‘We’ll get there’: the Ukrainian drone unit quietly knocking out Russian targets

Luke Harding 

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At a secret location in southern Ukraine, Roman Kostenko watched a drone rise into the sky. It ascended to a height of 100 metres, buzzing above a field of yellow rapeseed. The drone dropped a dummy anti-tank grenade on to a pile of tyres. The test worked. That night Kostenko’s team repeated the exercise over occupied territory. Two bombs fell on a Russian armoured fighting vehicle. It blew up, smoke pluming into the darkness.

Kostenko, a decorated special forces colonel, said his unit had destroyed dozens of Russian military objects, including tanks and howitzer guns. These operations took place every night on “a tactical level”, he said, close to the frontline. This stretches for 900 miles (1.450km), from the eastern city of Bakhmut where Ukrainian troops launched a local counterattack this week, to the southern provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

There has been intense speculation that Kyiv is about to launch a major counteroffensive. On Thursday night, Russian military bloggers erroneously reported that it had started. Speaking earlier the same day, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said his forces needed more time. According to Kostenko, Ukraine’s long-anticipated push should be understood as a rolling “spring-summer campaign” against an entrenched and powerful adversary.

Kostenko said the campaign was already unfolding in stages. The first involved the step-by-step elimination of Russia’s military potential, with strikes against logistical targets such as weapons depots and fuel dumps. This had begun, he said. A second stage involved seeking out and eliminating Russian command and control centres, causing a breakdown of communications with troops in the field. “That’s already happening too, probably,” he said.

Ukraine’s armed forces were unlikely to embark on a major frontal offensive until they had weakened Moscow’s battlefield capability, he indicated. “Our army won’t go forward until this preparation work is done. We can’t win if they have large amounts of ammunition and resources.” He acknowledged that Ukraine was playing a disinformation game about when and where it might strike, with signs that it was working, and that Moscow was beginning to panic.

Kostenko’s comments inject a note of caution into what Ukraine’s army might realistically achieve over the next few months. They raise the prospect that the war could go on for a long time – through 2023, at least, and into next year. Western observers, by contrast, appear to expect a decisive blow. Their optimism comes after Ukrainian operations last autumn in the north-east and south, which liberated large swathes of territory, including the city of Kherson.

Senior Ukrainian officials have warned against exaggerating the likelihood of a repeat breakthrough. In interviews this week, Zelenskiy said some armoured vehicles promised by the west had yet to arrive, and that Kyiv was not prepared to accept a bad peace deal if the counteroffensive failed, or fell short. “We can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time,” the president said.

Kostenko is also a deputy with the pro-European Golos party, and the chair of the Kyiv parliament’s intelligence and security committee. When Russia invaded last February, he led the defence of the southern city of Mykolaiv, and has since worked closely with the drone unit. The unit calls itself Perun, after a pagan god of sky and thunder. It makes its own quadcopters in a workshop, and is engaged in a constant battle of wits with Russian forces, who try to knock out the drones using electronic jamming systems.

According to Ukrainian partisans, spooked Russian soldiers have grown terrified of mysterious nighttime attacks. They have nicknamed the invisible drones Baba Yaga, after the supernatural witch who flies around on a broom. One Ukrainian operator, who uses the codename Caesar, said most missions were successful. The drones were comparatively cheap to build, and frequently knocked out $2m tanks, he said.

Explosives drop from the drone to the targets. Photograph: Emre Caylak/The Guardian

Ukraine’s counteroffensive plan is classified, known only to Zelenskiy’s commander-in-chief, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and a few others. There has been speculation that his troops might try to cross the Dnipro River, where Moscow controls the left bank. Kostenko said “anything was possible” but that the Russians would immediately spot a buildup of Ukrainian forces, and smash them with artillery. “There would be an unacceptable level of casualties,” he said.

In the meantime, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers were skirmishing on islands in the middle of the river. “It’s a grey zone. Nobody controls them. We fire and they fire,” Kostenko said, adding that both sides struggled to defend positions, which were gained and quickly lost, including on Velykyi Potomkin island, next to Kherson, itself the target of daily Russian bombardment. It was impossible to dig trenches because water appeared after only a few feet, he said.

The most obvious area for a Ukrainian attack is the Zaporizhzhia region. According to Russian military bloggers there were no signs on Friday of increased activity. It is widely assumed Ukrainian soldiers will try to recapture the city of Melitopol, and advance towards the ports of Berdiansk and Mariupol. If successful, this manoeuvre would sever Russia’s land corridor, cutting off Crimea and the left-bank of the Kherson region from the occupied east of the country.

Kostenko, however, said the distances involved were formidable. They would require a 40- to 60-mile push into enemy territory. The Russians had dug 6-metre by 3-metre anti-tank trenches and large-scale fortifications – some of the most extensive military defences seen for decades anywhere in the world, according to the UK Ministry of Defence. “It’s hard after a year of war for either side to surprise the other,” Kostenko noted, saying he was lobbying for an attack on Russia itself and the weakly defended border town of Bryansk.

Mines were a further problem, he acknowledged. Russian sappers had mined fields and roads all across the Zaporizhzhia frontline and put floating Yarm mines in the Dnipro River. Paradoxically, it would be easier for Ukraine to advance in Donetsk oblast, the region where Russia has the greatest concentration of forces, but with fewer mines to kill and wound advancing infantry, he said. “Mines are a big risk for us.”

According to leaked Pentagon documents, Ukraine has assembled at least nine new brigades. They are equipped with main battle tanks supplied by western partners, including the UK, which has sent 14 Challenger 2s; 80 Leopard tanks from Germany and Denmark are due to arrive by 1 June, and the US has promised by autumn to deliver refurbished Abrams tanks.

Kostenko said some of the European tanks were old versions, prone to breaking down. Russia had many more – “around 10,000”, he estimated. Ukraine’s urgent need was for long-range artillery, capable of striking targets deep behind enemy lines. The existing US-supplied Himars system had a range of about 50 miles. Since its arrival last summer, the Russians had moved their headquarters and weapons dumps out of range, he said.

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The Biden administration had refused to supply longer-range ATACMS rockets, which can be fitted to a Himars launcher, apparently concerned that they might be used to strike targets inside Russia. “I don’t know why,” Kostenko remarked. On Thursday, the UK’s defence minister, Ben Wallace, said Britain had supplied long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine. This is a significant boost to Kyiv and may prove transformational on the battlefield.

Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of Kherson’s regional military administration, said the Kremlin had abandoned plans to take more territory after its failure last year to seize Kyiv and its embarrassing retreat this week from the outskirts of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian forces advanced more than a mile. “The Russians are now trying to defend areas they already stole. They are not going forward. They are standing, and dying,” he said.

Prokudin said Ukraine had a good chance of fully liberating Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces, where locals supported Kyiv, and “pro-Russians” were very small in number. The same was true of Crimea which he said had not undergone the same intensive Russification as Donetsk and Luhansk, the two eastern cities in effect controlled by Moscow since 2014, when Crimea was annexed. These eastern areas would be harder to free, he said, but added: “We’ll get there.”

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