Endless Thread - Ukraine's expanding drone web

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising change has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online. It has become clear that a huge part of the drone war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired. Those wires are fiber optic cable, stretching from drone operators to the drones, which spool out cable across the ground and over trees along the battlefront. These drones are often single-use rarely returning from the mission they set out on. And the spools of fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. We explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, I want to show you a photo. Okay. A photo that I have thought about and wondered about for months. And even when I figured out what this photo was of, it still has kind of haunted my thoughts. Cool. Okay. So take a look and take a look and take. Tell me what you see. All right.

I see a landscape with a very beautiful, I'm guessing, sunset in the background, an orangey, peachy, orangey sky. Yeah. I'm going to go to jump to the bottom where you see some dirt and some grass. The middle is hard to parse, but it looks like it's either wire that's running through the grass or it's string. that's kind of a cluster of gray, but made up of tiny, tiny threads of something. How much of it would you say there is? Like, there's, like...

It's creating a similar visual effect to the Grand Canyon where you're like, this is either five feet or it's five bazillion feet in depth. It looks vast. The first thing you should know when looking at this photo is that it is a photo from the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

Hmm. Okay. What does the war in Ukraine mean exactly? Well, people who study this war with any scrutiny or have ever experienced it firsthand would probably say that the Russo-Ukraine war began over a decade ago in 2014. But as we know, there was a massive Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border in 2021. Russia began attacking Ukraine in early 2022. And we're now going on four years into that intensified part of the conflict. Once you know that information that this is Ukraine,

I get the haunting of thoughts that you were talking about here because you can't tell it's simultaneously the antithesis to what we think of as like a war zone where the pictures that I've seen coming out of Ukraine are leveled buildings, rubble, people, chaos, whereas this is just a field with stringy stuff. Okay. Here's another piece of information for you. This is a photo of fiber optic cable. Okay.

Like internet cable. Yep. And let's say fiber optic cable is mostly used for transferring data and information. Do you have a guess about what kind of information this particular web of fiber optic cable, crisscrossing this field as far as the eye can see, might be transferring. My head goes to two places.

It's either, you know, intelligence information, crucial intelligence information, or it's super mundane people just trying to communicate with family and friends during a time of great upheaval. So what I learned from comments under this photo when it was posted on Reddit months ago

was that this massive amount of fiber optic cables were left behind as a byproduct of one of the biggest parts of the conflict in Ukraine right now, and that is drone warfare. Hmm. I think of drones as being wireless, like remote-controlled.

Yep. And not needing cables or tethers of any kind. But that's, not the case, I guess. Yeah, that's what I thought too. And even though over the past four years, I've seen a lot of drone warfare footage

on the internet from Ukraine and Russia, I never knew that currently a bunch of the drone action in Ukraine is wired warfare. And I wanted to know how we ended up with drones that do this wired warfare. Where did drones that do this come from? I'd never seen this cable mess from the drones before. And it really kind of like shocked me when I saw this photo.

Because it appears to be strewn everywhere in Ukraine. And when I finally got on a call with a guy in the thick of the war, I found some answers. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sievertson and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, The Dron Web. Emory, I want to know what you want to know. I want to know what fiber optic cable has to do with drones flying.

It feels like drones feel very now, you know, like very now technology. And fiber optic cable feels like the AOL dial-up equivalent. Yes. You know, so. Yeah. Why, yeah, there's some dissonance there for me. These are all good questions, and I got answers to a lot of them from Alexi Zelensky. My name is Alexei Zelenzky.

Where in Ukraine is Alexi from? This is an important question, and the answer is part of this idea that where you point to the beginning of the war says something about you. So outside or inside of Ukraine. Alexei's hometown of Stikhanov, the Russian name, or if you're a uter, Ukrainian Kedivka is in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. For me, a war was started not in 2022, but in 2014, because I was born and raised in Wansk region in the city of Stahanov. It is a small town where a lot of coal mines and miners.

paramilitary groups from Russia took over the region as part of what is called the Dunbuss War between 2014 and 2022. Alexi fled the area when he was a student. He had to finish his schooling further west. I'm relocated to Kiev, pass my exams and started to study in a university in Kiev Polytechnical University. Okay, so he flees to Kiev. capital of Ukraine and goes to a polytechnical university. What does he want to do for work? Well, here's the thing. He can't get out of his head that he had to flee his home because of the war. When I end the school, I have some thinking about to go to anti-terroristic operation because I was a

patriot of my country. I love Ukraine. He's saying anti-terroristic operation. Yeah. Okay, so he wants to fight. He wants to fight. But in 2014, he's not old enough to join the army without his parents' permission. And his parents do not want Alexi to fight. Then the Russo-Ukrainian war kicks off in 2022, and the motivation to fight is compounded tenfold. Everybody's joining up. Cities way further into Ukraine are being bombed and attacked, including Kiev.

So Alexi, at age 25, volunteers. for the Ukrainian army. Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is the warning of President Putin to the world. Whoever tries to interfere with us or threaten our country should know that Russia's response will be immediate and lead to such consequences that have never been experienced in history. And what does he start doing?

He goes right into some pretty heavy stuff. Firstly, I was Greenwich. I use an RPG for maybe anti-tank tank missions. So we were talking here about rocket-propelled grenades. This is an explosive attached to a rocket, gets pointed by a soldier, fired out of a tube. Alexi does about 10 missions with that weapon, and he does well.

He gets moved to another squad moving up in the ranks. And his commander tells him, you're going to learn how to use mortars. Bigger weapon, bigger explosive, pointed at a higher angle up into the sky. But Alexi has no idea how to use a mortar. And he tells his commander, I don't know how to use these things. And he says me that you have internet, you have YouTube,

and I need to learn how to work with a mortar by YouTube and Internet. Oh, God. Okay. He's using Internet to get to YouTube to learn how to use these explosives in one. war. Yep. Training has been a consistent challenge in the war in Ukraine, at least from the Ukrainian side, because of everything from general resource challenges to the speed at which the war is developed, to the kinds of fighting that's happening, like trench warfare, which is a kind of older style of conflict, combined with new tools like drones. And because of the human resource challenges

in the Ukrainian army, as we might say, while they are trying to beat back this tidal wave of Russian attacks, Alexi gets put in charge. And after maybe one week learning in YouTube, we go to our first combat mission. First combat mission for me like a commander of a mortal unit. Oh, man. I don't even want to like tile my kitchen after learning how to do it. on YouTube. This is intense. Yeah.

One week watching YouTube and you're suddenly a commander of a mortar unit in your late 20s headed out to the front lines. Okay, so I'm trying to picture this. They have big explosives that they're using. Are they on foot? Are they in a tank? Are they in an aircraft? It was in our combat mission. with my squad.

There are four guys in the car. They're not in a tank. They're not in an aircraft. They're in a car. I'll give you one guess as to what kind of car they're in. Well, our Toyotas of War episode makes me want to say a Toyota,

what's that truck called? The cute truck. A hylux. You're close. It's a Nissan Trail. This is the kind of car you might see in suburbia. And unfortunately,

for Alexi and his unit, this car is not armored. Unfortunately, because the car eventually hits a 20-pound Russian mine. The impact is devastating. And we are ran into an editing mine TM62, it is a Soviet Union mine. It is maybe nine kilos of explosive. were exposed. I was sold out from the car and I stay in my legs on the ground. I see that car was on fire. Look on my hands and my hands was on fire too. The kind of explosives in these mines, Amory, they have stuff in them that catches you on fire and it's not like, I don't know,

a match or a lighter catching a piece of your clothing on fire. You are covered with a substance that is on fire and you cannot get it off. Oh my God. And he lived to tell the tale clearly, but what happened to him? So when this happens, he's really determined to get his team out of there and get them help. And they do have communications technology with them. I'm one person in the squad who has a radio and I try to send a message with hands on fire and it was very very scared.

But I drew this and after that I was passed out. I'm passed out. When Alexi wakes up, he's in a hospital. Do we know what happened to the other guys in the car with him? So of the four guys in his unit, two are dead. One has multiple injuries and Alexi is also badly wounded. Bad enough that even in a war where everybody is needed, where Russia is importing North Korean soldiers and conscripting prisoners and sending them to the front lines in Ukraine is signing up almost any able-bodied adult,

Alexi isn't likely to go back towards the battle anytime soon. But he's still going to make an impact on the war, one that will lead us back to that photo we talked about at the beginning and the way that the drone part of the war has evolved in terrible and fascinating ways. We'll be right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

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business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. So Alexei Zelensky is wounded in a Ukrainian hospital after his mortar unit was hit with a landmine while driving a Nissan. So Ben, how does he get involved in the drone aspect of the war? Okay. The first step is that one of his friends brings him a present while Alexi is trying to recover from his injuries and stuck in the hospital. My friend Roman Ark of bringing for me some studio printers because it's like a gift for me.

He said a 3D printer that his friend brings him? Yeah. Okay. What's he printed? I'll tell you. And I start thinking how it can be. helpful for maybe for defense for my country.

Alexi's first thought is to print out the bodies of drones with his printer. But he has no idea how to do this. He just has a 3D printer and a boatload of time on his hands. Can you guess where he went to figure it out? YouTube. Yep, he goes to YouTube and he starts trying to print something that isn't being used heavily in the war yet. I'm trying to print frame for the FPV drone. The FPV drones.

First person view, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a first person view drone. It's drones maybe for the racing, for the freestyle. But Ukrainian army starts using these types of drones for the combat missions. So this starts happening maybe in 2023. And it is worth pausing here and talking about why drones are so heavily used in the war in Ukraine. Hmm. Which brings us back to Toyotas of War.

Yep. Because we talk to a guy Ed Nash, who's a military-focused author and YouTuber, about the future of so-called technicals. These are vehicles with heavy artillery attached to them. What we're seeing now is drones. Civilian drones, which are armed or either with the end. explosive warhead or dropping explosive warheads, that's a great counter to a technical. It's super cheap, super simple to get, super simple to operate. Light, mobile, destructive.

You've maybe seen headlines about Ukrainian drones dropping explosives on Russian airplanes, for instance. I have. This came up a little bit in my Hidden Levels episode about joysticks and drones being operated with game controllers, basically. And these consumer-level drones that they retrofit to carry explosives are pretty cheap compared to tanks and planes, maybe a thousand bucks a pop. And I assume there are drones on both sides here, right? The Russians are using drones as well. They are. And between the years of 2021 and 2023, this kind of cat-and-mouse drone game between Ukrainian and Russian forces evolves at breakneck speed. One of the big issues that pops up in this cat-and-mouse game is countermeasures. For instance, jamming.

Most drones are controlled via radio frequencies. You have to talk to the drone to tell it what to do. But if someone has a frequency jammer, that messes with your ability to talk to the vehicle you are controlling. This is a common tactic in warfare, but it really exploded in this particular war because of the sheer number of small drone craft being used. Alexi, who has by this time started building first-person-viewed drones to be used in the field with his 3D printer, says the radio jamming has also evolved. We are tried to change frequencies using double frequency systems to fly in two frequencies on one time, yeah.

But now jamming systems are very strong. And there are some areas in the front line. where a radio drone can't control the combat mission. And this is a very big problem. So how to solve this problem? What do you do when you can't control a drone with radio frequencies anymore? Hmm. Well, the radio frequencies aspect of this felt new to me.

Internet. Fiber optic cables. Correct. Drones start to enter the battlefield. Because of optic fiber can fly anywhere. You can fly to the buildings. You can fly under the ground to the trenches and bunkers. Oh, because the radio frequency isn't interrupted.

Yeah, yeah. You have a good connection in all situations. There are some tactic for using this type of Alexi says fiber-optically controlled drones are a relatively recent development in the war. I saw some prototypes maybe in 20, 23. It was Ukrainian company. It was the drone on optic fiber, FPV drone, but this spool may be up to one kilometer or two kilometers. Which seems close to me to the person, one or two kilometers. That's your, you're, you're, you're, your target is not that far from you,

which presumably means you can find the person who is operating the drone or find the drone following that cable. Yeah, that's right. It's better than breadcrumbs, right? You can just, like, follow the cable back to the person. This is a good example of how war messes with our sense of scale. Like, when you think about one piece of fiber optic cable and other applications, having, like, having a one kilometer piece of internet cable, that sounds really long. Right. I don't think I've ever seen an internet cable that long. Like, I feel like 20 feet is the longest internet cable I've ever seen. But if you're thinking about one kilometer between you and the people you are fighting, that is not far. That is like you are on the front lines. You are in the extreme danger zone. And fiber drones can create a solution in avoiding radio jamming, but they also create this problem of reach. There are very big difficulties maybe to make a good drone on optic fiber. So Alexi realizes to really make these fiber drones effective, he needs longer cables. The way these fiber optic drones work is that they have these spools on them, almost like a fishing reel on a fishing pole.

The spool lets out the cable as the drone travels. Getting spools of high-quality fiber optic cable longer than one kilometer is tough. But as jamming becomes more and more popular, people start to find solutions to the cable length problem. It's a solution that it feels like everybody eventually comes up with. It's a very familiar solution. Get your product made in China. I see there maybe ads on Instagram, some videos on Reels. that Chinese produce optic fiber spools.

I think that it's a good idea to connect this technology, this spool on our drone. Oh, my God, the geopolitics, mixed with technology, mixed with humans continuing to want to hurt each other. Yeah. It's a lot, man. It's a lot, man. So Alexei and others in Ukraine start getting their spools imported from China because China makes bigger, longer spools. Which could be complicated because China is more allied with Russia in this war than with Ukraine, right? Right. And fiber optic cable is, well, kind of fragile. It is usually made out of long, thin strands of glass or plastic.

And it's usually surrounded by protective layers, but the spools need to be as light as possible to attach to the drones. So these much longer spools of cable coming from China don't have any protective layers. In when spools are transporting to Ukraine, there are some damages. So long story short, the shipping logistics and political logistics of getting big long spools of fiber optic cable from Chinese manufacturers to Ukrainian side of the fight are complicated. Okay, so Alexi, he's like a startup guy now. Yeah. He found the need for a tech product, and he is filling the need. He totally is.

He's basically created this company that uses 3D-printed components and fiber-optic cable spools shipped from China to first-person view consumer drones that are being used to drop explosives. In September 2024, we already have a good drone and started zero products. of each. We sent some samples to soldiers, but not many soldiers are realizing that it can be useful technology for the drones. It takes a minute for the Ukrainian army to get used to this new kind of drone that Alexei is building. But eventually, these new kinds of drones start to catch on. have no schemes how to fly to these drones and they don't know a tactic of using these drones. Who's buying most of these drones?

All branches of the military. Alexi says that includes the national police, combat units, the National Guard, the Armored Force, Border Guard. Basically, everybody who fights for Ukraine is starting to buy these drones. The litany of problems continues, though. Oh, man. Alexi. He's done so much. He's come so far.

He's found something that the Ukrainian army needs. He's made it less vulnerable to that radio frequency jamming. He's found a way to get longer cables for it with those fiber optic spools from China. He's gotten the military to use them. Yep. What else have we got for Alexi? So there are three things that are still kind of bedeviling Alexi's inventions here. Cost, weight, fragility.

His solution to the first two comes when, as with many things in Ukraine, Ukrainian fighters figure out how to repurpose peacetime tools to help them fight the war. Are the machines that we're making just regular internet cable that you've kind of now been using for the drones? No, these machines in normal life are using for the electrical spools, for the generators, maybe, motors, yeah. But we upgrade these machines to through winding the object fiber spools.

repurposing these Ukrainian machines from winding electrical cable to winding up spools of fiber optics drops the price of the drones that he is making from maybe $1,000 a pop just to drop a single payload down to $300 a pop. The Ukrainians can also create longer and lighter spools of cable. So from one kilometer to way longer. Now we are produced 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 45. kilometers. Cost and weight challenges solved. Alexi now has spools that are cheaper to make, easier and faster to get to the battlefront, and way longer, and they're lighter, because Ukrainians have figured out how to cut down on the thickness.

Maybe like a hail right over a scene. You said weight, cost, and fragility, but these thin, hair-like cables sound more fragile to me. Yes, and this is a big part of the final problem, the one that isn't solved. And I really want to think about this. You know, these drones are flying with explosives, maybe for an hour to get where they are going. These are active battle lines. And you want to know the worst part? I cannot believe that we are not at the worst part already.

But sure. Well, you kind of already know and can guess. But I think it's best to hear Alexi say it. If we speak about cable, it can't be used again because it is very thin and very long. You can't to come back it from the fields from the trees. And it is a very big ecological problem. Alexi is, of course, talking about the problem in that picture I showed you at the beginning of a field absolutely covered in a web of fiber optic cable.

Yeah, I get that in a time of war, the environmental concerns are not top of mind. And yet that is something also eerie about that picture, is this sort of what it represents, but also just the fact that it will be there in perpetuity. Yeah, and look, Alexi, other Ukrainians, they know this. and the farmers are very upset. Yeah, very upset. Yeah. That they're testing their optic fiber drones on their fields.

It is the problem. I am sad, but I understand that now we're a difficult time and we need to try to maybe defend cause, try to stay alive. Okay. Amory, I want to show you another photo. Oh, no. This is another Reddit post. The subject line is Ukraine.

Birds on the front lines weave their nests from fiber optics. There's a picture of a nest. seemingly made out of fiber optic cables. Well, yep. That kind of encapsulates what this part of the world is going through right now, where you have war, you have people just desperately trying to come up with solutions to save lives and protect their homeland, and then nature finds a way to repurpose our...

materials for their own survival and thrival. It's like sort of, it's definitely sad, but it's also sort of hopeful in a weird way to me. Yeah, birds, you know, they scavenge human trash to make their nests all the time, right? Like that's a normal thing that happens. So you could consider this a form of recycling. Upcycling. Upcycling. There you go.

You know, and I'm just, I'm kind of, I am fascinated by this story because of what it says about just how technology gets tangled up in war and how it changes war and how war changes technology. And I'm horrified to watch plastic wires cover the battlefield this part of war's lasting and like destructive force. And it makes me deeply sad. and I just imagine the cleanup of war and whether it's like landmines from the past or the drone web of the present. You know, getting back to a state of peace and a state of environmental stasis,

I guess, seems so far away. And I think it's far away for Alexi too. I want to see the end of the war. But when Ukraine, win there are. It's maybe what I want to see. But what really happened, I don't know and maybe no one, no. As we were wrapping up, our call, Amri, Alexi turned off his voice memo and we started saying farewell. And I wanted to stay on the line with him for some reason. I guess,

I don't know, maybe because it was, it was just hard to get him on the phone in the first place because of where he is and what's going on around him. And I just have no idea what his life is and trying to get a sense of it through the conversation was hard. The language barrier and the reality that we are living completely different lives was really weighing on me. It was hard for me to tell in that last clip of him when he says, you know, when Ukraine wins the war, it was hard for me to sort of parse whether he, you know,

he thinks that's a likely outcome or he's just like speaking it into existence. Yeah. Do you have a sense of how he's thinking about Ukraine's future, his own future? Yeah, I asked him about that. In a positive scenario, I want to come back to my motherland, my home. It was one of my motivation to go to the armed forces. But now I'm understanding, I'm thinking that this scenario is not so realistic. But I really know that I want to develop drones for the

Civils. Drones can be used in civil life too. Other than a world where Alexi can work on drones for civilian uses, did you get a sense of what other positive futures he might imagine?

Yeah, he really wants to go home. I miss our country house that my father are built. There are some horse. some other animals like deer's. And it was a very good place to rest, to have time on it. There are fishing, you can go to the hiking, to the river, and it was a very good place.

But Russians came to this place and this is very beautiful. This is very pity that people's lives are damaged because of someone's came who without requests. Yeah. To your land. So, Amory, this fall I had this thing strike me. I sometimes sit outside of my office and I look west as the sun is setting. and I was doing that this fall, and I noticed something I'd never noticed before.

As I was looking at the grass and the fallen leaves, I started to see these hundreds of tiny, glistening strands of spiderweb silk. And I think maybe I wouldn't have noticed that if I didn't know Alexi's story. And as we head towards the new year, I want to say that I hope that Alexi and everyone in his position displaced, injured by war, might at some future date be able to reflect on the past in a more peaceful environment and know that while the past is set, the future is unknowable. And in that unknowing, there can be hope. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was co-hosted by Amory Seaverton

and myself, Ben Brock Johnson. It was produced by Dean Russell, Franny Monaghan, and yours truly. This episode was edited by Meg Kramer, sound designed by production manager Paul Vikas. Our managing producer is Summint to Joshi. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter and Emily Jenkowski. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the drone web and a bird's nest. If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR.org. We also have a secure line for tips.

If you need to share something on background or off the record with us while protecting your identity, you can text or call us on the app Signal at 646-456-9095. That is 646-456-456-95 on Signal. And we should say WBUR is an NPR member station, and the CEO of NPR, Catherine Marr, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation. a nonprofit that supports that messaging app. That's it for this week. Stay healthy, stealthy, and wise. See you next week.