KYIV — The fighting in Ukraine no longer resembles the trench warfare of World War I — instead, drones have erased the solid front line by creating a killing zone.

The skies over battlefields are now blackened by drones. Some carry cameras and thermal detectors, others are equipped with bombs and guns; some merely lie on the ground beside paths and roads until stirred to life by a passing soldier or vehicle. They use electronic signals or are steered by impossible-to-jam fiber-optic cables. Counter-drones aim to block them while also hunting for the drone pilots hunkered down dozens of kilometers from the front.

The result is a gray area of chaos stretching some 20 kilometers from the front, where drones hunt for soldiers, the wounded are left to die because it’s so difficult to evacuate them, and supplies of ammunition, food and water are almost impossible to move up to the fighting troops.

“We have now switched to a drone-versus-drone war,” Col. Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of the President’s Office of Ukraine and a former battlefield commander, told POLITICO. “Drones are now able to sit in ambush, intercept enemy logistics and disrupt supplies. They have also made it more difficult to maintain positions: If you are detected, every weapon in the area will immediately rush to destroy you.”

A new way of war

Drones played a key role in the fighting from the earliest days of the war in 2022, when Ukraine celebrated the successes of Turkish Bayraktar drones against Russian armored columns. Despite that, both Ukraine and Russia initially prepared to fight a classic war marked by artillery duels, mechanized columns and defensive trenches, Palisa said.

In 2023-2024, however, the war changed and trenches started disappearing, said Ivan Sekach, spokesperson for the Ukrainian army’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which is fighting in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region.

Instead of long lines of trenches, the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian army created strongpoints and observation posts and relied on drones to make up for a shortage of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition. In response, the Russian army began to reduce the size of its assault units because Ukrainian drones proved capable of pinpointing and destroying larger troop concentrations.

Rather than the large-scale “meat-wave” attacks that characterized earlier Russian assaults, when large numbers of men were hurled at Ukrainian defenders, Russia is now attacking in small groups, said Col. Vladyslav Voloshyn, spokesperson for the Ukrainian army’s South command.

“It takes time for Russians to assemble a storming group. They are crawling, hiding. It takes two to three days for them to gather a group able to storm our positions,” Voloshyn said.

Usually, two Russian soldiers pave the way but only one survives, he explained. Smaller groups are harder to spot for Ukrainian drone operators, especially during fog or rain.

“As the result, we got a deep gray zone, where Russians infiltrate behind Ukrainian positions and are hiding there, multiplying in case not spotted and destroyed,” Sekach said.

Foul weather helped Russian soldiers break through Ukrainian defenses in Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region earlier this month after a year of attempts, as well as at other points along the front like Novopavlivka village in Dnipropetrovsk and in the central Zaporizhzhia region.

“Fog or rain hinders flights of drones, creating the opportunity for safer logistics, rotation or local operations. Therefore, weather windows are used for infiltration or repositioning forces,” Palisa said.

Russia is working to make defending Ukraine even more difficult.

“The Russian army is trying to make a kill zone as wide as possible, destroying all buildings and shelters with pinpoint strikes, to make it completely bare wasteland where it is impossible to hide,” Voloshyn said.

Supply nightmare

Drones are also forcing artillery to move farther from the front and make it almost impossible to use armored vehicles to supply troops.

“Drones became handy when it comes to delivery and evacuation, battle reconnaissance and distance mining — tasks usually done by people at war before,” Palisa said.

But as drones proliferate, even those uses are now becoming ever more difficult, turning the front into a hellscape.

Drones make evacuation and rotation, as well as logistics, deadly exercises. “Most soldiers currently die during rotation,” Voloshyn said. “Any kind of delivery bears grave risks. So, we use drones more often.”

As a result, commanders are forcing soldiers to spend weeks at the front — also called the zero line — without rotation.

“Usually, during a rotation, a car comes as far as 5 to 6 kilometers from the positions. Soldiers have to walk the rest of the road, hiding in terrain from drones,” Sekach said.

That creates problems for morale.

“An infantryman who once sat at zero in a hole for 60 to 165 days will not go there again,” said Mykola Bielieskov, research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at the Come Back Alive Initiatives Center. 

Video medicine

The wounded have it hardest, as drones critically undermine front-line medicine and evacuation, said Daryna, an anesthesiologist with the Da Vinci Wolves Battalion of the Ukrainian army, who asked to be identified only by first name.

“Today an injured soldier frequently has to walk, be carried, or even crawl for up to 5 kilometers from his position until the point where an armored evacuation vehicle can pick him up,” Daryna said. “Then an evacuation vehicle has to make it through swarms of Russian drones that can reach as far as 20-40 kilometers from the front-line positions.”

Drones also force Ukrainian combat medics to move their medical points farther from the front line, which prolongs the time it takes to stabilize the wounded. Injured soldiers have to stay at their positions for days or even weeks waiting for evacuation, which is sometimes now performed by land robotic systems.

Their inability to reach the wounded has forced Ukrainian combat medics to turn to TV medicine, using a Mavic drone to talk to stranded soldiers. “On a video, we can see how the tourniquet was applied. Then we can contact the fellow soldiers of a wounded [soldier] and direct them how to properly help him,” Daryna said. “Drones also become useful for the delivery of necessary medicine to the positions.”

There are also reports from open-source researchers of Russia’s abandoning wounded troops rather than trying to evacuate them.

Enemy drones are also making life much more dangerous for the pilots flying them from behind the front.

“I remember the times when you could safely go to smoke in a 10 kilometer zone from the contact line. Now we do not enter the zone without a shotgun. Fiber optic cable drones are reaching as far as 15 kilometers already, so you have to be extra careful,” said Sekach.

For now there appears to be no quick fix to the kill zone created by drones.

“There is currently no doctrine on how to build defense in depth when you have very few infantrymen on the front line, and the enemy is engaged in infiltration, and at the same time, when the enemy cuts off your connection between the front line and the rear and actively knocks out your drone operators on the front line,” Bielieskov said.

“This is the recipe for Russian slow advances — the squeezing effect.”