LYMAN, DONETSK REGION- “I don’t need your f***ing American shells,” Vadim Adamov muttered as he packed the Pringles can full of sulphate and plastic explosive.
It was early 2024, and he had been fighting outside Avdiivka, a small town near the occupied city of Donetsk that had been a major Russian target since the start of the war.
The town had been a nearly impenetrable fortress, and the Russians expended an extraordinary collection of men and armor trying to capture it.
Adamov usually packed explosives into ready-made metal containers, but the unit had run out. So, after finishing snacking on chips from the tubed Pringles can, he got to work re-filling it. And it worked.
With the help of neighboring drone spotting units, Adamov flew the drone into the sky and dropped the Pringles can onto a Russian armored vehicle.
The hit disabled the vehicle, which was then finished off by additional impacts.
The drone Adamov used was a DJI Mavic, which retails for a few thousand dollars. The explosives, meanwhile, cost less than a hundred. Pringles in Ukraine go for about $1.50.
Together, the combination proved capable of destroying armored vehicles that cost hundreds of thousands to manufacture.
Although Avdiivka would fall just over a month later, Adamov had learned a valuable lesson.
Ukraine could not always rely on its allies, but it could use quick thinking and ingenuity to stifle Russian advances.
SPIDERWEB
When Ukraine smuggled hundreds of drones in container trucks into Russia to destroy strategic bombers and spy planes — a June 1 assault known as Operation Spiderweb — they were carrying out a similar sort of DIY assault, albeit on a scale that shocked the world.
Near the front line in the Ukrainian city of Lyman, drone unit pilots flipped through videos of Russian weapons and armor positions being destroyed.
Another pilot sitting nearby trained on an FPV, or first-person view, drone, strapping the now distinctive goggles onto his face, controller in hand, while maneuvering the drone through various obstacles.
Here, the entire process has been gamified. Rankings are offered, online medals awarded and financial and equipment bonuses doled out for confirmed kills of Russian equipment.
“The best thing to do if you hear one is to play dead,” one drone pilot said, pointing out that many of the platforms navigate through motion sensing.
However, he added with a shrug, if the drone gets that close you are probably dead already.
NECESSITY
In his poem Arithmetic on the Frontier, Rudyard Kipling uses the example of a well-educated, highly trained British imperial civil servant killed in India with a hastily assembled threadbare rifle.
“Two thousand pounds of education,” Kipling wrote, “falls to a ten-rupee jezail.”
Warfare in the 21st century still has much in common with the 19th. When the Ukraine-Russia war began in 2022, drones had already become a fixture of modern warfare.
While variants that were used in more recent operations like the Global War on Terror were behemoths, hobbyists who employed smaller drones for amateur photography soon realized they could be used in scouting missions.
The platforms showcased their capability early in the war, when they guided Ukrainian artillery onto an enormous Russian armored column in the Kyiv suburb of Brovary.
From there, it didn’t take long for Ukrainians like Vadim Adamov to realize that drones could carry small explosives to be dropped from overhead or flown into an enemy like a Kamikaze.
When U.S. aid temporarily dried up at the end of 2023, necessity became the mother of invention. A subsequent shortage of artillery shells turned Ukrainian attention to the less expensive drone as their centerpiece of defense.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones last year. They expect to make as many as 5 million this year. These drones are not just FPVs used for targeting or reconnaissance, but platforms designed for use on land and sea.
A February 2025 conference in central Kyiv, hosted by an organization called BraveOne, showcased the country’s latest in unmanned development.
There, Sasha Rubina, a Kharkiv-born tech designer for Ukrainian Unmanned Technologies, showed off a UGV, or unmanned ground vehicle, that could be driven remotely and carry food or ammunition to soldiers fighting on the front line.
“The idea is that the person controlling it is in a safe place,” Rubina said. “The less soldiers used on the battlefield itself, the more lives we save and protect our medical personnel.”
OFFSETTING WEAKNESS
Such innovations continue to be critical as Ukraine pushes to offset battlefield weaknesses elsewhere.
Since the failure of the counteroffensive of summer 2023, the nation’s military has suffered serious manpower shortfalls, especially among its infantry ranks.
The psychological toll of blood, mud and anguish has washed away much of what was once the hope for an inevitable, hard-fought victory. And any cautious optimism that suggested U.S. President Donald Trump would come down hard on Russia has been dashed against the rocks.
With progress at the negotiating table negligible, Ukraine and Russia continue to be locked in a seemingly endless arms race to both produce and upgrade drones and other battlefield technologies.
It is a tech chess game of sorts, each move eliciting a counter.
In one instance, Ukrainian soldiers began carrying jammers capable of cutting live-feed connections between the Russian pilot and drone, a move that would disable the platform mid-flight.
Russians responded by equipping drones with spools of fiber-optic cable less than a millimeter wide, allowing them to withstand jamming efforts.
Now, Ukrainian trenches, buildings and even roads are often covered with physical netting.
ONE STRIKE AT A TIME
Traveling through Ukraine today reveals basements, back garages and commercial printing factories that have been turned into drone-production facilities.
While the cost of premade DJI Mavic drones continues to drop, amateur, yet increasingly innovative technicians, many of them just teenagers, are finding it cheaper to import the individual parts — rotor blades, batteries and cameras — to build themselves.
In many ways, the national drone-production effort appears as the modern-day opposite of the Manhattan Project. Instead of a super weapon, Ukraine is endeavoring to produce millions of tiny explosives to degrade Russian forces one strike at a time.
Whoever masters mass production and deployment of these drones will likely gain the advantage in the war.
“Strike hard who cares — shoot straight who can,” Kipling wrote.
“The odds are on the cheaper man.”
Tom Mutch is a Ukraine-based journalist from New Zealand. He is the author of The Dogs of Mariupol, available now.
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