The drone war in Ukraine is usually pictured as a contest in the air. Increasingly it is also waged on wheels and tracks, in the dark. In northern Donetsk, Ukraine’s Third Army Corps has paired aerial and ground drones to lay and clear minefields while attacking Russian lines — missions folded into Operation Vivaldi, a recent offensive which the corps says has seized about 50 square miles around the city of Lyman so far.
Major Serhii Tischenko, a commander of the corps’ 96th Support Battalion — which supports the 125th Separate Heavy Mechanized Brigade and the 60th Mechanized Brigade — explained the rhythm to Business Insider. Sappers work the night shift. “It is definitely better to mine at night, because the enemy cannot see our UGVs,” he said, using the acronym for uncrewed ground vehicles. Assaults follow in daylight. “It is more practical to carry out assault operations during the day because the enemy uses a lot of FPV drones, and during daylight we can detect them more easily.”
Ground drones — most commonly tracked or wheeled platforms able to carry up to 400kg, or about 880 pounds — are quiet on the battlefield, Major Tischenko said, and have transformed the arithmetic of mine-laying. The Third Army Corps says a single drone can deploy a minefield 1,300 feet deep in two days; a human crew would need two weeks for the same job.
The payoff comes at dawn. An assault soldier who sees a ground drone moving ahead of him knows the path has been swept, Major Tischenko said. “They can keep moving forward without constantly worrying about being seriously injured by a mine. This is extremely important during an assault.” The 96th also seeds mines of its own, chiefly to slow Russian advances and buy time to respond.
The airborne half of the outfit is no less busy. Heavy bombers — typically hexacopters carrying up to 40kg — lay mines by the dozen. “A single heavy bomber can drop up to 40 anti-personnel mines over a specific area,” Major Tischenko said. A typical night might see one bomber crew fly five sorties at ranges of up to 10km, just over six miles; a mining crew in his battalion flies about 130 sorties a month on average. Smaller aerial drones drop explosive charges to clear Russian minefields in turn. Over the course of Operation Vivaldi his unit ran mining missions along roughly 18 miles of the front. “And this produced significant results. We disrupted and demoralized the enemy and their assault groups,” he said.
Ukraine has spent the past year and a half heavily promoting ground robots, as officials call them, to keep people out of the war’s most lethal jobs. The machines do not tire or lose concentration, which suits meticulous sapper work. More to the point, they can be mended. “A human life, once lost, cannot be restored. We would rather spend money on UGVs than risk the lives of our soldiers,” Major Tischenko said.
Russia, too, fields ground drones, and commanders on both sides are improvising as they go. But the logic Major Tischenko describes is hard to argue with. Sapping has been soldiers’ most thankless trade since sieges had moats; handing the graveyard shift to a machine that costs money, not mothers, is less a gimmick than the direction of the war itself.