Sir Rich Knighton has revealed that he travelled to the front lines, where he admired Kyiv’s resolve but was troubled by the ‘gamification of killing’
Charlie Parker
August 7, 2026
The Times
The head of the British armed forces has revealed that he travelled close to the “kill zone” in Ukraine and watched Russian soldiers being hunted down by drones. Sir Rich Knighton, chief of the defence staff, wrote in an article about his “first-hand” account of seeing Ukrainian troops engaged in “fierce” fighting. A few weeks ago he travelled to the frontline headquarters of Ukraine’s 425th Assault Regiment, where the battle for the eastern city of Pokrovsk was being fought from computer screens.
Defense of Ukraine
The countryside command post, comprising half a dozen rooms in a civilian building northwest of the city, was bristling with digital maps “and live feeds from drones flying over the town”. “These drones were being used to look for the enemy, to attack enemy positions and to destroy other drones,” Knighton said, adding that screens also displayed footage from hacked Russian feeds. “In some cases, the grainy pictures on the screens were in fact the intercepted signals from Russian drones, a real-time window to the battle.”
The soldiers in the base were young men who had been fighting for Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022. Some had been painters, decorators and van drivers before Russia invaded.
Knighton described their commander as “a bear of a man, with biceps bigger than my thighs and with scars on his face from the battles he had fought”. He was transported in an unmarked car by the Ukrainians from the Unmanned Systems Force to a secret location a little further from the front line, which is a 30km wide and 1,200km long “kill zone” saturated with deadly drones.
Inside their makeshift headquarters large television screens were stacked one on top of the other, four or five high against the wall. Here he saw livestreams of drones being operated at longer ranges, across many kilometres of the front line in the Donetsk region “as they hunted their enemy”. “When the pilots weren’t flying, they were sleeping or resting in Japanese sleep pods just outside the ops room,” Knighton recalled.
When awake, however, their attacks were recorded from the drone’s camera and uploaded on an internal feed. Each was then independently assessed and the results were posted on a large screen in the centre of the wall. “If the claimed kill is confirmed, it is added to the running total of
Russians killed that day, that week and that month,” Knighton said. “The total increased by eight in the two hours I was in the building.”
Different targets, such as an artillery piece, radar or a person, have a number of points associated with it, which an operator earns for those they hit. The points can then be spent by the operator on new drones via a closed website “with the look and feel of any other online store”, he said. The “glamorification of killing” made him feel uncomfortable, he added.
Knighton’s detailed remarks were published in the Heywood Quarterly this week to illustrate “the changes that technology is enabling in the way war is fought today”. He also warned about the emergence of artificial general intelligence, which “could mark as significant a discontinuity in progress as the atomic bomb”. The technology does not yet exist but can theoretically “do things that we currently rely on humans to do — perhaps even better”, he said, by matching human cognitive abilities in terms of learning, reasoning and adaptability.
Knighton concluded: “Right now, I feel that we are living through the most dangerous period of my working life. The shifting balance of power, the fraying of the old order and growing competition generate instability and uncertainty. The risk of miscalculation and escalation is real. And the war in Ukraine is shining a light on how wars of the next decade and beyond will be fought.”
Charlie Parker is a news reporter for The Times, covering a range of patches from crime and defence to health and education. He has written about war, protest movements, health scandals and the spread of disinformation online.