Last week I travelled to Ukraine with several Economist colleagues. It was my fourth trip since Russia’s full-scale invasion. And it was a sobering one. On yesterday’s edition of The Insider, we all joined Edward Carr in the studio to discuss the alarming intensification of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and what it means for Ukraine’s prospects. In tomorrow’s show—and in a bit of an innovation for Insider—I want to take you with us to Ukraine, to see the drone war up close. 

We spent a day last week visiting the command headquarters of the Nemesis brigade, one of Ukraine’s top drone units. We were the first foreign journalists to do so. We visited several facilities and spoke at length to the brigade’s commanders. More remarkably, we were allowed to bring cameras. Obviously, we were careful not to film anything that might compromise the unit’s security, so many details are blurred. But between the conversations and the footage, I hope you get a vivid sense of what this new kind of warfare is like.

The trip wasn’t without complications—Adam Roberts, our foreign editor and one of my travel companions, wrote about our close encounter with two Shahed drones in The War Room newsletter earlier this week. But we took the risk because nothing compares with seeing things for yourself and hearing, first hand, from those involved. 

I feel as though I was catapulted into a dystopian future in which the battlefield (or “kill zone” as Ukrainians call it) is dominated by drones and sensors, and will increasingly be shaped by AI, too. It’s where those in the command centres digest huge quantities of data to plan operations, allocate drones to target areas, and hunt Russian soldiers and their supplies on myriad computer screens. It’s a type of warfare where the speed of innovation and the ability to scale those innovations are critical assets. 

Nemesis (officially the 412th brigade of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems forces) was founded by a group of civilians in 2023 and is manned by T-shirt-clad techy types who speak about feedback loops and KPIs. It feels like a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a gamers’ gathering. In the “battle room”, a cavernous space full of banks of monitors and men with consoles, Pavlo Laktionov, the brigade’s deputy commander, explained to me the “e-point” system: the unit can upload video evidence of successful strikes to win points. The value of the Russian target determines the number of points awarded and a leaderboard displays which brigade is ahead. He talked me through the way the unit is structured to optimise the speed of feedback loops between front-line units, the command centre and the brigade’s R&D facilities. 

I had seen glimpses of this style of warfare when I visited another drone battalion in 2024. But two years is a long time in any conflict and in this war, it’s a lifetime. Russia’s ability to bombard Ukrainian citizens right now is, in large part, thanks to its recent drone innovations, particularly jet engines on Shahed drones, and radio relays (known as mesh networks) that allow some of them to be piloted at moving targets, such as trains. How this war evolves will depend on how quickly Ukraine can scale up a defensive response to these drones and, then, on what comes next. 

It’s a terrifying, fast and relentless cycle of increasingly dangerous innovation. Where this could end up was brought home to me when I sat down with Oleksiy Honcharuk, one of the co-founders of the Nemesis brigade. He’s a former prime minister to President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as one of the entrepreneurs behind Uforce, Ukraine’s first mil-tech unicorn. He joined us at the command headquarters for an extended conversation and told me that, in his view, Western countries were totally unprepared for this kind of warfare. As you’ll hear, his assessment is chilling: the “battlefield can come to your city [...] within hours”. 

It’s rare to get this kind of access to the heart of the Ukrainian war machine—and even rarer to be able to film it. I hope that you’ll take the time to watch the show when it’s published at 6pm London time (1pm in New York) on Thursday. Once you have, please write to me with your feedback at insider@economist.com.