The Ukrainian soldiers rose in the predawn, stretching, rubbing their eyes and rolling up sleeping bags in a basement hide-out near the front line in the country’s east. Their day would not take them far afield. Most stayed in the basement, working with keyboards and joysticks controlling drones.
At a precarious moment for Ukraine, as the country wobbles between hopes that President Trump’s cease-fire talks will end the war and fears that the United States will withdraw military support, the soldiers were taking part in a Ukrainian Army initiative that Kyiv hopes will allow it to stay in the fight absent American weapons.
On Sunday, after a week of unabated warfare in Ukraine, including the deadliest attack on Kyiv, the capital, in nearly a year, the Trump administration issued somewhat conflicting signals about what would come next. President Trump had a short meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine over the weekend that Mr. Trump said went well, and in later comments he did not rule out sending more weapons. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that the United States was close to walking away from the peace table and said that the coming week would be “very important.”
Should the peace talks fail, or the United States decide to discontinue arms shipments, the Ukrainian drone initiative is likely to take on more importance than ever. The program, called the Line of Drones, doubles down on unmanned systems that are assembled in Ukraine, mostly small exploding drones flown from basement shelters.
The program is a reminder, once again, of Ukraine’s ability to innovate during this war, which has helped it face off against its much larger enemy.
“It’s not man against man anymore,” said the commander of the squad operating from the basement in eastern Ukraine.
The group flies first-person-view drones, which give the pilot the video equivalent of a front-row seat as bombs hurtle into Russian soldiers, cars, tanks or bunkers. In keeping with military protocol, the commander asked to be identified only by his first name and rank, Private Artem.
Even before the Line of Drones program, Ukraine was relying heavily on unmanned weapons, which now inflict about 70 percent of all casualties in the war on both sides, the Ukrainian military says — more than all other weapons combined, including tanks, howitzers, mortars and land mines. While those other weapons are partly provided by the United States, the Ukrainians assemble the drones domestically from components mostly made in China.
The expanded drone program, in the works since last fall but formally announced in February, is Kyiv’s Plan B if talks to end the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, fail.
Drones from both sides already hum near continuously over the battlefield. In the drone war, Russia has an advantage in quantity, while Ukraine has an advantage in quality, often becoming a first adopter of new technological approaches. Those include flying re-transmitter drones to extend the explosive drones’ range and guiding drones with hair-thin fiber-optic threads that are impervious to jamming.
The Line of Drones strategy has been overshadowed by the cease-fire talks and by Mr. Trump’s dismissive assessment of Ukraine’s chances without U.S. aid. (“You don’t have the cards,” he told Mr. Zelensky at a contentious Oval Office meeting). But the drone deployment has already yielded results, according to military analysts.
It has been partly credited for a three-month slowdown of the Russian offensive in Ukraine. Russian forces that surged forward last fall have been in a virtual stall since January, in spite of the Russian military’s staging costly assaults.
The Russian offensive peaked in November with the capture that month of 279 square miles of Ukrainian territory, according to DeepState, an analytical group with ties to the Ukrainian military. In March, Russia captured just 51 square miles, the group’s analysis showed. Russia’s main gain over the winter was expelling Ukraine from all, or almost all, of the Kursk region inside Russia.
The Ukrainian program will fill out four drone battalions to become drone regiments, expanding each from about 700 soldiers to 2,500 soldiers armed with first-person-view drones, others that drop bombs, and unmanned ground systems. The last includes remote-controlled vehicles armed with machine guns.
All wars spur innovation, from the invention of radar during World War II to night-vision goggles in Vietnam. But Ukraine’s drone strategy was also born of a key weakness of its military after more than three years of war: the waning motivation of Ukrainians to join the army. As draft evasion has become widespread, force replenishment has become a challenge.
Drones don’t replace soldiers; in fact, each flight of a first-person-view drone can require up to four soldiers. For flights last week in northeastern Ukraine, a drone squad consisted of a pilot, a navigator, an armorer and a pilot of a retransmitting drone.
But recruiting for these positions is easier than finding soldiers for the infantry who will serve in trenches.
With fewer soldiers to lose than Russia, Ukraine wants to limit direct engagements. That’s where the drones come in.
The strategy focuses on a belt of land about 18 miles deep behind Russia’s front line. Saturating the airspace over this area with reconnaissance and strike drones can prevent Russian soldiers from massing for assaults. The drones, flying at about 80 miles per hour, can outpace anything moving on the ground.
“The fair assessment is that it is working,” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said of the drone program. Russian equipment shortages and winter weather also played a role, he said.
The goal, Mr. Kofman said, was to design a force that “can lock down large parts of the front” and sustain itself without U.S. help. Ukraine, however, is still deeply reliant on the United States and European nations for air defense systems to defend cities against missiles far from the front line.
The program’s goal is to expand over time, with experienced drone pilots sharing expertise with soldiers in other units, in an attempt to complicate Russian logistics, air defense and electronic warfare operations behind the frontline, Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of the Achilles Regiment, said in an interview. “The idea is to cover the whole frontline” with drones, he said.
The Ukrainian military did a test run last year when Republicans in Congress stalled a supplemental spending bill for Ukraine. Artillery ammunition ran so low that some crews fired only smoke shells. At one section of the front, near the town of Chasiv Yar, drone crews compensated with a flurry of attacks that disrupted Russia’s offensive.
The drones cost $500 to $750 each, less than large-caliber artillery shells, which cost about $3,000.
Other militaries are taking note. The U.S. Marine Corps this year formed its first experimental attack drone squad flying first-person-view drones.
Private Artem is serving with the Achilles Regiment, one of the units recently expanded under the drone program. Like a fifth of all recruits to the regiment, he is a former computer programmer who worked in Ukraine’s booming outsourcing industry before the Russian invasion.
Though operating in cover about three miles back from the front line, drone crews are spared neither the barbarism of war nor the danger.
On Friday, the Ukrainian crew caught one Russian soldier in the open, dashing over the green grass of a floodplain of the Oskil River. He was running for safety in a grove of trees. But the final frame of the video feed showed a close-up of camouflage, suggesting he did not make it.
Later in the day, the Ukrainian soldiers who placed the drones outdoors for launch kept out of sight as a Russian drone buzzed overhead before speeding off and crashing nearby with a thunderous boom.
Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
