In Russia-Ukraine War, Drones are Now the King of Battle

It was like a scene from one of the futuristic techno-thrillers that fill the shelves of airport bookstores.

On Sunday, swarms of nimble quadcopter drones carrying explosives took flight from concealed launchpads built into the roofs of cargo containers being transported by commercial trucks deep inside Russia. Their target was at least four airbases, from which the Russian Aerospace Forces deploys long-range strategic bombers — the aircraft responsible for launching the cruise missiles that strike Ukrainian cities weekly.

The evidence thus far points to a masterstroke of operational planning and intelligence. Imagery from passersby show the drones taking off to the surprise of onlookers, with later photos showing multiple columns of smoke in the background. Videos released by Ukrainian military intelligence of the attacks show the first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones as they plunge into multiple Tu-95 “Bear” strategic bombers, with others aflame.

“An absolutely brilliant result,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on official social media channels. “A result achieved solely by Ukraine. One year, six months, and nine days from the start of planning to effective execution.”

According to Zelensky, at least 41 aircraft were destroyed or damaged, a significant loss for the Russian military, which is believed to have just under 100 operational strategic bombers. 

The cost of a strategic bomber varies widely — Russia has three types in operation, and currently produces only the supersonic Tu-160 “Blackjack” at a rate of one or two per year. The damage is therefore likely in the billions of dollars. Recently leaked documents indicate a refurbishment program required to turn six of the aged Bear turboprops into modernized Tu-95MS “missile carriers” carried a price tag of $316 million.

None of the technology required for such an operation would have been particularly cutting edge. FPV drones are widely used by both sides, and creating a concealed launch platform inside a cargo container would not have been a great challenge. It is the concept of the operation — its fusion of inexpensive tech, military hardware, and strategic daring — which are noteworthy.

Much of the war in Ukraine is a morass of mud and positional trench warfare that would have been familiar to a World War I soldier, but it is also a crucible for revolutionary changes to the technology and tactics of war.

While the killing field between the lines would have been familiar to a veteran of, say, the Somme in 1916, the hunters that prowl for miles past the line of contact, deep into rear areas, would have been alien to him.

Life and death on Ukraine’s battlefields is dominated by drones.

Athos never heard the one that got him.

It was September 2023, and the U.S. veteran — who went by the callsign “Athos” in reference to the “old, cranky Musketeer” — was on the frontlines south of Zaporizhzhia.

He was ostensibly in an elite reconnaissance unit, a mix of Ukrainians and foreign volunteers. But in reality, after Ukraine’s failed southern counteroffensive earlier that summer, the unit was being employed as an ad hoc quick reaction force. On this night, it had been tasked with clearing trenches in a classic infantry assault.

A veteran of multiple U.S. military branches, Athos served several tours in Afghanistan, including with the 3rd Special Forces Group, before joining the Ukrainian military about one year into the conflict. Rolling Stone independently confirmed details of Athos’ military service, but agreed to withhold his identity.

On that September night, Athos and his team disembarked from pickup trucks about five kilometers from the line of contact, making their way forward through the darkness on foot.

“We had heard drones over the past several days,” Athos tells Rolling Stone, “but our biggest fear was that they would spot us and call in an artillery strike.”

The fighting was intense despite the darkness, and at about 4 a.m., as Athos inched forward along a trenchline, he was discovered by a Russian drone.

“It must have had thermal sensors,” he said. It dropped a grenade nearby. One of his Ukrainian teammates took the brunt of the blast, but three pieces of hot shrapnel peppered Athos’ leg, shattering his tibia.

His initial reaction was surprise and disappointment, he said. Athos asked another soldier, a Brit, if they had been hit by a mortar. “No, it was a drone. Didn’t you hear it?” Athos remembers the man saying. He hadn’t.

The Brit put a tourniquet on Athos’ leg, and began to evacuate him. “He dragged me a short distance before he also got hit in the shoulder, by fragments from an artillery round.” Four of the six team members had now been wounded. They hunkered down and awaited daybreak.

“I crawled a couple hundred meters, until they sent a couple of guys with a stretcher to take me back to a humvee,” Athos recalls. “I was evacuated to a stabilization point, and they operated on me immediately.” All four of the wounded men survived.

While drones were already common when Athos was wounded, in the months since, they have flooded the battlefield. Both sides have become adept at using ever-more advanced and effective flying robots to hunt and kill.

“The future is soldiers hiding in holes underground while the drones fight it out above them,” says one Ukrainian soldier recently deployed to a frontline position near the northern city of Sumy, who declined to be named for security reasons. He, too, describes the harrowing journey by which soldiers reach battlefront positions, disembarking from vehicles miles from the front and making their way forward under cover of darkness, while the air above them buzzes with the sound of multiple drones belonging to friend and foe alike, ceaselessly hunting targets.

Military innovation pushes a pendulum back-and-forth between static defense and offensive maneuver. In the 1930s, General Heinz Guderian pioneered Nazi Germany’s concentration-of-force combined arms blitzkrieg tactics that turned those early 20th Century trenches into a relic.

By the dawn of the 21st century, satellite reconnaissance, all-weather attack aircraft, and guided “smart” bombs made large concentrations of troops and vehicles easy pickings for airpower, as demonstrated during Desert Storm in 1991. But in the absence of air dominance, blitzkrieg — thrusts of massed armor and infantry, supported by artillery and close air support — still seemed possible.

Neither side achieved command of the air when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian armored advances during the early months of the war, and subsequent Ukrainian counterattacks in the autumn, made it seem this new modern war could be dynamic.

By late 2023, observers were disabused of that notion by long-range precision fires from systems such as HIMARS, which routinely decimated Russian forces gathering men and material for assault, and in the minefields and artillery barrages that stopped the Ukrainian counteroffensive near Zaporizhzhia, in which Athos had played his role.

Now, blitzkrieg can be neutered by a consumer plaything.

By last year, drones made with consumer-grade electronics controlled via radio and carrying improvised warheads were in abundant use by both sides. Persistent swarms roved across the moonscape left behind by artillery bombardments, which rivaled those from World War I.

This in turn touched off an arms race in drone countermeasures.

In addition to GPS navigation, radio-controlled drones require specific bandwidths for their control and video feeds. These frequencies are an obvious target for jamming, interference, and disruption — an area in which Russia, and to a lesser extent Ukraine, already possessed sophisticated electronic warfare (EW) capabilities.

EW vehicles or stationary sites with powerful radio emissions quickly attract attention — and are prime targets for long-range strikes. Smaller EW devices designed to disrupt control of a drone and protect individual vehicles or personnel — of a type familiar to some U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, designed to block transmissions intended to remotely trigger roadside bombs — have become common.

Still, electronic warfare is a game of “Whac-a-Mole”: If a frequency is widely used by drones, it is widely jammed and another frequency is adopted — which, in turn, is jammed. 

Ultimately, the effectiveness of electronic countermeasures is a question of how much bandwidth devices can cover, how much power they have, how quickly they can be adapted and deployed — and even how long their batteries last. In addition, soldiers also use physical measures to stop tactical drones: meaning everything from shotguns, to nets strung over key roadways and fighting positions.

When Ukraine seized territory inside Russia in a surprise attack on Kursk oblast, or province, last August, it did so by coordinating mobile countermeasures — often trucks carrying multiple EW transmitters — and widespread area jamming. The drone threat was reduced enough that it seemed Ukrainian forces might be able to hold their gains indefinitely.

Then the fiber-optic drone showed up.

Unjammable and unstoppable via electronic countermeasures, these drones are controlled via data sent along fiber-optic cables that unwind from spools slung beneath, as they fly as far as 15 kilometers — 9.3 miles or more — in search of prey.

“It’s a significant threat. They can only be stopped by physical countermeasures, or kinetic measures,” says Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russian military technology, drones, and robotic and autonomous military systems at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded Washington D.C.-based non-profit research organization focused on national security.

“These drones had a very detrimental effect on Ukrainian logistic lines in the Kursk region, and were probably one of the major reasons why Ukrainian forces were pushed out of Kursk, as the Russians were able to interdict and interfere with supply, communication, and logistics,” Bendett tells Rolling Stone.

Thousands of personnel are now dedicated solely to drone warfare. In the first months of the war, units on both sides set up makeshift drone units using whatever resources they could get. Now, both Russia and Ukraine have formally established drone units, and the Kremlin even appears set to create a service branch dedicated exclusively to tactical operations using unmanned vehicles.

Tactical drones are everywhere on the battlefield, at all hours of the day. And they are produced and assembled in hundreds of small improvised factories sprinkled across both countries.

“Sometimes, you can’t fucking move without drawing half a dozen drones to your position,” says another Ukrainian soldier, who recently saw combat near Pokrovsk, a road-and-rail hub that has been one of the main focuses for Russian assaults for more than a year.

Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Oleksandr Kozenko, speaking at a defense conference in Singapore on Saturday May 31, said that his country was on track to produce 10 million tactical drones per year, and that drone warfare was inflicting 80 percent of all battlefield losses.

There is an alphabet soup of acronyms that experts apply to drones of various types, but the major categories have to do with how they travel: unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) by land, unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) by sea, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by air.

The most visible innovation has been with the last two categories.

Lacking a meaningful navy of its own, Ukraine has used advanced maritime drones, or USVs, to decimate Russia’s Black Sea fleet over the past year and a half. These USVs have their origin in an American project created for a conflict with China in the Taiwan Strait, which the CIA provided to Ukrainian military intelligence in the wake of Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Kamikaze variants of these drones, such as the Magura, have been used to sink Russian warships since at least March 2024, and a type of USV equipped with anti-air missiles has even been used to shoot down Russian fighter aircraft and helicopters — firsts in the annals of warfare.

But it is in the air that drone warfare has had the biggest impact.

Tactical UAVs can be divided into multiple categories, ranging from advanced reconnaissance or strike drones like the U.S. MQ-9 Reaper; to loitering munitions, essentially flying bombs, like the Russian Lancet; to heavy quadcopters or hexacopters that drop munitions or serve as reconnaissance or even signal relay platforms; to the FPV drones, originally developed for racing and personal entertainment, that have become the primary threat on the battlefield. FPVs can cost less than $500 to make.

Such drones have upended frontline operations. But a different type has also become an essential part of the strategic contest: the “one-way attack,” or long-range strike UAV.

The most important drones of this type that first saw widespread use in Ukraine were developed by Iran, which in 2023 agreed to supply Russia with the blueprints for its Shahed-136 one-way attack drone, and to train personnel in its manufacture and employment.

These drones, called the Geran-2 by Russia, can best be thought of as slow-moving cruise missiles. Their basic concept can be traced back to Hitler’s V-1 buzz-bombs, a so-called “revenge weapon” used to inflict strategically pointless but deadly area bombing on London toward the end of World War II.

Those who have heard the Geran-2 in action — as has Rolling Stone’s reporter — liken its engine to that of a moped, which is the nickname given it in Ukraine. One is made aware that the drone has entered its terminal trajectory and is about to impact when its engine cuts out, sending it into a steep dive — just as eyewitness accounts describe the V-1 in 1944 London, in a bizarre but fitting echo of history.

Although several variants exist, in general the Geran-2 carries a warhead that weighs about 100 pounds, and navigates to its target via a pre-set route, using an inertial guidance system supplemented by GPS or its Russian equivalent, GLONASS.

Russia intends to produce as many as 500 Geran-2s per day, Zelensky said in a press briefing on May 27. It has significantly expanded manufacturing in a factory near Yelabuga, Tatarstan — more than 800 miles from the front in Ukraine — which is largely staffed by Russian high schoolers and young women from Africa and Latin America imported to build drones. The factory was built in a special economic zone near the Kama River, which connects to the Volga and thereby the Caspian Sea, allowing materials to be sent directly by sea from Iran.

“Production is already much greater than what was originally planned when [the factory in] Yelabuga opened in 2023,” Bendett says. “The Russians were originally planning to produce only several hundred per month. Now they can produce many hundreds per week.”

Sanctions have bit into many aspects of the Russian economy, and were intended to limit Moscow’s ability to purchase essential military and “dual-use” electronics abroad. But they haven’t stopped drone production.

“On some components, on some specific items, there’s probably a bottleneck. But on others Russia has been able to establish supply chains that bypass the sanctions,” Bendett says.

Ukraine, too, has gotten into the one-way attack drone business. Since January, Ukraine has been using such drones to target Russian energy and military infrastructure, with some success — but nothing like the operation on Sunday. Kyiv says it plans to domestically produce as many as 30,000 long-range strike vehicles this year. 

There is little data to assess the overall toll that drones are taking on the battlefield. Social media is awash with hours of snuff film of drones attacking soldiers and vehicles, and anecdotal evidence suggests that drones are now responsible for a substantial portion, perhaps even the majority, of battlefield casualties, which aligns with the Ukrainian deputy defense minister’s claim of “80 percent” of all damage.

To attempt to nail down accurate numbers in the midst of an ongoing conflict awash in propaganda, disinformation, and just plain lack of reliable data, is to plunge into a realm of uncertainty and confusion.

When Rolling Stone visited the Severodonetsk front in June 2022, it was considered shocking that Ukrainian authorities claimed more than 100 soldiers were killed on each side per day.

Now, British military intelligence routinely claims Russia loses more than 1,200 soldiers — killed and wounded — per day on average, saying 2025 was on track to be “the costliest year of the war in terms of Russian personnel.” According to them, 960,000 Russians have become casualties in the war.

Russia does not release official data on its losses. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late head of the private military company Wagner Group who led a rebellion against Moscow in part over high casualties suffered by his men, claimed in June 2023 that 20,000 of his fighters had been killed and that at least 120,000 Russian soldiers had been slain, but the Kremlin was downplaying their losses.

Zelensky said in February that 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 380,000 wounded, although he added that a substantial percentage of the wounded had returned to duty — that averages out to more than 350 casualties per day of conflict, although undoubtedly the number would have fluctuated over time. Other sources claim even higher losses, as many as 70,000 Ukrainians killed.

Historically, casualty figures don’t always correlate to victory. Suffice to say, the war in Ukraine is becoming deadlier, more complex, and increasingly intractable. There are no off-ramps in sight and no cease-fire on the horizon.

The United States — the only great power capable of meaningful engagement with both combatants — may walk away from diplomacy to end the fighting altogether. President Donald Trump on May 28 said that he expects to see progress within “two weeks” — but he said the same thing on April 27, and on May 19.

In the meantime, the fighting continues. Over the weekend of May 23, another new milestone was reached: the largest aerial attack on Ukrainian cities since the start of the conflict, with more than 900 drones launched by Russia over three nights, along with ballistic and cruise missiles.

Athos, who says he is “95 percent recovered” from his wounds, has been discharged from the Ukrainian military. He remains in Kyiv with his wife. They listened as drones and missiles rained down on the city.

When asked if he planned to return to uniform, he says: “No. I’ve had enough of getting shot at.”