After a brutal winter, Ukraine’s drones are breaking Russian defenses

Ukrainian marines attach bomblets to a drone at a training site.

 (Brendan Hoffman for The Post)

Russia’s advance has suddenly stalled, and Ukraine is fighting on its own terms — a comeback credited to Kyiv’s efforts to steadily strengthen the capabilities of its UAVs.

Today [no date provided] at 5:00 a.m. EDT 

By Steve Hendrix and Serhii Korolchuk;

original article contains very useful links; not all of its images could be adequately published here, evidently for technical reasons.

DONETSK OBLAST, Ukraine — As a fifth summer fighting season begins in Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Vladyslav Tovstyi directs dozens of operators flying thousands of drones from an underground command center that looks more like a tech start-up than a forward bunker.

High-definition monitors lined the insulated walls, each showing a drone’s-eye view of a doomed Russian soldier in a foxhole, an enemy supply truck, countryside striped with trenches and razor wire. On one, a ground robot was delivering food and ammo to a forward unit — a Ukrainian soldier gave a thumbs-up to the camera as he unloaded a box.

From his ergonomic Secretlab gaming chair, Tovstyi monitored his team’s efforts along the front lines. His laptop connects him with other units sending drones further into Russia, some disrupting rear supply lines, and others striking oil refineries closer to the Arctic Circle than to the front lines.

It’s a remarkable evolution from the day Tovstyi experimented with one of Ukraine’s first drones, an off-the-shelf quadcopter with a one-mile range and a half-hour battery.

The new three-range strategy he is part of and this setup, at a secret location in the Donetsk region that Russia is desperately trying to conquer, helps explain why Russia’s war, predicted to last mere days, has now continued for more than four years — and how Ukraine suddenly seems to have the stronger hand.

For his first drone, in the conflict’s early weeks, Tovstyi was squatting in the dirt and thunder of the front lines, his platoon about to be surrounded by Russian soldiers. Desperate, they unpacked a store-bought Chinese drone and joy-sticked it into the sky.

“We were blind like kittens,” Tovstyi said. “Then we sent the Mavic up, and we could see 50 pieces of enemy equipment. We directed the artillery fire at them.”

Now, Tovstyi is among the high-tech soldiers directing an ever-evolving drone strategy. And after a year in which Ukraine lost territory, resisted White House pressure to cave to Russian demands and endured months of blackout, the latest drone warfare has set the stage for something few predicted during the bitter winter — a summer that begins, for once, with something resembling an edge.

Russia’s progress at the front has ground almost to a halt. The Kremlin is losing tens of thousands of soldiers a month while suppressing growing public anger at home. And with European funding, Ukraine has become an increasingly formidable arms manufacturer in its own right.

Ukraine’s comeback flows mostly, military experts say, from how it continues to rewrite the capabilities of its remote-controlled air force.

A homegrown approach to warfare that started with a few hobby shop quadcopters has evolved into a sustained, three-tier strategy of short-, medium- and long-range drone programs.

At the far end, a new generation of Ukrainian strategic long-range UAVs is reaching deeper into Russia than ever, rattling civilians and forcing a military superpower to defend territory it never imagined would be at risk. 

In February, one drone slammed into an oil refinery located in Russia’s far northern Komi Republic after a flight of 1,100 miles — setting a record that is not likely to stand for long.

More critically, tens of thousands of operational drones are now blanketing the middle ground — up to 200 miles behind the front — scrambling supply lines, targeting rear command centers and hunting the air defense batteries Russia needs to protect everything else.

And along the 750-mile front, Ukraine is shrinking the number of human soldiers in the kill zone using remote-controlled combatants. Tactical aerial drones spot and attack Russians, while ground robots resupply Ukraine’s own troops and evacuate the wounded, turning what was once a brutal exchange of infantry and artillery into a technological gantlet that Russian forces cross only at tremendous cost.

Russia, which was capturing an average of 150 square miles a month at its peak last year, has slowed to a fraction of that pace. In April, for the first time in nearly two years, it lost more ground than it gained, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Yevgen Karas, who commanded some of the first experimental longer-range drone missions in 2022, has watched the number of deep-strike drones Ukraine launches each month grow 20 to 30 times since then. Even more critically, the monthly number of mid-strike drones has expanded by more than 1,000 percent, Karas estimates.

“I think they will be in very big s--- this half of the year because we are going to increase the quantity of hits even more,” Karas said in an interview at his operations center in Dnipro. “For Russian officers, it will be hard times.”

Karas launched one of Ukraine’s first behind-the-lines strikes in September 2022, hitting a Russian fuel depot 50 miles away with a drone that had to take off and be guided so close to the front lines that its operators were stationed amid machine gun fire alongside teams firing mortar shells.

Now, they hit hundreds of targets a month from secret control centers all over Ukraine, access to the grid more important than proximity to the front. On Wednesday, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced a new $112 million “logistical lockdown” program to fund even more midrange strikes.

“There is a serious slowdown in the Russian offensive,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin Russian political analyst, told The Washington Post.

The midrange attacks in particular have disrupted the delivery of supplies and fighters to the front, Markov said. “They are forced now to keep more than 150 kilometers [93 miles] away from Ukrainian positions. This is reducing the capability of Russian forces to maneuver operatively.”

Ukraine still faces constraints that have hampered it from the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Kyiv is short on soldiers, short on air defense interceptors that it gets from the United States and heavily dependent on European funding.

The European Union finalized a loan worth 90 billion euros (about $105 billion) last month, funds that had been blocked by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban before he was voted out of office in March — but that still leaves a reported $60 billion gap.

But in a way that seemed unlikely a year ago, conditions now seem to favor Ukraine. Moscow wants to seize more of Ukraine, and Kyiv wants to hold the Russians off. Russia needs to be dominant; Ukraine needs to be durable.

“This is a war of exhaustion,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst at Come Back Alive, a nonprofit organization that raises money for the Ukrainian military. “It’s like a boxing match with unlimited rounds,” Bielieskov said. “We just need to stay on our feet until the last one.”

The past year in some ways was the worst yet for Ukraine.

President Donald Trump, after berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, had been pressuring Kyiv to make a deal on Russian terms, inclusing surrending territory.

The attacks have both material and psychological impact, bringing the war closer to Russians who for most of the past four years had watched only a sanitized version of the fighting on state TV.

This month, Russian President Vladimir Putin curtailed the country’s annual Victory Day commemorations, acknowledging that the central-Moscow parade route was well within range of Ukrainian strikes.

Both countries cut down on air attacks for an informal three-day ceasefire during the commemoration of Soviet losses in World War II. But days later, Ukrainian drones struck Moscow in the largest attack on the Russian capital yet, killing at least three.

Putin, seeking to tamp down mounting bad news, has restricted internet access, including the ubiquitous use of the Telegram messaging platform, drawing anger from an increasingly skeptical public.

Russian analysts say grumbling about the war is growing in the populace and among the president’s elite supporters alike. The country’s general happiness index fell to a 15-year low in April, as measured by state-controlled surveys.

“You begin to wonder whether Putin’s aura of omnipotence isn’t just beginning to waver slightly,” said Tim Willasey-Wilsey, senior fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a security think tank based in London. “If Ukraine suffered its worst moment over the winter, I think Russia is suffering its worst moment just about now.”

Ukraine’s show of strength does not mean it is on the verge of prevailing, analysts say. The front line, if largely unmoving, remains white-hot. Ukrainian officials recorded 233 combat engagements on a single day last week.

Russia also launched one of its biggest aerial assaults of the war Saturday, pounding Kyiv with attack drones as well as ballistic and cruise missiles, including an Oreshnik hypersonic missile. Russian forces still occupy roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, and neither side is anywhere close to a decisive military victory.

The tools Ukraine is using to stay on its feet have evolved almost beyond recognition since the war’s first weeks, particularly its drones. 

With strategic, long-distance strikes ever farther into Russia, Ukraine is trying to force Moscow to divert resources from its frontline invasion to defending refineries, weapons factories, airfields and oil-export terminals across its huge territory.

Russian bombers have been pushed thousands of miles from the front. Black Sea Fleet vessels relocated from Crimea to Novorossiysk after systematic drone strikes. Air defense batteries have been redeployed to ring Moscow, pulled from the front to protect the capital.

“We are using Russia’s vastness against Russia,” said Bielieskov.

The drones fly both ways, of course. Russia continues to pound Ukraine’s energy grid, and in April killed at least 238 civilians and injured 1,404 injured, according to United Nations monitors.

Zelensky, in virtually every public statement, hammers on the need for more air defense help. Ukraine is bracing for shortages of U.S.-supplied Patriot interceptors amid the Iran war and the need to replenish batteries across the Middle East.

Still, Ukraine is starting the summer with mounting confidence.

“It’s very cautious,” said retired Gen. Gordon B. Davis Jr., a former deputy assistant secretary general of NATO and senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “But yes, there is optimism.”

 Catherine Belton in London contributed to this report.

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Conversation summary

The comments express strong support and admiration for Ukraine's resilience and innovation in its conflict with Russia, often contrasting this with criticism of Donald Trump's administration for its perceived lack of support for Ukraine. Many commenters praise Ukraine's leadership and military strategies, while criticizing Trump's alignment with Russia and his handling of international relations. There is a recurring theme of disappointment in the U.S. government's actions, with calls for greater support for Ukraine and acknowledgment of Europe's role in aiding Ukraine.

Article by: 

Steve Hendrix

Steve Hendrix is a London-based foreign correspondent-at-large. He came to the UK as London bureau chief in 2025 after five years as bureau chief in Jerusalem. At the Post since 2000, he has written for most sections of the paper and reported from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and most corners of the United States.follow on X@SBHendrix

Serhii Korolchuk is a researcher in The Washington Post's Ukraine bureau. He reports from across the country, documenting the war in Ukraine.