Ukraine: Is the sky still the limit?

We arrived at our destination some 65km southeast of Kharkiv, well within the range of Russian drones — Moscow’s forces arrayed just 25km away. Much of the journey was unsurprisingly at high speed. Our jocular driver, call-sign “Santa”, was a bald man with a big white beard intent on getting us there as unsafely as possible, if that makes sense. 

We set off on the road to Izyum, a little over 100 km southeast of Kharkiv. During the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces occupied the town of 40,000. They were pushed out in Ukraine’s 2022 Kharkiv counter-offensive. A visit to Izyum in 2023 revealed the widespread devastation to the town’s infrastructure and housing. After its liberation, a mass grave of 440 people had been located outside the town. At the time there were none of the anti-drone nets which now line the route — an obvious statement as to how the war has changed.  

We turned off the Izyum road, now heading in the direction of Kupiansk, the contested town on the Russian border. We drove on through endless fields of corn, potatoes and sunflowers around Shevchenkove, before taking a track through acres of spring onions and, finally, carrots. The journey reminded one, if nothing else, of Ukraine’s top-ten producer ranking in a range of foods, including soya, sunflower, barley and grains. Farmers continued to harvest within range of Russian weapons systems. Life, living and livelihoods carried on.  

Next to the bumpy track in a beyond-bucolic setting was a wooden shack — once a labourer’s hut. Midsummer, the buzz of flies was kept under control by sticky ribbons, their success a matted infestation. Pinned nearby was another scorecard, this one for the number of Russian drones shot down by the team in the anonymous hut over the last three months, the tally at 29. 

Inside we were greeted by three soldiers of the Khartia Corps on their five-day rotation. One of the two rooms had two beds and the drone console, the other used for their store of Sting Interceptors, the bullet-shaped, 3D-printed, four-rotor counter-drone capable of bursts of speed up to 280kph. 

The Sting is produced by the Ukrainian tech company Wild Hornets. Designed to hunt down Russian loitering munitions including the Shahed, Lancet and Gerbera among others, at around $2,000 per unit, the Sting uses a camera and thermal-imaging to get close enough to explode the 450-gram warhead. By killing $20,000+ drones and missiles, such interceptors have helped to tilt the maths of war in Ukraine’s favour. 

The leader of the unit was once a steel executive who served three years in an assault brigade. His two colleagues, one a coal-miner from Petrovsk, the other a welder, had the world-weariness of those who had seen a lot of action. Yet all were proud to defend Kharkiv with Khartia. “Anything is easy after the infantry,” said the steel executive, having served in all the hotspots from the meat-grinder of Bakhmut to elsewhere across the Donetsk Oblast. 

Starting as a group of less than 200 volunteers, Khartia, meaning “charter”, was set up as a National Guard unit shortly after the Russian invasion. It grew to brigade strength by 2023, and this year was made into one of two National Guard corps, comprising four brigades, over 15,000 soldiers. It is most active in the Kharkiv region, including the protection of Kupiansk which Putin has claimed Russia has taken not fewer than three times during offensives in 2025 and 2026. 

The war of machines was reinforced by the stream of Humvees and other military transport under the nets, all carrying elaborate safety cages designed to keep the shaped charges of drones away from the thin skin of the vehicles. Many of the pick-ups carried an elaborate range of Electronic Warfare aerials, lumps, bumps and nodes on their roofs. The area was well within the range of Russian drones, the fibre-optic versions which can operate at extreme edges of 50 km. The constant state of drone activity is signalled by the repeated sirens in Kharkiv, its distance just 30 km from the Russian border allowing little time for warning, the crump of explosions sometimes coming mid-siren. 

Inside the labourer’s cottage, the team kept an avid watch on the tablet installed with Sky Map, an early-warning system which provides a detailed picture of drone and other aviation activity. If one slipped into range, Sky Map shifted into its role as a digital command centre, a chat popping up to alert the crew, who could arm the Sting and set it off on its target in under a minute. Sky Map collects and maps data in real-time from a network of over 10,000 acoustic sensors deployed across Ukraine, as well as traditional radars and optical cameras. The Delta battlefield management system which integrates data from diverse sources, local and foreign, civilian and military, satellites, drones and other sources, provides geolocated data mapped in real time. In so doing, it not only offers a cloud-based platform to exchange information on the enemy, but to plan operations and enable co-ordination between units. The system became operational in 2022, and was first used in anger in the Ukrainian counter-offensive to the Russian convoy moving towards Kyiv that year.  

Khartia knocked out 900 drones in 15 days of July 2026, and some 1500 in June. More than 60,000 drones were flown by Russia to attack Ukraine in 2025; this number is projected to double in 2026.

It’s not a good time to be a big bird in Ukraine. But it’s not just in the air that drones have come to dominate. 

Earlier that morning we visited the test ground for an Unmanned Ground System (UGV) manufacturer. We had to pass through an industrial area of Kharkiv to get there, a journey pockmarked by a sequence of shattered buildings, some twisted and burnt by fire, others without a pane of glass. The nearby train station included several badly damaged coaches and wagons, the passing petrol stations doing business also under anti-drone netting, many showing signs of previous encounters.

The battery powered ground drone being tested can carry 300 kilograms over rough terrain for over 120 km. This enables the logistical supply to troops in the “kill zone” — a strip of around 30-40 km separating the two sides, where few vehicles can move without attracting attention and deadly drone attacks. UGVs, which cost around the same as a pick-up truck, can make the journey without the risk to the driver, dropping off water, food and ammunition, and picking up the wounded. Helicopters seldom operate in this strip, given the level of vulnerability to surface to air missiles and, especially, drones. 

UGVs are not just used for re-supply and evacuation, however. The use of swarming ground attack drones is now a reality, capable of working together, and carrying a range of weaponry, including thermobaric explosives. 

Commanders now speak of Russia’s war in Ukraine (the one since 2022) unfolding in various stages: the first year dominated by light infantry armed with guided anti-tank weapons; 2023 of the emergence of First Person View drones as an attack rather than solely reconnaissance option, an awareness of the limits of armour in securing a breakthrough, the employment of increasing battlefield management software such as Skymap and Delta, and the imperative of an aviation component for the Ukrainians; 2024 and 2025 as the years when the mass production of FPVs came to dominate the battlefield; and 2026 of the extension of drones into a strategic, longer-range role.  

The latest battlefield developments include the integration of unmanned drones on sea and land, and air and land. In May 2026, on the Kupyansk frontline in the Kharkiv region, members of Khartia’s Lava regiment conducted a robotic operation using UGVs and UAVs. The operation was carried out using various types of drones, including strike UAVs equipped with grenade launchers, kamikaze drones with explosives, and others. 

Two months later, in July, Ukraine’s 123rd Separate Territorial Defence Brigade announced it had remotely guided a naval drone across the Black Sea to a position behind Russian lines on the Kinburn Spit at the end of the disputed Kinburn Peninsula, west of Kherson. On arrival, the Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) deployed a ground robot, which, once it reached the shore, began shooting with its machine-gun. The remote slaving of machine-guns started in 2015 by integrating the gaming handheld Steam Deck controller through a crowd-funded scheme. Known as the “Sabre”, the automated system allows operators to target and fire from trenches up to half a kilometre away, keeping soldiers completely out of the line of fire. 

Ukraine has partnered with the US tech giant Palantir to develop multiple software and AI ecosystems — most notably the Brave1 Dataroom for autonomous drone detection, the PRISMA system for planning deep-strike operations, and an AI-assisted framework for air-defence networks. Future developments in Artificial Intelligence suggest a future where not only are drones capable of swarming, but learning from each other and capable of making targeting decisions based on self-selection. Tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopters might be with us for some time to come, but whether they include people is another thing altogether. 

A visit to the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office detailed the 33,000 war crimes committed by the Russians, 80 per cent of which were against civilians. This includes attacks against infrastructure and individuals, but men and machines. The hallway to his office across the main, cobbled square has various models of Russian drones including a Geran 2 (aka Shahed), capable of carrying between 47-87 kilograms of explosive, the more rudimentary 20-kg warhead Gerbera, and the all-carbon smaller Chernika.

The Geran is continuously evolving. While the basic structure remains the same, comparatively large for a drone with a wingspan of 3.6m and length of 3.8m, it carries some 200 litres of fuel, giving the petrol-engined version a range of around 2,000km. No longer do all have the same high-explosive warhead, with thermobaric (fuel-air) and fragmentation versions also fitted. The Geran 3 is jet-powered, giving it a speed of over 300 kph, while others act as base stations to guide others. The tech is evolving to not only use GPS as the means form of guidance, but is allied to satellite surveillance across 16 different channels and the use of mesh modems to allow FPV-type target guidance. Also, the operating altitude is increasing continuously placing the Geran out of the range of most guns. The Ukrainians are preparing their defences for the advent of electrically-powered drones using passive measures and AI to hunt for targets. 

For every action there is, says Newton’s Third Law of Motion, an equal and opposite reaction. The cycle of innovation for drones is said to be three months, before the technology is outdated. This cycle is even faster for UGVs given that development has started more recently. 

In a workshop outside Kharkiv, members of the Khartia Corps develop, produce and repair UGVs, mounting machine-guns and rockets along with the ubiquitous cameras. They are led by a maths prodigy-turned-infantryman-turned-UGV-expert, Andriy, whose forearm is tattooed with an equation describing the motion of waves. Shockingly he goes by the call sign “mathematician”, having given up doctoral studies in the US to fight for Ukraine. “The priority of UGVs is, first,” he says, while showing us around their no-frills workshop, “for supplies, then logistics and only then for taking on a combat role.” In peak months UGVs delivered 90 tonnes of supplies to troops fighting around Kupiansk, or 30 per cent of requirements. It is estimated that the minimum need for UGVs is 75,000 across the Ukrainian armed forces — a number expected to increase to save lives. 

As with FPVs, this puts pressure on price, and finding the cheapest, reliable and thus most expendable way to produce UGVs. It will likely draw in a wide number of sub-component suppliers and, eventually, narrowing the field to a few types to allow for interchangeability and spares. Most UGVs do not survive more than four missions, and ways have to be found to ensure that they are not rendered immobile by jamming along with FPV attacks. The pace of development and imperative of cost-effective practicality is akin “to building the first tank in 1916 and, then, within four years, having an Abrams.”

But this is not a world out of the control of people, not yet anyway. 

The day of our visit to the carrot field protests erupted across Ukraine’s cities in support of the defence minister Mykhylo Federov, the man who is synonymous with the digital transformation of the country and its military. While some people might see this as a weakness, it’s a strength. 

This is bigger than a choice between Fedorov or the man that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy backed over Federov, the Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine General Oleksandr Syrskyi. It is being framed as a battle between Ukraine’s future and its Soviet past: innovation versus fear, top-down state versus a bottom-up transformation, accountability versus manipulation, data driven decision making versus ineffectiveness. “We will never defeat Russia by treating our army like Russia treats theirs,” says Daria Kaleniuk. “The reason why Ukraine is still able to sustain this war and keep fighting is because of grassroots innovation, this drive coming to the people of Ukraine … When we didn’t have ammunition to fight, we invented drones.” The protests were not because Ukrainians wanted the country to fail; to the contrary. “We will never win … if we treat our army like the Russian are treating theirs.”

It is people who drive innovation, make stuff, do the fighting and, hopefully, eventually make peace

It’s the difference between Ukraine’s horizontal society, where people just get on with things, like Khartia, and Russia, where orders are given and expected to be obeyed. This, too, is about a war of the future — citizens are clear in Ukraine about which one they would prefer, and have voted that way since the Orange Revolution in 2004.

“Santa” left his highly-paid job as a welder in Belgium at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to move his family from Kharkiv to Germany. He then returned to his city to fight for his country. High-tech machines might offer the method, or at least a part of it, but it is people who drive innovation, make stuff, do the fighting and, hopefully, eventually make peace.