“Our beautiful drone,” a soldier says, as a truck is unloaded on a dirt road at sunset in eastern Ukraine. What comes out looks like a miniature jet. NPR visited the unit as it prepared a deep strike on Russian targets.
The drone is made by Fire Point, a Ukrainian defense technology company, and can fly between 800 and 1,200 miles. Ukraine’s military has used drones like it to hit oil refineries and depots deep inside Russia, as far as Moscow and Siberia. On June 18, Ukraine launched its largest drone offensive yet on Moscow and hit a refinery. Thick black smoke rose over the city, and residents reported “oil rain.”
From Crimea to Moscow
The drones are also working closer to the front. Over the last few weeks they have struck supply routes for Russian troops, railroad bridges, ferry crossings and refineries in occupied Ukraine, Crimea included. “Crimea is being isolated by drones,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with a prominent Ukrainian journalist. “And in the near future, it looks as though Crimea will become an island.”
The campaign began in earnest in 2024 and scaled up sharply this year. It has helped Ukraine gain momentum in a war of attrition that, more than four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, has now lasted longer than World War I.
George Barros, director of innovation and open-source tradecraft at the Institute for the Study of War, said Ukraine can launch hundreds of long-range strike vehicles into Russia almost daily. They “actually generate substantial damage and really do upset the Kremlin,” he said. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on June 10 that over the previous year Ukraine’s long-range drones had struck more than 356,000 Russian targets.
A pit stop in a farm field
The soldiers belong to a secretive team called the First Separate Center of Unmanned Systems. NPR identified them by callsign at the request of Ukraine’s military, which cited security concerns.
Their commander, Charlie, is in his 30s and a career officer who took over the unit three years ago, when Ukrainian drone technology was young. “Our defense forces lack cruise and ballistic missiles but our drones have really influenced the course of combat operations,” he said. He described a faster arms race than the Cold War one, centered on unmanned systems in the air, on water and on the ground.
Setup has sped up too. “Setting up these launches used to take half a day,” Charlie said. “Now everything happens so much faster. I compare it to a pit stop in a Formula 1 race.”
At dusk the crew hammered launch pads into the ground. A soldier called Push, who sets up the drones almost every night, said seeing the results motivates him. Another, Uki, explained the launch: a motorcycle engine connected to the pad by a cable generates the high takeoff speed the drone needs. The engine roared through three crescendos, then came a piercing blast and a flash of fire as the first drone climbed into the dark. At least nine more followed.
Targets, denials and a quick exit
Charlie would not say where they were headed, only that the targets lay hundreds of miles away in Russia or occupied Ukraine. Russia intercepts most long-range drones, but some get through and have hit industrial and military plants and supply lines. Oil infrastructure is the main target.
The Kremlin denies any economic fallout, though refinery output has fallen and Russian media describe fuel rationing in Moscow, parts of northern Russia and parts of occupied Ukraine. Charlie confirmed his team worked on the strike on a refinery near Moscow last month. “We felt a sense of justice,” he said, “because the residents of Russia’s capital experienced firsthand what happens in our cities every day.”
Direct U.S. aid fell by 99% under the Trump administration, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker, and U.S.-led talks to end the war have stalled because of the Iran war. Charlie says Ukraine never relied on foreign aid alone.
The launches took about two hours, and then the team left. “The Russians, of course, are looking for us,” Uki said. “We are targets.” Like Zelenskyy, who calls the strikes “Ukrainian sanctions,” Uki and Charlie say they want the war to end, but not by rewarding Russia with Ukrainian capitulation. Only the smell of burnt fuel was left over the field.
