We're like snipers' Lethal and cheap, drones dominate the frontline now

Denys, a soldier with Ukraine's Khyzhak brigade, describes a new kind of war. Standing in a barracks workshop with piles of basic Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) drones behind him, he says: "There are fewer gunfights because there are more drone fights." Frontlines that were once a gunshot apart are now a killing zone several miles deep as Russian and Ukrainian drone squads hidden behind the frontlines target each other's forces with aerial attacks. "Back in 2022, we were still running around with machine guns from the tree lines," Denys says, almost with nostalgia.

- Dan Sabbagh

Another brigade member, Dima, whose call sign is Khimik (the chemist), demonstrates with a video on his phone. Because an FPV drone explodes on impact, the video ends abruptly in a flash of white noise, and the consequences of the explosion are invisible, as in so many videos released by both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries online. A Russian soldier several miles away had been spotted looking out of an upper floor of the building.

Though FPV drones are relatively plentiful, the Khyzhak brigade - mostly police patrol officers who have volunteered to fight - try to use them sparingly and patiently. The film shows the drone hovering and readjusting as its pilot tries to find the right angle to strike. "It's like the job of a sniper," Khimik says.

There remains no shortage of artillery or mortar shelling in the war in Ukraine, but the spidery seven-inch FPV quadcopter, capable of carrying a kilogram of explosive and operated with goggles and a handheld controller, has become ubiquitous. In the words of Samuel Bendett, a drone expert with the Center for Naval Analyses, the weapon has evolved from being "a novelty in 2022, to one of the weapons of choice in 2023, to roaming the entire tactical space".

Patient solo attacks are not the only tactic, as usage evolves. As the number of drones increases, swarm attacks are often deployed. Denys describes "an artillery bombardment by drone" on a Russian position near the frontline town of Toretsk in the eastern Donbas. "We dropped 1.5kg of explosives every eight minutes for three hours - by the end they had retreated."