Kyiv has created the world’s first military branch dedicated to unmanned systems as the decisive front shifts from land battles to the skies
Peter Caddick-Adams
25 May 2026
The Telegraph
The drone’s motor was at first a distant whine, like a lawnmower. It incited dogs to bark and a few machine guns opened up. An hour earlier, someone had spotted or heard the Russian Shahed unmanned aircraft and triggered warnings along its likely flight path.
It was dark as we grabbed our shelter bags (passports, valuables, a book, food, water, spare clothes) and trooped down to the Soviet-era basements that every apartment block boasts. Above, Lviv’s air raid sirens sounded, repeated on our mobile phones.
The intruder grew louder as it flew overhead, sounding more like a nearby chainsaw. Eventually we heard a muffled thud, indicating it had exploded in a nearby suburb, or had been shot down. I noticed how my basement buddies carried on talking or playing music throughout the interruption, to calm their children and drown out the sounds of war.
Although Lviv – from where I was observing the conflict in January 2025 – is only 50 miles from the Polish frontier and less often targeted by the Kremlin’s drones and missiles, Moscow’s aerial munitions range across the rest of Ukraine nearly every day and night. Their targets are claimed to be power stations, tank workshops and water and electricity infrastructure, but plenty of schools, hospitals, restaurants, shopping centres, and high-rise flats also get hit. These nightly bombardments have become the reality of war for President Zelensky’s people.
Although there are still exhaustive land battles being fought every day in eastern Ukraine, they no longer appear to be decisive. For now, the visceral aspects of conflict appear to have been transferred to the skies.
If we are honest, most in the West expected Ukraine to fall within weeks of the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022. But thick, gloopy mud stalled many of the Kremlin’s early land advances, while their heliborne assaults on airbases around Kyiv were met with determined resistance. Slowly, Ukraine mobilised its resources and fought Vladimir Putin’s warriors to a standstill, but were never strong enough to expel the men from Moscow.
Initially, Mr Zelensky and his generals relied on vehicles, weapons and equipment from the West to stem the Russian thrusts, but they came with caveats from Joe Biden and some Nato powers. Chiefly, they could only be used within Ukraine, and not against Russian territory, lest the conflict spread.
We can now see that policy was misguided. Since the Trump administration started scaling back aid to Ukraine, Mr Zelensky’s lions, still with access to Western military intelligence, have had to fall back on their own resourcefulness and cunning. Until February 2024, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi led the defence of his homeland, stopping the Russian blitzkrieg, but at enormous cost.
With a population of 40 million against Russia’s 141 million, Moscow’s sheer numbers were bound to crush Kyiv, unless Zaluzhnyi could find another way to fight. According to current estimates from Nato and the UK’s Ministry of Defence, 350,000 Russians have been killed and a further one million injured in the Ukraine war since February 2022. Ukrainian military casualties appear to be half these totals. But they are still numbers they can ill afford. A further 50,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed.
A different strategy, less reliant on the blood of the people of Ukraine was needed, and in 2024 Zelensky sent General Zaluzhnyi to London as ambassador and promoted his deputy, Oleksandr Syrskyi, to supreme command. The new boss immediately ordered his personnel to withdraw to more favourable defensive positions, while he sought ways of taking the fight into Russia.
Under him, the drain of valuable soldiers has slowed, but not stopped. Recently, he has imposed a maximum two-month time limit for troops in forward positions. Syrskyi also oversaw the creation of the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) Command, which directs combat by air, land, surface and sub-sea remotely piloted craft. It is the first military branch in the world dedicated to unmanned systems.
Today, Ukraine’s sizeable domestic drone manufacturing sector daily devises new combat applications and concepts, which the USF tests, while training operators for combat. So far, they have deployed more than 170 different unmanned systems in battle.
In June last year, the former entrepreneur and strategic thinker Robert Brovdi was appointed to lead the USF, which has expanded to employ short-range craft, controlled by fibre-optic wire. Such machines, operated by distant pilots wearing first-person view (FPV) wrap-around goggles, are controlled by their gossamer-thin command wires, which can play out up to 12.5 miles (20 km), but are safe against Russian electronic interference and jamming. Designed to attack individual targets like single vehicles and bunkers, they can also pause and rest to conserve their battery power and lie in wait for an opportunity target, like a natural predator.
Brovdi’s longer-range craft can carry cameras for tactical or strategic intelligence gathering, whilst other one-way drones, armed with ever-increasing warheads and directed by radio signals or pre-programmed routes, have been attacking symbolic targets in Moscow, and Russian oil terminals up to 1,000 km away.
Ironically, many innovations for unmanned craft, such as the use of fibre optics, came from the Russians, but were copied and employed with greater effect by Ukraine’s USF command. It helps that much of the country’s pre-war nerdy gamers and often anarchistic computer community have been banded together into military units led with a light touch. Backed by the state’s resources, they can shelve their video games for real war against a tangible enemy.
Four years on, Ukraine has learned to use the dexterity and talent of its drone operators, whose individualistic approach and suggestions are encouraged and embraced by higher commanders. Russia, on the other hand, has regressed into a Stalinist autocracy that is suspicious of any personal initiative.
After the 2022 attacks failed, and believing that quantity has a quality all of its own, Putin demanded large attacks – employing vast numbers of troops and equipment – of the type last seen in the Second World War.
Furthermore, he has created a security architecture that is suspicious of any individual ventures (perhaps personified by the rise and calamitous fall of the Wagner private military company under Yevgeny Prigozhin). It is designed to crush low-level initiative. In this context, it is significant that the Russian army still does not possess a corps of non-commissioned officers.
Although several generations of Prussian and German military thinkers have already indicated that successful commanders rely on clever doctrine rather than raw numbers, the army of Putin has nevertheless brought its sledgehammer to the battlefield.
However, it is fighting against Zelensky’s troops, who are deftly wielding a scalpel. Thus, the combat indicators for victory in Ukraine at present seem less to do with population and numbers of tanks or aircraft, and to rest more on individual initiative and clever machines.
Peter Caddick-Adams is a writer and broadcaster who specialises in military history, defence and security issues. He previously lectured in Military and Security Studies at the UK Defence Academy for twenty years, and in Air Power for the Royal Air Force. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Geographical Society, he also spent thirty-five years as an officer in the UK Regular and Reserve Forces, and has extensive experience of various war zones, including the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, Sandhurst and Wolverhampton University, where he gained first class honours in War Studies; he received his PhD from Cranfield University. His previous works include Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives (2011), Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell (2012), and Snow and Steel: Battle of the Bulge 1944–45 (2014).