Ukrainian soldiers are attacking trenches led by drones, military trainer says

Ukrainian service members in a trench at a frontline in Ukraine's Donetsk region in 2023.

REUTERS/Sofiia Gatilova

• Ukrainian soldiers are using drones to lead them through trenches, an Australian military trainer said.
• That's partly because of a fear of Russian booby traps, he told BI.
• Drones are playing an oversized role in the fighting in Ukraine.

Ukrainian soldiers are advancing through trenches drone-first and in smaller groups to avoid Russian booby traps, an Australian training Ukrainian troops told Business Insider.

This is a further sign of the prominent role that drones are now playing in the conflict in Ukraine.

Lt. Col. Davidson told BI that Ukrainians are using drones "to advance down the trench ahead of them."

He was speaking to BI at a training site for Ukrainian soldiers in the south of England. At the request of the UK Ministry of Defence, Davidson is referred to only by his surname.

Davidson said training on trenches and drone warfare are among the areas that have changed the most, based on developments coming out of Ukraine.

The sheer volume of trenches in Ukraine means that battlefields there have often been compared to those of World War I.

Both sides have dug trenches, with soldiers hiding in, launching attacks from, and fighting each other in the miles of deep lines.

Drones have featured more in the war in Ukraine than in any other conflict in history, with soldiers saying that there are often hundreds in the sky and little opportunity to move forward as a result.

One US soldier fighting with Ukraine previously told Business Insider that the number of drones was the reason why so many trenches had been dug, as soldiers were desperate to find somewhere to hide out of sight.

Davidson said Ukrainians "now break into smaller teams" to go down trenches instead of a larger line of people all advancing together.

This is partly because "they're just so unsure with booby traps and things like that, that can be found in the trench line" he said.

"Their dispersion is like a method of protection from booby traps. So it just means that they're not going to all collectively get hit."

The UK and partner countries have trained more than 30,000 Ukrainian troops in the UK since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Davidson said the training process is a collaborative one, where methods used by Ukrainians against Russia are integrated and can even be incorporated into UK military doctrine.

He said this allows them to give Ukrainian soldiers "more accurate training," but that in some areas "what we actually found is that we were learning more off them."

On trench warfare, "when both the UK and the international partner forces started doing this training, we had doctrine that was dated," he said.

However, they are now quickly learning from what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, especially when it comes to areas like trench warfare.

With that, we "quickly identified that the battle space over in Ukraine and what they were seeing with the Russians was very different to what we were teaching them," Davidson said.

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