Kamikaze drones that can defy jamming are killing soldiers and destroying convoys ever further from the front line.
The burning man died far from the front line. He was 55 years old and had two daughters. He sat back in the driver’s seat of his incinerated car, beyond help, the driver’s door open, smoke drifting off his body.
The main street in Kostiantynivka was deserted. No one wanted to linger, in case they should also be hunted down and similarly slain by a Russian FPV (first person view) drone. So the dead man burnt unattended in his car outside the town hall, a scatter of drone fragments and rubble shards around him.
Eventually, a pair of elderly women emerged, peered at his body, walked off in silence, and waited at a nearby bus stop. A bus duly arrived and took them away. The leafy street remained empty and silent.
A soldier told me later that we were 9 km (5.5 miles) from the nearest Russian position. In the everchangeing struggle for drone supremacy in Ukraine’s war, 9 km is now well inside the kill range.
“Nine kilometres is now an easy range in which to die,” shrugged a Ukrainian lieutenant, known only as “Stanyslav”, from the 93rd Mechanised Brigade, in the basement of a nearby building.
“No other weapon type has changed the face of the war here so much or so fast as the FPV drone,” he added. “Almost any vehicle within five kilometres of the front is as good as finished. Anything moving out to ten kilometres is in danger. Drone strikes at 15 or 20 km are not that unusual.”
