We get exclusive access to the secret command HQ to witness new technology ruthlessly ‘deleting’ Putin’s army

Dominic Nicholls Associate Editor (Defence). 

Jack Leather Senior Video Producer, in Ukraine

Published 12 May 2026

Zaporizhia, a city on the Dnieper river in south-eastern Ukraine, is home to Khortytsia island, a former Cossack stronghold. That historic warrior spirit persists.

The ranks of drab grey Stalin-era apartment blocks once served as dormitories for the city’s heavy industrial plants. They still do, to an extent, as the city’s population of around 700,000 has barely dipped since 2022. That figure is skewed though, with about a fifth now being made up by people displaced from elsewhere in Ukraine by the war.

The uprooted civilians move through the city in a steady flow, seeking sanctuary elsewhere in Ukraine or, for those who can afford it and have the connections, outside the country. They are easily hidden in the chaotic, traffic-filled streets one finds in any gruff town with bills to pay. But let one’s gaze linger for a while at petrol stations and bus stops, and there they are: people with a lifetime of memories hurriedly packed into bags, always present – just like the Russians a mere 12 miles from the city’s southern edge, their reconnaissance drones visible when the sky is clear.

The sky is not clear today, when The Telegrapharrives in the city to visit the command headquarters of the HUR, a unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence. What will be revealed to us is a stunning battlefield information system that is having a major impact on Russian forces.

We enter the city from the north-west, across an enormous hydroelectric dam; a concrete horror even before the bombs started arriving. Without the vast structure, Khortytsia island, and much else downriver, would be drowned. Russia has form in such things – in 2023, Moscow’s forces destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam in the Kherson region, 100 miles along the river, killing dozens. The full impact of the ecological disaster remains to be seen.

So it is with mounting – but I like to think well-concealed – concern that we crawl through the gloomy Wednesday morning rush-hour traffic across one of Europe’s priority targets.

We arrive at our destination. We are not allowed to film or describe the location and are quickly spirited inside (the drones may not be flying today but Russia still has spies in the city). We head underground, past makeshift offices – doors being pulled shut as we pass – and a large space (a former boiler room, perhaps?) that is now crammed with military camp beds, some still with snoozing occupants, this being a 24-hour workspace after all.

We arrive in the operations room, the heart of the unit into which all information is fed. It is filled with crackling radios and the harsh glare of computer screens. Information boards and unit paraphernalia are haphazardly pinned to the walls. As in every operations room I’ve ever been in before, there are more semi-filled coffee cups littering the tables than there are people present in the room. To my former military eyes it all looks very familiar. Except for the large gentleman sitting to one side, dressed all in black (including baseball cap and balaclava), gently stroking a cat that is curled contentedly in his lap. He does not acknowledge my cheery British hello. This war is weird on many levels.

We are introduced to another soldier, call sign “Taggart”, a company commander in charge of dozens of men – though he won’t specify exactly how many. To break the ice, I try a joke about Scottish detectives. Taggart is as unimpressed as the cat.

His men are facing a unit from Russia’s airborne forces, the VDV – a group that was, at least at the start of the full-scale invasion, considered elite. But the best troops are all dead now, he says. Today, the VDV is populated almost exclusively by “mobiks”: mobilised men who have received little training.

“They’re just taking people from the streets now and trying to train them and bring them here,” Taggart explains. “And they die every day.”

The operations room has a board of photos detailing the Russian commanders he is fighting – probably holed up in a room much like this one, just a few miles away. Do they have a similar board in their headquarters, with his photo on it? “Pretty much, I think,” he says, grinning. “Yeah.”

Our hosts have made no effort to cover up a large black-and-white satellite image of a nearby town, the target for a forthcoming operation, with notes annotating the positions of Russian troops. They are coy about its location to begin with, but by the end of our conversation they have shown us exactly where it is. Later, when we return to London, I find it easily on Google Maps. In the days after our return I pay special attention to it when I read through battlefield updates, keen to hear if their planning paid off. (It did – the town is now back in Ukraine’s hands.)

Taggart says he can listen to conversations between Russian troops, as they use radio communications that are not encrypted. In an effort to make up for the lack of security, the Russians employ codewords. However the patchy nature of their communications means these are not updated often. The Ukrainians are able to learn the new codes from the context of conversations before they are changed again.

This eavesdropping has revealed that Russian morale is not high. Taggart says Russian commanders “encourage” their subordinates with threats: “If you don’t go now, I will not give you any supplies for a week. But if you go from point A to point B, I will give you some cigarettes and some other stuff.” They also learn that Russian troops are not well equipped, largely because they must travel long distances on foot – sometimes as far as 20km (12½ miles) – to reach their positions and avoid Ukrainian drones. Often, especially at night, they are guided by their own drones.

“They are like cockroaches going through,” he spits.

Taggart has seen sniper rifles and PTM mines – scatterable anti-tank munitions – being delivered to Russian troops by drone.

They also make their own improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Taggart says they are very dangerous as they are designed to look like something natural. He has even seen green army socks repurposed as weapons. It sounds almost comical – until he adds that the IEDs often have special fuses primed to explode if they are touched or detect movement nearby.

The kill zone from the front line to the Russian rear is up to 30km in places, and it is dominated by drones. “They kill our logistics and make very big problems for us to assault their positions,” he says. “The number one problem is logistics.” Vehicles are rarely used. “If something stays on the front line it will be destroyed, 100 per cent,” Taggart says.

Both sides now routinely use drones controlled via fibre-optic cable, meaning there is a physical, unjammable link between the drone and the pilot. They are consequently much more effective and much more deadly. When they were introduced to the front line, the fighting “became hell”, Taggart says. “There was no safe place, no logistics. Every armoured vehicle was hit. It was terrible for us, but we made it through.”

The pendulum of war swung in Ukraine’s favour in February this year with Elon Musk’s decision to deny Russian forces access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet service. It dealt a heavy blow to Putin’s troops. Russian movement “almost stopped completely”, Taggart says.

Russian forces are trying to adapt to the loss of Starlink by using Wi-Fi bridges, similar to the hotspots one might use for mobile phones. As such, Russian command and control is improving, but Ukrainian drone pilots have become skilled at spotting newly erected antennas or killing Russian signallers clambering up existing cell towers to install additional radio dishes (Starlink can work through foliage, but, so far, the Russian replacement requires an uninterrupted view of the sky).

The backbone of Ukraine’s military capability

We’re still in the operations room. The radios have continued their incessant chatter. The man with the cat has neither moved from the corner nor said a word. I try to push him from my mind and concentrate on the interview, but he is rather scary.

We are joined by another commander, call sign “Kuzhma”, a man with a ginger beard like an angry mess of rusty barbed wire who, for the next five minutes, loudly declares his love for the city of Liverpool, the only place he has visited in Britain. As I said, this war is weird.

The radio blares into life: reports of a Russian gas attack on soldiers from another company. Thankfully, there were no casualties. Kuzhma breaks off from a historically questionable story about the Beatles to say that such incidents are not frequent but do happen, with gas often dropped from drones. Such attacks are rarely very effective, he says. “It’s a lot of waste.”

His face is illuminated by the glow of a giant electronic wall showing dozens of individual screens: some are live drone feeds, scouting the area just to the south of where we sit. Others display electronic maps, their symbology depicting Russian and Ukrainian positions.

Through the fog of memory I recognise most of the markings as being based on Nato doctrine. Some are new to me though. Kuzhma explains that they show the positions of Russian soldiers that have been killed today: 13, it turns out, in the short time we’ve been here.

He hovers the cursor over a symbol on one of the screens. A new window automatically opens showing the recorded video feed of the drone that ended the Russian’s life. It is beyond question that the drone hit the individual, and I realise that this is why Ukrainian battlefield statistics are considered so accurate by Western military and intelligence officials.

Something else dawns on me, confirmed with a nod from Kuzhma: I’m looking at Delta: Ukraine’s battlefield management and command tool. The big brain. I’d long heard of the system and its ability to take in multiple data feeds, collating and synthesising information from myriad sources, presenting the results in a clear and digestible format for humans, all in the blink of a cursor.

Delta is the digital spine around which the ecosystem of Ukraine’s military capability is now built. It is the ultimate battlefield information system: at once a live video surveillance tool showing reconnaissance and attack drone feeds overlaid with planning tools, while also being an archive of activity, dispositions, equipment stocks and much else. Oh, and it has a secure messaging facility too, so no need for those pesky codewords the Russians use.

I am shown the near-real-time dispositions of Ukrainian and Russian troops. I can click on any number of drone feeds across the battlefield, reconnaissance and attack vehicles alike. As the cursor flits across the screen, the digits displaying the matching grid reference explode in a blur; I can pinpoint locations to an accuracy that would make Ordnance Survey jealous. This stuff is gold dust.

But that’s just the window dressing, designed to pull the punters in. The really clever stuff is behind the numbers and the glitzy drone shots. Delta provides Ukraine’s fighters with a God’s-eye view of the battlefield. Data is shared at light speed: the co-ordinates of an enemy position can be distributed to the most capable and available “effector” (i.e. weapon system) as soon as it is spotted. Scarce resources are not squandered, opportunities are not missed. It is the Matrix, just with a sticky keyboard.

Every soldier has access to Delta, although certain levels of information are restricted. Nevertheless, Kuzhma relates how one of the most important pieces of information Russian interrogators seek from Ukrainian prisoners of war is their Delta login codes. For this reason, new access codes are distributed every few hours.

The weak point now for Ukraine is the paucity of carbon-based life forms to sit behind the Delta terminals or produce the ammunition that the big brain demands. There is evidence this year – in monthly ground retaken by Kyiv’s forces, or the proportion of Russian troops mobilised versus those that are permanently removed from the battlefield – that Ukraine is starting to turn the tide in this war.

If they had the military capability to feed Delta’s capacity, Putin would be in real trouble. He knows it, too: earlier this month he reinforced his lakeside mansion (home to his mistress, Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic gymnast, and his two rumoured sons) with even more high-end air defence systems. He now has 27 top-of-the-range anti-missile systems at Lake Valdai (up from seven in 2024), about 100 miles north-west of Moscow – nearly half of the 60 deployed around the entire municipality of the capital and its 20 million inhabitants.

As much as I want to keep staring at Delta, clicking and searching, our time is up. Even the cat has padded off in boredom. Handshakes, back slaps. More obscure Liverpool “facts”.

We clamber back into a nondescript car and are ushered out of the city. But my head is full of terrifying high-definition images – the final moments of men I never knew but whose deaths I now know more about than I could ever want: the time, the location, the weapon used, the last look on their faces.

‘We are hurting the Russians. I think of that with pride’

In Dnipro, a city 30 miles farther north, I ask a drone pilot if he feels desensitised to the violence.

“One hundred per cent,” says Dimko Zhluktenko, a former IT engineer who is now a drone pilot with Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces. “For any person, it’s so complicated to go through that. Up until the last seconds of the life of this poor guy, you just do the thing, you chase him and you kill him.”

On this occasion he says “kill”. Throughout the rest of our conversation he usually uses “delete” instead – another coping mechanism, he says. “If you start thinking about it emotionally, we have people in the command post looking at all the screens with Russian idiots having, like, a nice walk through those Ukrainian tree lines, and the only job of those battle captains is to co-ordinate the force in a way that we can delete them.”

A lot of the motivation comes from understanding what the alternative is, he says. “But at the same time, you have to [stay] sane during that process.”

Has he ever talked about his work and the effect on him with his wife? “Definitely. She’s supported me 100 per cent. It’s better to have those discussions and for her to understand the transformation of this young mind of mine, so that we are able later on to have a beautiful life together.”

He adds: “Without that understanding, there would be no kind of connection between [us]. So it is critical, I think. I just wish so many more of my brothers in arms would talk with their loved ones about what they’re going through, because there is no other way for you to find that connection.”

And how does he feel knowing that, as a drone pilot, the Russians are targeting him personally? “That just means that we are a high-value target, and we are doing a lot of things to hurt them. So I just think of that with pride.”

First-person view or FPV drone, controlled by fibre-optic cable or radio signal. Fibre-optic cannot be jammed because of the physical link, unlike radio signals, which can be jammed. FPV drones are mainly used to carry explosives to hit tanks or buildings, or to kill individual soldiers.

We are speaking in a bustling café in Dnipro. It is cold outside, but bright. The snow has clumped together in gritty piles, making a last stand against the sun that has finally returned after a long winter. I am feeling bullish.

I had met the HUR and seen how they have turned killing Russians into an industrial art form. I had met Delta. I had met the weirdo in the corner and his cat. For the first time in a long time, there was hope on the front line. And now here is Dimko, outlining his plans for the bike shop he wants to open after the war, feeling pride in defending his country while taking steps to look after his mental wellbeing. I fall into the trap of feeling good.

But Dimko brings me down to earth.

“So many people in Ukraine and in the West are free-riding on the sacrifice of Ukrainians who have contributed so much for their collective security. There is already some resentment building up regarding the sacrifice that people in the military here are doing. This is our duty. Because if we do not do this, then I have literally no idea who would stand up for the country. If you are active and young, you should be doing your part.”

Will there, perhaps, be recriminations or repercussions after the war, with those who served looking poorly on those who did not step up? Is this a problem waiting to happen for Ukrainian society? “I think that has to be addressed at some point,” he says.

There is still a lot of killing – and a lot of dying – to be done in Ukraine before any kind of victory. And even after that, there will be battles.

How much of the technology is ‘off the shelf’?

At the start, around 80 per cent; now, a much smaller proportion – and only really for the small tactical devices. The bigger and more technically complex vehicles are designed by government facilities. However, units such as the HUR have their own in-house development team in order to innovate rapidly and make adjustments for battlefield conditions, or when the Russians make a technological leap. Every unit adjusts their drones to its needs. It’s a necessary process. You don’t go from factory to the battlefield; you need to customise a little bit.

Customisation usually means software, although some parts – especially the drones’ legs, for those designed to sit on the ground and wait in ambush – are made using 3D printers. The standard fibre-optic-controlled, first-person-view kamikaze drone – the workhorse of the Ukrainian army – costs around $2,000, which includes the fibre-optic cable. They are the new, affordable face of mass. It’s a bullet.

How many of these do you produce for your unit each month?

For a battalion, a couple-hundred a month; for a brigade, around 2,000, for a 5km frontage. If they don’t find a target, they fly the fibre-optic drone into the ground, they do not bring it home. No one will risk the lives of people by returning an armed drone!

[Suggestions about what the drones could do, if tweaked at the front, are passed on by the engineers.] It depends on your interest and your laziness. Everyone in this line is interested in making drones better. Everyone has their own expertise. The best background for this is software engineering, because most of the problems are not with hardware. The other one is classical engineering. A background in aeronautical engineering would be ideal, but not everyone has this skill.

How far away are we from autonomous AI systems operating on drones?

Yesterday! AI coincided with the creation of armed drones, and they are developing together. AI and software solutions are already placed in different roles. The most usual case is recognition [i.e. to differentiate – as far as the drone is concerned – between a square building, a square civilian truck or a square enemy tank].

Do the Russians operate differently? And how has the battlefield changed in recent years?

It doesn’t change in terms of years; the change is in terms of months. In the past two years, armoured vehicles have been made extinct from the battlefield because they’re a very easy target.

Russians are keen to locate their drone operators extremely close to the front line. They try to locate their unit of reconnaissance drones just behind their assault troopers – not in the same position, but one bound behind [to maximise the range of the drones flying forward]. These people are very easy to detect with antennas and generators. These drone pilots, they get caught and attacked. This tactic is insane for us. We don’t have enough drone teams to just casually lose them.

The Russians are very serious opponents. They are a very serious enemy. We can’t underestimate them.

……………

This article was copiously illustrated. To see them and the accompanying videos, click original article:

Khttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/12/ukraine-war-drones-tech-russian-soldier-attacks/