The corn in the fields stands several feet tall — it hasn’t been harvested in a long time. Villages are destroyed and deserted. Burnt-out car wrecks line the roadsides. There is no sign of fighting — the area in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border looks downright eerie.
These images from reconnaissance drones and stationary video cameras are continuously transmitted to the monitors at a Ukrainian command post. Here, the National Guard’s Khartiia Brigade monitors the region. The post is a few kilometers from the front line, in the basement of an abandoned building north of Kharkiv in Ukraine.
The battalion commander goes by “Thunder” and he doesn’t take his eyes off the monitors for a second. The weather was clear, the sky cloudless; reconnaissance must be especially vigilant. “If the enemy advances close to our positions, then we’ve overlooked something somewhere,” Thunder told DW.
Traditional shelters and trenches no longer offer protection in this war, he said: “The entire infantry — both Ukrainian and enemy soldiers — are digging into underground tunnels to remain out of reach of attack of the drones.”
To spot traces of the enemy, he said, the brigade members carefully “read signs on the ground from the sky.” They hunt for subtle clues: trash left on the streets of abandoned villages, freshly churned earth in gardens, a small pile of wood in the middle of a yard.
Pilot Oleksiy steered a drone toward one of the houses and spotted something suspicious near a well. “It looks like animal tracks, but theoretically someone could have stopped there to fetch water. We’ll have to check that out later,” he said. He scans the nearby road: Reconnaissance had noticed a civilian vehicle there. Just moments earlier, they had reported it stopping for a few minutes near a small cluster of trees.
“The enemy is constantly supplying its infantry,” Oleksiy told DW.
As soon as his brigade discovers a Russian hideout, combat drones are sent there. “Russia does the same thing,” Thunder said. “Whoever has the best hideouts and the upper hand with drones dominates.”
Delivering supplies with ground robots
It is essential that underground shelters remain undetected for as long as possible. As a result, Ukraine’s armed forces are increasingly relying on unmanned ground vehicles — rather than cars — to transport supplies and combat equipment, clear mines and evacuate wounded people. Different types of these robotic systems can carry 200 to 700 kilograms (440-1,540 pounds) of cargo.
The enemy is actively “hunting” Ukrainian ground robots, a commander known as “Scrooge” said. His brigade sends unmanned platforms loaded with supplies to positions every night. The DW reporter met him at the stroke of midnight in the middle of the steppe, on the outskirts of a village on the Kupiansk front line in the Kharkiv region.
There, quadcopters, combat gear, provisions and fuel were hurriedly loaded onto the various platforms. Everything had to happen very quickly, because enemy combat drones have been spotted circling just 5 kilometers (3 miles) away.
‘Dream’ is shattered
First, a ground robot nicknamed “Dream” was dispatched. According to the plan, the cargo would arrive within two hours. A pilot controlled the platform from a distance of 40 kilometers. Dream was accompanied by a reconnaissance drone controlled from another command post about 20 kilometers away.
Halfway there, Dream had to suddenly stop because an enemy combat drone was sighted. About an hour later, the platform came under attack. At the company’s control point, the cargo could be seen catching fire.
Scrooge said Dream was an “experienced fighter” and had sustained two “wounds,” and mechanics would likely be able to repair Dream. The other deliveries went successfully, so the loss of Dream isn’t so bad. “It’s just a machine,” Scrooge said. “The main thing is that no people die.”
Robots and drones instead of soldiers
The commander said Ukrainian ground robots were advancing faster than Russia’s. He showed DW a combat platform ready for deployment in his company’s workshop; mounted on it is a large-caliber US Browning machine gun.
Scrooge said it was capable of destroying enemy troops and equipment. Batteries can be used to keep the platform in standby mode for a long period.
“If a robot with a machine gun can attack the enemy from a distance of1 1/2 kilometers, that alone is psychologically difficult for those under attack,” said Yuriy, the company’s mechanic.
Scrooge is a career soldier and comes from a military family. He said it was only a matter of time before “instead of soldiers, only technology — robots and drones — will be on the battlefield.”
“People will be sitting 100 kilometers away and controlling them,” he said. He added: “All the operations you saw here tonight could be controlled from anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared in Ukrainian.
