Ukraine is gaining ground by reshaping the front line to allow for the use of armoured vehicles
Verity Bowman
3 October 2026
The Telegraph
For more than two years, any tank that ventured near Ukraine’s front line was hunted by drones and destroyed. But against the odds, Ukrainian tanks rolled towards the battlefield again this summer and survived. A sophisticated strategy of targeted attacks by Ukrainian drone units and commandos helped push Russian troops back and clear the way for the heavy armour.
The tanks – some of which are believed to be British-made Challenger 2 tanks – became central to the major counter-offensive in Oleksandrivka that saw Ukraine regain 288 square miles of territory. Moving the tanks there took eight months.
First, Ukraine went after supply lines, hitting Russian convoys up to 100 miles behind the front and starving the drone crews and gunners who made the kill zone so deadly. Then Kyiv started listening: Ukrainian units hacked into Russian soldiers’ phones and read their panicked messages saying “that was close” about a nearby blast to work out where they were positioned and adjust their artillery accordingly. At the same time, drone teams hunted Russian crews until they fell back. Only then did the Ukrainian infantry move in, slipping through enemy lines on foot and clearing the way for the tanks to roll in behind them.
The tank units fired at the Russian positions and helped keep the ground that Ukraine had won back. The approach is spreading beyond Oleksandrivka. This week, Ukraine’s 475th assault regiment, known as Code 9.2, released footage of two tanks attacking Russian positions in Vilkhuvatka, Kharkiv.
The tanks, fitted with extra armour against drones, were escorted by Vampire heavy bomber drones, first-person view aircraft (FPV) and reconnaissance drones. They drove over light mines, fired directly into buildings where Russian infantry were sheltering, then withdrew under repeated FPV attacks. According to the regiment, the tanks returned undamaged. It was a raid rather than an advance, but it showed armour surviving where, until recently, it would almost certainly have been destroyed.
Analysts told The Telegraph the strategy showed that heavy armour still had a place on the battlefield when units were able to starve the kill zone close to the front line.
The Oleksandrivka counter-offensive – one of the most successful since the full-scale invasion – began when Kyiv learned that Russia was massing for an offensive against Zaporizhzhia. Instead of waiting, Ukraine struck first, hitting a weakly defended stretch of front nearby and forcing Moscow to scramble troops from elsewhere to defend ground they had assumed was safe.
The Russians were caught off guard and fought half-blind as a result of sweeping internet blackouts after SpaceX blocked Russian forces’ unauthorised use of Starlink satellite technology. Some Russians spent days unaware that Ukraine was moving in on their positions. And when
they did discover Ukraine’s progress, they were too afraid to tell their commanders, leaving Vladimir Putin and his military hawks in the dark.
At the same time, Ukrainian units struck supply lines around 10 miles behind the front to stop fresh drones and batteries from reaching the crews flying them. Further back, around 20 to 25 miles, strikes starved Russia’s artillery. At around 60 miles, relentless bombardments started to ground the fixed-wing reconnaissance drones that spotted targets for Russia’s rocket launchers.
In May alone, there were more than 200 Ukrainian strikes on Russian logistics vehicles. Some of the targets were more than 100 miles behind the front on the main highways feeding Russian forces in the area. “It’s essentially a dismantling of Russian forces’ ability to sustain their combat power,” said Robert Tollast, a researcher in the land warfare team at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). For the Russian soldiers at the front, the effect was grim. Short of water, food and ammunition, “life just becomes a lot more miserable”, Mr Tollast said.
Ukraine then hunted the Russian drone units, shooting their Shahed drones out of the sky and destroying the radars and electronic warfare systems that helped them find targets. It was slow work: Ukrainian units sent up drone after drone, with rows of operators watching the feeds. Each time one was shot down, its location was logged in a central system and fed into the planning for the next mission. In time, Russian crews pulled back to avoid being killed, and their valuable electronic warfare kit went with them, moving the kill zone further back. “It’s not that [the kill zone] is gone altogether,” said Sam Cranny-Evans, an armour specialist at Rusi. “It’s that the area where it was a problem for [the Ukrainians], they can now move through a bit more safely.”
Ukraine had also hacked into the messaging apps Russian troops used to talk to one another, reading what they were saying as the Ukrainian shells landed. “We can afford to adjust artillery fire using their messenger app,” a Ukrainian officer said. “The company commander shouts: ‘S—, that was close.’ We keep working on him further.”
Experts believe Ukraine managed this by deploying drones carrying fake mobile phone masts, which tricked nearby handsets into connecting to them and sharing its data. “We have a phrase in electronic warfare: find the emitter, find the asset,” said Dr Thomas Withington, an expert in electronic warfare, radar and military communications. “The minute you switch your cell phone on, you have to assume you’re lighting up like a Christmas tree.”
With the kill zone pushed back, the infantry moved in on foot. Small groups of Ukrainian paratroopers and assault troops slipped through gaps in Russian lines and pushed deep behind them. Where Russian positions were well dug in, they often went around them rather than engaging in conflict. Some Russian soldiers hid. Others, exhausted, stayed in their hideouts and did not notice the Ukrainians passing.
That left pockets of Russian troops stranded behind the Ukrainian advance, which reconnaissance units had to go back and clear – some of the most dangerous work of the offensive.
Soldiers walked up to 12 miles to reach the fighting. In some sectors, almost every tree line had been cut down or mined, leaving them to cross long stretches of open ground. Rivers, including the Vovcha, cut across the sector, with Russia destroying the temporary crossings Ukraine had built.
Ukraine came up with a simple but clever tactic to circumvent these blockades: Soldiers would swim across the river, with drones delivering dry clothes for them when they had reached the
other side. Only once the ground had been taken did the tanks roll in; their main job was to hold the ground the infantry had taken.
Russia tends to counter-attack hard to retake lost territory, and often keeps throwing men at a failing attack rather than pulling back, according to analysts. “They counter-attack, and they counter-attack hard,” said Mr Cranny-Evans. “They will tend to reinforce a counter-attack even if it’s failing.”
Heavy armour gave Ukraine something to absorb those blows, but it was not the roaming kind of tank warfare many imagine. The tanks are “held up in a hole firing at the Russians”, Mr Cranny-Evans explained. “They’re not used in these broad, sweeping offensives that everybody wants to think about.” The brigades that led the offensive were known to operate a mix of Western and Soviet-era armour. Not every tank made it. Ukraine lost at least one American-made Abrams tank in early February, and Russian footage from the offensive showed Ukrainian vehicles being hit.
But Western tanks have shown that they are able to take a battering from small drones and keep going, according to Mr Tollast, and Ukraine has added extra armour to many of them. “I don’t necessarily think conventional armour has disappeared from the battlefield because of drones,” said Dr Withington. “I think drones have changed the method of employment.”
The lessons are being watched closely in Britain, which supplied the Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine and is upgrading its own fleet to the Challenger 3.
The British Army’s plan for its future fighting force, set out in last year’s strategic defence review, rests on a similar idea. Under its 20-40-40 model, crewed vehicles such as tanks would make up 20 per cent of the Army’s combat power. Reusable drones would make up another 40 per cent, and expendable munitions, from shells to one-way attack drones, the other 40 per cent. The aim, said Mr Cranny-Evans, is “using drones and things to shape the battlefield so that the armour can be more survivable” – much as Ukraine did around Oleksandrivka.
Ukraine has not brought back the tank warfare of 2022, but it has shown something potentially more important: that armour can move again when drones, electronic warfare, infantry and long-range strikes first reshape the battlefield around it. “If you take it to its absolute endpoint, you’re re-establishing large-scale manoeuvre with tanks,” said Mr Tollast. “But before you go down that road, there are so many obstacles to cross.”
Verity Bowman is a seasoned foreign news reporter at The Telegraph since September 2018, covering major global events such as the US election and the war in Ukraine. Previously, Verity worked as a news reporter for The Guardian and gained extensive freelance experience, contributing articles to various publications including Grazia and The Tab, where Verity also served as Leicester Editor. Verity’s journalism career began with significant internships, notably the first intern for The Tab in the United States during its launch. Educational qualifications include a Master’s in Newspaper Journalism from City St George’s, University of London, and a Bachelor’s Degree in History and American Studies from the University of Leicester, along with a year abroad at St. John’s University.