Podcast: Inside Ukraine And Its Battle Against Russia’s New Drone Challenge

Aviation Week's Steve Trimble travelled to Ukraine where he participated in a military drone event and gained insights into how Russia's UAV operations are evolving. Steve discusses his observations and other aspects of the conflict with Tony Osborne and Robert Wall, as they unpack what it means about the changing battlefield dynamics.

Read Steve's dispatch from Ukraine here

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Robert Wall: Welcome to Check 6, where today we talk about Ukraine and the escalation of fighting there, as well as the incursion of Russian drones in NATO airspaces. Joining us today are Steve Trimble, Aviation Week's senior defense editor who is in Warsaw and just a few hours ago made it back to Poland after a trip into Ukraine. Steve, it's great to see you. You made it out safely and we look forward to hearing from what you found there. And also with us Tony Osborne, Aviation Week's European defense editor, who's been following quite closely the reaction in the West to those drone incursions I mentioned earlier. Steve, let's see. We'd love to hear from you before we actually talk about the business of why you went there and what you learned about the military activity in Ukraine. Just give us a bit of a sense of the vibe in that country right now. The war has been really been going on. It's been a difficult year for the offensive. Tell us where you were and yeah, just before, what was the feeling?

Steve Trimble: Yeah, I don't know if I can speak for the entire country and I expect my experience was very different than somebody who was further east. I went to Lviv and spent four days in Lviv, which is a western city, just 35 miles from the border with Poland. The front, as we know, it extends roughly 550 to 600 miles further northeast and east from that location. So if you're American and say if you're on the east coast, like in Washington, D.C., where I live, you'd be thinking about the front being in Chicago, stretching down to St. Louis, maybe up to Detroit, that this is a general frame of reference. That's how you would think about it. So I was pretty far away from anything that was the heat of the action of that very bloody and brutal war that is happening at the front. That said, I mean the rear areas and the western cities have been attacked frequently and leading up to this trip, Russia had engaged in their latest offensive over the past three weeks. That seemed to have culminated by the early part of this week. Just as I was arriving in Ukraine, I wasn't aware of that, just was kind of a happy coincidence for me. So there were no air strikes, there were no air raids in my part of the country. But I went there to see a conference and it's the first time I've ever gotten an air raid shelter pass along with my conference credentials to get into the conference. Luckily we never had to use them, but as far as the overall mood there, I mean, I think it's very realistic. You can't call it optimistic, you could even call it pessimistic in some ways. They face some really tough challenges over the next several months. Russia is not giving up. They've sustained huge losses and they're still coming. And not only that, it looks like Russia's come up with some new tricks that the Ukrainians haven't figured out yet, and I think we're going to talk a little bit about that in a bit. But yeah. But overall, I mean in Lviv itself, the atmosphere is kind of a surreal thing because it does while you're there, especially while there are no air raids, it feels like a normal city. You just go about your business, the normal rhythms of people commuting, people going to work, people going out, having a good time. You see all that in Lviv right now. At the same time, the signs of a country at war are all around you. You see soldiers everywhere. There's a curfew that's strictly enforced. There's martial law. The signs of the war are very apparent even when it's a calm week like we had.

Robert Wall: Yeah. Well, interesting. I mean, good to you. I really delight. We're really glad to get the message when you made it out, even though as you said, it was a quiet week. It's great for you to go. Now, in all fairness, we didn't send you there to play tourist, so why don't you tell us a bit about what you learned on the business end of the trip?

Steve Trimble: Okay. Well, the big reason for the trip was that they were staging this thing called the Defense Tech Valley Summit, which is a defense exhibition that really emphasizes startups, Ukrainian startups foremost, but also broader European startups, even American startups were there. And the idea is that the hope is that they can unite Ukraine, the Ukrainian defense industry with the broader European defense industry and have the parts of the Ukrainian industry that are leading in technology, especially in drone warfare, where nobody has had more experience besides the Russians than the Ukrainians at this point, maybe arguably the Israelis, but to leverage that expertise and create partnerships with European companies, create commercial pathways into the European defense market for these Ukrainian companies that would help them for one thing, expand their operations, develop their technology even more, give them more resources and capacity to do that. And that's really necessary right now.

Robert Wall: Yeah, that's very interesting actually, because Tony and I were at DSEI obviously a few days before, and there was the defense procurement chief for the Ukrainians there, and that was very much his message to the entire audience, come work with us. We need the capacity. And what you get in response is well access to battlefield obviously, and a lot of experience to improve your drones. So that this does seem to be kind of a big theme. I think it's really been a theme throughout the last year out of the Ukrainians, but that's very interesting. Now you really came away, I think with a few observations about, we've been all been very impressed with the Ukrainians and the level of innovation in the battlefield, but you're just reading your first report out there. It's not all, maybe we are being overly optimistic and it's always a danger obviously in the situation that you believe the narrative you want to believe. So why don't you give us a bit of your sense, what you actually picked up there?

Steve Trimble: Well, I focused on the drone war, and that is I think driving a lot of the military action on the front, just the way the conflict is set up. And it's very clear early in the conflict Ukraine, I think the whole world was fascinated when as this happened, but Ukraine adapted, innovated in this sort of desperate way to deal with the problem that they were facing. Russia has this enormous manpower advantage over Ukraine, and in some areas of the front you have one Ukrainian brigade defending against two Russian divisions. The way that they've been able to manage that without breaking, obviously the lines go back and forth quite often, but for the most part, they're holding relatively within 50 kilometers of where they were originally set a couple years ago. How they've been doing that is using drones and sort of a drone-based reconnaissance strike complex where you have a first-person vehicle interceptor drones that are sort of like their air superiority fighters that are taking out and clearing the skies of Ukrainian attack, sorry, Russian attack drones. And then underneath that you have fixed-wing reconnaissance drones, roving the front lines, searching 20 kilometers deep behind the Russian line, behind the Russian lines, and then vectoring small quadcopter-style attack drones, first-person vehicle type drones at anything that moves in that 20-kilometer kill box.

And that has been very effective. The biggest thing it's done is it's prevented the Russians from maneuvering in the classic way that they would want to in armored formations. Anything that enters that space, that 20-kilometer space before you get to the front lines is seen and then destroyed by those drones. So that was really up until about earlier this spring, that was really the situation on the front where the Ukrainians had frozen Russia's ability to maneuver at the front line, but Russia figured out how to adapt, and they set up this organization called the Rubicon Center for Unmanned, well, something like that. The Rubicon Center for Unmanned Technology or something in Moscow. And they devised and they were given broad latitude to work with Russian frontline units, developed new technologies, and basically take the ideas that Ukraine had used on them, scale it up at the short range level, and then expand it with mid-range drones so now and Russia can do it at a capacity that Ukraine can't match. So what's happened now, and they were very frank about this during the conference, we had General Denko, the Deputy Commanding General of Ukrainian armed forces say that they can no longer move supply convoys and reinforcements to their own frontline positions. Anything that enters that 20-kilometer box. And he said they've moved it back even beyond 20 kilometers now is destroyed.

So they're trying to come up with different ways of doing it. One way is to shift all of the supply convoys into unmanned ground vehicles. They're hoping to do that over the next six months. That doesn't mean that they're not going to sustain heavy losses with those unmanned ground vehicles, but it won't be human losses, lives will be saved, and that's a very precious resource right now for the Ukrainians. But they still have to figure out a way to sustainably resupply and reinforce those troops, and they haven't figured that out yet. What they've also done is establish cages and metal cages and netting over these supply corridors, roads basically to prevent the FPVs, the Russian FPVs from hitting those moving vehicles. But even that has proven to be less effective than the Ukrainians had hoped because the Russians had devised new tactics. You have one FPV blow a hole in that cage, and before somebody can repair it, another one comes in and hits the target.

So that's one of the issues. The other big issue, and in fact probably even more concerning for Ukrainian forces on the front is that that reconnaissance strike complex that I was talking about earlier, that depends on having the recon element of it, the reconnaissance fixed-wing UAVs flying over the front. Now those get shut down all the time, but the Rubicon Center has devised ways and by just scaling up those FPV drones to a level that Ukraine can't match has made it impossible for those recon drones to fly, they're instantly getting shot down. And so now Ukrainian units aren't even launching them because they know they'll be shot down instantly. And that's creating freedom for Russian forces to maneuver in the open in what was a kill box, that 20-kilometer kill box. And we think we saw the fruits of that strategy and those tactics played out.

And the Russian breakthrough at Pokrovsk just a few weeks ago, that was right before the Alaska Summit got a lot of headlines, created a breakthrough through the Ukrainian frontline defenses about 10 kilometers deep. And it seemed very concerning at the time. But what also became clear is that the Russians hadn't figured out how to exploit that yet effectively. So Ukraine was able to rush their defenders in mass and they've collapsed a lot of that pocket that salient that the Russians created in that one spot in the line. Meanwhile, other positions along the front line are moving back and forth as well. But that's the concern is that at the moment Russia has created an advantage or they've negated the Ukrainian advantage, but they still haven't figured out exactly how to mentally exploit that advantage to the fullest. And if they get to that point, Ukraine is going to have some real problems. They don't have the manpower to defend a Russian offensive one versus one. They have to use some kind of technological advantage to offset Russia's, even though Russia has taken huge manpower losses in this country, they still have more and it's still way more than the Ukrainians. So that's what we're going to see play out over the next several months is how does Ukraine come up with a way to offset advantage,

Robert Wall: Tony, I mean, you've obviously been following the battlefield in Ukraine quite closely as well as we said, obviously the Western response. I mean, what's your take of, from what Steve just said, what do you think what it means both there and perhaps even for the allied support to Ukraine?

Tony Osborne: Everything that Steve just said actually just makes for really terrifying listening frankly. But obviously the reason that we are in this situation is that because no side declared or was able to achieve air superiority, we probably have a very different conflict if one of those sides, particularly Russia had achieved air superiority and we probably wouldn't have those formations of the Rubicon organization, we wouldn't have this drone artillery people in trenches kind of conflict. Obviously, we might not even have a war at this point if one of the sides had succeeded, but it does paint quite an alarming picture and one of, obviously a lot of nations now are thinking about drone protection. Obviously this is now leading to efforts to try and create low-cost drone defenses and so on. And certainly we saw a lot of that emerging at DSEI just over a fortnight ago in terms of we've just seen developments in Poland where drones were used, what appears to be quite deliberately to probe, to test Polish resolve the Shahed drones that Russia uses to try and basically prompt surface-to-air missile defenses into action to try and burn through to saturate.

Those systems were flown into Poland, and we've also seen that in Romania. And today we've even seen Russian jets interfering in Estonian airspace. So there's obviously a great deal of activity going on here, but the picture that Steve paints is quite a scary one, and we are seeing Europe listening, investing heavily in those sort of industrial capabilities to build drones. But strikes me, obviously you still need to grow this quite dramatically quite quickly and getting raw materials and so on.

Russia can rely on Chinese supply chains, I'm guessing from those quick countries as well. There's a lot of challenges here that the West needs to face with Ukraine, and it's good to hear that, at least from the conference point of view, that Western companies were there to try and be willing to be there to Ukraine. But I dunno, Steve, did you get the impression that there was a lot of Western support, that there was a lot of Western interest in getting involved in the Ukrainian supply chain and the Ukrainian ecosystem to try and help build this up to try and support this?

Steve Trimble: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. We saw AI there, Evia was there. Quantum Systems, these are well-known European defense companies. SHIELD AI is an American defense company, but it is not all hopeless and there are opportunities for them to strike back. And we've seen this throughout the war. There's moves and counter moves as I point out in the story. I mean there's been moves and counter moves all throughout this war. Ukraine deploys kamikaze boats in the Black Sea. They hit the Russian Navy score several hits on major ships, Russia strikes back, they basically send helicopters out over the Black Sea and anything that moves that looks like a kamikaze boat, they destroy. That looked pretty effective for a little bit. And then Ukraine added surface-to-air missiles, well, the drone version of that, the first-person vehicle drones and launched them from the boats to take out the helicopters, and that moved the Russian Navy's helicopters out of the Black Sea and made it possible for Ukraine to go after the boats again.

So they're trying to find something like that that they can do to the Russians now to offset this instability that Russia has created through the Rubicon unit. And I forgot to mention that, I mean, one of the main technology innovations that I think Russia has in part stolen from Ukraine, but also scaled up to a degree that I mean is really amazing to see is the fiber-optic controlled first-person vehicle drones. One of the issues that they were having is that as soon as they launched an FPV drone, it had a radio frequency link back to the operator, and that was a telltale sign that it was there, and that made it a lot easier for the Ukrainians to find it and shoot it down. Now they've added fiber-optic cables to this extremely lightweight cable. It is like a thread, and they pack these little drones with miles of these cables.

And so they have a direct link from the human controller to the drone. And that makes it very difficult for the Ukrainians to see as it made it difficult for the Russians to see Ukrainian drones that use the same technology. It's just that the Russians have spooled this technology up to this incredible level in deploying it on tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of drones on the front today. And not only are they doing that at the short range, at just 20 kilometers, they now have drones, these first-person vehicle drones with these fiber-optic cables going 40 kilometers behind the Ukrainian front lines. In some cases they fly into those rear areas and then just park and wait, they turn off and they have some kind of a seismic sensor or acoustic sensor that wakes 'em up if they see something coming by or detect something coming by and then they spool up, Russian operator still has that direct link with the fiber-optic cable and they go and intercept whatever is moving that happens to be passing by at that point.

So it's a very sinister situation, but that's where there could be an opportunity for Ukraine to exploit there as well. That was what Kimberly Kagan at the Institute for the Study of War was advocating is that Ukraine to this point has focused really on the short range. And what they could do is basically take a page from the Russian playbook and do the same thing back to the Russians. Because the Russians, their advantage is mass numbers, the number of people, number of vehicles that they can bring. But right now they're not putting those people in those vehicles and those formations and the command centers within that 20-kilometer box behind the front lines, they're further back. So if Ukraine can come up with some mid-range munitions, whether it's fiber-optic cable or have some other type of guidance system and target those positions, they're going to find a lot larger concentrations of troops that they can use, that they can exploit and create a new advantage that really plays to their strengths by targeting these large groups of Russian military units.

And there are indications that is coming, maybe Ukrainian defense industry hasn't gotten there quite yet with that level of range with their drones, but there are other options coming forward. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago about the extended range attack munition that has now been cleared by the U.S. government to sell to Ukraine. And of course Ukraine has just gotten a European fund that would allow them to buy those in large quantities. I think the industry is trying to produce about 840 in that ballpark this year. And these are small low-cost cruise missiles that cost somewhere in the range of $250,000 or relatively unsophisticated compared to something like a JASSM, which is $2 million or in that ballpark. But with munitions like that, they'd have in a larger capacity of those munitions, they could have a sustained mid-range air campaign to add to what they're already doing in the long-range strike campaign as they've been trying to target, especially Russian oil refineries and oil depots way in the rear and the short-range attack complex. So that's the hope really. And at least that's one idea that Kimberly Kagan sort of proposed to the Ukrainians at this conference. But what do you think about that, Tony?

Tony Osborne: I was just going to just briefly talk about the FPV drones because I've seen some amazing pictures from Ukraine where you've seen fields full of this fiber-optic thread literally just covering the grass because there were so many of these drones and because Russia literally almost had no fiber-optic industrial capability like two years ago and have rapidly ramped it up to meet this. And I think even some of the Russian fiber-optic factories have been targeted by some of the Ukrainian drone strikes, some of these missile strikes to deliberately try and knock that capability out. But yeah, I suspect that the fiber-optic cable littering issue, it's almost going to be dealing with the future issue of mines. Like in other conflicts, it's going to be just have to be massive clearance of fiber-optic cables from the battlefields of Eastern Ukraine. It's just an incredible use of that technology, certainly one that a few people would've really sort of thought a few years ago.

Steve Trimble: Well, the question, so I had to moderate a panel at this and the question was air superiority in the drone era, what is that? What does it look like and is it different in Ukraine than it is in other places? And I don't know if the panel arrived at any unimpeachable conclusions, but my general sense is that Ukraine is a pretty unique situation in modern warfare. This frozen conflict militaries in the current age want to maneuver. They want to avoid conflicts like this. Their entire force structure, their investment portfolio of technology is aimed at preserving the ability to maneuver. And so something like this, if this is the future of warfare, it definitely looks quite different if you don't have aircraft carriers involved, if you don't have stealth fighters and stealth bombers, it's a very different way of thinking about the future of warfare. But I tend to think that the closeness of the two opponents in this conflict, their inability to establish air superiority. That's the other thing. I mean, I'm pretty sure a NATO country or U.S. would never begin the ground offensive like Russia did without first establishing air superiority. And if they couldn't do it, they wouldn't start the ground offensive because it leads to something like this protracted conflict that nobody wants.

Anyway, I think that's another part of this. What we're seeing in Ukraine is very interesting and it can be tempting to extrapolate that to all of warfare anywhere. I'm just not sure if that's really going to be the case.

Robert Wall: I mean, I think that's a great point and also a great point to end on. So again, Steve, thanks for going really glad you are back on your way back, I guess. And Tony, thanks for joining as well. So really appreciate it, both of you. And as always, thanks to our audience for checking in to Check 6 and come back soon for another episode of our podcast.