Ukraine’s drone hunters fighting air war on the ground

In the final seconds as their weaving missile neared its on-screen target, the soldiers huddling in the armoured hull bawled out encouragement to the warhead, as if it were a racehorse galloping down the final furlong.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the five-man surface-to-air missile crew called out in a speeding tumble of enthusiasm, watching the glowing blob near the crosshairs on the screen. “Yeeessssssssss!” they shouted at the moment the kill appeared as a sudden plume of black smoke.

There was no time for further celebration. The Ukrainians manning the Osa missile system may have only destroyed a machine — a Russian drone — but a rocket fired in reprisal from a Russian jet locked on to their radar signal could turn them into charred chunks seconds later. So the soldiers switched off the radar the moment the kill occurred and drove their 40-year-old armoured Osa vehicle fast from the launch site across the shell-churned landscape before they could be hit by a retaliatory strike.

 “We don’t have much but what we have, we use well,” grinned “Hassan”, the team’s 30-year-old lieutenant, afterwards, using his war alias. He patted the propeller and nose cone of a Russian Orlan drone that his team had earlier shot down, now mounted on the armoured vehicle’s engine cowling, and rued the fact that debris from Tuesday’s kill, likely to have been another Orlan, had fallen too far away to collect as a further trophy.

“We prefer it when the enemy’s machines fall from the sky close enough so we can collect the pieces,” he said.

Mud-spattered, damp with rain, rangy and young, the men seemed an unlikely vanguard of the latest high-tech phase in Ukraine’s air war, which sees the skies almost empty of jets and filled instead with drones and surface-to-air missiles.

If the jets are now a rarity then gone too are the days when Bayraktar TB2 drones, purchased by Ukraine from Turkey, were the sole killing stars of the drone war: today’s A-list includes the one-way trip “kamikaze” drones — Russian Kybs, US Switchblades and Iranian Mohajers and Shaheds — that loiter in the skies, find a target and hurtle into it to explode; and tiny quadcopters that drop bomblets into tank turrets and bunkers with more range and accuracy than a lobbed hand grenade could ever achieve.

Less infamous but more common and as lethal in their way are the surveillance drones, such as the Russian Orlan-10, which loiter over a designated sector of the map, feeding information back to artillery units and spotting targets for them to shell. Hassan claimed his Osa team had shot down nine Orlans in the past three months alone.

“Leave them in the sky and they will call in artillery on our soldiers,” he said, a death’s head painted on his helmet. “As soon as our men hear the sound of an Orlan above them, they know bad news is coming their way.”

The sharp escalation in drone use in the Ukrainian war was inevitable. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 2020, in which Azerbaijanis used Bayraktar TB2s to such deadly effect on Armenian armour, confirmed the potency of the weapon and thousands of drones are now being used in Ukraine, including cheap commercial drones bought online by individual teams of soldiers and adapted for warfare.

Less well known is the role played by Soviet-era surface-to-air missile systems to deny the sky to jets of either side, an absence that has further elevated the role of drones. Ukraine’s autumn counteroffensives into the Kharkiv and Kherson oblasts should by rights have been repeatedly hit by Russian aircraft along the flat lands and ribbon-straight roads over which the Ukrainian armoured vehicles advanced. Yet despite the target-rich environment, Russian aircraft remained almost absent from the battlefield, wary of their earlier losses.

 “The threat over the area [of Ukrainian operations] is such that Russian aircraft just can’t loiter there,” said Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, a former deputy RAF commander who oversaw combat operations in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. “They don’t have the systems to stand off and search for targets. Had they tried it, they would have got shot down in the process. They are flat-track bullies.”

Though legend recounts mythical Ukrainian pilots such as the “Ghost of Kyiv” destroying multiple Russian aircraft, the truth is less glamorous. Virtually every single one of the 60 Russian fixed-wing aircraft known to have been destroyed so far was shot down by surface-to-air missiles, the true killers of the air war, fired from systems such as Buk, S-300 and sometimes Osa.

The Russian failure to suppress its enemy’s air defence systems, and Ukraine’s equal wariness of losing any more of its remaining jets to Russian SAM systems — having lost over 50 of its own aircraft — has caused a scenario in which both sides are highly cautious about committing jets over the battlefield.

“They’ve got to a state of what you could call air inferiority in which neither has control,” Bagwell said. “Ukraine has deliberately sought this stalemate, as it is the best of its air options: a zero-sum game favouring Kyiv.”

In this way drones, cheap, effective and more dispensable, have become the natural inheritors of the skies. Yet not much has changed for the SAM teams on the ground.

“Our fight is all about sudden speed,” explained Hassan, standing beside his Osa, nicknamed Otaman, positioned in a shrapnel-torn treeline southwest of Donetsk, as artillery thundered away in the distance. The vehicle looked far from slick. A relic of the Soviet era, codenamed the Gecko SA-8 by Nato, the Osa system first entered service with the Red Army in 1971. Consisting of a six-wheeled armoured vehicle with a radar on its top and six missiles to its rear, it can fire at air targets up to eight miles away, yet the control consuls inside looked like props from a Sixties B-grade sci-fi film.

“It’s not the best and spares are difficult,” Hassan admitted. “But it’s all we’ve got. We live in the mud in holes beside it, getting rained on waiting, always waiting. Then if we get a sudden order on the radio from one of our early warning systems that a drone is approaching, we scramble into the vehicle and power it up.”

His team can only keep their radar on for a maximum of two minutes to avoid the signal being traced and tracked by a Russian anti-radiation missile. Then, whether or not they have achieved a drone kill themselves, the soldiers switch it off and move fast elsewhere.

They showed off video on their mobile phones of the nine drones the team had shot down in the past three months. Video records of missile launches are a military dictate rather than a vanity, and the footage included clips from inside the command consul and from outside the vehicle as it launched.

Then a soldier showed me another clip showing one of their comrades’ Osa vehicles, its radar on and rotating in the middle of a field, getting blasted to pieces by a Russian rocket before it had the chance to fire its own missile. “He kept his radar on too long,” the men said simply.