Drones Now Rule the Battlefield in the Ukraine-Russia War

When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.

But then the small drones started to swarm.

They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.

“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.

Scrambling for a tourniquet, Sergeant Taras saw that the team’s driver had also been hit, his eye blasted from its socket.

The two soldiers survived. But the attack showed how an ever-evolving constellation of drones — largely off-the-shelf technologies that are being turned into killing machines at breakneck speed — made the third year of war in Ukraine deadlier than the first two years combined, according to Western estimates.

Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. In some clashes, they cause an even larger share of deaths and injuries.

When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent troops storming into Ukraine three years ago, setting off the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II, the West rushed billions of dollars in conventional weapons into Ukraine, hoping to keep Russia at bay.

The insatiable battlefield demands nearly emptied NATO nations’ stockpiles.

The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say.

Until recently, the clanging, metallic explosions from incoming artillery, ringing out around the clock, epitomized the war. Ukrainian soldiers raced at high speed in armored personnel carriers or pickup trucks, screeching to a stop and spilling out to run for cover in bunkers.

The artillery gave soldiers a sense of impersonal danger — the dread that you could die any moment from the bad luck of a direct hit.

The conflict now bears little resemblance to the war’s early battles, when Russian columns lumbered into towns and small bands of Ukrainian infantry moved quickly, using hit-and-run tactics to slow the larger enemy.

The trenches that cut scars across hundreds of miles of the front are still essential for defense, but today most soldiers die or lose limbs to remote-controlled aircraft rigged with explosives, many of them lightly modified hobby models. Drone pilots, in the safety of bunkers or hidden positions in tree lines, attack with joysticks and video screens, often miles from the fighting.

Speeding cars or trucks no longer provide protection from faster-flying drones. Soldiers hike for miles, ducking into cover, through drone-infested territory too dangerous for jeeps, armored personnel carriers or tanks. Soldiers say it has become strangely personal, as buzzing robots hunt specific cars or even individual soldiers.

It is, they say, a feeling of a thousand snipers in the sky.

“You can hide from artillery,” said Bohdan, a deputy commander with the National Police Brigade. But drones, he said, “are a different kind of nightmare.”

The war’s evolution could have major geopolitical implications.

As the precarious relations between Ukraine and the Trump administration threaten future military aid, the kind of conventional weaponry that the Americans have spent billions of dollars providing Ukraine is declining in importance.

Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured, with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added.

Drones, by contrast, are much cheaper and easier to build. Last year, they helped make up for the dwindling supplies of Western-made artillery and missiles sent to Ukraine. The sheer scale of their wartime production is staggering.

Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025.

They’re being deployed far more often, too. With each year of the war, Ukraine’s military has reported huge increases in drone attacks by Russian forces.

Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy.

However effective they may be, the drones fall far short of meeting all of Ukraine’s war needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, commanders warn. Heavy artillery and other long-range weapons remain essential for many reasons, they say, including protecting troops and targeting command-and-control outposts or air-defense systems.

But the emerging dominance of drones could change the nature of warfare itself, leaders note.

The battlefield tactics shaping Ukraine are sure to be emulated by Western allies and adversaries alike, including Iran, North Korea and China.

“The war is a mix of World War I and World War III — what could be a future war,” said NATO’s supreme allied commander for transformation, Adm. Pierre Vandier of France.

NATO just opened a joint training center with Ukrainian soldiers to develop new warfighting strategies with A.I., advanced analytics and other machine-learning systems.

Admiral Vandier said it was vital not just for the current war, but also to understand how the changes playing out across Ukraine can prepare NATO for future conflicts.

“A war is a learning process, and so NATO needs to learn from the war,” he added.

The pace of advances has astonished even close observers of the war, forcing many to rethink the viability of weapons that cost millions of dollars on a battlefield where they can be destroyed by a drone that costs a few hundred dollars.

Drones armed with shotguns are now shooting down other drones. Antiaircraft drones are being designed to take out surveillance drones flying higher in the sky. Larger drones are being developed to serve as motherships for swarms of small drones, increasing the distance they can fly and kill.

The proliferation of drones, many equipped with powerful cameras, has also provided a closer glimpse of the fighting in frontline areas often inaccessible to journalists. The New York Times analyzed dozens of video clips posted online by military units on both sides of the war. While these videos are sometimes used for promotional purposes, they also help illustrate how new battlefield technologies are reshaping the war.

Drones, of course, were deployed in the earliest days of the invasion as well. When Russian armored columns streamed into Ukraine at the start of the war, some civilians — calling themselves “the Space Invaders” — organized through an informal chat group to help defend the country. They quickly modified their own drones to drop hand grenades and other munitions on the advancing enemy soldiers.

Those ad hoc weapons have become so common that one of those early defenders, Serhiy, said he was later attacked by the same kind of bomber drone he had developed.

“I was wounded by the same technology I worked with,” said Serhiy, using his first name for fear of retribution from Russia.

The Ukrainians make use of a wide range of explosives to arm drones. They drop grenades, mortar rounds or mines on enemy positions. They repurpose anti-tank weapons and cluster munitions to fit onto drones, or they use anti-personnel fragmentation warheads and others with thermobaric charges to destroy buildings and bunkers.

Capt. Viacheslav, commander of Ukraine’s 68th Separate Jaeger Brigade’s strike drone company, scrolled through his phone to show some of the 50 types of munitions the Ukrainians use.

“This is called ‘White Heat,’” with over 10 kilograms of explosives, he said. “It burns through everything.”

“This one is called ‘Dementor,’ like in Harry Potter,” he added. “It’s black, and it’s a 120-millimeter mortar. We just repurpose it. This one’s called ‘Bead.’ This is ‘Kardonitik.’ The guys really like it.”

The proliferation of drones inevitably gave rise to widespread electronic warfare — tools to jam the radio signals that most drones need to fly.

Tens of thousands of jammers have been littered across Ukraine’s front lines to disable drones, cluttering the electromagnetic spectrum that also enables GPS, military communications, navigation, radar and surveillance.

The jammers have made it much harder for even skilled Ukrainian pilots to hit their targets, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders said.

That has fueled innovative ways of overcoming jamming.

Ukrainian engineers have built drones and robots with “frequency hoppers,” automatically switching from one radio signal to another to evade jammers.

Surveillance drones that guide themselves with A.I. — instead of being remotely operated by radio — are starting to take flight, too. Last fall, a drone being tested by the American company Shield A.I. found two Russian Buk SA-11 surface-to-air missile launchers, and sent their location to Ukrainian forces to strike.

Ukraine and Russia have also reached back to older technologies to thwart jammers, including tethering drones to thin fiber-optic cables that can stretch for more than 10 miles.

With its long tail, the drone remains connected to a controller, so it doesn’t need to use radio signals, rendering it immune to jamming.

Russia has been quicker to churn out these fiber-optic workarounds on a mass scale, partnering with Chinese factories to make the spools of cable for the “fly-by-wire” drones, Ukrainian officials say.

In recent videos from the front lines, fiber-optic cables crisscross fields, glinting in the sun. The production of this new weapon follows a pattern in the war: Ukraine has a broader variety of new designs, but Russia has a numerical advantage, able to make them more quickly.

Other adaptations to the swirl of drones are surprisingly low-tech. Soldiers cover tanks in anti-drone netting or makeshift structures of metal sheets, with rubber and logs nestled between to protect them.

Ground drones have also been thrust onto Ukraine’s battlefields at a time when they are still being tested by many modern militaries.

The so-called battle bots sometimes look like remote-controlled toy cars with puffy tires or small tanks on tracks, scattering land mines, carrying ammunition or helping to evacuate the wounded. They have been packed with explosives to slam into enemy positions and outfitted with machine guns and other weapons.

In December, the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine carried out what the Ukrainian military said was the first fully robotic combined arms assault in combat.

Russian forces tried to destroy the remote-controlled vehicles with mortars and by dropping explosives from their own drones, said Lt. Volodymyr Dehtyaryov, a brigade spokesman. Soldiers were kept at a distance, operating from a bunker behind the Ukrainian front line.

“Drones show that the one who is quicker to adapt,” he said, “wins the war.”

Air defenses remain one of Ukraine’s most urgent needs, so much so that the F-16 jets that NATO countries have donated mostly fly air patrol and other defensive missions, rather than attacking. But A.I. is about to enter the picture, commanders hope — particularly to counter Russian bombs.

Russia has outfitted its Soviet-era bombs with pop-out wings and satellite navigation, turning them into guided munitions called glide bombs. More than 51,000 of them have been dropped on Ukrainian cities, towns and positions near the front, the Ukrainian military says. It has tried to intercept them, including by shooting them down with costly missiles. But it does not always succeed.

So NATO is trying to use artificial intelligence and other machine learning to find patterns in glide bomb attacks, hoping to intercept or jam them more precisely, NATO officials said.

Ukrainian officials say they have also made strides in drone-on-drone warfare to bolster traditional air defenses.

Small quadcopter drones can now spring off the ground and crash into long-range Russian drones. Ukraine also recently claimed to have developed a laser weapon that can hit low-flying aircraft, including the Iranian-designed Shahed drones that Russia has used since the war’s early days.

Long-range weapons are also a priority. Russia has launched more than 10,000 missile strikes across Ukraine and is continually replenishing its missile arsenal. Ukraine, by comparison, has depended on a limited number of Western-made weapons to hit targets far inside Russia, and some of them are so old that officials in Kyiv doubt their effectiveness.

As an alternative, Ukraine has developed long-range drones to attack Russia at distances that would have been unthinkable when the war started. Some have struck more than 700 miles beyond the front, and it is not uncommon for more than 100 long-range attack drones to fly into Russia and Ukraine on any given night.

At sea the battle is no less surprising, especially given that Ukraine started the war with almost no navy.

For months, Russian warships, visible from shore, menaced the coast of Odesa, one of Ukraine’s biggest cities. Even after the Ukrainians sank the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, using domestically produced Neptune anti-ship missiles, the Kremlin effectively blockaded Ukrainian ports.

Three years later, Russian ships rarely enter the northwestern Black Sea, while its navy has pulled most of its valuable assets from ports in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, fearing Ukrainian attack.

Crude Ukrainian robotic vessels packed with explosives sail hundreds of miles across choppy waters to target enemy ships. Russia’s fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol now has layers of buoys and barriers to protect itself against naval drones.

Ukraine often sends its drones to hunt in “wolf packs,” hoping the lead drone can blast a path for those that follow.

The commander of Ukraine’s naval forces, Vice Adm. Oleksiy Neizhpapa, said that while traditional naval weapons and warships remained necessary, drones have “ushered in a new era in maritime operations.”

“This is not just a tactical tool but a strategic shift in the approach to naval warfare,” Admiral Neizhpapa said in a statement, crediting the drones with “altering the balance of power in the Black Sea.” American military leaders have noted the Ukrainian approach to see if there are lessons should China make a move to attack Taiwan.

Taken together, what has unfolded in the war’s first three years has made some Western leaders question longstanding military assumptions.

“I think we’re moving to technological warfare,” President Alexander Stubb of Finland said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “Not only the Ukrainians are a step ahead of us, which I think is great, but the Russians are adapting to a new situation as well.”

“So we really need to think about collective defense comprehensively,” he said. “The advancements are so quick that all of us need to be alert to that.”