The nerdy gamers who became Ukraine’s deadliest drone pilots

The Russians’ bodies disappeared in a puff of smoke, blown apart by a couple of pounds of explosives strapped to the drone. As the dust settled, body parts appeared to be sticking out from the toilet.

“They returned to where they came from," said the drone pilot, Oleksandr Dakhno, as he re-watched the scene, shot from a surveillance drone that accompanied the armed one, a few days later. Then he chuckled.

The cheerful, soft-spoken 29-year-old had added another two to the roughly 300 Russians he says he has killed in about a year and a half, a tally almost double that credited to the reputed deadliest American sniper, Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle, who served in Iraq. Some of Dakhno’s colleagues have even higher numbers.

Aerial-drone pilots are the deadliest soldiers on the modern battlefield, just as machine-gunners or snipers were in the last century. They can deliver the explosive power of a rocket-propelled grenade with the precision of a sniper, at the range of an artillery gun.

In Ukraine, they’ve created a no man’s land forward of front lines that has stopped the massive Russian army from overrunning defenses this year. Russia’s much larger and better equipped forces have inched forward but haven’t achieved a breakthrough, and have incurred heavy losses, largely thanks to the drone killers.

The movie image of elite soldiers as macho hulks has fueled concerns that today’s flabby and screen-addicted youths couldn’t cut it in a real fight. But piloting drones demands quick thinking, sharp eyes and nimble thumbs, the kind of prowess more readily associated with computer games than military combat.

With artillery ammunition in short supply, Ukraine has increasingly relied on its nerdy Rambos to hold back waves of Russian armored and infantry assaults. Ukraine is the first country to integrate drone units into most brigades of its armed forces, where they tend to operate as a creative subculture, running their own tech hubs and bomb factories.

“We are a team of civilians who want to kill Russians with our cleverness and technology," said Heorhiy Volkov, commander of a drone battalion called Yasni Ochi, or Clear Eyes.

Russia has quickly caught on and can put a larger number of drones in the sky, but Ukraine has an edge in skilled pilots and technology, Ukrainian soldiers say. The role of pilot is a plum job, in part for the distance and relative safety it offers compared with other roles, such as infantry.

For pilots, mostly men in their 20s, the long-distance killing can appear like a realistic videogame without the gut-churning proximity of trench warfare. But the human on the screen sometimes flickers into view.

“You see the flesh torn apart, how you tore a head off," said Dakhno, who is from the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “It can be horrific. Someone’s legs are blown off and he bleeds to death."

The former director of a co-working space said he is doing his job, to stop armed invaders, and that joking and laughing about it helps. “If I worried about it I’d have to stop. I know that it’s the enemy, but it’s still a living being," he said.

Scrappy startups

Ukraine’s innovative use of small aerial craft has given it an edge since its much-larger neighbor invaded in February 2022.

Drone teams like Clear Eyes started out as unpaid civilian enthusiasts who would deploy commercial drones to track Russian military movements.

Volkov, the 37-year-old owner of a marketing agency, soon progressed to dropping bomblets from drones using plastic claws produced on 3-D printers. He enlisted in the military, and by 2023 was experimenting with explosive drones.

The quick, nimble craft—known as first person view drones, or FPVs—are controlled by a pilot who wears goggles that stream a live feed from a camera on the craft. They usually have a diameter of 7 or 10 inches, a range of around 12 miles and can carry explosives weighing up to 9 pounds that detonate when the drone slams into a target.

Ukrainians also developed larger drones known by the Russians as “Baba Yaga" after a wicked witch from Slavic folklore. They are typically armed with four bombs weighing 9 pounds each that they can drop from the air and then return to base to reload.

FPVs are in plentiful supply as Ukrainian factories are churning out tens of thousands of them a month at $500 apiece.

Behind the best remote killers stand organizations that operate like edgy but orderly tech startups. The key to success, said Volkov, is innovation, logistics and communications, as well as solid military tactics.

“One good pilot doesn’t change anything," he said.

Clear Eyes’ main headquarters in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk Region has a command center where dispatchers watch feeds from reconnaissance drones and coordinate the work of strike-drone teams. There are workshops for engineers and a pilot-training school for dozens of recruits. And there’s a ping-pong table.

Training in a nearby field one recent day, a dozen pilots smoked, slurped energy drinks and ribbed each other while taking turns to show off their skills. One of them flipped the FPV over in midair and sent it zipping away just before it hit the ground.

The vast majority of personnel in drone units were never in the military before and largely ignore the service culture of ranks, including saluting or waiting for an order to get on with their job.

Volkov at times seems more like the head of a scrappy startup than a military unit. He said he prefers to think of it as a creative profession. “I’m a music producer and these guys are my f—ing boy bands," he said.

Team members innovate and repair equipment themselves, including at locations closer to the front lines.

Yevhen Yachevskiy, Volkov’s 34-year-old deputy, is an agricultural chemist who became a bomb-maker. He learned how to make explosives from YouTube, then managed to recruit one combat engineer and a 55-year-old former miner who used dynamite in his day job.

A handful of village houses in the northern Kharkiv region, where Clear Eyes teams are also deployed, function as small bomb factories and tech hubs.

In one, a soldier from Clear Eyes sawed the detonator off a Soviet-era rocket-propelled grenade. The explosives are removed, melted in slow cookers and then poured into lighter plastic casings, allowing drones to carry bombs that pack a bigger punch.

In another house, an engineer attached a guidance system taken from a Russian glide bomb that had failed to detonate on hitting the ground. The main aim at the bomb factory is to add more explosives—sometimes using duct tape—for a bigger bang that leaves few places to hide on the battlefield.

Dakhno, an avid videogamer in his youth whose mom would tell him off for playing too long, recently flew a large FPV loaded with a 9-pound bomb into a school auditorium where Russian soldiers were sheltering.

“No more school," he said. “My childhood dream came true."

A new weapon rises

It was late last year, as artillery ammunition ran low, that strike-drone pilots earned their spurs. Ukrainian forces were outnumbered and outgunned following a failed counteroffensive and as the U.S. dithered over sending fresh military supplies.

The situation called for men like Farmer, a laconic, 27-year-old former restaurant manager who received his call sign from playing a mobile game where he raises hens and pigs.

After Russian forces took over his hometown in 2022, he became a reconnaissance drone pilot but grew bored as an observer. “It’s more interesting to kill," he said. Now he pilots FPVs for Clear Eyes. He has adopted a simple logic: The more Russians he kills, the sooner he’ll be able to go home.

After Russia started pushing for a breakthrough around the eastern city of Avdiivka last fall, Clear Eyes was assigned to villages to its west. Their task was to create a kill zone a mile deep to protect outnumbered Ukrainian infantry in front-line trenches from Russian assaults.

They set up positions in basements and other locations a couple of miles behind the front line. Dispatchers at a headquarters miles away watch a bank of screens that beam live feeds from reconnaissance drones, identifying targets and passing them to the pilots.

During quieter times, they hunt for high-value targets like armored vehicles and long-distance surveillance equipment. Farmer eliminated three tanks in a single day that were hidden in trees. FPVs struck bridging equipment last month during Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, part of an effort to cut off thousands of Russian troops there.

When Russian vehicles course toward Ukrainian lines, drone pilots look for their weak spots, such as engines or turrets. Once the vehicles are immobilized, they can be destroyed with further strikes before the Russians are able to recover them.

Dakhno, also stationed nearby for the 47th Brigade, spotted one of Russia’s most modern tanks, a T-90, barreling toward Ukrainian trenches. His FPV hit it and exploded just under the turret. The damage was minor, but it spooked the Russian driver, who veered off the road, crashed through a tree and pulled up. The crew dismounted and ran away, and drone teams soon finished off the abandoned vehicle.

The strikes are often caught on video from reconnaissance drones. In one, Dakhno hits a Russian armored vehicle piled high with infantry. Soldiers jump from the top as it careens from the road. The video has a Keystone Kops quality, as one soldier tumbles over another.

It’s this kind of video that is popular on social media. Drone units set them to thumping electronic music and add their unit’s badge. Volunteers who raise money for them often post stills of terrified Russian invaders reacting as the drone swoops in for the kill.

“Grandmothers donate money, and when they see the result they feel part of it," said Volkov, the Clear Eyes commander.

‘I’m done’

After repeated failures to advance with armored columns, the Russian army now often sends forward small groups of infantrymen to try to cross a no man’s land strewn with charred vehicles and shattered buildings and survive long enough to bring forward reinforcements. That means drone pilots are often targeting individual soldiers in battles that pitch man against machine.

Farmer said he started taking double his usual allotment of 20 FPV drones with him for a day’s work, most of them armed with shrapnel munitions to target infantry rather than high-explosive ones for armored vehicles.

Sometimes there are so many targets that he doesn’t wait for the signal from a dispatcher or the video feed from a reconnaissance drone, but takes off and searches for enemies via the FPV’s own fuzzy feed. It’s harder in the summer, as the Russians are more concealed under thick foliage.

The sound of an approaching FPV, like the buzzing of a giant mosquito, now rivals the whoosh of artillery shells as the most terrifying sound on the battlefield for infantrymen.

Dakhno said he closely observes the enemy’s reaction as his craft swoops in for the kill. Terror quickly turns to resistance or a desperate attempt to flee, and then, finally, resignation or a last pathetic attempt to shield the fragile body with raised arms.

“They try to shoot, try to throw something, then their shoulders slump and they look at the drone as if to say, ‘I’m done,’" he said.

The drone operator kills from a relatively safe distance in a one-sided contest, like a bomber pilot. Only the image on the screen provides a measure of intimacy. On rare occasions, pilots are even able to direct enemies to surrender.

Dakhno recalls one exhausted Russian looking at his drone, crossing his arms and mouthing: “I won’t do it any more." The invader escaped as the reconnaissance drone tracking the target ran out of battery and it was too dark to send out another.

“I would have gone to kill him," said Dakhno. “Why the f— did you come here? I couldn’t care less that he prays, begs, swears he won’t do it again. I’m sure the mothers of Ukrainian children also cried."

On radio intercepts, Ukrainian soldiers hear their enemy call roads littered with corpses “Roads of Death."

“It’s just roads and fields, there’s nowhere for them to hide," said Dakhno.

Russian soldiers often pretend to be dead, but the Ukrainian teams identify them by learning the pattern of corpses or spotting them when they sneeze or open an eye. Reconnaissance drones capture the aftermath of a strike, allowing pilots to decide whether they inflicted a fatal injury or need to send another drone.

A recent video shared online by one Ukrainian unit showed a Russian soldier in a field fleeing grenades dropped by drones. His legs apparently crippled, he drags himself under a small tree. Another grenade drop sets the grass around him on fire.

The soldier props a rifle up on the ground and puts its muzzle in his mouth. He pulls the trigger but it jams, so he casts it aside. He picks up a second rifle and fires it into the branches to check it works, then puts the muzzle in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The bullet blows his hat and the back of his head off, and he slumps to the ground.

Discussing his recent strike that decapitated a Russian soldier, Farmer wondered whether a quick death may be preferable.

“He got lucky," said Farmer, as he hadn’t suffered before dying.

Pilots say their strike rate is about one in three. The Russians are getting better at jamming the connection between the pilot’s controller and the craft, which sends it crashing to the ground. Sometimes, the drones don’t detonate on impact due to technical faults.

Farmer recently sent three drones, one after the other, in for the kill on one Russian soldier—first when he hid under a rug, then when he emerged and got to his feet and a third time when he ran away through a field. The drones hit near their target, but none of them exploded.

“He must have gone to church and prayed that morning," said Farmer.

Ievgeniia Sivorka contributed to this article.

Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com