Outmanned and outgunned by a nuclear power in the largest land war in Europe since 1945,\u00a0Ukraine\u2019s front line<\/a>\u00a0is increasingly held not by\u00a0soldiers<\/a>, but by machines and the skeleton crews that control them.<\/p>\n Commanders describe brigades hollowed out to half strength or worse. Frontline units often operate at 50% to 60% of authorized manning, some as low as 30%.<\/p>\n In some sectors, a maximum of 12 fighters hold 5 to 10 kilometers of front, far below what Cold War-era NATO planning assumed for high-intensity defense.<\/p>\n The numbers tell the story of an army running out of people. The average frontline soldier is 43 to 45 years old, according to\u00a0Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n Roughly 200,000 troops are absent without leave, and around 2 million men are evading mobilization, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told\u00a0CNN<\/a>\u00a0in January, with Western and Ukrainian\u00a0analysts<\/a>\u00a0estimating the overall shortfall at 300,000 personnel.<\/p>\n Ukraine is no longer just supplementing its infantry with tech \u2014 it is replacing infantry in many cases with drones, ground robots, sensor networks, minefields and artillery cued by unmanned systems.<\/p>\n The battlefield revolution was not born simply of necessity, but as a war strategy of a\u00a0smaller nation against a much larger enemy<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the Donetsk region alone, Russian losses reach 156 soldiers per square kilometer, Fedorov said in an address marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s benchmark: more than 200 casualties per square kilometer \u2014 \u201ca level of losses at which further advance becomes impossible,\u201d Federov told reporters on Monday.<\/p>\n Over the past year, Military Times interviewed dozens of drone operators, robotics engineers and defense officials across Ukraine to understand how the country is bridging its manpower shortage \u2014 and what an increasingly unmanned army looks like.<\/p>\n As a correspondent who has covered this war since the first hours of the full-scale invasion, I have never seen the battlefield transform this rapidly.<\/p>\n Inside Lazar\u2019s Group, a National Guard special forces formation that has claimed more than 40,000 targets destroyed since the full-scale invasion, the substitution is already operational architecture.<\/p>\n The roughly 1,700-person drone unit, according to its commanders, stations a ground crew every 10 kilometers along the front, an ISR team every 20, with FPV pilots and interceptor crews filling the gaps.<\/p>\n Commanders say its strike drones now account for 60% to 70% of all hits in its sector.<\/p>\n In practice, that means a single operator hunched over a tablet in a basement can toggle between three FPV feeds while sending one drone into a trench line as two more orbit overhead waiting for targets \u2014 one pilot doing the work of a squad.<\/p>\n \u201cMore drones, more Russians killed,\u201d \u201cPhoenix,\u201d the operational head of Lazar\u2019s Group, told Military Times at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum in February.<\/p>\n Military Times agreed to refer to all active duty soldiers by their nom de guerre for operational security.<\/p>\n Russia does not face the same constraint \u2014 and is not pushed to innovate as quickly or dramatically as a result.<\/p>\n Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last year that Moscow was recruiting 40,000 to 45,000 troops per month, compared to Ukraine\u2019s 25,000 to 27,000.<\/p>\n Ukrainian military intelligence data suggests the actual pace is around 30,000 to 35,000 new Russian contract soldiers per month, according to the\u00a0Kyiv Independent<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 still enough to outpace Ukraine\u2019s intake by a widening margin.<\/p>\n Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko, a former infantry officer and combat drone unit commander who now helps oversee Ukraine\u2019s unmanned systems strategy, told Military Times, \u201cThis is the only chance to win for us. There is no other chance.\u201d<\/p>\n So, the military is adapting.<\/p>\n The 28th Brigade\u2019s newly formed Unmanned Systems Battalion \u201cFlash\u201d is Ukraine\u2019s first international UAV unit \u2014 a foreign-heavy drone force where English fluency, not combat experience, is the entry requirement.<\/p>\n \u201cInfantry is dead,\u201d \u201cScooby,\u201d a Polish Flash operator who had just returned from his first mission with Flash, told Military Times earlier this month.<\/p>\n The 28th Brigade has already shifted 70% of frontline logistics to robotic systems, its commanders told Military Times.<\/p>\n Designed as a replicable model for how Ukraine wants to restructure force composition, the unit runs FPV strikes, drone-on-drone air defense and ground robot operations. The substitution is happening in layers.<\/p>\n His description matches what drone operators across multiple units described to Military Times: units are exponentially increasing their kill rates by investing a majority of their strategic resources on autonomous and unmanned tech.<\/p>\n According to internal Ukrainian estimates and government data published by\u00a0Reuters<\/a>, drones accounted for 69% of strikes on Russian troops and 75% on vehicles and equipment in 2024.<\/p>\n By the end of 2025,\u00a0drones were responsible for more than 80%<\/a>\u00a0of all enemy targets destroyed, with 819,737 video-confirmed hits logged that year.<\/p>\n Twelve drone operators with enough airframes can now do the work of dozens of infantry \u2014 a ratio that inverts the traditional calculus of ground combat.<\/p>\n In the 12th Azov Brigade\u2019s sector, commander \u201cKil\u201d has described areas where there is \u201cabsolutely no Ukrainian infantry\u201d \u2014 defense maintained largely through UAV surveillance, artillery strikes and minefields, according to\u00a0NV<\/a>.<\/p>\n Drones spot targets, artillery fires on them, mines block movement \u2014 and infantry enters only for specific tasks.<\/p>\n \u201cOur battalion is an unmanned systems battalion,\u201d Ash, head of Flash\u2019s medical and MPZ \u2014 the unit\u2019s morale and psychological support program \u2014 told Military Times. \u201cIt means we don\u2019t have infantry.\u201d<\/p>\n After four years of mixed battlefield tactics blending muddy trench warfare with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles, Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has already become the drone war of the future \u2014 fought almost autonomously from a distance, strength, brute strength and numbers matter less than robotic force multipliers and electronic warfare.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do drones. We kill with drones. We save with drones. We liberate with drones.\u201d<\/p>\n Integrating unmanned systems into the core of its military fabric is no longer improvisation in Ukraine. It is doctrine.<\/p>\n After taking office in January, Fedorov outlined a government plan built around what he called \u201cthe mathematics of war\u201d \u2014 from completing corps-level reform to transforming command systems through data-driven management.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s Unmanned Systems Forces, a standalone military branch established in 2024 and now commanded by Maj. Robert \u201cMagyar\u201d Brovdi, encompasses more than a dozen strike and reconnaissance units, including the 414th \u201cMagyar\u2019s Birds\u201d Brigade, the top performer on the military\u2019s verified combat-rating leaderboard.<\/p>\n These USF units have destroyed thousands of enemy targets each week in February, according to Ukrainian Defense Ministry data.<\/p>\n Brovdi\u2019s philosophy for the force: \u201cPeople think \u2014 machines do the work.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ukrainian military has separately set the goal of\u00a0establishing a 15-kilometer unmanned \u201ckill zone\u201d<\/a>\u00a0along the front lines, a project dubbed the Drone Line.<\/p>\n And the supply chain is catching up to the doctrine.<\/p>\n Alona Zhuzha, director of digitalization at Ukraine\u2019s Defense Procurement Agency, told Military Times that drone delivery times have dropped from two to three months to an average of 10 days \u2014 and in some cases, one day from order to frontline delivery.<\/p>\n But the ambitious model still faces challenges.<\/p>\n A historic winter has hammered battery-powered drones. Temperatures across the 1,200-kilometer front line plunged to their lowest of the entire four-year war \u2014 hitting minus 20 Celsius \u2014 with cameras icing over, batteries dying mid-flight and short-circuits grounding entire fleets,\u00a0AFP<\/a>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n Troops have resorted to unorthodox solutions for airframe insulation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just put lard on them, and it takes off. I\u2019m laughing, but it\u2019s how it is,\u201d Denys Shtilierman, chief constructor at Fire Point, a company making Ukraine\u2019s first long-range drones, told\u00a0AFP<\/a>.<\/p>\n Russia is adapting in parallel, scaling its own FPV production and using heavy electronic warfare to jam and burn down Ukrainian drone swarms.<\/p>\n Robots are still a long way from warring autonomously.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as replacing infantry,\u201d Jesse Nuese, a former U.S. Army paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran who co-founded Forward Horizon Group to facilitate reconstruction and technology transfer between the U.S. and Ukraine, told Military Times in Kyiv. \u201cUnmanned systems cannot hold ground alone.\u201d<\/p>\n He may be right \u2014 for now.<\/p>\n But on a stretch of front east of Pokrovsk, a tracked robot with a 12.7mm machine gun holds a position for weeks without a crew \u2014 and somewhere behind it, a single operator toggles between three feeds, doing the work of a squad.<\/p>\n And battlefield dynamics continue to evolve at lightning speed.<\/p>\n \u201cOne pilot, three drones now,\u201d Phoenix said. \u201cIt would already be 10 with more funding.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/C2HD2B2FGBGFLBJH2VWBFX4DFA.jpg\")
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