Bowen: Why Ukraine remains defiant and does not feel close to defeat

BBC World · Feb 24, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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2 days agoJeremy BowenInternational Editor, KyivBBCOn a dark and cold night in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, the netting protecting the road from attacks by explosive drones shimmered and rippled in the headlights of our armoured Toyota Land Cruiser, as we drove down strange and surreal tunnels to get in and out of the most intensive area of fighting in eastern Ukraine. The nets go on for miles, suspended from wooden poles around 20ft high along the sides and over the top of the road. Dystopian military vehicles straight out of Mad Max rumble past, encased in their own cages of steel and netting.Nets snag the propellers of attacking drones, making them a cheap and surprisingly effective physical barrier. Even if their Russian controllers detonate the charge they carry, there is a chance that the explosion will not be close enough to kill people using the road in civilian buses and cars as well as military vehicles.Much of the netting has been donated by European fishermen. Only this week the Scottish government announced it was sending over another 280 tonnes of salmon nets that were about to be recycled. Before any of it gets used, the Ukrainian military crashes drones into it to test its strength.In Ukraine, anti-drone nets go on for miles, suspended from wooden poles The three most feared letters on the battlefield are FPV, standing for "first-person view." FPV drones are major killers, used by both Ukraine and Russia. They have cameras that feed information back to their controllers in a command centre that might be 30 or 40km away. We visited a few of them, hidden away in basements of wrecked buildings or nondescript village houses.Inside there are banks of screens, relaying video and data from drones that is analysed by the Ukrainian military's leading-edge software. The cameras zoom in on small figures of soldiers moving around the ruins, with the controllers directing the men on the ground through walkie-talkies, callsigns and headsets. We could see the men entering buildings where the drones had seen Russians hiding, and emerging after they had killed them. Early versions of the drones were controlled by radio signals, but both sides are experts at electronic warfare and quickly found ways to jam them. Now they are mostly controlled by fibre optic cables, so thin that a spool 25km long (that carries data and video) fits into a container built into the drone that is the size of a large bottle of bleach.The nets snag the propellers of attacking dronesEastern Ukraine used to feel like a throwback to the Western Front in World War One, with trenches and dugouts reinforced against artillery and snipers. After the full-scale invasion four years ago it still, for a while, felt like a 20th Century battlefield. But now drones have transformed the way the war is fought, and armies across the world are watching closely, being forced to change their ideas of how to fight.The narrow confrontation line that used to exist between the two sides is now extended across a broad swathe of land that both sides call the kill zone, stretching perhaps 20km either side of the forward positions of the two armies. Rear positions for logistics and dealing with casualties that used to be relatively safe are now as lethal as the old front line. The skies above get saturated with surveillance drones, making movement extremely dangerous. Social media feeds are full of terrifying videos filmed from FPV drones as they swoop into their targets, sometimes chasing down individuals in the open, or even entering buildings, threading their way through rooms and doorways until they find their quarry. The last shot is often of a horrified man about to die.Artillery and tanks are still formidable weapons. But a drone that costs around a thousand dollars can, in the hands of a skilled pilot, destroy a tank that costs $30m (£22m). The Wall St Journal recently reported that a small group of Ukrainian drone pilots created havoc when they were invited to oppose Nato forces in an exercise in Estonia last year. Nato has a lot of catching up to do. One major consequence of the last four years of war is that Ukraine and Russia are now the most experienced and proficient practitioners of drone warfare in the world.Both countries are constantly innovating to get ahead in the drone war. Both have been using Starlink system owned by the world's richest man, Elon Musk for battlefield communications and navigation. The Russians had a recent setback when Musk agreed to turn off Russian-registered terminals active inside Ukraine. That seems to be a major reason why Ukraine, with an active Starlink system funded by Poland, recently recaptured territory in the south.But all the Ukrainian drone units I visited believed that the Russians would soon find a workaround. They respect the skills of the elite Russian drone units they said were called Rubicon and Day of Judgement. A senior officer told me that western Europeans need to forget the military blunders Russia made after the full-scale invasion four years ago and make a distinction between the thousands of front-line Russian soldiers who are killed every month and the elite drone units that Moscow values as a key part of their war effort. He said they were "cherished" by the Russian army.FPV drones have cameras that feed information back to their controllersOn my most recent visit to Ukraine, the threat from drones meant we watched the weather forecast closely before heading into Donetsk, postponing during a day of clear blue skies and waiting for more snow. Drones struggle in bad weather.Feeling a little reassured by the nets and the snow, we headed towards the town of Slovyansk, past the ruined shells of buildings destroyed over the last four years. Slovyansk functions as a town, just about, with some cafes and shops open. But thousands of residents have moved to safer places, and when the people who have stayed go out, their fear of Russian FPV drones means they hurry down the icy, snow-covered streets to get through their errands to make it home alive. Nets are going up in the town centre.Slovyansk is high on Russian President Vladimir Putin's uncompromising list of terms for a ceasefire. A big part of the price he is demanding is for Ukraine to give up the 20% or so of Donetsk it still controls, along with other land that his army has been unable to capture, in the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. According to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Americans have pushed him to take the deal, to get to a ceasefire by the summer.US President Donald Trump also wants Zelensky to call an election, a demand he has not directed at Putin. The evidence suggests that Trump wants to be able to declare he has ended the war. Even if a ceasefire didn't last, he would treat it as a victory he will take into the US mid-term elections next autumn. He is also eyeing huge business deals with Russia, which cannot happen until sanctions are lifted.The Americans have tried to impose deadlines for a deal. Most recently they told Zelensky he needed to agree to a ceasefire by the summer that Donald Trump could concentrate on the mid-terms. The US inability to bend Ukraine – or Russia – to its will shows that its leverage has limits. Four years after Russia's full scale invasion, there is no discernible evidence that a genuine ceasefire is coming .The dangers in DonetskWhen I saw President Zelensky this weekend in Kyiv, he told me that he could never give up land that Russia has not been able to capture. He would never, he said, abandon the people there, and even if he was tempted to do so it would not work, as within two years by his reckoning, the Russian military would be ready and reequipped and Putin would order them to attack again.The first person we visited in Slovyansk was Oleh Tkachenko, a beefy middle-aged pastor who has built up a remarkable relief operation. He is one of the few people outside the military who travel to the most dangerous areas, delivering bread to outlying villages that he makes in his own bakery, which produces 17,000 loaves per week.After his deliveries he often returns with residents who have had enough of living near the front line. Oleh's bakery is an oasis of order and warmth in the freezing, snow-covered ruins of an industrial area on the edge of Slovyansk.The UN World Food Programme helped him re-establish it when he was forced out of his hometown, which is now occupied. He told me that the dangers in Donetsk have multiplied in the last few months as the drone war has intensified."The situation has changed radically. There are only very dangerous places and relatively dangerous places. Nowhere is safe in the Donetsk region anymore."I asked him whether Zelensky should give in to Russian and American pressure to sacrifice Donetsk for a ceasefire. It was the same question I put to everyone I met in Slovyansk, and it produced the same kind of answer."What more does Putin want? This is my Donetsk region. I was born here. My children were born here. I created my family here. And I should leave all that? What for?"Putin, he said, should not be allowed to take and keep territory that does not belong to Russia."We are destroying the values on which this world is built on one person's whim. Not only will the villain avoid punishment, he [will] also be rewarded? I'm sorry. How many villains like this are there in the world?"AFP via Getty ImagesZelensky said he could never give up land that Russia has not been able to captureAt a coffee bar I met Oleksii Yukov. He runs an organisation called Advis Platsdarm that collects the bodies of dead soldiers from where they were killed, to honour their memory, and before they get a decent burial, identify them to give their families some certainty about them. Oleksii makes no distinctions between dead Russians and dead Ukrainians, but that does not mean he is also prepared to accept Russian domination in Donetsk. Like Oleh, he does not believe prom