(electronic whirring)
(mysterious music)
- [Johnny] In the heart of Ukraine,
a quiet revolution stirs.
The creation of new tools of war.
Built by volunteers and students and technicians,
tinkerers who are repurposing their skills
to resist invasion.
We partnered with the Kyiv Independent
to get a deeper understanding
of what this actually looks like.
This is their story.
And the story of how set they are on keeping their country.
(gentle music)
Not by having bigger weapons, but by having smarter ones.
(munition exploding)
(tense music)
- [Francis] Can you hear me all right?
- Yeah, I can hear you. How you doing?
This is Francis Farrell,
a reporter from Ukraine's largest
English language news outlet, the Kyiv Independent.
They've been covering this war in-depth
and they worked with us to tell this story.
How is Kyiv feeling these days?
- It's this kind of tense, waiting period,
'cause everyone's ready for another kind of wave
of Russian missile and drone attacks
against the energy system.
- I wanna hear about your time on the front lines
and I wanna hear about drones
and just walk me through that story.
- 11 o'clock in the morning, we met our contact.
We jumped in his car
and headed out straight towards the city of Bakhmut,
which is now basically in ruins.
(somber music)
It was pretty quiet,
but then we started to get hit by Russian shelling,
by mortar shelling.
You can hear the whistle coming in and the explosion.
You can feel it in the ground when it's really close.
And when the time came,
a target was acquired and it was time to go out and fly.
They had the drone ready with the munition on it.
- And what did the drone look like?
Can you describe it?
- So it's an FPV drone, so it's a quadcopter,
but it's a very kind of crude designs,
and on the bottom you have the actual munition strap.
It's actually made from a helicopter rocket.
They cut the rocket part off and they just used the warhead.
The pilot put on these crazy futuristic goggles
and have the controller in his hand.
(drone whirring)
But at that point,
you start to see this Russian electronic warfare
jamming stuff starting to kick in.
So it really is like,
"Oh, the signal's gone. Oh, now it's back."
There's a button somewhere that's like,
okay, this is where we release the bomb.
- So a lot of the drones that they're using in Ukraine
actually look a lot like the drones I use
when I'm out reporting in the field,
which I'm gonna get to in a little bit.
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I am really glad Incogni exists
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So with that,
let's dive back into this video about drones in Ukraine.
Francis' reporting shows us how this war,
the war in Ukraine,
is becoming more and more, a war of drones.
- That's what this war is all about, really.
It's this mix of very old school brutal tactics
of infantry and artillery, but with this high-tech edge,
- [Johnny] Some of these drones are military weapons
designed for warfare.
But more and more we're seeing drones being made in homes
and classrooms and DIY workshops around the country
by students and volunteers,
overnight drone experts who bypass the Ukrainian army
and send their drones directly to soldiers
on the front line.
- This is where war becomes really almost scary
and futuristic.
- [Johnny] To understand how drones became a centerpiece
of this war and why engineering students
are the ones making them,
we have to remember how the war started.
- [Speaker] Putin has just launched a full scale invasion
of Ukraine.
- Since the beginning of this conflict,
Ukraine's biggest weakness has been the sky.
Russia has a much stronger air force
and they quickly developed air superiority.
This allowed them to better gather intelligence,
support their ground troops, and precisely deploy missiles.
This was Russia's huge advantage.
Ukraine needed a way to fight back,
and so they started turning to military drones.
- [News Anchor] Bayraktar, the Turkish-made weapon
Ukrainian officials are touting
as one of the most effective in their arsenal,
that's played a part in slowing down the Russian advance.
- [Johnny] But drones like this
kind of resemble traditional airplanes.
They're easily spotted
and shot down by Russia's anti-aircraft weapons.
They needed to find another way.
- They needed eyes in the sky.
That's literally how they tell me every time.
And so very quickly there was a frenzy
to buy DJI civilian drones for hobbyists,
for photographers, YouTubers.
- This is actually the type of drone
that I've always used when I do my field shoots.
And I gotta say, it's a pretty useful tool
for the use case of the Ukrainian army.
It's light, it's portable, it's cheap,
and it's small enough to not be detected by Russian radar.
- [Francis] And very quickly they figured out
how to integrate them with their tactical maps,
learned how to jailbreak the software
to get around the geoblocking.
- Soon you've got Ukrainian soldiers
writing back to their families,
asking for supplies and bulletproof vests,
and more and more, asking for drones.
These DJI drones became really useful
for helping Ukrainian soldiers
have a reconnaissance view from above.
They could see the lay of the land.
It also helped them more accurately pinpoint their targets
of these big artillery guns they were using.
- Immediately became the bread and butter
for any Ukrainian unit.
And then from there,
the innovation just really began to get going.
(suspenseful music)
- These DJI drones were useful,
but they had limits.
DJI, which is a Chinese company,
is not thrilled about their drones being used in war,
especially by the Ukrainians.
So they make big efforts to block software and hardware
from getting into the country.
These drones are also vulnerable to Russian jamming.
Basically, you can jam the signal,
and make these drones basically useless.
Also, you can't really customize a DJI drone that much.
Ukrainian soldiers needed to be able
to customize their drones more and more
as the war progressed.
And that led to the rise of the FPV drone.
(tense music)
These drones are usually used for racing,
or for getting shots like this.
The strength of the FPV drone
is that they're easily put together with cheap parts
and they can be highly customized
with a little help from a 3D printer.
On the battlefield,
Ukrainian soldiers started taking these little FPV drones
and strapping explosives to them,
carrying it across the front line
and then barreling right into a Russian target.
These cheap drones became the edge that Ukraine needed
to level the playing field in the sky.
But there was one major problem.
- They get destroyed constantly.
And obviously,
kamikaze drones are only meant to be used once.
They're also a kind of expendable material
on the front line.
- [Johnny] Soldiers begin using a lot of these things.
By one estimate,
they're using 10,000 of these drones per month.
- And if a unit doesn't get them replaced
very, very quickly, they can be in big trouble
on their little part of the front line.
- [Johnny] And yet the flow of drones kept coming.
Thanks in part to a widespread effort, a grassroots effort,
all around the country from resourceful Ukrainians
who saw an opportunity to apply their technical skills
to supporting their country.
(gentle music)
(speaking foreign language)
(drone whirring)
- The Kyiv Independent helped us connect
with some of these drone makers.
They are technicians, engineers, some of them are students,
a lot of them are volunteers,
and they are the ones keeping these drones
flowing to the front lines.
(speaking foreign language)
- This guy, Denis Lyubchenko,
used the money and infrastructure from his existing business
but redirected it to making drones.
(speaking foreign language)
- This informal drone economy has cropped up organically
and it's widespread.
A lot of people are participating in it.
But it's outside of the authority
of the government or the military.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Johnny] It's yet another expression of
how Ukrainians are resourcefully fighting back
in light of their country being invaded
by a much stronger power.
- So you have IT specialists, you have engineers,
and you basically have this nation,
which is just very experienced with tinkering
and experimenting and coming up with solutions on the spot,
or really tricky problems.
They've got the technical background
and now there's motivation.
(suspenseful music)
(speaking foreign language)
(suspenseful music)
- Very often you see fundraisers just scrolling
through Instagram Stories organized by friends of soldiers
who know that there are people out there on the front line,
they need a drone.
- So you have started to see that the tactics of drones
on the battlefield are evolving really quickly.
They're starting to settle into some main tactics
that drones are now being used for all the time.
A first major one is recon and intelligence gathering.
Drones being undetectable eyes in the sky
allow Ukrainian soldiers to get a lay of the land
in a way that you can't really get any other way,
unless you have like a full-blown air force.
They're able to track and view
their adversary's troop movement, and crucially,
they're able to investigate their targets
before they try to hit them.
When you're shooting these big artillery guns,
it's kind of a game of guess and check.
You shoot the gun, you hope it hits the target,
and then if it doesn't, you adjust it and try again.
When you have a drone in the air to observe
where that shot actually hits,
you can more precisely calibrate your gun
so that you're hitting your target more accurately.
But with the rise of FPV drones
and all of this customization,
you're starting to see drones become carriers of explosives,
bigger and bigger explosives.
Just like what Francis saw,
a customized explosive that is attached to a drone
with a 3D printed quick release,
that with the press of a button,
can release the explosive on the desired target.
And then of course there's the kamikaze tactic,
which is just to strap an explosive to a drone
and run it right into a target, like a tank.
This effectively turns your cheap drone
into a precision guided missile,
something that would cost orders of magnitude more.
But as these techniques become more and more sophisticated,
so do the counter attacks.
Russia counters all of this,
not only with drones of their own,
they now have fleets of drones
that they are using to attack Ukrainian cities,
but also with electronic warfare,
which basically means jamming signals.
This whole tactic relies on radio signals
that allow a pilot to see where they're flying
and to control the drone remotely.
Russia is getting better and better
at putting out signal jammers
to stop pilots from seeing and controlling their drone.
You can see some of this interference happening
in some of these drone feeds.
And when your drone looks like that
and you can't control it, it basically renders it useless.
So to counter this,
Ukrainian soldiers now put up drones
that are specifically meant to boost their signal
to create kind of a bridge of a radio signal
that will counteract this electronic warfare
and secure a more solid signal
between the pilot and the drone.
The cat-and-mouse game here
is kind of the Wild West for warfare,
and it is pushing drone warfare into uncharted territory.
And finally, these drones on the front lines
are being used to capture video,
which is then edited together
and usually set to some hardcore rock music
and published to the Internet to boost morale in this war.
(rock music)
Morale is a key ingredient to winning a war.
And war propaganda is as old as war itself.
So when Ukrainians see this footage
of a Ukrainian pilot cleverly taking out a Russian target,
it has a real effect.
- [Off-Screen Voice] Yeah! Bombed them!
- The rest of the world is watching this as it unfolds.
This is unprecedented territory,
strapping explosives to small consumer drones
and using them in a real world warfare experience.
So this is going to change war forever.
And in fact, we're already seeing this.
The Pentagon recently released this proposal
for small businesses in America to pitch them
on how to build a small explosive or munition
that they can put on a small drone.
This is a part of their innovation and research effort.
They say here in this document that the ability
to put explosives on small drones is vital
for the future of army combat operations.
And that their ability to do this would advance
the US Army's modernization priorities.
They're basically saying that drones
are a big part of the future of war,
and they emphasize that whatever this product is,
it needs to be attachable by a soldier in the field,
meaning someone's out there on the front lines
and they can take this explosive,
they can put it on a drone and they can send it away.
Exactly what they're doing in Ukraine.
The Pentagon is watching what is happening
and they're responding.
But for those caught in the middle of this deadly war,
drones are about one thing right now, and that's survival.
Survival of their country.
As this conflict grinds on,
Ukrainians continue to show us
just how serious they are about enduring this long fight
by coming together, by supporting their troops,
and endlessly innovating.
And in the process,
ensuring that their country doesn't get swallowed
by their much larger enemy.
(speaking foreign language)
(drone whirring)
(drone whirring continues)
(ambient music)
Hey folks, thanks for watching.
I loved working on this story
because I got to talk to people on the ground.
I got to interface with the experience of Ukrainians
and tinkerers and defenders of their country.
I mean, it was really compelling.
I'm really grateful for all of those who who spoke to us.
I wanna tell you about a couple things.
Number one, I don't know if you all know this,
but we have a second channel now.
It's called "Search Party."
It is a geopolitical and global sports explainer channel.
Turns out geopolitics and sports
are becoming more and more intertwined.
And this channel really breaks it down.
It is run by my old Vox colleague, Sam Ellis,
who is the creator of "Vox Atlas,"
and now he runs "Search Party."
So go over and subscribe.
We have a lot of amazing videos coming out
and you won't wanna miss them.
If you like this stuff here,
you'll like this stuff over there.
I wanna say thanks to all the members of The Newsroom,
which is our Patreon.
The Newsroom members contribute to our journalism,
and in return,
they get a behind-the-scenes vlog every month.
They get access to my scripts, they get royalty-free music,
and they get the warm, fuzzy feeling,
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We want to do deeper and deeper videos over on The Newsroom.
They allow us to do that, to level up, to be more ambitious.
Other ways to support include LUTs and Presets,
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All the links are in the description, as per usual.
And the best support is just being here,
watching the videos, commenting, sharing, whatever.
I really love the feedback that I get from everybody.
I love the good discussions and the comments.
And I'm just happy that we can continue to make good stuff.
So thanks for being here and I'll see you in the next one.
Hey, before you go, I need to tell you one last thing,
which is that we made probably our last batch of the poster
that I designed last year.
It's a poster called "All Maps Are Wrong,"
and I'm very proud of it.
It shows all the ways that you can take our Earth
and project it onto a 2D plane,
which always comes with some distortion.
Anyway, it's kind of a nerdy map lover thing,
and if you're into that,
you should go over and check it out before they're all gone.
This is probably gonna be our last batch,
so get 'em while they last,
and the link's in the description.