The simple farmhouse north of Kharkiv—Ukraine’s second-largest city, just 20 miles from the Russian border—serves as the base of operations for an infantry company of the Ukrainian 13th National Guard Brigade, known as Khartia. One room is filled with bunk beds, and the walls are hung with helmets and body armor. In the yard, sacks of food and crates of ammunition sit under a laundry line dangling fatigues and T-shirts. But this is more than just a soldier’s billet. The main activity here is planning—a new kind of detailed forethought required by drone warfare.
Both Russian and Ukrainian use of drones has changed dramatically since the war began nearly three and a half years ago. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now come in all shapes and sizes. Both sides use widely diversified drone arsenals for scouting and striking enemy forces. Long-range drones terrorize Ukrainian cities and destroy oil depots deep inside Russia. Others with shorter ranges buzz overhead, night and day, on the front line.
These smaller drones, ever-present eyes and weapons in the sky have transformed the battlefield, creating a six-to-12-mile “gray zone” between Russian and Ukrainian lines. It’s a deadly no man’s land where no one dares risk exposure. Even tanks and armored vehicles hesitate to cross the desolate territory for fear of drones. Instead, small groups of attacking Russians dash in on motorbikes, drawing fire to expose Ukrainian positions. And virtually everything the foot soldiers of Ukraine’s infantry once knew about fighting—assault and defense—has changed.
For the Khartia infantrymen I saw working from the converted farmhouse, the evolving technology makes their job simultaneously easier and much more perilous.
Formed in 2022 as a volunteer civil defense unit, Khartia played a leading role in the battle for Kharkiv in the first three months of the war, helping to beat back the Russians from the city’s gates. Superior training and technology helped the brigade emerge as one of Ukraine’s most celebrated elite units, attracting celebrity volunteers and joining some of the war’s bloodiest battles, including Bakhmut and Soledar.
Known from the start for its infantry units, Khartia has also been at the forefront of wartime innovation. In December 2024, it mounted a historic, fully robotized assault. Dozens of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles—some with machine guns, others designed to lay and clear mines—attacked enemy troops massing north of Kharkiv. There were no flesh-and-blood Ukrainians on the battlefield, and according to the brigade, Russian losses were significant.
But robots haven’t replaced soldiers yet, and the infantry company at the farmhouse was among the first units to enter the fray after the unmanned attack. Five hours of futuristic shock and awe prepared the way for five months of grueling human combat as the company pushed the enemy back toward the Russian border, yard by yard. “Drones or no drones,” the unit’s master sergeant, who goes by the code name Doc, explained grimly, “infantryman is still the hardest job in the army.”
A slight, sad-looking man with a dark beard and black glasses, Doc has watched drones evolve since the war’s outset—growing bigger, with better cameras and longer-lasting batteries, greater range, and more capacity for explosives. Today’s Ukrainian drones can detect advancing Russians many miles away. But the opposite is also true, and the Ukrainian company is in constant danger of Russian strikes from above.
“We used to be afraid of Russian artillery,” the company commander, a beefy older man code-named the Czech, explains. “Now we don’t even think about artillery.” It’s much easier to aim a drone and call in a strike than to maneuver and fire these big, long-range guns—Stalin called them the “god of war”—that once helped decide infantry battles.
Two recent innovations—heavy multicopter bomber drones and those piloted by fiber optic cables rather than radio waves—demand some of the biggest adjustments on the ground. For the Khartia unit, the steepest new challenge is distance—the vast, growing gray zone between the farmhouse and the line of contact.
Instead of riding in an armored vehicle to a spot a few hundred yards from the fighting and sprinting, soldiers trudge up to 15 miles to remote positions. They make the trip far less often—it’s too dangerous—and this, in turn, poses a host of other challenges: finding new ways of masking frontline positions, longer stretches in the trenches, more frequent runs on longer supply lines, and ever-more dangerous evacuations of soldiers wounded in battle.
The new distances have even created new jobs. As recently as a couple of years ago, there was no need for soldiers like the unit’s guide, Monatik. (His code name is borrowed from a popular Ukrainian singer.) A chubby, good-natured man from the Kharkiv region who knows the local roads, he shepherds fighters to and from the unit’s distant frontline positions. “We go as rarely as possible,” he says. “We can’t afford the risk.” The usual duration of a shift in the trenches, once a few days, now often runs over a month.
Inside the farmhouse, the unit’s fresh-faced young deputy commander, who goes by the call sign Myth, shows me how drones are changing the front line. A trio of screens dominates a corner of the living room—16 flickering feeds from friendly UAVs flying in the area. This isn’t a drone command center—the men in the farmhouse aren’t manipulating the drones on the screens. But the feeds have become essential to their planning—information that guides the dangerous slog to and from the trenches, supply runs, and battlefield operations.
Three kinds of UAVs supply pictures on the day I visit: expensive reconnaissance drones, small first-person-view strike drones, and a new, heavier “Vampire” bomber. We scan all 16 feeds and then zero in on one as it follows a road through an empty field. Myth is planning the route that an armored vehicle filled with supplies will take to the line of contact that evening, under the cover of darkness. “We used to use maps,” says Doc, the master sergeant, sitting nearby. “This is much better—much more information. It’s also easier to show the men who will make the trip. We can point them exactly where to go and predict at least some of the problems they’ll face.”
It’s a slow day, and the men seem in a good mood, joking about the names they call enemy soldiers. One uses a slur, and the others scold him playfully: “Not in front of a foreign journalist!” Myth picks up the joke and runs with it, scanning the feeds for human life. “Look,” he says suddenly, pointing to a fuzzy spot in the middle of the screen, “a person from the Russian Federation.” They all laugh, but then some kind of shock jolts the image, and we watch a small dot fly away from the fuzzy spot. We’ve just watched a drone strike, and the Russian is dead. “That’s a bit of his skull,” Myth explains.
The Khartia brigade goes to great lengths to protect its fighters. Recruits are guaranteed 14 weeks of training or more. That’s more than twice as long as the 45 days most Ukrainian soldiers get. Management techniques borrowed from NATO have flattened the chain of command to encourage initiative and input from soldiers at all levels. Every significant battlefield operation is followed by an after-action review to identify mistakes and improve planning. Virtually all the men I speak to at the farmhouse underline the point. “We do everything we can to save lives,” Doc tells me. “That’s the most important thing.” And it pays off. According to him, despite the danger, the unit has lost just .5 percent of its fighters since it arrived at the farmhouse over a year ago.
It’s unclear how much this assuages the men’s fear. A new, gap-toothed recruit code-named Intelligent seems thrilled to have joined the unit, chattering about the training and the camaraderie. But his mood changes abruptly when the talk turns to drones. “There are just so many of them, all the time,” he explains. “It’s terrifying.” Monatik, the scout, agrees: “People are much more frightened. We try to jam conventional drones, and we shoot down the ones controlled by optic fibers or try to catch them in a net. But sometimes—too often—there’s nothing you can do. You just sit and listen. What’s coming is coming.”
Asked about the costs and benefits of the drone revolution, the men are divided. Ruslan, a young officer fresh from the National Guard training institute, is sure the new weaponry helps more than it hurts. “The more technology, the better,” he says. Czech, the middle-aged commander who has been in the armed forces off and on since 2014, isn’t so sure. “Drones mean 99 percent more work,” he says, “and everything takes more planning—much more planning. In a way, that’s good—drones help you see further ahead. But you can’t foresee everything.”
I try asking again: When was it better to be an infantry fighter—before or after the new technology of unmanned aerial vehicles? But the old soldier dodges my question: “Peace is better.”
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