Ukrainian soldier Roman Lozynskyi mourns over the coffin of his friend and fellow soldier, Dmytro Pashchuck, in Khlivchany, Ukraine. Photo / Laetitia Vancon, The New York Times
Drones have changed the war in Ukraine, with soldiers adapting off-the-shelf models and swarming the front lines.
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 armoured 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 Junior Sergeant Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.
Scrambling for a tourniquet, 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% of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, chairperson of the defence and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more – up to 80% of deaths and injuries, commanders say.
When President Vladimir 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 one million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armoured vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say.
The trenches that cut scars across hundreds of miles of the front are still essential for defence, 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, armoured 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 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 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 4000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025.
Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-calibre artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy.
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, Admiral Pierre Vandier of France.
Nato just opened a joint training centre with Ukrainian soldiers to develop new warfighting strategies with artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and other machine-learning systems.
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.
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 analysed 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.
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 on to drones, or they use anti-personnel fragmentation warheads and others with thermobaric charges to destroy buildings and bunkers.
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 Lieutenant Volodymyr Dehtyaryov, a brigade spokesperson. 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.”
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 north-western 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.
Taken together, what has unfolded in the war’s first three years has made some Western leaders question long-standing 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 defence comprehensively,” he said. “The advancements are so quick that all of us need to be alert to that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Marc Santora, Lara Jakes, Andrew E. Kramer, Marco Hernandez and Liubov Sholudko
Photographs by: Mauricio Lima, Tyler Hicks, David Guttenfelder, Daniel Berehula, rendan Hoffman and Laetitia Vancon
Finbarr O’Reilly
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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