EOS featured in news.com.au’s frontline report from Ukraine

Ukrainian drone commander, 25, reveals the brutal reality of the world’s deadliest battlefield

Standing just over 152 centimetres tall with a smile full of braces, you wouldn’t know 25-year-old Viktoriia Savkiv is a commander of 25 soldiers on the world’s deadliest battlefield.

But that’s exactly what she is.

The Ukrainian soldier was just 21 and living in Poland when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, prompting her to return home and volunteer for the armed forces.

She began as a combat medic, helping evacuate wounded soldiers from some of the fiercest fighting of the war, before retraining as an First Person View (FPV) drone pilot and eventually taking command of an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Platoon with Ukraine’s 214th Separate Assault Battalion.

Now a junior lieutenant, she has responsibility for 25 soldiers operating drones on the front line in the Donetsk region.

“I made the decision to return to Ukraine, because I understand my belonging to this country. It is my nation, and I want to defend it from the aggressor,” Lt Savkiv told news.com.au.

“For me, the country is not just a jurisdiction, its not a physical territory with borders. For me, it is a conscious choice of every citizen to take responsibility and be responsible for its present and future.”

Her transformation from medic to drone commander has mirrored the rapid evolution of the war itself, with unmanned aircraft becoming an increasingly central part of combat.

“I’ve certainly changed as a servicewoman,” she said.

“I feel much older than I actually am due having to take responsibility both for the Ukrainian nation and directly for its defenders. At first, as a combat medic, I had to ensure wounded soldiers were evacuated alive.

“When I made the decision to be a platoon commander, I was aware and accepted the responsibility for the lives of my personnel.”

The drones her unit operates are part of a new kind of warfare in which relatively cheap unmanned aircraft can hunt down soldiers, artillery and vehicles, while increasingly sophisticated systems use artificial intelligence to identify and track targets.

A common theme of current media coverage is around the “gamification of war”.

It’s an easy link to see when drone operators are sat motionless at monitors or under AR goggles for hours at a time piloting drones.

Ukraine has even introduced an E-points-based system, under which squadrons receive points based on the types of targets they hit, which can then be used to acquire equipment they need, including more drones.

But Lt Savkiv rejects the idea that the system amounts to a video game.

“We understand that this is reality. Every action we take is real and has consequences,” she said.

Lt Savkiv said Ukraine had adopted the technology because it made it possible to take action without putting one of its own soldiers directly into harm’s way.

“But behind all this technology, behind every operator of an FPV drone, is a real person who has no restart, who has no reboot,” she said.

The young commander said she had no regrets about taking on a role that would normally seem extraordinary for someone her age, instead reserving her regret for the war itself.

“I regret that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people have been subjected to war,” she said.

“I regret that the Ukrainian youth, the Ukrainian people, have no choice, because we didn’t choose to invade another sovereign state, having no choice — must put absolutely everything on the line for Ukraine’s victory in this war.”

Asked whether she regretted losing her own youth to the conflict, she gave a blunt response.

“I regret that I have the Russian Federation as my neighbour,” she said.

“I made a conscious decision because of the situation that arose. This is my reality. This is the reality of my country and my people.”

Another Ukrainian drone battalion commander news.com.au spoke with, Igor Lutsenko, told an anecdote about an interaction he had as Ukraine was wrapping up a large campaign aimed at cutting Russian logistics in the occupied territories.

“A couple of days ago, I was watching footage of our FPV attacks on the ‘Novorossiya’ highway,” he said.

“A truck – a grain hauler – stopped, and the driver got out, a man in his sixties. He spread his arms and silently begged us not to hit his truck.”

Mr Lutsenko, a former journalist who won the medal of courage for his role in the Battle of Kyiv, said those few seconds watching his operator felt like an eternity.

“The drone was hovering just a few meters in front of the cab, while the driver slowly edged toward it. The FPV would back away a little – and the old man would step toward it again.

“Eventually, the pilot decided to fly away and struck another target,” he said.

Mr Lutsenko said he later reflected on what he would have done in the pilot’s place.

“If I had hit the truck, would that have been ‘hate’? Definitely not. It is something different, something closer to indifference.”

He compared the feeling of hitting a target as “like scoring a goal”.

Lt Savkiv described her own reaction to killing an enemy combatant as similarly indifferent.

“Personally I neutralised my first Russian target on my very first mission about two years ago and I can’t say that I felt anything,” she said.

“I probably felt the same as [Mr Lutsenko]. Nothing.”

“I understood that I needed to successfully execute my mission so that military asset could not proceed and put Ukrainian lives at risk.”

As for the Russian population?

“I suppose I feel a sense of revulsion toward them,” Lt Savkiv said.

“Through their silence they are perpetuating this war. They do nothing to influence the situation and it continues because of their silence.”

Australian drone defence

The stakes have made the rapidly changing technology crucial, and that is where Australian defence company Electro Optic Systems (EOS) comes in.

Dr Andreas Schwer, chief executive of EOS, says the Canberra-based company is staying ahead of the accelerating drone threat with a combination of artificial intelligence, lasers, cannons and interceptor drones.

Dr Schwer said in order to stay at the cutting edge of the industry, EOS needed to develop end-to-end systems capable of detecting an incoming drone, identifying what it is and determining how it should be engaged, potentially without a human having to make every individual decision.

“A turnkey solution is offering the prime contractor that there’s a system which is identifying any kind of intruder into a kind of protective Dome span over your protected area of the infrastructure,” Dr Schwer said.

“As soon as any kind of intruder is identified, the identification and classification is happening with AI-supported autonomous software algorithms to identify the threat and then do an autonomous assignment of different effectors for the various types of drones, be it a swarm attack with four or five drones or drones coming in from different angles.”

EOS architecture is designed to reduce human cognitive load, however, it still keeps an operator in control of oversight with the ability to intervene.

“You need to decide which effector is supposed to take out which kind of drone, and that needs to happen in no time. So it’s all machine-based. It’s all AI-driven.”

The company has systems operating in Ukraine and the Middle East, where Dr Schwer says hundreds of drones and dozens of rockets have been intercepted in recent months.

But one of the biggest challenges in modern air defence is economics: a defender cannot indefinitely use weapons costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to destroy drones that can be manufactured for a fraction of that price.

Dr Schwer said EOS had therefore focused on cheaper ways of bringing drones down.

“The laser weapon is the cheapest way of engaging drones. The cost per shot is around five to seven dollars. It’s almost nothing. It’s the cost of producing the electrical energy only,” he said.

“The next one in line are the interceptor drones. The interceptor drone we can produce for around $8 to $15,000.

“The third one in this range is obviously kinetic cannon-based air defence systems, like our Slinger system, where the cost of engagement is about $100 to $300 — the price of one to three rounds.

“Those are all cost-effective solutions. Much more effective than any kind of rocket or missile.”

Lasers, in particular, could become increasingly important as drone attacks grow in scale.

Dr Schwer said current systems could shoot down between 20 and 30 drones a minute, with EOS aiming to eventually reach 50.

“In the future, any kind of anti-drone system protecting critical infrastructure will be a hybrid system composed of different types of effectors,” he said.

“But the laser will play a very crucial role, the laser is the effector which has the capability to take down more drones per time compared to anything else.”

The technology is evolving quickly, however, and Ukraine has become one of the world’s most important testing grounds.

Dr Schwer said jamming, once highly effective against drones, was becoming increasingly obsolete as Russia and Ukraine deployed aircraft controlled by fibre-optic cables or pre-programmed using on-board systems.

“In Ukraine, in the beginning, 80, 90 per cent of the drones were taken out by simple jamming. Today it’s history. It’s no longer the case,” he said.

“The drones are becoming more and more driven by AI software-based algorithms, causing small drones particularly to fly in a kind of random pattern so they don’t follow straight trajectories anymore. So for the defence forces, it’s harder to predict the flight path and it’s harder to hit them.”

That arms race is also forcing counter-drone companies to update their technology constantly.

“We get all this feedback from the troops at the front line in almost real time. And we adopt our software on an almost monthly basis to cover those kind of changes,” Dr Schwer said.

For Lt Savkiv, however, the technology is ultimately about keeping Ukrainians alive.

She said her greatest regret was not the life she had lost, but the fact her country had been forced into war in the first place.

And after spending her 20s fighting, she has a simple message for Australians.

“I want to thank Australians and the Australian government for the assistance already provided and ask them not to stop helping us in this war,” she said.

“Ukraine must prevail. We have no other option. And for this, we need strong partners. We need the support of other nations. Russian forces continue non-stop shelling of Ukrainian cities like Kyiv, and Ukraine needs support to protect its civilian population and skies.”

This article by Robert White first appeared on news.com.au