A half dozen officers from Ukraine’s 54th Mechanized Brigade hover around the table in what was once a modest civilian home on the outskirts of Sloviansk, a small, war-torn city just behind the front line. The table is heaped with a holiday feast—meat, rice pilaf, salads, and even smoked salmon canapés. We’re waiting for the colonel, code-named Khors, a career officer in his early 50s with a Cossack haircut—shaved on the sides to show off a long, flaxen topknot. When he arrives, we sit down to eat.
No one speaks of the battle a few days before—a close encounter with more numerous and better armed Russian forces. The Ukrainians mounted a robust defense, and the men now seem eager to put it behind them. But when I ask about morale, their faces grow longer. “People are tired,” Khors says, staring into the middle distance. “Especially the commanders. And the winter doesn’t help.”
After nearly three years of all-out combat, the war in Ukraine is heading into what could be a pivotal few months. The Russians have been moving forward on the eastern front, throwing troops at the fight and losing as many as 2,000 a day, but still advancing yard by yard into Ukrainian territory. Intensifying bombardments terrorize cities far from the battlefield. Over half the country’s electricity-generating capacity has been destroyed; some households experience daily outages. Ammunition is somewhat more plentiful than when U.S. aid stalled a year ago, but many units complain they are short of manpower.
Perhaps most uncertain is what a Trump presidency will bring. Will the new American leader try to make good on his promise to end the war in one day? Will Vladimir Putin heed his call to come to the negotiating table? And what kind of peace deal might they strike, with or without Ukrainian approval?
Amid this uncertainty, Khors’ unit—a few hundred fighters specializing in drone warfare called the “Heavenly Punishment” battalion—goes about its business day to day. Some men are worn down, but others seem too busy to be downcast, committed to their chores and making the best of a soldier’s life.
Maybe it’s the unit’s unique mission that accounts for the mood. Developing and deploying drones is not the same as day after day of close combat in the trenches. Maybe it’s the battalion’s leadership. In the five months I’ve known the group, no one has said a bad word about Khors, a thoughtful man with an engineering degree from a military university. Unlike in some units, there have been few, if any, desertions, and by Khors’ own carefully worded account, morale is “stable.” Only the officers seem to look ahead and wonder what the future will bring.
Even here, close to the front’s hottest flashpoints, intense encounters alternate with more routine days. One Ukrainian military blogger reported that the unit’s recent battle—a Russian assault on Siversk, some 20 miles east of Sloviansk—was among the heaviest fighting the frontline town has seen since the start of the war. Mechanized combat troops attacked from three directions: more than 400 soldiers in 30 armored vehicles, plus golf carts and motorcycles—less vulnerable than tanks to the Ukrainian drones buzzing overhead—with close support from artillery and the Russians’ own drones. According to Khors, the enemy managed to capture some Ukrainian logistics positions, but his unit and others succeeded in holding the line.
Things are quieter on the day I visit the Heavenly Punishment command center. Several large TV screens cover one wall, each screen filled with smaller tiles—between nine and 12 flickering feeds from drones operating along some 25 miles of the front line. Some are reconnaissance drones; others are kamikaze devices with explosives—all overseen by a handful of men watching intently and speaking quietly into mics on the table in front of them.
One feed zooms in on a Russian foxhole, peering into the darkness, and the soldier monitoring it in the command center switches the view from visual to thermal—all the better to determine if there are men in the trench. A moment later, another feed spots an enemy soldier walking in the open—a rare sight on a battlefield under constant surveillance by overhead cameras. But he disappears before the Ukrainian chain of command—the monitors in the command center communicating with “coordinators” at another location, who signal to pilots in trenches just five miles from the Russian positions—can order a kill.
The closest thing we see to action: one tile lights up with red traces—enemy fire aimed at a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone that manages to fly away unscathed. But the men show me video shot a few days before in which a drone hovering over an oil storage facility spots the barrel of a Russian tank peeking out from a heap of charred timbers. A second Ukrainian drone arrives in short order and smashes into the tank, followed by several seconds of gray static. Meanwhile, in real-time, another feed on the same screen passes over a little patch of pink, and one of the operators mutters, “Look, some meat.” It’s a fallen Russian left untended on the battlefield.
Later, we drive to the Heavenly Punishment drone hub. Along the way, we pass a row of shops covered with plywood. Once an electronics outlet, a bakery, and a liquor store, their bright signs still beckon would-be customers into an abandoned parking lot. We see shuttered factories and demolished houses. But there are few colors in the wintery landscape: road, fields, tree line, and sky are just so many shades of gray. One man in the car explains the effects of winter weather. It’s much harder to maneuver on muddy roads, while overcast skies limit visibility and colder temperatures reduce battery life, making both sides’ drones less effective.
The drone hub is a vibrant, bustling place. Some dozen men are scattered at workstations in the big empty room, their desks strewn with wires and electronic circuitry. A bearded technician code-named Bob—like the others at this location, he’s dressed in civilian clothes, with close-cropped hair and a dark widow’s peak—shows me around. Each drone is passed from desk to desk: an improvised production line, including a 3D printer and several spot welding machines, modeled on the setup in the furniture factory where Bob used to work. Khors puts a lot of effort into recruitment, and the team has grown rapidly in recent months. Some of the men have engineering degrees; others are mechanics. Still others worked before the war as IT technicians. Together, Bob estimates, they equip some 300 to 400 drones per month for use on the battlefield near Sloviansk.
The unit gets few, if any, UAVs from the ministry of defense. Its drones are rudimentary, inexpensive 10-inch devices, most purchased online and donated to the unit by charitable nonprofit groups and local governments, then modified in the hub to adapt to the front’s changing conditions. Sometimes, what’s needed is a more powerful battery pack or a more deadly explosive. In other cases, an additional algorithm can enhance or replace one of the tiny circuit boards that control the device. The most difficult challenge facing the team: Russian electronic warfare (EW). Radio interference produced by armored vehicles with rooftop antennas seeks to redirect or crash incoming drones by blocking the signal that connects the pilot and the device.
The drone war is, first and foremost, a technological contest. One side deploys a new device or tactic the enemy then races to counter, an unending cycle of weapons development. In the first days of the war, Ukrainian fighters used commercial drones to track Russian troop movements and target artillery fire, prompting the Russians to ramp up their use of electronic warfare to jam and spoof the Ukrainian devices. And so it went over the years, as both sides developed more sophisticated drones and techniques to block them.
The most effective response to EW is artificial intelligence—drones that can navigate by themselves and home in on enemy targets without guidance by a human operator—and the most advanced drones on the market are AI-enabled. But most are too pricey for ordinary Ukrainian units, and AI cannot be developed ad hoc on the battlefield. So, the Heavenly Punishment team and their Russian counterparts make do with improvised solutions. Khors says Moscow is experimenting with wire-guided drones. His unit relies primarily on equipping its devices with several radio frequencies, then switching among them mid-flight to avoid Russian jamming.
The team’s proudest product is a “repeater”—a separate, specially equipped flying device designed to extend the range of a reconnaissance UAV and enhance its performance over hilly terrain. Among the features that allow the repeater to evade Russian EW are sophisticated antennas operating on multiple frequencies, a high-quality video transmitter on a less-used frequency, and a rudimentary form of AI that allows the device to hover over a target without GPS guidance. Still, Khors concedes, this homegrown rig is an interim solution. He dreams of the day when he can replace it with more advanced weaponry.
In between showing off their new technology, the men in the hub tell me about working in the battalion. Sashko, with curly brown hair and two hoop earrings, was employed before the war as a software developer, and unlike some of his peers, he didn’t rush in the early days to join the army. But in spring 2024, after a heavy bombardment in Kyiv, he decided he had to do something. “I was afraid I would be killed by a rocket,” he says. “But instead of running away, I ran to my fear.” After enlisting, he served briefly in another unit before Khors recruited him. “I was in my 40s and starting to wonder about my goal in life,” Sashko recalls. “Now I have one—and these guys have become my family.”
Vlad talks about the unit’s morale. A former marketing manager married to a doctor from a Kyiv suburb, he helps the battalion procure drones from charity groups and local governments, among other tasks. He has cropped hair and a fading scar from a wound sustained early in the war. “My commander has created an unusual environment,” he texted me before I visited Sloviansk, “unlike anything I’ve experienced elsewhere in the army.”
The unit offers supplemental training, regular vacations, and rotations away from the fighting. The men are encouraged to take initiative and use the skills they bring from civilian life. You see this in the drone hub but also in the unit’s makeshift studio: one soldier who used to work for a TV station has created a low-tech production arm that churns out video for social media and recruitment drives. Most important, Vlad tells me—and he says it’s less common than it ought to be—Khors cares about the lives of the men he commands and works to avoid exposing them to unnecessary risks.
None of this takes the danger out of soldiering, as even the men most fulfilled by their work are all too aware. Vlad quotes part of a line he remembers reading somewhere by Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots.” Khors’ reaction: “When a man tells me he’s afraid, I tell him I’m afraid too. But other men’s lives depend on me and what I do.”
Asked if he’s hopeful about the future, Khors hesitates. “I usually see the positive side,” he says after a long pause. “But it’s hard right now.”
Though he says he’s willing to consider a negotiated peace, he’s not sure what to think of Trump or what to expect from him. He’s also skeptical that European peacekeeping forces or even NATO will extend themselves to protect Ukraine from future Russian aggression. “Will they actually meet fire with fire?” he asks, shaking his head. The one thing he knows for certain: Putin is determined to wipe Ukraine off the map.
“Whatever happens,” he vows, “I will fight to the end.” But he doesn’t want his son to become a soldier. “Nobody at this table wants to fight,” he says and looks around the room at the commanders serving under him. “We do what we do because we have to.”
