The commander stepped over a box stacked with plastic drones and opened the lid of his new shipment. Inside lay the light gray wing of a small plane, his latest drone for the fight against Russian forces.
The Ukrainian army’s best-performing drone unit is Senior Lieutenant Yuriy Fedorenko, 33, known by his call sign “Achilles.” He is the main constraint in preventing Russia from seizing the strategic town of Chasiv Yar on Ukraine’s eastern front, an internal report said.
For months, his drone teams, part of the 92nd Commando Brigade, have been filling gaps in manpower and ammunition shortages in other parts of the Ukrainian Army. The teams work day and night, attacking Russian armored units, dropping explosives on Russian positions, and using drones to deliver supplies to Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines.
It was vital for the Ukrainians to hold Chasiv Yar, a town of about 200,000 people located on a ridge five miles west of the devastated city of Bakhmut, overlooking a cluster of industrial cities and villages.
Chasiv Yar is the gateway to the last piece of land in the Donetsk region still in Ukrainian hands. If Russian troops capture the town, they will have the entire eastern region, known as the Donbass region, in their grasp, a long-standing goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The cities of Kostyantynivka, Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, just a few miles from Chasiv Yar, have come under increasingly heavy bombing in recent months.
“Without us, the Russians would be in the Kiev area right now,” Achilles said in an interview at a secret base far from the front lines. That may be an exaggeration, he said. (The capital, Kiev, is far to the west.) But, he insisted, “without the drones, we would have failed.”
Achilles showed a New York Times reporter his workshop, proudly pointing out where engineers install and update software and mechanics test machines and add parts to prepare drones for combat.
But when he sat down to talk, Achilles, a trained martial artist, expressed anger and frustration at what he saw as the broken promises made by Western allies and the damage Ukraine has suffered as a result. Approval of Supplemental Assistance Program Because the Ukrainian army is seriously short of artillery and anti-aircraft weapons, he said.
“We are facing a ridiculous situation,” he said. “Imagine a boxing match where two boxers are equally matched, but one of them can land one hit and his opponent can land 10 hits.”
He added: “This is an absolute farce.” He said that with no anti-aircraft weapons, the Ukrainians had to mount machine guns on the back of pickup trucks to shoot at Russia’s Shahed drones.
He said the fighting on the eastern front had never been more brutal. Since first feeling a shortage of artillery shells in September, Ukrainian forces have been losing ground to a widening Russian offensive.
Achilles said the Ukrainians had successfully prevented a major Russian breakthrough during the winter, but in late February the Russians began a full-scale offensive toward Chasiv Yar.
He used a drone to spy and saw Russian soldiers massing. “I realized they were coming,” he said. But without enough artillery shells, the Ukrainians could not launch a preemptive strike against Russian rear supply lines as they usually would.
The Russian offensive adopted tactics that the Ukrainians had seen in cities such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka, using glide bombs, aerial bombs weighing up to a ton and a half that could destroy concrete bunkers and multi-story buildings, to deliver devastating strikes on Ukrainian forward positions.
“They advanced step by step, taking one position after another,” Achilles said. “Our defenses were very strong, and the Russians used guided air bombs to raze these positions to the ground. That’s how they approached Chasiv Yar.”
“This is because we are short of ammunition and our cannons have no ammunition to fire,” he added, saying that the cannons were firing only two shells a day when they should have been firing at least 30.
He showed on his phone maps where Russian bombs had destroyed three lines of Ukrainian defense and were barreling across fields to the edge of town.
He said no one could withstand such a bombardment, and the Ukrainian army suffered heavy casualties and was forced to retreat. Achilles and his team used drones to observe the Russian infantry advancing and overtaking Ukrainian positions.
His two drone pilots, Sić, 24, and Shulik, 26, who identified themselves only by their call signs in keeping with military protocol, said they had been overwhelmed by infantry as they fought hard to gain territory.
“It was so sad,” said Sichy, who was awarded a medal for bravery for capturing a group of Russian soldiers during the capture of the village of Klishchivka. Life as a frontline infantryman was tough, and he and Shurik were transferred to Achilles’ drone battalion.
Now they use Ukrainian-made Vampire drones to attack Russian positions or provide supplies to their comrades on the front lines.
“We sent them supplies, ammunition and sleeping bags,” Sich said. “One of the problems was water.”
Both Russian and Ukrainian armies make heavy use of explosive drones, which makes any movement near the front lines extremely dangerous, so unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly being used to deliver supplies to the trenches.
Shurik said a Ukrainian unit fought for 21 consecutive days in what the Ukrainians called the zero-line trenches.
“The zero line is very difficult because it’s usually full of aircraft wreckage, broken trees and bomb fragments,” Shurik said. “We try to get as low as possible and land the boxes exactly in the trenches where the soldiers are hiding so they don’t have to risk going out.”
According to Achilles, in mid-April, the Russian army launched another offensive towards Chasiv Yar, deploying 30 tanks and armored vehicles.
He said Ukrainian forces destroyed at least 22 Russian vehicles despite a lack of artillery, adding that most of the attacks were carried out by his drone team. They used drones loaded with explosives to carry out attacks, or used drones to drop mines on the path of Russian armored forces, he said. Some vehicles were hit at close range by Ukrainian infantry with anti-tank weapons.
“Right now what we can do is use the drones we have to slow them down,” he said.
For the soldiers in the trenches, the Russians’ superior firepower and numbers were devastating.
“It’s attack, attack, attack, attack,” said Rule, 38, the command sergeant major of the 126th Homeland Defense Brigade, who recently sent a battalion from southern Ukraine to help defend Chasiv Yar. “We have a lot of wounded, a lot of dead; that’s war,” he said. “But I just got back from our battalion headquarters, and our soldiers are heroes.”
He said his soldiers had repelled three attacks by Russian forces just an hour earlier, killing seven Russians and wounding only one Ukrainian.
Achilles predicted that the Russians might succeed in taking the outskirts of Novochasiyar in the coming weeks. But he said that by then he expected new supplies from an aid package approved by Congress in April to have arrived, adding that he hoped Ukrainian troops would be able to hold the town with them.
Oleksandr Chubko Reporting from Kiev, Ukraine, also contributed.
