All that can be seen in the dead of the Ukrainian night is the red lights of the ‘Vampire’.
In a secret underground location, the drone’s operators, code-named Artist and Aviator, wait until a radio crackles with the order to attack.
They race to make final adjustments to the lethal device before its propellers roar to life and it takes off into the sky.
In just 15 minutes, they fly it to the target – a squad of Russian soldiers hiding in a shattered house on the Kharkiv front line.
The Vampire – which Moscow’s soldiers call Baba Yaga after the child-devouring witch of folklore who flies by night – drops the anti-tank mine it had carried across no-man’s land.
Artist and Aviator watch their screen. A cloud of smoke surges upwards. Then it clears to reveal the Vampire’s latest victims: a pile of bloody, mangled corpses.
“Some say that in Khartiia we don’t fight as much, but that’s because we do the groundwork – 24/7 surveillance and intelligence to spot enemies and uncover their routes,” says Volodymyr, a soldier in Ukraine’s 13th Khartiia Brigade of the National Guard.
“If we can take them out from a distance, why should we come closer?”
The Vampire is one of the first mass-produced drones used by the Ukrainian army to carry out strikes without risking the lives of its soldiers, who are heavily outnumbered by Moscow’s forces.
The development of the drone, which carries a thermal-imaging camera to identify its targets, marked an early sign of the ingenuity of Kyiv’s engineers, who adapted a simple agricultural tool into one of the cheapest, most effective weapons of the war.
Now those same engineers are in a technical race against their rivals in Vladimir Putin’s army to create more, and even deadlier, drones that can evade the raft of electronic jamming systems that disrupt their flight.
Last week, it was revealed that Ukraine had learnt how to hack into the Shahed drones that have plagued its cities, and redirect them back towards Russia or Belarus.
Often, the development of Ukraine’s drone improvements is pushed from the ground up – at the brigade level, where the need for advancements is most pressing.
Kyiv’s military still lacks a formal state programme to standardise the breakthroughs made by the mini-Beaverbrooks at work across the front line.
“At the beginning, we relied totally on commercial drones, but we started our own production line this spring,” explains Istek, an engineer with the Khartiia Brigade.
“The initiative came from the brigade’s leadership. They had a clear vision – save the lives of our people. And there’s no simpler and more effective way than improving technology.”
In an underground laboratory in southern Ukraine, engineers work frantically to repair and refashion a huge variety of drones.
The centre is led by Oleksandr, a 40-year-old electrician when the war began. He enlisted when Russian forces ravaged his home region of Chernihiv, ending up in an artillery unit.
A unit commander there thought to make use of the skills Oleksander had learnt over his career, and asked him to try to extend the flight time of the drones used by the squad. He did, attaching two batteries to the mainframe that boosted its range by 50 per cent.
Other requests followed swiftly: to improve antennas, shield pilots and make the drones themselves more hardy.
The brigade began to recruit other soldiers with similar experience to Oleksandr, forming an unmanned systems battalion.
“I brought out artillery, infantry, mortar people and I told them, ‘Do you want to be useful? Come with me, let’s help the brigade,’” Oleksandr told The Telegraph.
Pilots a key part of process
In the bunker, he now works incessantly to remodel commercial drones, “dragon” drones (which spray molten thermite at their targets) and Vampires, among a host of other winged systems.
3-D printers work through the night to make small parts needed for the tweaks his team develops. Drone pilots are a key part of the process – both making requests for improvements and being trained in how to use the latest ingenious tweak.
“When I have a new invention, I call the pilot and tell him to test it. I want him to bring me ideas on how to improve it, how to make it simpler, and things like that,” Oleksandr says.
“Pilots don’t know much about technology, and most of us here don’t fly in real combat situations. Smooth communication is key. Without feedback, the technology can’t develop.”
One of Oleksandr’s team is Archie, a 26-year-old former First Person View (FPV) drone operator with the 31st Mechanised Brigade, who trains both pilots and engineers in the innovations.
“We’ll never have more soldiers than Russia or 1,000 tanks for every offensive. I believe we’ll win this war because we have brilliant minds developing new technology,” he says.
Last week, the United States urged Ukraine to drop its conscription age to 18, with an unnamed official saying that manpower was the army’s most critical challenge as Russia’s forces advance across the eastern front and in Kursk, the Russian region where Kyiv’s army has carved out a precarious foothold.
‘A front line without soldiers’
In April, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, reduced the age limit from 27 to 25, but has resisted easing it further in an effort to protect young lives.
A source in his office said that it was pointless sending teenagers into battle when the West had not made good on delivering the full range of equipment and weaponry they need to survive.
In Oleskandr’s laboratory, many engineers believe technological advances can make up for the comparative lack of recruits.
”In a year, maybe a little more, we’ll see a front line without soldiers – just robots and pilots at a distance. It won’t be the same,“ Oleksandr predicts.
In time, artificial intelligence will allow drones to identify targets and fire off their weapons without the need for operators like Artist and Aviator.
For now, Oleskandr’s dream machine is something more prosaic – a drone that “eliminates bureaucracy,” he says, drawing a laugh from the 31st Brigade.
“You wouldn’t believe the paperwork I have to fill out every time we lose a drone. Without it, we’d already be the best.”
