REPORTING. “On the front, the sky is literally teeming with drones”: how the Ukrainian army trains to face the threat

The soldier knelt on the ground. He holds his Kalashnikov firmly on his shoulder, his gaze fixed on the horizon. But when the buzz of the drone is heard, it’s already too late. Despite his shots, the machine whizzed past his head. In a real situation, he would have blown himself up.

“Why didn’t you break? He already hit you, three fucking times!” explodes Nazar, the instructor, dressed all in black. Overlooking the hill, the friends are laughing. “I told you, we fire in short bursts. Why? To increase the density of fire. And if you see that he’s approaching you, five or seven meters away, you have to get out! Come on, next!”

All afternoon, the soldiers repeat the same gestures. “We must acquire these skills, maintain them, practice them, said Kyrylo Krasovsky, commander of an attack drone company. They must become automatic.”. Dmytro, who pilots fiber optic drones, returns from the combat zone, near Dobropillya. “These training sessions will inevitably be useful, because today, on the front, we can say that the sky is literally teeming with drones, of different types, with different uses, small planes or quadcopters, absolutely everything!”

However, most of the soldiers training that day have never found themselves targeted by an FPV drone. “We had to dodge more, they made a lot of mistakescomments one of the managers. When the drone passes over you, you have to change location immediately.” The trainers do everything to put the soldiers in a real situation.

“We’re trying to reproduce battlefield conditions, so they can stay alive. We want them to be psychologically ready.”

A training manager

à franceinfo

For some, just hearing the drone’s characteristic buzz is a maximum stressor. When these kamikaze machines have spotted you and are coming at you at 120 km/hour, destroying them with a machine gun before they explode is a feat. However, some succeed, like Andriy, who shows us his still smoking catch, a gaping hole in the middle of the plastic body: “I’m proud of myself! It was very difficult to target them… They are small, very fast, very maneuverable. But as you see, the bullet went through the motherboard. When it’s like that, everything disappears, the connection, the video… it’s the brain of the FPV drone. He’s no longer worth anything.” In combat, attack drones equipped with an explosive charge are a little bigger: “It will be a little easier”.

For this training session alone, the brigade “consumes” around thirty drones. The training session, combined with shooting sessions, lasts several days. The discreet training ground is set in a hilly landscape, a mixture of forests and large squares of brown earth — the crops have not yet grown there. “In that wooded strip over theresays Rostislav, the brigade’s press officer, we installed training rooms. We also built trenches which served as shelters in the event of bombing. The risk still exists. If the Russians learn where our troops are, anywhere, they will try to attack. The training grounds are ‘appetizing’ targets, because there are prepared and trained personnel.”

Not enough to dampen the morale of the soldiers of the Boureviy brigade, who in this first week of June seem generally optimistic. “With all the equipment we have now, all the support, and given what is happening today on the front line, we are not going to lose the war,” assures one of them with a big smile. In the meantime, the drone battle is gaining strength. Russia would now be capable of producing 500,000 short-range copies each month.