Fighting Russia from a distance: Inside a Ukrainian drone school

Kyiv, Ukraine – Andrey Pronin doesn’t know how many drones he has crashed.

“I lost count after 100,” the 44-year-old, camouflage-clad instructor told Al Jazeera while observing three cadets of his drone flight school pilot their buzzing aircraft over a withering meadow just outside Kyiv.

Sitting at a plastic table littered with tools and batteries, the cadets with their joysticks and goggle cameras looked geeky and harmless.

During their Saturday morning drill, each of them took turns flying a drone whose camera allows first-person views of the flight.

Time after time after time, the cadets learned how to manoeuvre their drones by flying them through two loops stuck into the wet ground.

The drones often fell with a whiz after touching a loop or a bush, losing a red plastic propeller or a leg that had to be found in the wet grass and reattached.

But hundreds of hours of such drills slowly turn a drone into an extension of its pilot’s body – and serve him on the front line.

‘We want to live so that our children are not afraid’

Some of the cadets are too young to be conscripted.

“I still have 10 years,” Kemal, a 15-year-old of mixed Ukrainian-Turkish origin, told Al Jazeera, referring to the conscription age of 25.

His immediate goal is to “get ready for races” among the cadets of similar drone-flying schools in Kyiv. Other cadets who aren’t eligible for conscription want to pass on everything they learn.

“We want to live so that our children are not afraid, are not hiding in bomb shelters, because where have I been teaching all the time? In bomb shelters,” Viktoria, a schoolteacher who will teach drone flying to her high schoolers as part of a new, obligatory class, told Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian women are immune from conscription, but many choose to serve in the military or in volunteer units.

Survival!’

Viktoria was sitting next to six men in a dark classroom on the top floor of a drab office building in southeastern Kyiv, listening to theoretical portions of the course. Pronin was projecting slides onto the wall to explain things like frequencies used for flying the drone and getting video feedback.

Four of the men were active servicemen dispatched by their military units to master a new skill. Taciturn and focused, they refused to be interviewed or photographed – and only one of them blurted out “survival!” when asked about his motivation.

That’s the keyword for any aspiring drone pilot or engineer, especially during Ukraine’s conscription crisis when thousands of men of fighting age are forcibly rounded up and sent to boot camps – or bribe their way out.

“Let’s be realistic. If you are taken by conscription officers, you pay 8,000 hryvnias [a little less than $200], and they let you go,” Pronin said. “That’s the price of our training course.”

Moreover, the 16-day, Ministry of Defence-certified training course offered by Pronin and his partner Roman, who withheld his last name for security reasons, is a pathway to join what in many ways is the newest military elite.

Bang for Ukraine’s buck

Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region showed how important heavy drones such as Predators and Bayraktars have become on the battlefield. But the Russia-Ukraine war has become the world’s first military conflict to be dominated by lightweight first-person-view (FPV) drones.

Pronin’s cadets bring plastic water bottles bought and weighed at supermarkets on their way to their drills, so they can practise flying with the extra weight. Those plastic bottles can be replaced with an explosive flown into a Russian trench or a tank with an open hatch with a shocking price-to-quality ratio.

FPV drones that cost less than $1,000 have destroyed two-thirds of Russian tanks that cost millions, a NATO official said in April.

Most FPV drones are propeller-driven and helicopter-like and can carry anything from heat detectors and night-vision cameras to food, water and medical supplies.

Larger, more advanced ones can perform comparable tasks to Predator or Bayraktar drones.

One is Vampire, a Ukrainian-made heavy drone equipped with a machinegun that hunts down Russian servicemen at night. Russians call it “Baba Yaga” after a children-eating witch from Slavic folklore.

Pricier, fixed-wing FPV drones are more energy-efficient than quadrocopters and can fly farther. Large ones strike Russian command centres, fuel depots, airfields and military plants.

Modern drones are fully capable of replacing snipers whose range of a couple of kilometres pales in comparison with what an experienced shooter with a drone can do.

“Snipers will kill with drones,” Roman said.

The downside is that even if drone pilots hide in a trench, a basement or a well-camouflaged bunker, they still are sought after by enemy drones that look for signs of their presence, such as protruding antennae.

“This is dangerous. This is target number one,” Pronin said.

Meanwhile, the Russian side is astonishingly quick to mimic any tactical or technological trick invented by Ukrainian drone developers.

“We have a leap. They have a leap,” Pronin said. “And then they begin to scale it all up because over there, everything is on a government level. They have unreal budgets.”

Ukrainian state-run weapons manufacturers often lag behind – and that’s when volunteers step in.

‘Orchestra’ of drone makers

They churn out hundreds of thousands of drones a month – in apartment buildings, basements, former warehouses and factories – and raise money online or through word of mouth.

They use Chinese and Taiwan chips and spare parts and come up with inexpensive features, such as wings made of 3D-printed plastic or even cardboard.

They increasingly rely on Ukrainian-made electronics and can produce drones without a single Chinese-made part although Pronin said: “If China is closed to us, it would be painful.”

They enjoy little government support and tell donors that the best financial contribution is not the number of drones they buy but the number of cadets they pay to train.

The drone developers are in constant contact with the front line – and modify new models on the go by using new firmware, larger antennae or switching to radio frequencies Russians can’t jam yet.

The ever-changing nature of drone warfare is reflected in the school’s course, which “was absolutely different a year ago”, Roman said.

The school has trained hundreds of men and women to fly and assemble drones, and their priority is to teach them to work in a team “like in an orchestra”, Pronin said.

Dozens of similar schools operate throughout Ukraine, training thousands.

After encountering Western military instructors and training foreign cadets, Pronin and Roman realised that Ukraine’s drone war experience is the world’s most advanced – and their school can offer something others can’t.

Both are former teachers from the eastern region of Donbas. They also worked in a bank before becoming drone pilots after Russia-backed separatists in the region rebelled against Kyiv in 2014.

Both said they constantly learn by flying and, yes, crashing new drones, monitoring publications, watching videos, attending forums and even sneaking into closed Telegram groups for Russian servicemen.

They already offer courses in English – and think about allowing an exclusive experience for a foreigner who sits cosily in his home while flying a combat drone.

They are also confident that once the war is over, their school won’t cease to exist.

“We’re not aiming at war. We’re aiming at peace,” Pronin said. “Drones have become part of daily life, just like cellphones.”

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