The Q&A: "The human may not be able to make decisions at the speed modern war requires"

Analyst Olena Kryzhanivska on Ukraine's drone revolution — and the hard choices ahead

Mood-swinging on the Russia-Ukraine war has lately swung toward unaccustomed optimism among supporters of Ukraine in its long defence against Russian attack. In March Ukraine said it took back more territory than Russia gained, for the first time in three years. Of course in a chaotic conflict with sky-high stakes, much could change. But Australian defence analyst Mick Ryan, a retired major-general, has noted Ukraine’s “strategic momentum.”

Much of Ukraine’s resilience is attributable to a fascinating longer-term development, which began before 2022 and has picked up momentum. That’s the revolution in automated warfare — not just airborne drones, but automated ground and sea vehicles too. Increasingly deployed in combination. Constantly improving thanks to a wide-scale culture of tinkering and revision. Deployed in ever-increasing scale.

I figured it was time for an update. Olena Kryzhanivska is a Senior Editor at the NATO Association of Canada and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Defence Innovation at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Her Ukraine’s Arms Monitor newsletter on Substack is a frequently-updated digest of news from the Ukraine conflict.

I spoke to Olena Kryzhanivska on Friday. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A reminder that this post is part of my occasional Q&A series, transcribed long-form interviews with newsmakers. I’ve done 19 of these in just over a year. They live under the Q&A tab on my website, and you can revisit them any time.

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Paul Wells: You’ve been writing about drones for the last few years, and it feels like the definition of drone has been changing along with everything else. Let’s start with three acronyms to situate everything for our readers: UAV, USV, and UGV. What do they mean, and how have they been changing?

Olena Kryzhanivska: When we talk about drones, we mean unmanned systems. We can refer to aerial systems, ground systems, and waterborne systems. UAV is the most commonly used acronym: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. We are talking about Mavic-type drones, FPV [First Person View] drones, and long-range strike drones. Shahed-type drones also can be named UAVs.

UGVs are Unmanned Ground Vehicles. These are ground robots. They are little armored vehicles—not tanks, of course—but they are pretty small and they are used for a variety of logistical purposes, military evacuation on the battlefield, and strike purposes, as well.

And then we have USVs, which are part of the larger class of waterborne drones, Unmanned Surface Vehicles. They are unmanned boats. There are also Unmanned Underwater Vehicles, that’s another class.

PW: How much use of these systems was Ukraine involved with in the middle of 2022, and how much have they scaled up?

Kryzhanivska: Well, they’ve scaled up significantly. First of all, the developments of drone technologies in Ukraine started already before the full-scale war. We know that the war in Ukraine started in 2014, and since then, Ukrainian forces have been using different types of drones, mostly Aerial Vehicles. We are talking about small drones used for racing, but then, of course, there are larger drones used for agricultural purposes. Since 2022, the use of these systems has transformed completely.

What we see now is that drones are used for battlefield purposes. They deliver explosive payloads, conduct reconnaissance, and this can be used with small systems like FPV, first-person-view drones, which are usually used for civilian purposes. Also, Mavic-type drones, produced by the Chinese DJI company.

According to recent updates, 75% of casualties on the battlefield are happening due to those small drones. They are very effective. But also, what we saw from 2022 is that Ukraine has been innovating extremely well. Ukraine always starts with some improvised systems, for example, unmanned boats. They start with the usual boats, and then adapt them to battlefield purposes. First adapting to logistic purposes like transporting cargo, but then they started to transport explosive payloads, and then the technology has been maturing as it was used more on the battlefield.

What we see right now is a dynamically changing battlefield in the drone warfare in Ukraine and Russia. We see that drones are used in multi-domain operations, which means that we see the increasing integration between ground vehicles and aerial vehicles. Ground drones are carrying FPV aerial vehicles. Ground drones can carry interceptor drones. USVs [unmanned boats] can carry aerial vehicles. It’s like the integration of different capabilities which is something that Ukraine has been using increasingly on the battlefield during the last year. We do not see fully autonomous drones on the battlefield just yet. There are a lot of claims about experiments, but no full autonomy. But that’s something that’s going to happen in the future.

I think one of the interesting uses of drones is for air defense, something that was very important in the context of the war with Iran, when Iran was launching hundreds and thousands of those Shahed-type munitions. The Gulf countries didn’t have anything else except for very expensive interceptor missiles that cost millions of dollars to counter those Shaheds. Ukraine was able to show that there are other cost-effective methods of doing that.

PW: The scale of production is massive. We’re talking about 4 million aerial vehicles produced by Ukraine this year, and they would like to increase that. It feels like a completely different way of doing war.