KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian soldiers are spending days moving through the kill zone just to reach front-line positions, a top defense official told Business Insider. This difficult journey, he said, can be the most dangerous part of their mission.
The “kill zone” is a front-line area heavily saturated with drones capable of targeting and attacking anything that moves, both soldiers and vehicles. Though it’s wider in some places, it typically extends roughly 10 to 20 kilometers from the front line, and Ukrainian officials have said it’s growing.
Oleksiy Vyskub, Ukraine’s first deputy defense minister, said that the kill zone could double in size this year. Right now, infantry soldiers lose several days getting to their positions inside this deadly area, under the constant monitoring and threat of enemy reconnaissance and strike drones.
Navigating what has also been described as a “dead zone” is when Ukrainian soldiers face the greatest threat to their lives, Vyskub said through a translator in a recent interview, adding that troops may be unable to penetrate the kill zone entirely in the future.
Ukrainian officials have set out to replace people with drones — in particular, ground robots — for all logistics missions within the kill zone, given the increasing risk that soldiers face from above.
The emergence and continuous expansion of the kill zone underscores the increasing surge of drones into combat as the war becomes increasingly robotic and Ukraine ramps up production of uncrewed aerial and ground platforms.
Andrii Hrytseniuk, CEO of the Ukrainian state-backed innovation platform Brave1, said that artillery dominated the battlefield in 2022 when Russia began its full-scale invasion. Now, he told Business Insider, more than 80% of strikes are carried out by drones.
Most of the strikes — over 95% — are carried out by Ukrainian-made drones as opposed to foreign-supplied models, Hrytseniuk said. The defense industry has exploded since 2022, growing from fewer than 10 drone manufacturers to more than 500 today.
Ukraine’s vast drone arsenal is sprawling and increasingly specialized, with systems built for reconnaissance, strikes, interception, naval attacks, ground operations, and long-range missions.
Some drones rely on radio links, others use fiber-optic cables to cut through jamming, and newer AI-enabled models can keep searching for targets even after contact with the operator is lost.
“The number of drones increased dramatically,” Vyskub said. He shared that Ukraine is now delivering tens of thousands of interceptor drones for air defense purposes every month. “They’re not being used to engage infantry or military equipment.”
Beyond the interceptor drones, which have emerged as a cornerstone of Ukraine’s air defense network, Kyiv is also prioritizing mid-range strike drones, designed to target Russian positions and logistics up to 300 kilometers deep.
Ukrainian officials and conflict analysts have praised the ongoing mid-range strike campaign as a successful new phase of the war, disrupting Russian logistics operations in the south, particularly around the occupied Crimean peninsula.
“We deliberately prioritized this direction, and the results are now visible,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told reporters last month. “Data dashboards already show a clear pattern,” he said. “The more enemy forces are destroyed at operational depth, the fewer assault operations occur on the front line.”
Mid-strike drones are “one of the key technological advantages,” Fedorov said.
The tremendous scale of technology’s role in the war and how substantially it is changing the way that it is fought is often underappreciated, Vyskub said. Many commanders lack traditional military education but are strong when it comes to working with data, he added, and that drives battlefield innovation.
“The conventional, classic war with infantry and artillery and people who are clashing [with] each other,” he said, “unfortunately, that is going to the past.”
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