Nazar Yuschenko of Lviv, 25, is a former graphic designer who co-founded an air reconnaissance group for his Ukrainian infantry batallion.Anton Skyba/The Globe and Mail
The Ukraine war is the first mass-scale drone war, with tens of thousands of the deadly airborne robots deployed by each side. It wasn’t always that way. The Ukrainian brigade of Nazar Yuschenko learned that no drones meant fighting weakness.
He and three of his fellow machine-gunners, all of them tech-savvy young men, began experimenting with drones – also known as UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles – more than a year ago, before the large-scale counteroffensive that Kyiv launched in June. Today, the four-man drone unit they formed is known as Icarus – the figure in Greek mythology who used wax and feather wings to escape his prison (and crashed when the sun melted the wings).
The gift of a cheap, Chinese-made drone in the early summer of 2022 gave them the start they needed to become a stronger fighting force. “When we were fighting, we found there was a lack of information from above,” he said. “We needed to see from the sky to be effective in battle.”
Mr. Yuschenko met The Globe and Mail last week in a wine bar in central Lviv, the Western Ukrainian city that became the working capital of the country at the start of the war, when Russian military columns were rolling toward Kyiv.
He is 25, though he looks younger, and tall and slim. He has a shy, reticent air about him and was happy to be on a 10-day leave from his brigade to see his new wife, who is a communications officer for a United Nations agency in Lviv. The screensaver of his phone shows the two of them embracing. His war duties prevented them from having a honeymoon.
He was born in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, about 130 kilometres south of Lviv. As a teenager, he was attracted to technology. He learned graphic design and marketing in school and, before the war, built websites.
In his military training, Mr. Yuschenko learned to use the American-designed 0.50-calibre M2 Browning heavy machine gun, whose variants have been seen in dozens of conflicts since the Second World War. Drone use was not part of the curriculum. He learned how to use the flying machines several months after he started combat missions.
Nazar Yuschenko and a comrade work in the field with an M2 Browning heavy machine gun.Courtesy of Nazar Yuschenko
His accounts of the drone attacks and surveillance missions that he and his Icarus colleagues launched are impossible to verify by The Globe, but the Ukrainian military makes no secret of its expanding drone activities and social media is brimming with often gruesome images of drone attacks on Russian soldiers and armour.
Mr. Yuschenko showed The Globe dozens of photos and videos of his team’s warfare, including a few that apparently recorded the final moments of Russian soldiers as their front-line slit trenches were hit by small bombs dropped by Icarus drones.
At the start of the war, 20 months ago, drones were scarce to non-existent in some Ukrainian brigades, and they suffered high casualty rates partly because of that, especially against Russian brigades that used drones in great quantities. (Generally speaking, a Ukrainian brigade is composed of 4,000 soldiers, led by a colonel.)
One was Mr. Yuschenko’s National Guard brigade, which was trying to break Russia’s devastating siege of Mariupol, in the country’s extreme southeast, on the Sea of Azov. (He has since transferred to a regular Ukrainian military brigade whose identity he is not at liberty to reveal.)
As a machine-gunner, he quickly became aware that lack of aerial intelligence put him and his fellow fighters at a big disadvantage; they could not visually detect Russian troop and armour movements beyond their line of sight. In June, 2022, four months after the start of the war, he was given a precious gift – a DJI Mavic drone whose simplest versions cost only a few hundred dollars. They are controlled from a phone app.
While the Mavic was designed for recreational use, the drones could fly as high as 500 metres, giving them the ability to “see” dozens of kilometres in every direction. And their small size and noise output made them hard to detect. The Mavic was too small to carry weapons. “We saw the Russian side in the battle and we used the location information to direct our artillery strikes,” Mr. Yuschenko said. “We were able to destroy some heavy artillery.”
The Mavic’s early success impressed the unit’s commander. “He asked us to make the drone unit permanent,” Mr. Yuschenko said. “After that, I stopped operating machine guns and did only surveillance.”
The DJI Mavic drone has been an invaluable tool for Ukrainian troops who need a clear view of the battlefield. This footage from the 93rd Mechanized Brigade shows how one such drone helped to target Russian positions in July of 2022.
About half a year later, the Icarus team tried to step up its game by adapting bigger agricultural drones, which are used for crop spraying, to carry munitions that weighed as much as 20 kilos – theoretically enough to cripple a tank. The experiment lasted only a month. The two-metre-wide drones, with six electric motors, were too big and noisy to be unobtrusive. The Russians proved adept at shooting them down or using radio jammers to deafen the control signals between the drone and the operator.
In an interview, Mykola Bielieskov, research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, said “the Russians are fast learners” when it comes to defending themselves against Ukrainian drones and developing their own ever-more-advanced ones.
Still, the Icarus soldiers had their successes. Going back to unarmed drones that directed artillery fire, they took out a Russian tank, which they believe was a Soviet-era T-64. Mr. Yuschenko showed The Globe grainy video of the tank blowing up.
By then, they knew that their own lives were increasingly in danger, even though they typically operated 500 to 1,000 metres behind the front lines, as the Russians became more savvy. “When the Russians realize our drones are in the sky, they send up their own drones to see where ours land,” he said. “Then they hit that sector with artillery.”
Icarus’s most successful day came on Feb. 14. The team was able to plot the probable direction of a Russian amoured column. The information was sent to the brigade’s combat engineers (also known as sappers), who installed mines along the column’s anticipated route. It worked – the series of explosions led them to believe they destroyed seven tanks and heavy artillery pieces.
A month later, they almost lost their lives when their brigade was fighting in the nightmare killing zone in and around the town of Vuhledar, about halfway between Donetsk and Mariupol. Using a new type of light drone, they discovered to their alarm that they could not turn off the machine’s GPS. The Russians homed in on the signal and blasted the area with a barrage of Grad missiles.
“My left arm near my elbow was pierced by shrapnel and I have a piece of shrapnel in my butt,” Mr. Yuschenko said.
Nazar Yuschenko, left, monitors drone data during the Vuhledar battle in southeast Ukraine.Courtesy of Nazar Yuschenko
Mr. Bielieskov said it is hard to say which side has the deadliest drone fleets. The Russians, he said, are generally better at suicide, or kamikaze, drones, which self-destruct when their warhead hits its target. One of them is the X-winged Lancet, which has emerged as a serious threat to the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
On the other hand, the Shark drone, which was developed by Ukraine since the start of the war, has been described as a “game changer’ for reconnaissance missions. With long endurance and the capability to fly at high altitudes, its data stream helps long-range M777 howitzers and HIMARS missiles find their targets, Mr. Bielieskov said.
What is certain is that drones are playing a crucial and expanding role in the war, and that the Icarus team has played a small but vital part in that campaign. “Overall, Icarus is not so important to the war, but in my brigade’s battles, we used drones to stop the Russians and that’s a big deal,” Mr. Yuschenko said.