How Drones Are Reshaping the Ukraine War

Soldiers riding along the Ukrainian front now carry a device that looks like an old Game Boy. It has a small screen and three antennas, and when an enemy drone's radio signal gets close enough, the screen lights up with the enemy pilot's own view: a live feed of the drone that may be hunting the very person holding the device. He watches to see whether the camera is pointed his way (46:06). A man staring at a screen to learn whether he is already a target says more about this war than any map of the front line.

A War Run by Screens

Military analyst Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and Preston Stewart, a West Point graduate and Afghanistan veteran who covers the war on his own channel, spend hours describing why the Russia-Ukraine war looks the way it does. Drones now cause roughly 80 percent of battlefield losses (20:42). One side alone flies something like 8,000 to 10,000 small FPV drones a day, quadcopters about a foot wide that carry a small charge and crash into their target (25:18). Yet the footage people see online is misleading. Most clips show a hit, never a miss, so viewers assume one $300 to $500 drone reliably kills a tank (29:53). In reality it has taken as many as 79 drone strikes to destroy a single heavily armored Russian tank, and thirty to forty is common (31:15). Minefields, dug-in artillery, and the threat of counterattack still matter, because drones alone cannot hold ground, and they perform badly in high wind, rain, or snow (21:09).

Russia's answer to this dense "kill zone," a drone engagement belt roughly 15 kilometers deep on either side of the line (19:40), has been to stop sending columns of vehicles, which get spotted and destroyed far from the front, and instead push forward on foot, on motorcycles, and in small trucks. Soldiers advance in waves of ten; seven might not survive, but the three who slip through reveal a gap in Ukraine's thin three-man outposts, and commanders send the next group down the same path (32:35, 39:47). It is a tactic one American volunteer fighting with a Ukrainian brigade described as effective only if a commander does not care how many men he loses along the way. Kofman calls what results on the map a gray zone, not a line, and Stewart points to the Russian pushback against inflated claims of advance on the ground.

"One soldier in a basement is not control of territory." — Preston Stewart (104:25)

Technology keeps shifting the terms of this contest. Fiber optic drones, first adopted widely by Russian units during Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, trail a hair-thin cable behind them instead of broadcasting a radio signal, which makes them essentially impossible to jam (43:00). Fighters have flown them as far as 50 kilometers (43:42), though the cable adds weight and can snag on trees or roads. Both sides now cycle through new tactics and countermeasures roughly every three to four months, and Kofman notes a pattern: Ukrainian units, built like small defense startups with their own in-house research and manufacturing, tend to improvise faster, while the more centralized Russian military is slower to adopt an idea but better at scaling it once it proves effective (47:33).

A Mismatch at the Top

That same gap between improvisation and central control shows up in how each army is run. "We push authority down and allow junior leaders to make decisions in the moment," Stewart says of the Western military model, in which an 18-year-old soldier can decide on the spot to dig in, retreat, or call for reinforcements, because everyone up the chain understands the larger mission (82:05). The Russian military, he and Kofman argue, remains top-down: orders come from senior officers, and units that lose contact with that chain often simply stop rather than adapt. The cost of that rigidity compounds because Russian battlefield reports are frequently inflated, sometimes claiming territory as much as 15 kilometers ahead of where troops actually stand, built on a single soldier's photo with a flag or a position that was lost days earlier (107:29). Kofman describes a moment when he was near Kupiansk as Russian General Valery Gerasimov told Vladimir Putin that Ukrainian forces there were fully encircled, a claim that did not match what Kofman could see with his own eyes on the ground (110:00). Bad information like this gets forces killed by their own side's artillery and convinces political leadership the war is going better than it is.

The Wagner mercenary group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, grew out of this same friction between a rigid Ministry of Defense and a leader willing to improvise, recruiting convicts into disposable assault units that ground through the city of Bakhmut for nearly a year. After Prigozhin's short-lived 2023 mutiny and his death in a plane explosion weeks later, the Russian military did not abandon what made Wagner effective. It absorbed it, building its own convict-staffed assault companies, called Shtorm-Z and Shtorm-V, across the regular force (136:12). That overspecialization in small, expendable assault groups helped Russia grind forward for a time, but Kofman says it has since produced diminishing returns, and 2026 is shaping up as Russia's worst year of combat performance since the winter of 2023 (09:13).

The deeper problem, as Kofman frames it, is that Russia's political demands have not moved since the war's opening weeks, while its military capacity has shrunk. He argues the invasion's only real test of Ukraine's survival as an independent state happened in the first 30 days of 2022 and failed decisively (140:15). Everything since has been a grinding, attritional war that will decide borders and concessions, not Ukraine's existence. Yet Putin's maximalist goals, including the rest of the Donbas region and limits on Ukraine's alliances, remain unchanged even though Russia is spending about 44 percent of its government budget and 9 to 10 percent of GDP on the war (153:00), has at times relied on North Korea for 40 percent of its artillery ammunition (152:09), and is losing an estimated 30,000 people a month (150:57).

Kofman is wary of treating military strength as something fixed and portable from one war to the next.

"Military power requires a context to express itself, right?" — Michael Kofman (76:21)

A ranking of armies means little without a specific war, a specific piece of geography, and a specific political goal attached to it. That is why he resists predicting a quick end. Ceasefires, he warns, have historically served as rearmament periods in this conflict, pointing to the failed Minsk agreements after 2014, and a new one could simply set up a third, more destructive round (166:54). Still, both men end the long night's conversation with something other than gloom. Stewart describes a new Ukrainian system called Skyfall, essentially a drone-carried stretcher that flew two wounded soldiers 30 kilometers to safety while a crew talked to them the whole way back (176:09). Kofman recalls a company commander who drove into drone range without armor to pull two wounded men into a pickup truck by hand. As William Gibson's line goes, repeated here by Kofman about the speed of this war's innovation, "The future's already here. It's not evenly distributed" (58:56). What keeps surfacing alongside the worst of it, both men agree, is something stubbornly decent in the people fighting it.

"War is a sickness we can't kick. For all the ways we've gotten better as people, the one thing we keep coming back to is we kill each other over disputes." — Preston Stewart (174:33)