Revealed: Secret robot offensive that killed 3,000 Russians

 In the dead of night, a Ukrainian drone crossed the front line in northern Donetsk, one of a hundred or so to pass overhead that day.

But this was no ordinary drone: a second machine was hanging beneath it, a small robot on wheels, packed full of explosives.

The carrier drone flew on past the last Ukrainian positions, at least 10 miles into Russian-held territory, before dropping its cargo to the ground.

There, the remote-controlled vehicle sprang into action, tracking down Russian soldiers lying in wait to attack Ukraine, before detonating its payload.

The 3rd Army Corps had eliminated a deadly trap, but not one pair of boots had touched the ground.

The unit’s commander told The Telegraph that no other army had air-dropped ground robots behind enemy lines until now.

The feat – part of a top secret offensive known as Operation Vivaldi – had helped Ukraine kill 3,000 Russians in a matter of months, recovering 48 square miles of occupied Ukraine, the 3rd Army Corps said.

But the drop was the easy part: getting one machine over the line took jamming, artillery and darkness, a glimpse of how far Ukraine will go to keep its infantry off the ground.

“This drone, it has no fear, and unlike men, we are not afraid to lose it,” said Darwin, commander of the 2nd Mechanised Battalion of the 3rd Army Corps. “It makes the war safer for our soldiers.”

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are remote-controlled robots on wheels or tracks.

Most are unglamorous: small flatbed machines that carry ammunition, food, batteries and wounded men along routes too dangerous for people.

Others – such as the ones deployed by the 3rd Army Corps – are fitted with heavy machine guns, or packed with explosives and driven into Russian positions.

Getting the UGV – known as Gryphon to Ukrainian soldiers – over the line in Donetsk was the difficult part, Darwin explained.

A drone big enough to lift a robot is large enough for Russian troops to see, and a machine gun is enough to bring it down.

So Darwin’s team set about making it invisible.

Electronic warfare was used to jam Russian reconnaissance drones, so the crews watching that stretch of front could not see what was moving across it.

Ukrainian drones and artillery struck Russian infantry positions to force the men there into cover, where they could not shoot upwards. The flights went in under the cover of night.

“The most difficult part is to reach the point where you should lift the drone,” Darwin said. “We use radio electronic warfare to blind their drones, and they cannot see what we are doing any second.”

The difficulty is that almost nothing on this front moves unobserved.

“A man cannot disappear from the battlefield in any situation,” said Darwin.

Three or four Russian drones hang over Darwin’s positions at any given second, he added. Across a day, up to 100 pass over his battalion alone.

Some are shot down, but Russia replaces them immediately.

Ukraine fights back with electronic warfare, with drones and artillery hunting the Russian crews flying them, and with soldiers simply shooting upwards. “You can use your automatic weapon to fire at this drone, and it really works,” Darwin said.

When it works, the reward is not just territory but ordinary life.

“If there are no enemy drones over them, our soldiers can move,” he said. “They can move safely. They can hide. They can eat, even sleep, a rarity in this war.”

The robots went as far as 12 miles beyond the front line, deep enough that Russian commanders struggled to believe what had hit them, according to Darwin.

In one intercepted exchange, a Russian officer dismissed the idea that a Ukrainian machine could have reached his men at all.

“The distance was such that the commander did not believe it could have been our little machine,” said Mykola Zinkevych, another commander in the unit. “He said: ‘I’d sooner believe that our own guys drove up and hit you than that it was the khokhols’” – a slur for Ukrainians.

Once the robots had done their work, his men went forward on foot.

They took the position, dug in, and waited while artillery, drones and more robots worked over the next stretch of ground.

“We go forward, making a defence line, then waiting until artillery, flying drones and robots do their work, and then go in again,” Darwin said.