Reuters reports:

A terrifying game of hide-and-seek is playing out in this deadly corridor that snakes along the 1,200 km-long (750-mile) front line in Ukraine.

The war, well into its fifth year, has become the first major conflict to be dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, with thousands of the cheap but deadly machines filling the skies.

Ukraine and invader Russia are constantly advancing the new technology, which is transforming modern warfare. Both sides have had to abandon age-old tactics of gathering troops, vehicles and artillery in a relatively compressed area along the front lines. Such visible targets are easy prey for drones.

Instead, teams as small as two to three soldiers hide in tiny dugouts hollowed under the ground, scattered across a huge kill zone extending many kilometres on either side of the line of contact between the two sides. Infantrymen often act as lookouts, avoiding direct engagement that could give away their position, instead calling in drones to do the killing, said an officer in leading Ukrainian drone brigade Madyar’s Birds, who goes by the callsign Silhouette.

Drones are guided by pilots hiding in the kill zone or further away who fly them using video game-style controls. Many are first-person view (FPV) craft, allowing the pilot to see the scene from the drone’s perspective in real time. They are controlled either through radio signals or via long, ultra-fine fibre optic cables stretching behind the drones. [Continue reading…]