LVIV, UKRAINE — Social media is flush with footage of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers being killed by drones. Users around the world watch in first-person as a machine enters a building and detonates itself next to a man cowering in a corner. An aerial camera records a soldier trying to fight off another drone with a stick. Some throw their rifles at the machine. Others simply stand in place and allow the drone to kill them.
Some of these videos are posted as war propaganda. Some are shared on military forums or Telegram channels for armchair analysts to dissect and discuss. Perhaps most horrifically, many are posted by clickfarm accounts to sites such as X for the simple purpose of attracting eyeballs.
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These videos, which amount to battlefield snuff films, generate intense responses from viewers because of the jarring dynamic they reveal about drone warfare — very frequently, soldiers killed in action never had a chance against an operator pursuing them from miles away.
Killing people through a screen
Jordan O’Brien is a New Zealand soldier who formerly served with the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces’ 3rd Separate Special Purpose Regiment.
He spoke with the Washington Examiner at a pizza restaurant in Lviv, a few hours before the nationwide curfew, which dictates when civilians close their businesses and return home. In the Western city of Lviv — the “backyard of the war” as locals refer to it — the curfew is around midnight. Drones sometimes wander into the city and smash into structures such as church towers, but they are much rarer than in the East. City-wide alarms ring out occasionally, but people usually accept the risk and go on with their day as the sirens blare.
O’Brien showed up in Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 with a rucksack of medical supplies and joined the first outfit that would take him on. There was no paperwork, no contracts, and no fussing about visas. In those early days of the conflict, units were willing to onboard just about any able-bodied soldier willing to fight.
“I actually walked out of my old job in New Zealand as a security manager,” O’Brien told the Washington Examiner. “I absolutely despised the job, despised my boss. And I saw what was happening in Ukraine, and I was like, ‘That’s me — I’m a soldier, that’s where I’m supposed to be.”
O’Brien fought on the front lines of the conflict, and as the nature of the battlefield changed, he was baptized by fire into both operating drones and defending against them. He earned perhaps his highest honor in 2024, when the Russian government found him guilty in absentia of fighting as a mercenary and sentenced him to 14 years in prison if captured. His response on social media: “Lol.”
O’Brien said that by the time a drone has spotted you in the open, you are already a dead man walking.
“It’s gonna kill you. It’s one of those situations, the most basic human vital flight response, and most guys are gonna f**king run,” he told the Washington Examiner. “But you’re not running away. You’re not f**king running unless by some miracle you’ve got cover nearby and you’ve got a very small chance of maybe diving into a bunker or getting into a tree line and this thing gets snagged on some branches or something like that. But if you’re out in the open, you are f**ked.”
This scenario of unavoidable doom has only escalated as both sides have learned to coordinate drone operations in packs, meaning that if you somehow manage to overcome one, another is likely prowling the skies nearby and preparing to hit you from another angle.
Some styles of drone, such as the Shahed and the Mavic, have become widely recognized, but every week brings new demands and models. Last month’s drone technology is always compromised or made obsolete by this month’s anti-drone development.
O’Brien spoke with grim realism about the situation. He has seen comrades killed by drones not far from his own position. He has helped kill Russians from afar with the same technology. He acknowledged that it feels like warfare is “getting close to that Skynet theory of robots dominating the battlefield” and a “disconnect” is forming between combatants operating drones from bunkers and their targets.
“You’re watching someone through a little screen. You don’t feel that fear,” he said. “When I’ve been in gunfights before, there’s a fear because, ‘Man, a stray bullet and I’m gone, I’m done.’ When I’m flying a drone, there’s still risks like that — artillery hitting our position, drones hitting our position. But it’s a lot easier when I’m set in some bunker and I’m watching this dude run around trying to save his own life. But I feel no compunction about killing him, regardless of whether he’s throwing his rifle away or whatever.”
O’Brien is, however, aware of the ways that dramatic changes in warfare have rendered conflict unrecognizable to the civilian public. Digital spectators, unfamiliar with the dread of impending death upon seeing an aerial vehicle hovering overhead, wonder why some soldiers just seem to lie down and die.
“You see some Russians just stand there,” O’Brien said. “And this is where a lot of people start to question like, ‘Oh, this is some fake bulls**t. You guys are just standing there. No one’s going to stand there and let themselves get killed.’ But when you’ve been on the front line for over 4 years, with no fucking rotations and you are just zapped of all resources, I can sort of understand why some guys just give up and let it hit them.”
The gamification of war has been a motif of dystopian fiction for decades. Public commentators in the modern day variously decry the proliferation of lethal drones as a moral crisis, which removes humanity from conflict or as a cowardly means of waging war that lacks honor.
“There’s a lot of people online talking about, ‘Oh, there’s no honor in war anymore’ — as if there was ever f**king honor in war,” O’Brien said. “It’s not an honorable thing.”
He sees these talking points as meaningless appeals to virtues that have never existed on the battlefield. He pointed to the development of artillery that can indiscriminately bombard enemy positions from an unassailable distance, or the use of air strikes against ground troops that cannot hope to take down a fighter plane.
He joked that medieval knights probably had the same complaints about the introduction of crossbows that modern opponents have against drones.
“I want to crash it into a Russian,” he said. “I want to be the one who can make sure that that pay load that’s been prepared by my mate. I want to make sure that it finds the weakest spot on whatever target I’m going for so I can kill it. I mean, that’s what we’re here to do. We are here to kill as many Russians [as possible] and destroy their tanks, destroy their planes.”
‘We kill Russians. That is what we do’
Jonas Oehman is the founder of Blue/Yellow, a Lithuania-based NGO started in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea. He is a native of Sweden and a veteran of the Swedish Armed Forces.
Every wall and set of shelves at the Blue/Yellow office in the capital city of Vilnius was cluttered with war trophies and unit badges sent from Ukrainian soldiers. The organization is a grassroots fundraising outfit that uses all donations to equip Ukrainian troops with drones, protective gear, medicine, computers, vehicles, and more.
“We are totally crowdfunded. Again, mind you, we are an NGO. We are like a cat shelter-level organization,” he said just a few feet from a display of a massive, spider-like monstrosity called a “Baba Yaga,” used by the Ukrainian military for precise nighttime strikes.
Due to the immense red tape surrounding the process of furnishing a foreign military with lethal weaponry, Blue/Yellow cannot use its funds to provide guns or munitions. But Oehman, who makes no effort to speak about his organization in a politically correct manner, says there’s really only one thing Blue/Yellow does: “Kill Russians.”
Oehman has many ways of conveying that mission statement. His laptop is full of professionally edited montages of Russian soldiers being killed by drones. Each video clip ends with the same discomforting visual — a first-person acceleration so close to a fleeing soldier that one can clearly see the look of terror on their face, then a cut to black of static fuzz. The next clip is another identical killing.
Oehman also has a stack of Russian passports picked off of Russian soldiers after being killed in battle. Each still has the identifying page in it that puts a name and face to the victim.
“We kill Russians,” he said, bursting with pride. “That is what we do. We help the Ukrainians to kill Russians.”
The nearly identical truisms about killing Russians offered by O’Brien and Oehman push back on Western critics who get cold feet about Ukraine killing invading forces: buried under complaints about a lack of honor on the battlefield is often a more fundamental discomfort with watching the reality of men dying in combat.
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O’Brien speculated that because the West’s most recent visceral experiences with war were the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, portions of the public are unable to digest and understand the realities of a national invasion by a sovereign country such as Russia.
“This isn’t [about winning] hearts and minds,” O’Brien told the Washington Examiner. “We need to kill them to stop them dead in their tracks. You can’t be squeamish about it.”
