• Ukraine's drone operators aren't necessarily more protected than other soldiers on the battlefield.
• Saying "they are doing their job in much safer conditions is completely wrong," an official said.
• They're top targets, and a soldier said pilots sometimes need to fight just like infantry.

Ukraine's drone operators aren't necessarily spared from the horrors of war because they pilot remote systems, a senior official said. Many are in the fighting, and they're often top targets for the enemy.

Taras Berezovets, head of the military cooperation department of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, a part of Ukraine's armed forces, said that with drone operators, "they do just the same job" as other soldiers. "To say that they are doing their job in much safer conditions is completely wrong."

"We should never forget that drone operators are the primary targets for Russian units," he added, speaking at a recent drone summit in Latvia. "They are trying to kill them," he said, just as Ukraine is trying to do to Russian drone pilots.

"Drone operators are first of all soldiers, and they are subject to the same psychological problems and traumas" as any other soldier, Berezovets said, explaining that he would never consider operators differently.

Dmytro "Liber" Zhluktenko, a former drone operator who is now a lessons-learned analyst with Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment "RAID," told Business Insider that operators don't feel they are in any less danger because they have a remote-controlled weapon. "It's not like that," he said, rejecting the idea that the role is safer. "It's very dangerous."

"In some of the cases, we have our drone operators engage in small arms combat like infantry," he said, "So it's basically infantry with the drones." It means getting close to a fight, as soldiers with other weapons do.

Drones are a crucial weapon for both Ukraine and Russia in this war, filling shortages of both weapons and manpower. Ukraine says that drones are now causing 90% of Russia's front-line losses as usage expands.

Drone operators are also force multipliers. One pilot can launch countless drones over a deployment to scout and gather intelligence on enemy movements and targets or to launch cheap attacks on soldiers and weapon systems, including expensive gear.

That makes them priority targets.

The operators that control Ukraine's spy and strike drones often have to get close to the front lines to preserve the connection with their drones and to work effectively with regular infantry. It means they have to move, hide, and survive just like other soldiers.

Soldiers and drone operators have told Business Insider that Russia treats drone pilots as high-value targets because of the damage they can do on the battlefield. They said Russian forces have intensified attacks with missiles, bombs, and other weapons to hunt those operators, while Western analysts have noted rising casualties among Ukraine's drone pilots.

One drone operator, who spoke to Business Insider on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military issues, said "when the enemy spots a drone operator somewhere, it uses every single thing at its disposal — every type of weaponry" — to eliminate them. And Ukraine is targeting Russian pilots, too.

Ukraine is working to develop solutions to protect its drone operators by keeping them farther from the fighting to decrease the risk. For instance, there is new remote-control technology that allows interceptor drone pilots to control their drones from hundreds of miles away from the launch point. But many drone types still require operators staying much closer.

Zhluktenko said that Ukraine wants to have fewer people at risk on the battlefield, but that's not always possible.

Sometimes they move operators farther back for their safety, "even if it comes at the expense of our capabilities, because these are our people and we value them so much." He described it as "a very tough balance."

"We want to keep them extremely safe, but at the same time, there is some work to be done," he said.

Ukraine is heavily pushing autonomy so drones and robots can operate with less human control, keeping soldiers farther from the fight. It's part of a broader effort to move troops out of the most dangerous areas, including by scaling ground robots that could eventually handle front-line logistics.

Mykyta Rozhkov, chief business development officer at Ukrainian drone and weapons maker Frontline Robotics, told Business Insider that "the general trend is to get the pilots as far as possible" from the front line, with the absolute bare minimum of soldiers used in dangerous areas when drones and robots can't handle it alone.

But, for now, drone operators and other soldiers remain at risk.

"Russians are right now prioritizing hitting not the assault troops or soldiers;" instead, they are aiming at drone and ground robot operators, he said.

Western militaries watching the war are also aware of how at-risk drone pilots can be. The US Army course designed to catch the force up on drone warfare is teaching soldiers what it feels like to be hunted.

Maj. Rachel Martin, the course director, previously told Business Insider that the instructors deliberately use drones against students to help them understand "what it's like to be hunted by another operator from an adversary force: what it sounds like, what it feels like, how often they need to displace in order to survive or not be observed."

That matters because "the minute you're observed, you need to move," she said. "What follows that is usually fires of some capacity," such as artillery.

She said that the goal is to simulate an enemy force actively searching for them and to test their reactions "so they get used to one being hunted by the enemy." The US is used to having control of the air in its conflicts, where anything in the air above them is likely friendly, but that may not be the case in future fights.

Berezovets said Western militaries should study Ukraine's experience, including how heavily Russia targets drone units and command centers. He said Ukraine has to keep moving them because "this war, especially in terms of the drone war, is like a cat-and-mouse game. The Russians are always searching for the locations of our drone units."

He said allies ought to consider building drone command centers "deeper underground," like Ukraine does when it can, even though it's expensive work. He said that "they should be as deep as possible."

• Ukraine's fast-moving fight means once-cutting-edge defense tech can quickly lose relevance.
• An official said counter-drone tech no longer ideal for Ukraine could still help allies.
• Partner nations want defenses fast as they prepare for Shahed-style drone threats.

A Ukrainian official said the country's earlier counter-drone technology, even if it's no longer sufficiently cutting-edge for its own fight, could still be useful for partner nations worried about similar threats and searching for good-enough solutions now.

Ukraine is in a constant innovation race with Russia, with both sides trying to rapidly develop drones and counter-drone defenses to beat the other side. Technology that was once key can rapidly become obsolete on the battlefield, yet still be a better option than what many allies have available now to meet the challenge.

Davyd Aloian, the deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said some Ukrainian drone technology, including some early designs for interceptor drones built to shoot down incoming attack drones, may no longer be an ideal solution for Ukraine's needs but could still work elsewhere, where the weapons race is moving more slowly.

In the event of attacks against other countries in Europe, for example, he said "it would be better to have at least the solutions that showed their efficiency months ago."

Aloian's idea aligns with a key lesson NATO nations are learning from the war in Ukraine: having a lot of good-enough weapons available today beats a limited arsenal of perfect ones that come too late.

The deputy secretary said that this dynamic was visible in the Middle East during the Iran war, when the US and its Gulf allies faced attacks by Iran's Shahed drones. Though Tehran used some newer jet-powered one-way attack drones, like Moscow is increasingly deploying, it relied heavily on propeller-driven Shahed designs — the kind that Ukraine had been battling since early in Russia's war.

During the Iran war, Ukraine sent roughly 200 military experts to the Middle East to help nations strengthen their air defenses. It also sent troops and Ukrainian anti-drone solutions, which were used in combat. The fight triggered a sharp increase in interest in interceptor drones.

Aloian said that designs that were a year old and less relevant at home still proved effective in the region.

"We are ready to share our operation, technologies, and experience, and everything that will be needed in order for our partners to achieve the same level of defense deterrence that we have in Ukraine," Aloian said.

A starting place could be gear that Ukraine no longer has use for but could still prove practical for another operator in another kind of fight.

Aloian said it would be useful for allies to have "access to those solutions that are efficient." Even if they're not used in a fight, they could hold value as training tools, he said.

Ukrainian officials have said that Kyiv is willing to send partner nations defense technology, including interceptors, when it can do so without hurting its fight. It is also planning to export some systems, including long-range drones, that are no longer useful on its battlefield but still interest partners.

Aloian said that in the war with Russia, "speed is essential," and the defense industry has to work much faster than what allies are used to. Within months, "solutions will already be outdated."

Ukrainian officials have said that interceptor drone designs can change so quickly that the advantage of a new model may be negated within months. Companies are constantly upgrading platforms while swiftly phasing out obsolete systems. There are possibilities for those systems, though, in regions like the Middle East or elsewhere in Europe.

NATO countries are increasingly concerned about drones, especially after several Russian long-range drone incursions, but they are not under the same immediate pressure as Ukraine, which faces bombardments regularly. Officials have argued that, as they prepare for future drone threats, there is real value in defenses that are available now.

Ukraine has shifted from being a country many expected to be quickly overrun by Russia and urgently seeking help from cautious partners to being a source of new battlefield technology and tactical lessons that many Western militaries now want to study.

Aloian said Ukraine has "the experience, and we have the knowledge, we have the solutions" that it's already sharing "with our, not even partners, but with friends."

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants to partner with Silicon Valley.
• Zelenskyy said the tech hub's AI skills and Ukraine's wartime drone experience could be "powerful."
• Ukraine has built a drone arsenal that's captivated the world as it fights Russia's invasion.

Ukraine has experience fighting and defending itself using drones. American tech companies have AI firepower. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the combination of the two could be world-changing.

"American technological companies have a lot of different interesting AI technologies that we don't have. And we have a lot of things that they don't have because of our experience on the battlefield," Zelenskyy said on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "I think this cooperation can be huge and the most powerful in the world."

Ukraine, out of necessity, has built an arsenal of drone tech and anti-drone tech on a shoestring budget, captivating the global defense industry as it's largely held the line — despite its underdog status — since Russia launched its full-scale invasion over four years ago.

Ukraine said three types of homegrown drones allowed it to strike in the vicinity of Moscow earlier this month, and that it had developed a fixed-wing mid-range attack drone that's helped it strike in areas Russia once deemed safe. It's learned valuable lessons in the process, like the need for drone units to always be on the move and for their command centers to be buried underground to protect them.

The AI craze in the United States, meanwhile, coupled with a Defense Department eager to develop new autonomous military technology, is fueling the growth of a Silicon Valley defense tech industry. Companies like Anduril, led by Palmer Luckey, who built the Oculus virtual reality headset that Facebook bought in 2014, have raised billions to develop new uncrewed weapons systems.

Ukraine has since become an important potential proving ground for some of that new hardware.

Through a state-backed "Test in Ukraine" program launched last year, hundreds of international companies have applied to test drones, counter-drone systems, AI, electronic warfare tools, naval drones, and ground robots in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy on Sunday said he wants to deepen this symbiotic relationship further, and soon. His message to Silicon Valley: Stop talking and start building.

"We need to negotiate already," Zelenskyy said Sunday. "Not to speak about it. Just to take steps and to do it as quick as possible."

• Russia hunts Ukrainian drone operators, units, and command centers.
• As a result, Ukraine tries to keep them on the move and concealed and underground.
• A Ukrainian defense official said the West should take heed, even though it makes things expensive.

RIGA, Latvia — The West would do well to make sure that its future drone units and command centers are mobile and ideally underground because they are such high-value targets, a Ukrainian defense official said.

The West is investing heavily in drone warfare and tactics after seeing how effective they have been in the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine has hard-earned lessons to offer.

One of the lessons Taras Berezovets, the head of the military cooperation department of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, a branch of the country's armed forces, said the West can learn from its experiences is just how high-value drone units and command centers are as targets and how much effort is required to protect them.

"This war, especially in terms of the drone war, is like a cat-and-mouse game. The Russians are always searching for the locations of our drone units," he said, so Ukraine is always relocating them, especially if there is a chance they have been exposed.

Speaking at a drone summit in Latvia attended by Business Insider, he said that Western allies also need to consider building drone command centers "deeper underground."

"This is much more expensive, but with Russians and our Ukrainian experience, you can believe that it's always better to hide these command centers and training centers deeper underground," Berezovets said.

He said, "They should be as deep as possible."

Berezovets said that the lesson may be harder to apply in the smaller NATO countries, which have less room than Ukraine to keep relocating drone units and command centers. Ukraine is nearly 10 times the size of Latvia, and in smaller countries, he said, "it would be much harder for you to find these locations."

As an alliance, NATO gains more depth by dispersing units across its members, but in a wartime situation, moving command centers, training sites, and combat drone units across borders would bring its own complications, from logistics and communications to permissions and coordination.

Many of Ukraine's drone command centers are kept concealed and operate underground when they can. Some centers have been built as mobile vehicle-based systems, with the command apparatus established inside trucks and armored vehicles.

Drone operators also regularly operate from concealed or underground positions, flying their drones as remotely as possible to stay safe.

Drone command centers, which can range from small to large operations, are high-value targets because they coordinate the work of high-impact weapons. Ukraine says drones are causing 90% of Russia's front-line losses. Ukraine has also publicly celebrated when it has hit Russian drone command centers.

And it's not just command posts that are in the crosshairs. Individual Ukrainian drone operators are also priority targets.

Ukrainian soldiers and officials have described drone pilots as Russia's top targets, and Berezovets called them "the primary targets for Russian units," saying that "they are trying to kill them." The threat extends up the chain as well. The head of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces said last year that Russia had tried to strike multiple Ukrainian drone unit leaders at once.

These warnings align with growing realizations that for future fights, Western militaries will need to be more mobile, discreet, and dispersed.

Sir John Stringer, NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told Business Insider that Ukraine demonstrates that what the West has become used to in the decades since the Cold War, the "big single air operation center, which a lot of people have grown up with over the last sort of 35 years," is no longer viable.

Force dispersal comes with complications though. "The more distributed it becomes, the more difficult and challenging it is," he said.

Some Ukrainian defense companies have said their Western counterparts should consider no longer producing in a single large site, but instead break up their efforts across multiple locations. It makes the work harder, they say, but it's safer.

Many Ukrainian companies break up their work like this to avoid being a target, and some also work underground.

Achi, the CEO of Ukrainian defense firm Ark Robotics, told Business Insider that the company makes sure to keep different parts of "manufacturing independently from the other" and is flexible about location.

"We try to avoid building a gigafactory. I would love that, to be honest, I think this is literally the best way to do it. You build a huge factory, everything is in there," he said, speaking using a pseudonym as a security precaution.

But even as the company explores manufacturing in other parts of Europe, it still wants to keep that principle, and thinks the wider defense industry there should learn that lesson.

Achi said that "as default for defense-based manufacturing going forward, you don't want to have huge factories in one place because they are these targets. " He called it "a much deeper long-term lesson" rather than something that only companies in Ukraine need to pay attention to.

Karmo Saar, the head of sales for Estonian company Krattworks, which makes drones used by Ukraine, told Business Insider that some of Ukraine's big drone makers have more than 15 production sites, even though it would be easier and cheaper to run everything in one big facility. He said the rest of Europe needs to learn from that, warning that if a war starts, "I think we're going to be punished."

• A new tax meant for electric vehicles has come back to bite Ukraine's surging ground drone industry.
• Without the 20% VAT, Ukraine could have produced 5,000 more UGVs, an industry association CEO said.
• The tax, introduced in January, threw the local ground drone industry into disarray for months.

An electric vehicle tax that came into force this year inadvertently cost Ukraine thousands of ground drones it needs on the front lines, the CEO of a major defense trade association said.

Had the 20% value-added tax, which went into effect in January, not been introduced, Ukraine's military could likely have bought 5,000 more uncrewed ground vehicles in the first half of 2026, said Ihor Fedirko, the CEO of the Ukrainian Council for Defense Industry.

"We know that our government is procuring 25,000 in the first half of this year. If they could procure 20% more, that's 5,000," Fedirko told Business Insider. "For our armed forces, that's a lot."

The new tax also threw the local ground drone industry and military into disarray at the start of the year, causing contracts to dry up for months and several major manufacturers to nearly go out of business, he added.

Ukrainian lawmakers are now racing to undo the tax, with some politicians saying it's handicapped a key war industry that Kyiv is trying to rapidly expand.

Nina Yuzhanina, a lawmaker for Ukraine's European Solidarity party, said in a statement last week that the EV tax "almost ceased" the supply of ground drones to the military in some areas.

She and 44 other Ukrainian parliamentarians introduced a bill on May 19 aiming to fix the core issue: because uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, are so new, they were lumped together with EVs by the country's trade standards. The new law would define the drones as a separate good, exempting them from the 20% tax.

The bill is set for discussion over the next two weeks, but Fedirko estimates that if the law passes immediately, it would still take about two months for its effects to fully trickle down and restore production.

That comes as Ukraine's defense ministry said it plans to buy a total of 50,000 ground drones by the end of the year. Ukrainian UGVs can cost between $5,000 to $100,000 apiece, depending on the type of system and the gear it's equipped with.

"The exemption would save more than eight to 10 billion hryvnias, which is about $200 million," Fedirko said of the tax's impact on the local industry. "For us, it's a huge number."

How Ukraine began taxing its own war production

This year's VAT on ground drones is unusual for Ukraine. Under martial law, most of the country's war industries aren't subject to any such taxes.

This sort of consumption tax is collected at every step of the supply chain, but is typically eventually passed on to the end consumer — in this case, Ukraine's own military.

Ground drone manufacturers didn't actually have to worry about the tax until recently; Ukraine had been exempting EV duties since 2018.

But that exemption expired on January 1.

Military procurers found that their ground drone budgets needed to be 20% higher, but initially were confused by the new process because defense equipment and weapons are exempt from VAT by default, Fedirko said.

Amid the turmoil, drone makers couldn't find state contracts — the lifeblood for major manufacturers — for three months, he added.

"Three months without procurement, that's crazy. It's impossible to live without it," Fedirko said.

Production chaos while at war

The Ukrainian defense ministry highlighted the bottleneck in April, saying it was working quickly to "unblock" contracts and speed up deliveries.

But local firms had struggled to stay afloat in the meantime. A 20% cut to a firm's budget, in an industry already desperate for financing, can be a killer blow.

The new VAT also adds weeks of bureaucratic delay for an industry at war, with firms having to loop in state tax services and meticulously document the procurement process.

Fedirko said some firms may have had to drop capacity to a third of last year's to stay solvent, with cuts to employees or engineers.

A few tried to reclassify their drones as tanks or armored vehicles, while others sold their UGVs to volunteer organizations such as ComeBackAlive, which supplies military units on an ad hoc basis.

Tencore, the manufacturer of the popular tracked TerMIT drone, said it had to rely on these volunteer organizations when it couldn't find state contracts for five months.

"For UGV manufacturers, the VAT issue was not an accounting detail," the firm told Business Insider. It works with the Ukrainian Robotics Force association, which falls under Fedirko's UCDI umbrella.

A fix six months in the making

It's taken Ukraine this long to address the tax problem because military ground drones were so new that lawmakers had trouble defining them, Fedirko said. European Union commodity rules, on which Ukraine bases its own goods classifications, also don't have clear specifications for these uncrewed systems.

Though ground drone procurement resumed in the spring, manufacturers like Tencore say the months of delay have already cost frontline troops the equipment they need.

"For Ukraine, six months feels like infinity," Fedirko said.

When reached by Business Insider, the defense ministry declined to comment on the parliamentary bill introduced last week, saying it's not allowed to influence its consideration or debate.

However, it said Ukraine's UGV industry has so far grown to over 280 companies, with 550 types of drones for sale.

As the war moves into its fifth year, Ukrainian troops are increasingly relying on these platforms to conduct missions on the front lines, including logistics, evacuations, and attacks on Russian positions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in April that his forces had used ground drones to carry out over 22,000 missions in the first three months of 2026 alone.

• Western militaries need to study one Ukrainian operation in particular for drone warfare lessons.
• Officials say Operation Spiderweb, which struck dozens of Russian jets, offers key lessons.
• The US Army's drone course director told Business Insider it's "the one event that I teach to the students."

Western militaries are investing heavily in drone warfare after seeing their impact in Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion. And while it isn't necessary to absorb every lesson, current and former military officials say one major operation is worth studying closely.

Maj. Rachel Martin, director of the US Army's Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course designed to accelerate training on small drone warfare, told Business Insider that the 2025 Operation Spiderweb is "the one event that I teach to the students."

Offensive potential

In the operation, Ukraine smuggled drones into Russia, drove them to positions close to Russian airfields, and launched them at strategically valuable aircraft. The Ukrainian drones hit 41 Russian warplanes and caused an estimated $7 billion in damage.

The strikes showed how arsenals of small, cheap drones can destroy high-value military assets far from the front — and how difficult they are to defend against.

The operation was complex and took roughly a year and a half of planning, but, Martin said, it showed "that a small amount of money could be spent to destroy something at the strategic level," in this case, bombers and other high-dollar aircraft.

It cost Russia billions of dollars when it "is already hurting financially from being in a prolonged war."

Seeing that kind of low-cost attack destroying assets that could take years to replace, she said, "was a big eye-opening experience for the world." It highlighted not only what was possible with attack drones on offense, but also critical vulnerabilities.

Defensive realizations

The Ukrainian operation sparked a realization in the West about the need for significantly more protection at air bases, especially those hosting essential mission tools, such as nuclear deterrence elements.

Lt. Gen. Andrew Gebara, the deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration for the US Air Force, said of the operation last year that "disruptive" technologies like the drones seen in the Ukraine war "will have big implications not just for our bomber force or our nuclear force but really any critical infrastructure."

"We have counter-drone capabilities at these bases. Do we need to continue to modernize? Do we need to accelerate?" he said. "Yeah, absolutely, all that."

The majority of the most strategic US air assets are based inside the continental US. American airpower also depends heavily on warplanes stationed at air bases around the world. Defending against drones has proven challenging at both home and abroad, as the Tower 22 disaster and a number of domestic incidents have highlighted.

European air bases have likewise grappled with the challenge of drones, making the lessons of Operation Spiderweb particularly poignant.

Retired Air Marshal Greg Bagwell, who spent 36 years in the British Royal Air Force and served as its director of joint warfare, said last month that Operation Spiderweb holds key lessons that NATO allies need to learn.

When it comes to modern drone warfare, the West has more to learn from operations like Spiderweb than from day-to-day front-line drone fighting, he said at the UK think tank Chatham House. The West doesn't necessarily need to engage in heavy quadcopter warfare at the front when it has artillery and substantial airpower.

"The lessons that we need to learn are more from Operation Spiderweb, where Ukraine employed these drones in a much more sophisticated way and really did start to take out some significant targets," Bagwell said. That operation had a high-level strategic effect on a stronger adversary for a comparatively lower cost. It's asymmetric warfare that the West can't ignore.

Picking up lessons from the war

The US is using drone warfare in ways beyond what Spiderweb demonstrated, drawing on other lessons from the war. In its war with Iran that started last month, it has used drones to attack Iranian targets, including the new one-way attack LUCAS drones.

It's also still employing traditional drone tactics, using platforms like the uncrewed strike and reconnaissance drone MQ-9 Reaper.

The Army's new drone course is just one of the many ways that it is advancing its drone warfare capabilities, along with other moves like plans to buy at least a million drones in the next two or so years. Allies across NATO are taking similar steps.

Martin said their power is undeniable, and the course itself was created because the Army could see that it was behind in small drone warfare and needed to fix that. But the US is not in the same existential fight that Ukraine is, nor is it facing the same weapons shortages.

Drones have kept Ukraine in the fight against Russia even as other weapons ran out. They haven't been decisive, though, indicating that deep stocks of traditional and advanced weaponry still matter.

The US Army course teaches soldiers that drones aren't always the right weapon.

Bagwell also cautioned against leaning too heavily on drones. He said that drones have been "hugely useful" for Ukraine, but "these have not won the war for either side."

He said that Ukraine has "had to adapt and fight the way they can only fight, and I applaud them for what they have done. But there is a question for us in the West as to whether that is the way we want to fight."