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'POKROVSK, Ukraine—In the flat farmland and shattered mining towns surrounding this eastern Ukrainian city, the war has become mainly a
contest between Russian foot soldiers and Ukrainian explosive drones.
After nearly three years of fighting, Ukraine is desperately short on
infantry to man the trenches. They are outnumbered at least 5-to-1 along
most of the eastern front, and the men they have are mostly older,
recently conscripted, and lacking motivation and experience in battle, Ukrainian officers said.
What Kyiv’s forces have in abundance are drones—which Ukraine is now relying on to compensate for the lack of infantry.
Surveillance drones police the 600-mile front line, having all but
entirely replaced human reconnaissance. When Russian soldiers advance
toward Ukrainian positions, explosive aerial drones are dispatched to
pick them off, while larger drones drop bomblets onto them. Infantry
fire their weapons only when the occasional Russian soldier manages to
slip past the phalanx of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The strategy has worked, up to a point. In nearly a year since Moscow
began marching on Pokrovsk, Russian troops have failed to capture the
city, despite huge advantages in manpower and artillery ammunition.

Russian drones are a constant threat in besieged Pokrovsk. WSJ’s Ian
Lovett reports from the city where some residents are determined to
remain, despite Moscow’s forces on their doorstep. Photo: Serhii
Korovayny, Nikita Nikolaienko
Their slow progress is a testament to just how difficult the
proliferation of drones has made attacking. Neither side sends large
armored vehicles all the way to the contact line much anymore—they are
easy targets for drones. Instead, infantry usually hike the last few
miles on foot, often in groups of just two or three soldiers, which are
harder for drones to spot.
But the age of front lines patrolled by drones instead of humans isn’t
here yet. The Russians are still advancing, albeit slowly. To halt their progress, Ukraine would need a large influx of troops, according to
several officers fighting in the area—something that is unlikely in the
near future.
“Drones can’t replace men,” said a battalion commander who has been fighting just south of Pokrovsk for the past two months. During that
time, his battalion has retreated about a mile. “They can disrupt an
enemy attack, but not fully stop it.”
Without drone support, he added, “the situation would be horrific.”
The same dynamic is playing out across the eastern front, with Russian
forces putting undermanned Ukrainian brigades under intense pressure
across a broad swath of territory. Moscow recently seized the city of
Velyka Novosilka, southwest of Pokrovsk, and is now threatening Chasiv
Yar to the north.
In some more rural areas, Ukrainian drone pilots can almost defend the
line on their own.
Late last month, The Wall Street Journal visited an aerial-drone
battalion from Ukraine’s 60th Mechanized Brigade, which was trying to
beat back Russian assaults near the northeastern village of Terny. From
a command post, the battalion’s commander, a senior lieutenant who goes
by the call sign Munin, watched live surveillance-drone feeds as Russian soldiers rushed forward across the flat, marshy fields around Terny
toward a river.

A destroyed building in the Ukraine-held city of Pokrovsk last month.
One of Munin’s deputies spotted two Russians sprinting across a bridge,
and Munin dispatched an explosive drone to hunt them down. As the
Russians heard the drone approaching, they dropped to the ground. Then a
huge blast lit up the screen. One man lay still, his leg blown off. The
other struggled to get to his feet, then fell again.
“I think they’re dead,” a drone pilot, who was in a bunker several miles back from the front line, said on the radio.
“Go finish him so we know for sure,” Munin responded.
A second drone hit a minute later. “Plus two,” said 38-year-old Munin, meaning two more Russians killed, bringing the battalion’s total that
day to eight. The nearest Ukrainian infantry hadn’t needed to leave
their foxhole.
Munin said a massive increase in the quantity of drones at his disposal
has allowed his battalion to take pressure off infantry.
A year earlier, his team might have launched 15 first-person-view
drones, or FPVs, on a busy day. Now, Ukraine is producing roughly
200,000 drones a month. Munin sends out at least 60 on a normal day—and
can afford to use them on severely injured Russians. In addition, many surveillance drones are now equipped with thermal-vision cameras, making
it easy to spot Russian attacks at night.
Still, the Russians are slowly advancing around Terny and now control
most of the village. Though they have taken more than 1,000 casualties
in their assault on the village, Munin said, they seem to have
“unlimited manpower” and continue to send men forward in small groups, which can more easily slip past surveillance drones.
Sometimes, Russian jammers down Ukrainian drones. On rainy or foggy
days, most drones can’t fly, which gives Russian forces the chance to
make larger assaults with armored vehicles. Once leaves cover the trees
again in spring, Russian infantry will be harder for drones to spot.
And once they spot a Ukrainian position, they hammer it with every type
of weapon they have until the Ukrainians are forced to withdraw.

Infantry soldiers from Ukraine’s 60th Mechanized Brigade in Ukraine’s Donetsk region last month. The massive deployment of drones has eased
pressure on the infantry.
“Artillery, glide bombs, everything,” Munin said. “Until you can’t use the position as cover anymore.”
The Russians also have their own drone army, which is the foremost
menace for both Ukrainian infantry and civilians in front-line cities. A
medic working around Pokrovsk said roughly 70% of the Ukrainian
casualties in the area come from drone strikes. Any military vehicle
entering the city is equipped with an array of electronic jammers, but
Russians are also using drones that are connected to the pilots by
fiber-optic cables and can’t be jammed. When soldiers spot them, the
only reprieve is to shoot them down.
The enormous volume of drones in the air has changed the nature of
combat over the past year, according to Ukrainian soldiers.
Last spring, when a 25-year-old infantry platoon commander first arrived
in the area south of Pokrovsk, there was lots of close infantry combat,
he said. Within a month of the brigade’s arrival in the Pokrovsk area,
he said, 80% of the infantry had been injured or killed and were no
longer fit to fight. Since then, he said, the brigade had retreated
about 19 miles in the area west of Pokrovsk.
They are now outnumbered by the Russians about 10-to-1, but the growing
supply of drones—plus small influxes of new soldiers—have allowed the brigade to continue fighting the Russian advance. The Russians are
suffering at least seven casualties for every Ukrainian soldier injured
or killed, he said, but added that Kyiv would need 10 times as many
troops here to stop Moscow’s troops entirely.
“We just don’t have enough people to defend Pokrovsk,” he said.
In open fields, it is relatively easy for drones to spot Russian foot
soldiers trying to advance. But in the towns and villages around
Pokrovsk, where there are more buildings for the Russians to take cover
from drones, infantry are irreplaceable.
Several weeks ago, Russian forces advanced into a village south of
Pokrovsk, first occupying one house on the main street, then another. To properly defend that village, the platoon commander said, Ukrainian
forces would have needed men in all eight houses on the street. But they didn’t have enough, and three weeks ago had to withdraw from the
village.
“We don’t have enough reinforcements,” he said. “We just kept moving back.”
Commanders around Pokrovsk say the quality of reinforcements has also
become a problem, with most of the new arrivals recent conscripts in
their 40s and 50s with little motivation to fight. Some abandon
positions, they say, or refuse to go to first-line trenches. One brigade commander said 30 men of the quality he had early in the war would be
more effective than 100 of the men he has now.
A major in the 68th Jaeger Brigade, which is fighting south of Pokrovsk,
said that new recruits need time to adjust to the reality of life at the
front line before they are thrown into a trench.
“But in the current circumstances, we don’t have time to let people adapt,” said the major, who goes by the call sign Barracuda. “There’s a shortage in every position, especially in the infantry.'

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