A three-man team last month manually directed a drone to hit a cluster of antennas affixed to a tower in Polohy, a town occupied by Russian troops in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. The Russians were using the electronic warfare system to spoil the work of Ukraine’s satellite-guided rockets.
The drone, made of Styrofoam-like material and costing $1,500, crashed into one of the antennas, detonating on contact. With the Russians’ jamming ability suddenly disrupted, the Ukrainians then destroyed the tower with a strike from a U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS. The missile slammed into the structure with the sort of precision the Ukrainians have come to rely on in their 17-month fight to expel the Russian occupiers. But had the drone not disabled one of the antennas first, the HIMARS rocket likely would have missed.
That sort of operation has become a trademark of special forces units such as the Security Service of Ukraine’s “A,” or Alpha, division, which recently granted Washington Post journalists rare access to their teams assisting regular military brigades in Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which now stretches across the country’s southeast.
The nature of this war — fought mostly at a distance with artillery and with the sides separated by densely mined fields — has forced traditional special operators to transition from covert tactics they used more often earlier in the conflict. Now, the fighting is largely done with technology, including a wide array of self-detonating drones, while the skilled soldiers direct them from a safe distance — a preferable risk-to-reward ratio than sneaking behind Russian lines.
“What is the problem with going behind enemy lines? Total mining,” said Oleh, the first deputy director of the Alpha forces, who, like others in this story, asked to be identified only by his first name for security reasons. “It’s almost impossible to go somewhere secretly. You have to use some kind of demining equipment. This means you will already be identified.”
The work of the Alpha units offered a window into the early challenges in Ukraine’s counteroffensive, where limited advances have been hard-gained as the Russians have hunkered down in defenses prepared over many months. Alpha fighters are trained to do everything from firing an antitank missile to operating a mobile air-defense system. Their snipers are regarded as the best in Ukraine. But all have turned their focus to drones lately as their targets became more difficult to reach.
The struggles of the Alpha fighters illustrate the steep challenges the Ukrainian military now faces at every level — even among its most elite and effective units — as it runs into a Russian force that has prepared and adjusted since its repeated missteps last fall when Ukraine recaptured large swaths of territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
The eastern front line, near the besieged city of Bakhmut, is less mined than the wide fields of the southern Zaporizhzhia region. But it is still hard to get close to the Russians. Recently, a team of Oleh’s fighters had “a relatively shallow entry” into enemy turf near there and 14 of them were wounded, he said.
“And with our resources, the loss of 14 people is a huge loss for us,” Oleh said. “Yes, the enemy also suffers losses. But again, are our losses appropriate in these conditions and are they justified? I cannot use these 14 people in other operations in the near future.”
“The things that could be done a year and a half ago or a year ago, which were relatively safe and were done, now we need to assess the appropriateness,” he added.
Ukraine’s main internal security service, the SBU, created its Alpha division in 1994 with a focus on counterterrorism operations. That work remains, but more has been added amid war.
The head of the SBU, Vasyl Maliuk, recently confirmed that…
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