President Donald Trump has taken a harder line with Russian President Vladimir Putin than many in Ukraine expected, pressuring him to reach a deal with Ukraine to end the war.
Attacks from both sides appear to be intensifying. Russia has stepped up air attacks on Ukraine, often sending dozens of drones in a single night. A Russian drone assault on the Kyiv region overnight left at least three dead after a strike on an apartment building that ignited a fire across multiple floors.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is stepping up a campaign to cripple Moscow's war machine, targeting key military and industrial facilities. Ukrainian special forces struck one of Russia's largest oil refineries, about 300 miles north of the border with Ukraine.
Oil and the money it generates fuels Russia's war effort. Ukraine's strategy appears to be to choke that revenue stream to undermine Moscow's capacity to wage war.
President Trump appears to also be focused on oil as a potential lever against Putin. Thursday he called on OPEC to lower global oil prices, arguing that a drop in revenue would pressure Russia to end the conflict.
"If the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately," Trump said in comments to the World Economic Forum. "Right now the price is high enough that that war will continue. You've got to bring down the oil price, you've got to end that war."
But so far Putin is holding firm to demands that Ukraine capitulate and a pro-Moscow regime replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Editors note: This is a republished version of this story for "In the Shadows with Jason Bellini." The piece originally aired in May of 2024.
Exploring the world of one of Ukraines most accomplished FPV drone pilots a 20-year-old former medical student who personifies the evolutionary leap in drone warfare.
Before Russia's full-scale invasion of his country, he was a medical school student. He loved reading about biology. He set his books aside to join Ukraine's struggle for survival first as a combat medic. His comrades dubbed the young scholar "Darwin."
The callsign stuck. The war evolved. So did his role in it.
His unit received surveillance drones, and, to his commanders, it quickly became clear: Darwin's fast fingers were more valuable turning knobs than tightening tourniquets.
But his true dexterity and derring-do as a pilot would not be fully realized until last summer when drone warfare took an evolutionary leap.
Turns out, the small, inexpensive, consumer drones that Darwin and thousands of others had been flying as eyes in the sky could (with bigger batteries attached) be strapped with explosives.
But that wasn't all.
Staring down at a screen, pilots can manage a drone's movement well enough to navigate the battlefield. But when that same pilot looks at the drone's camera through immersive goggles, an elevated brain-body connection emerges.
First-person view (FPV) drones can enable a pilot (a highly skilled one) to fly his machine wherever his mind may take him.
When we first met Darwin in a rear training area last October, he described it to us this way:
<b>"You really feel like a bird... and not just a bird, but a bird that explodes at the end."</b>
But not all birds are predators, and not all predators are equally adept at catching prey.
Darwin downplays his experience as a video gamer, but it also seems a no-brainer that the neural pathways forged at the controls of an Xbox 360 carry over to real-life mortal combat.
<b>"I don't know if it's a coincidence or not," says Darwin. "I have six thousand hours in Dota, another two thousand in Counterstrike and, of course, other multiplayer action games."</b>
Highly skilled FPV drone pilots can chase
things
like tanks and mobile artillery.
They can chase people individual enemy soldiers, who are often bolting in terror. By now, soldiers on both sides know that by the time they hear that whizzing sound, their fate has likely been sealed.
The best of the best FPV drone pilots can make surprise appearances through narrow places like open windows and bunker entries.
For this episode of "In the Shadows," we accompanied the "Achilles" Strike UAV Battalion (named after a legendary Ukrainian warrior, Ivan Sirko) of Ukraine's 92nd Assault Brigade to their secret frontline position in Eastern Ukraine.
Our day began at 3 a.m. An ammo truck secreted us to their location during the brief, pre-dawn window when Russian thermal image drones would be less likely to spot the truck dropping us off there.
The unit's home base is a bunker laden with explosives of various strengths. The smallest ones are used to hunt individual Russians; the largest ones are reserved for tanks.
It's cold down there. Darwin uses this gas heater to keep his fingers warm between missions. We asked him about the danger of having an open flame so close to dozens of pounds of explosives. He reassures us:
<b>"If it blows up," he says, "you won't feel anything."</b>
The explosives are triggered to detonate by kinetic force. We're told to stay far away from the drones as they're launched; they've been known to, on occasion, explode during takeoff.
The team runs on adrenaline, caffeine, nicotine, Pringles, and zip-ties.
They work three "shifts" back-to-back, only getting a few hours of rest back at their house before embarking on the next day's missions.
At one point, incoming Russian artillery forces the team to pause their missions for around a half hour. We're shown a piece of shrapnel that landed near the bunker. "Still warm," we're told.
This "In the Shadows" episode is about more than the thrill of the hunt. It's also about the realities of the new day dawning the use of FPV suicide drones on a massive scale.
Darwin admits all these missions targeting Russian soldiers, playing out in real-time an inch from his eyes, maybe taking a psychological toll on him. But he says he'll seek help dealing with that, if he needs it, "after victory."
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