Marc Santora, Lara Jakes, Andrew E. Kramer, Marco Hernandez and Liubov Sholudko
When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.
But then the small drones started to swarm.
They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.
“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.
Scrambling for a tourniquet, Sergeant Taras saw that the team’s driver had also been hit, his eye blasted from its socket.
The two soldiers survived. But the attack showed how an ever-evolving constellation of drones — largely off-the-shelf technologies that are being turned into killing machines at breakneck speed — made the third year of war in Ukraine deadlier than the first two years combined, according to Western estimates.
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