drone operators may already rank among the deadliest fighters in the history of war. I joined three of them on June 1, one of the most intense days of Russia’s invasion, to see firsthand how they are remaking drone warfare.
Earlier that day, Ukrainian intelligence services had launched an attack deep inside Russia, targeting the bombers and surveillance aircraft that Russian President Vladimir Putin uses to terrorize Ukrainian cities. The operation destroyed up to a third of Russia’s strategic air fleet.
That night, after the attack had ended, I rendezvoused with a drone unit from the 34th Brigade in Kherson, in southern Ukraine. We met at a bombed-out gas station a few miles from the Zero Line, the edge of no-man’s-land. We were well within range of Russian artillery, but the bigger threat was the first-person-view (FPV) drones roaming the area, which allow a pilot to stalk their targets using a live video feed.
Under the cover of a bullet-riddled awning, the unit commander briefed us, using only a red penlight for illumination. He introduced himself and the rest of the group—“Team A”—in a mix of Ukrainian and English: “We don’t use our real names, but my call sign is Adama. I fly the suicide drones. ‘Ghost’ will launch the reconnaissance drones, called Mavics, and recover them so they can be reused. ‘Triple-A’ will operate the Mavics once Ghost gets them in the air.” (I have changed their call signs to protect their identities.)
The suicide drones Adama referred to are Ukraine’s answer to Russia’s FPVs, and they are key to Ukraine’s defensive strategy. Ukrainians manufacture them, for only a few hundred bucks each, in warehouses and home garages throughout the country. Conservative estimates suggest that Ukraine will produce more than 4 million this year. They will be equipped with FPV cameras and warheads, to be flown over no-man’s-land into Russian-occupied territory.
As we strapped on helmets and body armor, Adama laid out the mission. We’d be traveling to a bunker near another unit, Team B, which would assemble suicide drones and arm them with explosives. “Once fuses are set, I will take control from our position and pilot the drone,” Adama said. “Triple-A will trail my killer drones with his Mavic. He’ll verify targets, ID new ones, and record kills.”
He smiled, then added, “Happy hunting.”
Adama turned to me with one final instruction: “When we get to the bunker, go in. Don’t grab your gear. Don’t try to help. Just get inside. We will take care of everything else.” The few seconds it would take to sprint from our vehicle would be extremely dangerous, he said. If a Russian drone tracked us to that spot, we’d be an easy target.
The route to the bunker was short, just a couple of miles. Every yard brought us deeper into the range of the Russian FPVs. We drove fast through Kherson, with no lights. The buildings bore bullet holes and burn marks from artillery blasts. Roads were cratered, and overgrowth claimed parking lots and playgrounds. The Russians had held the city for nine months, until November 2022. Then a Ukrainian counterattack forced them back across the Dnieper River. Some months later, the Russians blew up the dam, leaving this part of the city underwater for weeks.
Several minutes into the trip, we heard the whine of Russian Shahed drones descending toward targets in the inhabited city center behind us. Adama ordered our driver to find cover, and we stopped under a dense canopy of trees. Gun crews around the city opened fire. Their tracer arcs converged on the approaching drones.
Once the wave passed, we proceeded to the bunker. Our truck skidded to a stop outside a 14-story building pockmarked with shell holes. Every window was blown out, and rubble littered the ground. I sprinted inside to a small room on the first floor as the team unloaded gear in near-total darkness. The whole transfer took less than 15 seconds. Adama, Triple-A, and Ghost settled into their stations, plugged laptops into antennas, and unpacked the Mavics.
Within minutes, Adama received an audio message. The encryption filter made the excited shouting sound metallic. “Scooter, scooter, scooter!” a voice yelled. Adama enlarged the infrared feed from an overhead surveillance drone, revealing a pair of Jet Skis racing across the Dnieper from the Russian side. They pulled up to the bank, dropped two soldiers near our position, and sped off.
This is a favorite tactic of Russian special forces looking to attack drone crews, because it allows them to sneak behind the front lines, past the Ukrainian infantry defending the riverbanks. “Probably Wagner,” Adama said, referring to the mercenary group that produces many of Russia’s most brutal fighters. “They do some crazy shit.”
Across the street, Team B prepped a drone for launch. Ghost set up his Mavic, and within seconds both the suicide and recon drones were in the air, speeding toward the last known location of the two Russian soldiers. Other teams in the area launched more drones, competing for the kill. “They’ll be dead soon,” Adama said of the Russians.
Ukraine’s drone units, like Adama’s, have pioneered one of the most consequential innovations in modern warfare. It has nothing to do with materials science or weapons design. Rather, it is a new approach to killing: Ukraine has gamified war, awarding points to pilots who eliminate certain targets. An online portal updates the point values for killing infantry, destroying artillery, or neutralizing any manner of battlefield asset. On any given day, military intelligence might determine that rocket launchers pose a special threat, in which case they could be worth the most points. Today, the value of a special-forces soldier, such as the ones speeding toward us, is especially high.
Points mainly confer bragging rights, but pilots can also exchange them for items that make life at the front more bearable. The system reminded me of my time in the Boy Scouts, when I sold light bulbs and candy to rack up points, which—at the end of one glorious summer—I exchanged for a Lego fighter jet. Instead of toys, drone pilots can win perks such as new combat boots, electric kettles, or upgraded night-vision goggles.
The two Russian special-forces operators deposited on Ukraine’s side of the Dnieper had no idea how little their lives were worth. Later that day, their deaths would be delivered by a cheap drone, composed of printed parts, assembled a few hours earlier, and equipped with a one-kilogram explosive charge surrounded by bits of scrap metal. On a shelf next to me, between the smoke grenades and coffee creamer, sat a 20-pound bag of rusty bolts waiting to be packed around the next day’s warheads.
For every drone sent downrange by the 34th, the enemy sent two back. My original plan had been to follow Adama’s team for three hours, then withdraw and get to safety before sunrise. But at dusk on our second night, the Russians still had us pinned down. I learned later that this was one of the largest drone assaults of the war so far. Putin apparently wanted revenge for the bombers he had lost the day before.
I gave up counting after the eighth strike near our position. After another 10 or so, my reflexive flinching stopped. I still felt each blast wave in my chest, and I still closed my eyes as dust rained down from the ceiling. But I learned to shrug off the Russian misses.
Nothing that moves survives long in the wasteland between the Russian and Ukrainian lines. Sometimes, even things that don’t move get destroyed. We saw a Russian flag atop a building, a transparent attempt to provoke Ukrainian drone pilots. It worked. Adama judged the flag to be worth the price of a suicide drone and lined up his shot. I didn’t understand the power of a single kilogram of explosives until I saw the flag vaporized.
One hour passed. We monitored drone feeds and listened to other units engaging until the drone circling our area spotted what appeared to be sandbags in the window of a bombed-out home. On closer inspection, the camera revealed antidrone netting, an indicator that the building might be occupied. Adama ordered Team B to prepare a killer drone, and within minutes he was piloting it toward the new target. He flew into the window, hoping to flush out anyone inside. The drone snagged on the netting, then detonated. The entire structure shook. Triple-A was watching from his Mavic and shouted in Ukrainian. I looked over his shoulder at the screen and saw a Russian soldier sprinting out the back of the building.
Over the next four hours, the team tracked the soldier as he moved between piles of rubble looking for cover. “Why don’t you just launch another drone and take him out?” I asked. “I want to see where he takes us,” Adama responded. Eventually, the soldier entered a building. Sandbags and plywood protected the windows, but the materials were recessed to be less noticeable, and fresh vehicle tracks marked the ground nearby. “There’s more in there,” Adama said.
Over the encrypted chat, he laid out an attack plan involving a drone unit in a neighboring sector. The mission unfolded just as Adama directed: Mavics observed and recorded as a pair of killer drones got into position. The first slammed into the building, blasting a hole in a wall of sandbags that had been piled behind one of the windows. Adama piloted the second drone; he waited a few seconds for the dust to clear, then lost patience and declared, “Fuck it, I’m going in.” Moments after his drone entered the building, the whole structure seemed to expand, and debris and dust shot out of every window. The roof lifted several feet in the air.
Adama kept his gaze on the screen while Triple-A high-fived him. “That’s a secondary explosion,” he said—other munitions had probably detonated inside, given the size of the blast. “Let’s count it: one confirmed kill, probably more.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“Because we blew the fucking roof off,” Adama replied. He smiled again. “Sometimes,” he added, looking up from his screen, “we’ll see them crawl out before they die.”
Adama turned back to his screen. “And sometimes,” he said, “when we take back a cleared area, we get to see what we’ve done.” He lit a cigarette, and entered the kill into a spreadsheet on his laptop.
Two hours later, a nearby Ukrainian signals-intelligence team hacked into the Russians’ drone feed and shared it with Adama. “This is what the Russian drone pilots are seeing,” he explained.
“Right now?” I asked. “Isn’t that our position?”
Adama answered, “Yes, and yes.”
Every time the Russian-drone camera panned across our building, searching for signs of life, Adama, Triple-A, and Ghost waved at the monitor, pointing toward the building across the street. “Not here!” they yelled, laughing. “Hit Team B! They’re assholes!”
Late into the night, the attacks subsided. Adama surmised that the Russians were low on drones and attempting to resupply. We took advantage of the lull and called in a truck to pick us up and take us to safety.
In the 20 hours I spent with Adama’s team, it launched 12 suicide drones and killed at least one Russian—likely more. One kill a day might seem insignificant. But that rate, repeated over and over by drone units across the front, has transformed the war. The best teams, like Adama’s, might take out several hundred Russian soldiers in a year. In previous conflicts, a kill count that large from a unit this small would have been extraordinary; for drone warfare, it’s merely good. Ukraine’s drone teams comprise about 2 percent of its total armed forces, yet they account for a large majority of Russia’s casualties.
The truck radioed to us that it was one minute away, and all joking stopped. Although the attacks had waned, we knew that the Russians had likely spent the past 20 hours homing in on our location. Adama repeated his earlier instruction to me: “When the truck pulls up, move fast. We’ll get your bag and everything else.”
The pickup came to a halt outside our bunker. Within seconds, we were loaded up and speeding away. Our driver took curves on two wheels, with no headlights to illuminate the road ahead. We approached a bridge, the main bottleneck for vehicles entering and exiting the combat area. Adama’s drone detector screamed a warning, picking up the electronic signature of an approaching Russian craft.
We raced across the bridge and saw the wreckage of another vehicle smoldering by the side of the road. “From a few hours ago,” Adama said. Past the bridge, the screech of the detector faded, and we eased up. Ten minutes later, we parked in front of a bombed-out, seemingly abandoned building.
Adama unfastened a padlock and loosened the chain securing the doors. When he swung them open, I saw half a dozen 3-D printers on workbenches, whirring as they deposited new drone parts onto holding trays. Every wall was stacked to the ceiling with thousands of suicide drones, ready for assembly and waiting for the appropriate warhead, to be determined by whatever the next day’s priority targets would be.
The team dropped its gear, and we gathered outside to say goodbye. Adama ripped his unit patch, the camo crab, off his shoulder and handed it to me. “Crabs adapt,” he said. “They can operate anywhere.” I did my best to return the gesture, handing out my last two Navy patches. But they felt insufficient somehow, so I unpinned a set of gold aviator wings that I’d received when I graduated flight school; they had been fixed to my backpack for more than a decade. Adama nodded in a wordless acknowledgment of the wings’ significance. He reached into his bag and pulled out a small black patch.
In Russian, it read “PMC Wagner Group.” I felt a streak of hard crust on one side of the patch where it had been partially melted. Adama said, “He was on fire when he died.”
I will never display that patch. I keep it in a drawer but pull it out sometimes and wonder about the life its owner led before Adama took it. I think, too, of the man I saw being hunted across the wasteland of Kherson. I picture him consumed by fire, and imagine the uncounted soldiers who died alongside him.
More than any other patch I have collected, this half-burnt one comes closest to telling the truth about modern war, and the brutal game it has become. Dead men’s patches are traded like tokens. Soldiers’ lives are reduced to points. That makes drone warfare seem abstract and impersonal, but the opposite is true. Unlike artillerymen, drone pilots single out individuals, sometimes seeing the panic on their faces before striking. Killing this way is as intimate as it is efficient. It is a game we may never stop playing.
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