I Went To Ukraine’s Killzone Frontline

title: I Went To Ukraine’s Killzone Frontline
author: Justin Taylor
publication: YouTube
published: 2026-01-18T00:00:00
source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rKu-1u2Le8

word_count: 8014

I don't expect the war to stop from my personal opinion and I think uh next is World War II. I just spent about two weeks in Ukraine managing to talk to quite a lot of people asking quite a lot of questions about quite a lot of things. I wanted to know how things were really going on the ground for those fighting. I wanted to see the destruction of everything firsthand and get a very real sense of what I was missing out on just from reading Telegram feeds and YouTube videos. My goal was to answer a relatively simple question. How has the war changed over the last year, over the last 6 months? What new tactics are being formed? How has technology evolved? And how is the war itself playing out? And bottom line up front, the war is not going well. Russia's consolidation of its drone forces has proved to be highly effective on the ground. Ukraine is facing massive shortages in every metric from soldiers, ammo, supplies, and equipment. While Ukrainian troops are inflicting casualties on Russia in numbers that are hard to comprehend, Russia does not care in the slightest and continues to march people into the meat grinder against well-fortified defensive positions. I do have a disclaimer that I want to provide, but that's going to be the end of the video, so stay tuned for that to answer any random burning questions you probably have. First, I entered the country via train from Warsaw, [music] making my way to Kev. The only way into the country is bus or train because the airspaces are shut down. In Kev, I met my translator, Roman, and [music] driver Sergey. Roman himself was a producer prior to the start of the war before joining as a volunteer fighter after the full-scale invasion in 2022. Sergey, my driver, outside of being a literal mountain of a man and probably the most genuinely nice people I've ever met in my life, was a lifelong resident of the Dawnboss region where the majority of the fighting has been happening over the last several years. My first night there was also my first lesson about the war. There is no front line. There was not a time or a place the entire duration I was there that my immediate vicinity wasn't targeted by some kind of Russian attack. Bombs and drones in any population center were literally a multi-day occurrence from the second that I crossed over the border. Air raid sirens were so persistent that everyone with a handful of exceptions just ignored them. I went into a shelter when I first heard one, but after the first one, like everyone else there, I just didn't bother. I don't say that trying to sound cool and tough. The reality is that if you took shelter every single time an air raid siren went off, you would literally be spending 24/7 underground. But my first stop, the gun range. I had a chance to do some short-range marksmanship training with Ukrainian special operations forces, and [music] they gave me a full rundown of the gear and weapons they were actively using in their fight. I teamed up with United 24 media on this trip and met up with Nikita, a war correspondent that's been covering the front in some of the most dangerous areas possible and who's seen how it's shifted from maneuver warfare to trench warfare and now drones. Hey, what's up? This is Nikita Ilchenko from United 24 Media. I have been working uh as a war reporter aka producer um since the start of full scale equation. Now we are sort of driving to uh show Justin a specific uh but very interesting uh unit of special operation forces. Covered a lot of uh topics, a lot of uh directions of fighting from uh my favorite reports. I would highlight uh the latest one I did in the uh so-called enchanted forest. Uh uh those are the forests of Luhines region in the east of Ukraine. >> What's been the hardest [music] part about this job for you? >> Uh hardest part about it probably seeing it all unfold on my home. Ukrainian special operations forces have been a critical lynchpin of the country's defense. Over the last year, they have been spending a good bit of time in the newest front in the war, Sunumi, where Russia began a large-scale incursion in February of 2025. There is debate on why this was done strategically, but it has two big impacts. First is that it creates a buffer zone where Ukraine cannot launch missile and drone attacks into Russian territory. It's pushing those assets further south, reducing their range. And second, it forces Ukraine to disperse their already thin defensive forces. Most of Russia's dedicated drone forces are in the east and south with the north being closer to a conventional style fight, at least compared to the robotic battlefield in other parts of the country. This kind of environment is the perfect deployment for these guys, but perfect does not mean easy. Drones are still persistent in the north and movement can only be done during the daytime. At night, the Russians switch over to thermal equipped drones, [music] meaning that once the sun goes down, which in Ukraine at this time of the year is before 400 p.m., they just have to hide. It takes days to move just a handful of kilometers. The risk of aggressive maneuvers is just too high. There is no practical way to get casualties evacuated and treated, and one operator wounded is a total mission failure. The margin for error on their operations is zero. And because each mission is an all or nothing affair, smallarms training is paramount. Nothing I saw there was revolutionary. It was Daniel Defense M4s and HK416s. [music] Rifles that, regardless if you think they're overpriced, will absolutely go bang when you need them to go bang at any time. They were being tasked with every kind of mission imaginable. From raids, recon, setting up ambushes, sabotage, and a host of other things that they were not allowed to tell me. This meant that each mission weapon setup was different. Sometimes suppressors were used, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes SMGs were brought along and sometimes sniper rifles were the primary or an M249. They all had to be trained in it and they all had to be experts. I had a chance to interview a handful of them as most of them spoke English and it would be one of the only times I would hear English other than my translator for the rest of the trip. Our time was cut short though as many of them had to literally leave from there straight into mission prep in sumi. The fact that they took the time to be literally hours before going out into enemy fire just to talk to me was mindboggling. I'll be turning the time I spent with their SOF into a separate video. So be on the lookout for that. But for now we need to move on. The next day we started the real journey by heading to Harkke, a major city to the northeast just 12 to 18 mi from the Russian border. The region surrounding the city was one of the first to fall during the full-scale invasion in February of 2022. However, Russian occupation forces were pushed back out of the area by September of the same year. It took us all day to get there and we ended up sleeping in a borrowed apartment from a famous Ukrainian artist who at the time was in the UK selling pieces from his collection in order to help support the war effort. So, this is the workshop. We might hear an air raid siren just went off. But like he does like art obviously, but like like drone art and like there's military boxes over here. I'll show you more in a sec. This is very cool. This is where I'm This is where I'm staying. It's got all these books, like ammo cans. This is American, I'm pretty sure. Fuses. 1.4 means Yeah. American stuff. Got some Chinese stuff right here. I don't know what this is. Very cool. I don't know what these black squares are. This is where I'm sleeping tonight. >> Apparently, this says love. These are uh ashtrays made out of he said a shell. Shell of what? I don't know. just got in here. In case you're wondering, they have uh they duct tape X's on windows so that if there's a blast, [music] it stops shrinel from just going into the room. Doesn't protect the window, but protects you a little bit more than if it was just plain. There are two stark things you would notice if you went to HKE today. First is that the city is under a constant state of GNSS jamming. Most Russian longrange munitions use a mixture of American GPS, Russian GLONES, and Chinese Bay DAO satellite P and T systems or position navigation and timing. It's the same thing you use on your phone to get directions to go from A to B. But with all that jammed, navigating the city became a struggle, and even traveling short distances grew into significant headaches. But that problem is worth the trade-off. probably comes to no surprise, but there weren't exactly a lot of outside people visiting, and most people already knew their way around. So, forcing Russian loitering munitions to use a less accurate targeting [music] method was only a small sacrifice. Our first step was a TE CL class or tactical combat casualty care. It's a fairly common standard training that most members of any military will have exposure to. The purpose of it is to stabilize a patient, typically right at or very close to where they were actually wounded, and then package them up for evacuation, so the dedicated medical personnel with actual medical equipment can start to care for them. The class itself, though, had no soldiers. Instead, it was a mixture of very young civilian volunteers, some of them just teenagers, a handful of paramedics, some firefighters, and older civilians. The purpose was to be a basic course on stabilizing civilians in the city. the Russian ordinance landed. The constant attacks combined with civilian targets always getting hit and force tens of thousands into the role of emergency medic. The stark reality is that if your neighbor gets injured with shrapnel, an ambulance will probably not make it there in time before they bleed out, and that's going to be on you. Drones have made it so that blast injuries are the overwhelming majority mechanism of injury. They're also probably the worst kind of injury you can sustain, maybe second to burns. They cause concussive brain damage, internal bleeding, and instead of putting a hole in your leg like a bullet would, they blow your leg half off. The nature of shrapnel and the massive wounds that blasts cause also has the nasty hidden secondary effect of incredibly dangerous infections later on. Even if you do manage to stop and stabilize a bleed, there's a good chance the bacteria they were exposed [music] to will cause permanent damage, amputations, or even death later on. The class went on for hours going through various scenarios and was specifically tuned for helping civilians help other civilians. One thing I did find interesting were some of these small differences in what I was used to. I had sat through probably close to a 100 TC classes in my time in the military, but the differences were notable. One in particular had to do with this. This is a combat application tourniquet or CAT. On it, you will find a spot to write the time that it was applied. Tourniquets, when properly applied, cut off blood flow entirely to an extremity, and how long an arm or leg has gone without blood is something that doctors and medical staff need to know. The instructor noted that for many situations, though, don't bother writing the time on this thing. It's worth saving a few seconds trying to load up a casualty faster because odds are everyone knows what time the blast happened because it's reported everywhere on Telegram anyway. We later joined up with a local group of soldiers conducting training close to the gray zone just north of us. In loose terms, Ukrainian territory is split into three categories. Green indicating that it was territory firmly in Ukrainian control, gray indicating the territory was contested and probably incredibly dangerous, and red being fully under Russian control. Maps like Deep State are good illustrations of this. However, it's important to not think of these as super clear-cut and easily defined lines. It's closer to a gradient and the actual line of control changes by the hour. [music] The training being conducted was so quintessential to this conflict that it could not have been better timing. First was a team from an infantry unit conducting trench clearing operations with grenades. One soldier would provide covering fire until the second was close enough to toss in the explosive and then both took cover. One thing that interested me was the sheer variety of grenades used. While in theory the US has a whole list of grenades we quote officially use, 99% of the time it's a smoke grenade that we've been using since the 40s or the M67 frag we've been using since 1968. The variety of grenades they were using is naturally a byproduct of them having to source supplies from literally anyone willing to sell or donate to them. But there was a heavy leaning towards offensive style thermmoar grenades. These put more emphasis on the explosion aspect of the weapon rather than the fragmentation of it. Because if you're around a corner in the trench, shrapnel is not going to hit you, but a blast absolutely will. After the grenades were all thrown and my hearing was effectively reduced to nothing but a high-pitched ringing sound, another group arrived. These were drone pilots, but they weren't there to fly. They were there to shoot. Their weapons weren't anything fancy. Most were [music] cranks along with a shotgun. The exception to that was the firearms instructor who had definitely put some time and effort into customizing his rifle. I did think it was funny that here in the United States, the AKS74U or Crink is a rare and highly sought-after weapon system because we just think it's cool. However, everyone over there absolutely hates them and their nickname for it translates to the [ __ ] But they weren't practicing to shoot at Russian soldiers. They were there to practice shooting down drones. For short-range FPV pilots, their job is to be sent forward to ad hoc bunkers hidden along the front where they conduct operations. Naturally, those are one of the main targets Russia wants to hit with their own drones. For the time being, the best method the world has come up with dealing with these things is shooting it with small arms. You're not going to see any crazy high-speed cool guy drills. No competition shooting timers beeping to practice how fast you can fire a single shot, reload, and fire again. It was a flat range, but without the flat range antics. Simple focuses on the fundamentals and building confidence with a rifle or shotgun. I did ask what kind of ammo they were using for the shotgun. There has been a lot of debate on that. And while there are specialized kinds they've been using that combine different kinds of loads into one shell, for the vast majority, it's just standard bird and bug shot that you would take hunting. Ukraine has begun producing its own semi-auto shotgun specifically for this role. However, everyone I talked to just preferred simple pumpaction ones because they have a much higher reliability. Remedial action has a much higher pucker factor when it's clearing a magfed shotgun and there's a flying bomb coming at you at 80 m an hour. But that night also happened to be my 30th birthday. So, we went to an underground bar and I spoke to a few reporters we'd met earlier in the day. It's also worth mentioning that I had food poisoning the entire time. So, I decided to head back by myself a little early, but ended up getting lost and with no GPS turned what should have been a 10-minute walk home into a 30inut one. The next day, we took the time to see some of the city. So, the building behind me uh used to be where they did all the radio and TV stations in the Soviet Union, and now it's just uh like a Ukrainian media hub. But apparently this is the largest state square in all of Europe, which I think is insane. You wouldn't expect it to be here, but it is. And I can tell you it's absolutely breathtaking. It's been so insane to see this city and how beautiful and built up it is and old, but in the coolest way. I mean, these buildings are absolutely gorgeous. And yet, we're just right on the front line essentially. You know, air rays were going all last night. Uh, everything's in bunkers now, but the city is just astoundingly beautiful. Like, words don't do it justice. If you didn't know where you were right now, you'd have no idea war was really going on. Later, we met up with others coordinating our meetings with other military units. At one point, stopping in an old Soviet broadcasting station that, after the invasions and getting bombed, had been converted into a media coordination hub. Afterwards, my translator Roman wanted to show me a bombed out school, one that served as a symbolically important event in the first days of the war. >> The fight was like three days here. Uh special s of Russians didn't want to surrender. They had a couple propositions to surrender and they uh fighted till the last uh fighter and that uh used to fight in this school. balloon. It's totally smashed. Now you can see that that it was a school before. It was a classes here. Kids were study here. And now you can see what's happen when Russians are entering the school. This is the Russian world in their perfect condition. I wasn't kidding. Leftover Russian brass. I don't know if you can hear it, but there's an air raid siren, which I think is appropriate. Very fitting for right now. This is just completely destroyed. I probably should not be walking on the staircase, but I didn't come all over this way to back down. Bombed out schools and apartment buildings were all too common a sight even four years later. The fires have been put out, but that was the extent of it. The bullet holes, scorch marks, and rubble were all still there. Later that night, we moved forward again closer to the front to a hidden command and control station for the K2 unit, also known as the 20th unmanned systems brigade. The unit began in 2017 as a small informal recon group only consisting of about a dozen soldiers. By the time of the full-scale invasion though, they had grown into an entire battalion due to their effectiveness. Now in 2026, it's an entire brigade. Over the last year, they made a major switch over to ground drones and now operate as an entirely robotic force. I had the chance to talk to some of their soldiers inside their operation centers as we watched ongoing missions that were occurring that night. I managed to get about three sentences in before bolting out of the room to throw up because again, I had food poisoning. Naturally, when a foreigner wanders into your secret underground command post while actual missions are being conducted and he has a camera and now he quickly sprints out of the room, you will not be pleased with him. I got a very stern talking to after that, but it was very much deserved admittedly. I interviewed the commander, Alexander. He himself was quite the character, having garnered a sizable social media presence during his time as a tank commander using both Ukrainian T-series tanks and German leopards. You can find his videos all over the internet due to just how insane tank warfare looks in the 21st century. And he is absolutely not afraid to let his gunner shoot at anything that moves with the main gun. We both lamented that it was sad to see the vehicles we both spent more time in than our actual homes being turned into scrap on the battlefield. but knew that the way forward was with drones. His brigade had recently joined the Unmanned Systems Forces, a newly stood up branch in the Ukrainian military that consolidated the major drone commands and units into one. The goal there was to streamline logistics and innovation and so far has proven to be very effective. His unit and many like it were the true backbone to Ukraine's entire war effort, running hundreds of missions a day, doing everything from evacuating casualties, conducting recon, kinetic strikes, and testing out new lethal ways to put drones into use. He referred to this as the robot war. Now, that rapid integration of new tech, new platforms, and new ideas is absolutely critical to keeping up with the pace of the fight. But it doesn't just magically happen. It takes a lot of work. After talking to Alexander, I was taken into a truck deep along forest roads and complete darkness to see where that work was taking place. The long drives along mud paths really brought the question in my mind, what the hell am I doing here right now? And how did I end up in this situation? Anytime I've done anything in a military context where someone loaded me into a military vehicle to go somewhere, that thought always came back to me. And in a weird way, it was comforting [music] to return to a feeling I was very familiar with, but hadn't felt in a couple years. Even if you remember the fact that I was in a different hemisphere at the time. We ended up at a secluded drone workshop after about half an hour of driving. Here, they were repairing broken drones and modifying new ones. That night, they were swapping parts on a pair of logistics ground drones. These are in essence a remote controlled box with wheels on them. Though hardened against some threats like shrapnel, they're still incredibly vulnerable to other drones hitting them. Despite the fact that the UGVs are purpose-built for the war, all have been modified after delivery before they're sent forward. The primary things change being batteries and comms. Factory ship drones lack the range needed with the batteries they arrive with and can't communicate with things like Starlink nodes. [music] This workshop also contained a cats, which I very much enjoyed. Part of the reason for this discrepancy between what is needed and what is actually built in a large-scale factory is that that large-scale production can't shift hardware builds as fast as necessary to keep up with changes and threats. They also at the end of the day are a business, not a charity, while trying to keep up orders at a complete break neck pace. Ultimately, it's easier to just let individual units figure it out and modify it themselves. Though that does create operational delays and increases the per unit cost overall for the individual operators. It was Ukraine's goal to deploy at least 15,000 of these types of drones by the end of 2025. No official reports have come out of that goal was indeed met, but all numbers point to them having been on track to reach that number. The particular one I was looking at was called the Snake and was configured for resupplies. However, I saw others that were specifically for casualty evacuations as well. Here we've got a UGV. See on the inside mostly for supplies and casualty evacuation. We only have a limited amount of time of this because it's got to go to Petrok which I don't know what the status of that's going to be by the time this video gets out but right [music] now it's not good. See, it's got the camo nets on it. Giant off-road wheels. Snakes cost anywhere between 15 and $20,000 each, depending on configuration and modifications put into them. That's not cheap, and it hurts when they get destroyed, but it's still cheaper and incurs less harm than losing a truck full of soldiers. These are built by a firm called Rovertech, a domestic company in Ukraine. Snakes were designed specifically and only for the war and unlike other smaller drone platforms like FPVs are actually standardized across the board and were done under NATO Stanag requirements. And this was done in the hope of getting more western purchases which would also help with economies of scale. Other companies like Dev Droid have partnered with Rovertech in order to create combat oriented variants. While Roert's version was primarily done for logistics and support, Dev Droid was working to place machine guns on top or mine laying equipment inside. As infantry forces continue to dwindle, many agree that armed UGVs with heavy firepower are going to be the next evolution of the fighting. Each can carry up to 500 kg of cargo, a bit over 1,000 lb each, and travel about 20 km. While that range is pretty decent for what this is, that's still too close to the kill zones. The standard practice now is for troops to load up the drones onto trailers, drive like a bat out of hell to the edge of the UGV's range, and then speed back, repeating the process again and again. The UGVs are controlled remotely at command stations. This is a slow, tedious, and unglamorous job, but one that is absolutely critical for keeping logistics going. One of the biggest problems with UGVs is keeping them connected to the controller. Typical radio signals are too short ranged or easily jammed and don't perform well due to the vehicle being on the ground and blocked by everything as opposed to one in the sky where line of sight communication is easier for flying drones. The answer to that has largely been the use of fiber optic cables. Those are however an imperfect solution. Even in best case scenarios, they get tangled, they snap, and they reduce the maneuverability of platforms. If used on a dedicated ground platform, they become essentially useless because anything and everything can disrupt the connection. The ground is a much harder place to figure out navigation than the sky is. And that's why they rely heavily on Starlink. The reason that this form of network is so persistent is because it's incredibly hard to jam while also being fairly reliable and easy to set up. Starlink uses thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit as opposed to single geostationary ones or small networks of them like GPS. Each node in space only briefly communicates with a ground terminal before handing it off to the next. This means that the link constantly changes frequency, polarization, and source direction. If you wanted to jam this, you would have to blanket a massive chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is not practical and would also disrupt your own communications because both sides are using Starlink. It's almost like an unofficial begrudged handshake between the waring countries. What really surprised me that night was how all of this was being coordinated, how all these missions and communication was being handled. When I saw computer screens open, I didn't see some bespoke system more akin to what I was used to using in the US Army. I saw Discord calls and Microsoft Team meetings. I saw Google Earth and WhatsApp text messages pulled up on everyone's phone. There were no encrypted data links, no dedicated satellite dishes. The war was being fought on iPhones and civilian laptops, all connected through a single Starlink Wi-Fi signal. Text messages were reporting battle damage assessments. Zoom chat meetings were coordinating artillery strikes. Probably the most shocking thing that I saw was that in order to call for drone support, the infantry in the foxholes at the front would go to a dedicated website on their cell phone and send an email to the command station that they needed help. So, the same method that you and I would report that our Amazon package was delivered to the wrong address is how soldiers are calling in for a medevac to save their buddy's lives. I say that this is shocking, but I don't mean that in a negative or derogatory way. If you are someone with even a little military experience, you probably understand why this was blowing my mind. Most well-unded militaries, regardless of country, use dedicated communication networks, all built specifically for them. These are encrypted to high heaven, run on expensive, purpose-built equipment, and are so unbelievably complicated that I never have any hope of understanding how all that works. And that's all just to send a simple radio call or a digital message. If I had suggested even coordinating a food drop off in training with my cell phone while I was an officer, I would have been fired. But not a single bit of that was found anywhere that I was at in Ukraine. I asked about this just in broad terms why that was the case. But the reality is it's what they had. It was the fastest, simplest, and cheapest way to communicate in the war zone. [music] The war is being fought on WhatsApp as one of them told me. And Russia was no different. And they also relied on Starlink for network connectivity. I also asked about that because sanctions should have made that impossible. Keyword should. Turns out Russia buys them in droves via third parties in the Middle East. But this kind of gave me the feeling that everyone was holding on by a thread. All it would take would be one bad day at the Telegram or WhatsApp office and hundreds of people could be killed. One Microsoft Team meetings drop and a village is either captured or not captured. That's not to say that American bespoke systems were necessarily more reliable. My networks were often down more times that they were working, but we could at least point a finger at the guy who [ __ ] it up. That feeling of both sides hanging on by a thread was only reinforced by the hundreds of repurposed civilian vehicles I saw driving around, filling up at civilian gas stations in videos of Russia doing the same. It seems that the only things making it to the front other than guys on foot are drones, motorbikes, and horses now, and only if they're lucky. Most infantry soldiers are forced to be in position for months on end without relief, sitting in their foxholes, basically just waiting to get hit with FPVs and then attacked by Russian assault forces. But the more I thought on this topic, the more I realized I was just automatically assuming that our way, the West's way of doing things versus their way of doing things was just inherently better because it was more expensive and needed specialized personnel to perform it. Really, Ukraine was using what they had. It was proving to be effective. While my first instinct was to criticize the idea of sending a text message for literal missionritical communications in an active battle, I then remembered the frustration I felt during my time in the military trying to do something similar and thinking to myself how much easier it would be to just send a text and be done with it. It made me wonder how much my innate thinking on war and strategy was just outdated or overly conservative. There were certain risks I was trained just not to take. and using WhatsApp to call for artillery or get a casualty out of a battle was one of them. The sheer reality is that improved and hardened communication systems would do absolutely nothing to make a real and tangible difference on the battlefield over there. Sure, it might be safer, but if something doesn't directly lead to increasing lethality against the Russians, they're not super interested in it. What they're doing works plenty well for what they're needing to use it for. And if anything, I think the West needs to learn a lesson here on this kind of thing. But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. The next day, we headed directly south to the city of Kromatorsk and the donuts go blast. Here was the real war. Miles and miles of anti- drone nets, more military cars than civilian smoke from recent bombings and constant air raid sirens. Along the route were miles and miles of dug in defenses, triple layers of wire, tank traps, mounds, and [music] ditches going as far as the eye can see with the singular goal of slowing down and advance. This was the direction that Russia was making its primary effort and where at the time the battle to control Picrosk was being held. Picrosk was and is a military and symbolically important town that for months sat right on the edge of Russian control. Its centralized location, the Ukrainian highways made it an important logistics hub and symbolized a stronghold of Ukraine's resistance. However, by the time I got there, it had largely been surrounded. Conflicting reports from the front range from there being small openings and active fighting to the battle being completely lost already. But either way, it wasn't good and both sides were throwing everything they had at it. So, we just stopped real quick because uh my fixer Roman needed to pee and smoke a cigarette. And I was advised not to go too far because this area is pretty mined still cuz this is where the first counter offensive took place. But I want to show you these nets real quick. So, I don't know how well you can see it on camera, but and I know I showed the whole way, but these are the anti- drone nets. As you can see, they're really just As you can see, they're really just bits of plastic, almost like thinner than what you'd see on like a soccer goalpost or something, but they're secured by this metal wire and zip tied. And some explosions just went off in the distance. But these have just been going on for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers and there's no end in sight and they're building more as you saw earlier. So this is a newer thing that they've been doing. I want to ask them how effective these actually are, but I kind of don't want to know the answer and I want to assume that they do. So I'm going to leave it at that. We only briefly stayed in Kromaturk, but took the time to interview a pair of Ukrainian drone pilots. They were both in their mid20s, which is young for a soldier on either side of this war. It was fairly apparent that frankly they did not want to talk to me or really care about my questions. And I do not blame them at all. Being granted a brief moment of recovery from the fighting only to have to spend it sitting in a bombed out factory in the cold and then talking to a foreigner that doesn't speak your language does not sound like an enjoyable experience. Though my questions were largely about the war itself, their answers kept returning to their family, wanting to see their wives again, lamenting that they were missing their very young children growing up. And one can only imagine the heaviness of that. Each and every single fighter is trapped in a desperate fight inside of their own country that is not going well. And every day they're worried that when they wake up, today might be the day to get killed. Being away from your family and war is incredibly emotionally taxing. But now imagine that you're also worried that your own life and children are in the firing line. Every Russian drone sent into cities kills families. There is no safe space for anyone to go, only less dangerous places to go. Some families leave the country while the man stays and fights, but it's prohibitively expensive for many. And the life of a refugee is not an easy one regardless of circumstance. After we continued south, bouncing along different locations outside of which I will not be showing for security reasons. Here we watched ongoing drone operations primarily from these vampires. Vampire drones are the heavy bombers of UAS's. These style of drones were originally built for agricultural and survey purposes, but ended up performing rather well in combat due to their ability to carry heavy payloads. Vampires and their cousin, the Baba Yaga, were total game changers for Ukraine and at the heart of some of their most decisive winds. However, Russia has become increasingly more proficient in their ability to down large bomber style drones, which was one of the few advantages that Ukraine had going into 2025. These are able to carry a little over 30 lbs for about half an hour. As they become more vulnerable to being shot down at the front, they've begun taking on duties like supply drops and mining operations where traditional assets aren't able to reach. This shift keeps them less exposed to intercept. And nowadays, they're largely used as reactive fire support to Russian assaults near Ukrainian positions rather than offensive weapons hitting behind enemy lines. Much like the snake UGV, these are modified before being placed into action. And while it theoretically could be used with fiber optic controls, I only saw them with wireless network uplinks. I met with a company commander for a vampire unit inside of an abandoned gypsy home that she had repurposed as her personal HQ at the front. To see a company commander with bright dreadlocks surrounded by goddy decorations and what was essentially just a large room of a house was interesting. My first thought was that grumpy Cold War vets who never saw combat would be the first to criticize her appearance. Despite the fact that her company alone had a over fourdigit kill count, much like the two drone pilots I interviewed in the bombed out factory, she was exhausted, worried, and on edge. She informed me that her unit of about 100 drone operators and enablers conducted somewhere between 200 and 400 missions per day. One mission being a single sorty, a takeoff, bomb something, and come back thing. But that could include hitting multiple targets in one mission. Then you remember that she's just a company, one tiny slice of the thousand km front line. You probably heard countless times that accurate casualty numbers in this war are nearly impossible to come by. When you read headlines about over a million casualties after 4 years, it starts to make more sense when you hear statistics like that. I asked how on earth they were able to keep up with that many missions per day nonstop. A question that I asked everyone, and she said the same thing that everyone else did. There's no choice. Rest and rotations aren't dictated by optimal human performance. They're dictated on the fact that the attacks never stop. But just as soon as we got there, it was time to move on. We traveled to a nearby testing and training area where here new types of ammunition for the vampire were being developed, specifically really big ones. The goal that day was to test the feasibility and accuracy of larger bomber canisters rather than individual grenade style ones. New parts were being tested out, seeing which ones were more accurate or incurred less misfires, of which there was a few, and EOD techs had to take care of. This also gave me a much better appreciation of how much these explosions hurt. Even small impacts near us were enough to move controllers around and make your teeth rattle. >> Oh, yeah. >> Even the smaller detonations were enough to kick dirt on our heads over 100 meters away. But it wasn't until that night that I gained a harsher appreciation of Russian drone hits. Shortly after the sun went down, the Russians leveled the area. Bombs were dropped on houses while loitering munitions targeted any vehicles. Areas like these have only been partially evacuated. Those that stay are either too poor or too old to go somewhere else. Many homes that are evacuated are rented out for cheap by Ukrainian forces as there is nowhere else to stay. Russia knowing this hits everything that they can and the destruction was apparent, hitting homes, schools, anything they could. But after 2 weeks of talking to people and trying to sponge up as much information as I could, we began our journey to my train station late that night. The fog was incredibly dense, making driving in dart sketchy to say the least. Russia had been using the fog to move troops and supplies to the front because it made drone operations difficult and any chance to gain an advantage had to be taken. I said goodbye to my translator and driver as they helped me board the train and then they left to begin preparing civilian evacuations near the front. An overnight train ride to Kev later and I had an evening to myself in my hotel room and naturally I passed out almost immediately. That was until about 1:00 in the morning. That night Russia [music] launched hundreds of drones and missiles into the capital. The entire night was nothing but listening to machine gun fire outside of my hotel as troops attempted to shoot down incoming munitions. And the sound that followed would be the inevitable blast. Shooting down a drone doesn't make it inert. It just makes it miss. The gunfire and explosions didn't stop until 9:00 in the morning, right as everyone had to start their day. Luckily, civilian casualties that night were shockingly low for the high amount of ordinance that hit the city. But the entire capital was exhausted after a sleepless night, having spent it hoping that the next explosion wasn't for you. By this point, I was very ready to be home. I was exhausted. I was only just then recovering from being sick. And my body had been running on pretty much just adrenaline stress for the previous 14 days. But I was lucky. That day, I got on a bus and started my journey back to the United States. But not a single person I talked to, met, passed by, or saw was. They were still there. They are still there and they're going to be there every single day until the war is over. So, let's address the question I set out to answer. How has the war changed in the last year? Well, first, the front line is less of a front line and more just a massive kill zone that getting in and out of is essentially suicide. And all of that is due to the propagation of cheap drones that have taken over every corner and aspect of the war. Drones are the primary causes and effects of everything now. And while I knew that going into the war, I don't think the scale of it really hit me until I was there. Ukraine's tactic of a drone wall defense has been working. But when you have 10 bullets and the Russians send 11 troops, there's only so much you can do. Russia has managed to keep troop replacement rates high despite massive casualties, and there are no real indications that they will be slowing down. Putin has stated numerous times that he doesn't intend to stop until they seize the territory they want. Gains on the Russian advance are slow, but they are gains nonetheless. Ukraine lacks the industrial, economic, and population factors to keep pace with Russia. They're conceding territory where they have to in order to prevent further casualties. Though, while they do that, they're making it as painful [music] as humanly possible for Russia to take said territory. There don't seem to be any grand plans in place, no overarching strategy on either side. Russia is trying to take every inch that they can and Ukraine is trying to kill as many Russians as they can. Neither have the ability to further escalate the war and are throwing everything they possibly can into this conflict. The result is a simple war of attrition. Victory is determined by numbers. Logistics on both sides are wildly strained. If you watch the endless stream of FPV videos on the internet, you'll notice that they almost always target the vehicle if they can because those are used to transport supplies to the front. The overall feeling I got was that most Ukrainians view this war today as their one shot of retaining control of their own country. Any politically negotiated peace would just give Russia time to reorganize and attack again. The only permanent peace option in their eyes is a military defeat of Russia. Ukraine doesn't have to win, but Russia has to lose. The loss doesn't have to be decisive, but it has to be definitive. But there are ways you can help. I have put donation links below in the description for all the units I worked with. None of these links were people I didn't meet personally, and every little bit helps. And all right, disclaimer time. A good portion of my intent in going to Ukraine in the first place was [music] to try to bring light to people's stories for the express purpose of helping them. So, please, if you can, send something to the donation links down in the description. Those donations will be going directly to the Ukrainian units that I was at in the front. There are no middlemen, no third party organizations. They are literally the people on the front right now. I also got absolutely nothing for this production. This video will also very likely be demonetized. For me, I spent thousands of my own money in total for this video to happen between flights, [music] trains, buses, gas, food, and paying for my translator and driver. I received zero money or any morsel compensation from anyone. I'm also being very intentional not to sensationalize anything I did or I saw. I think the propaganda jokes that we all make are funny, too. But if you think me showing up blown up schools, burning homes, and exhausted soldiers is somehow shilling for one group or another, I don't know what to tell you. Go take a media literacy class or something. My goal with this was to just report what I saw, and it's only the first of probably several videos I will make on this. There are countless hours of interviews and topics that I want to hit, so stay tuned for that. And on that note, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed today's video. Please subscribe and I will see you in the next