The elephant in the ‘kill zone’

Kherson, from our correspondent. If Lieutenant Slon were a bartender, he would have specialised in mixology. He would study spirits and spices in depth, give his creations absurd names, and his bar would always be packed, with a team of devoted apprentices ready to share the workload with him – and perhaps a night-cap at the end of the evening with the latest alcoholic concoction that would seem unbeatable to everyone. Slon, however, is a soldier; his real name is Ihor, and his ‘alchemy’ does not involve spirits and flavours, but their drone equivalents: skilful reconnaissance missions and ingenious assaults. He commands the unit responsible for unmanned vehicles within the 34th Brigade. His call sign means ‘elephant’, though at first glance it’s not entirely clear why: he doesn’t have enormous ears, nor is he particularly big; he has a foodie’s belly, but it’s only slightly rounded – he doesn’t quite fit the size scale of elephants. “I don’t even know why myself; perhaps it’s something to do with my surname.” He thinks about it; he certainly knows the answer: “Or perhaps because I don’t let anything stop me.” When the war began in 2022, he joined the queue to enlist: “But there was a seven-kilometre queue; I certainly couldn’t stay there waiting all night. I turned up the next day and the queue hadn’t got any shorter. I managed it on 4 March.” And two weeks later he was already working with drones – not much to speak of at the time; at most, it was a Mavic and a joystick. “If we’d had the equipment we have today back then, everything would have been different and we would have saved many lives,” he says as he shows us Rys and Zmi – Lynx and Snake – two of the latest robot models sent to the front line for resupply, rescue and even assault missions. We had arranged to meet on a road in the Kherson region. Before Slon arrives, two drone operators turn up in shorts, flip-flops and a fisherman’s hat. They look like two passers-by heading for the surrounding fields; they try to look more like soldiers when they put on their camouflage. They are not just ordinary soldiers; amongst themselves, they call each other ‘sloniki’, the little elephants. Slon is a brand. “The Russians know it well,” they say. The lieutenant explains that they know it so well they track its movements. His latest headache came from an elderly woman in Kherson: “I was told that the Russians had found out my personal car had a ‘Slon’ number plate. It was an elderly woman in town who’d passed on the information. So I changed the number plate.” 

He arrived at our meeting in his official car, which certainly doesn’t go unnoticed given that the bonnet is topped by the head of a red-eyed elephant. There’s no need to ask him; the eyes are blood-red – they are his own and those of his ‘sloniki’ as they remotely direct their operations against the Russian army. After the rendezvous along the road, Slon and his team carry on and stop in a clearing amongst the vegetation; they explain that they arrived late because of enemy drones and, as they’d brought Rys and Zmi with them, they had to be very cautious during the journey. Slon begins to list all the operations they have already carried out with the robots, though the part he seems to favour most is the operations they can still carry out. Slon has a goal: to extend the ‘kill zone’ across the River Dnipro – the line separating the Ukrainian and Russian positions – in order to flush out the Russians and push them towards the isolated Crimea.

“The kill zone is around thirty kilometres, the aim is to extend it to sixty kilometres. Whilst our drones previously struggled to fly as far as forty or forty-five kilometres, we have now managed to get them as far as sixty-two kilometres without the Russians intercepting them.” Slon shows a video of one of his drones flying over the Black Sea; he has been a specialist in this type of operation since the start of the war, when he managed to gather data by flying a Mavic drone over enemy territory: “I showed them the footage and they said, ‘Now that’s a job well done’.” At that stage of the conflict, such a flight was very difficult; bringing back intelligence on Russian lines was not an everyday operation as it is today. “Now our task is to tighten the noose a little, secure the kill zone at around forty-five kilometres and hold it. We must apply pressure so that the Russians not only stop setting foot in the area and stay well away, but also fear sending in ground-based drones, because they would be taken out.” Between the expansion of the kill zone and the disruption of logistics, Russian troops attacking from the occupied part of the Kherson Oblast would find themselves isolated. Similar conditions led to Moscow’s retreats in previous years, first from the Kharkiv region and then from the city of Kherson. “Our task is to expand the kill zone and create the conditions for a counter-offensive,” says Slon. And he does not sound either delusional or boastful when he envisions the Ukrainian army’s next moves. His 34th Brigade is among the most highly decorated by the Ministry of Defence; its ability to eliminate and identify the enemy has enabled it to be among the best-equipped. In recent months, it has managed to destroy more than twenty artillery positions in the occupied part of the Kherson region, thereby reducing the number of shells reaching the city. The ‘sloniki’s’ ability to identify the enemy has improved, and Slon wants to dominate, at least from the air, the grey zone between the two lines, to prevent the Russians from entering or sending aerial or ground-based drones.

It is not hard to picture this ‘Elephant in the Room’ when it comes to decision-making; Slon stops at nothing, and his stories prove it. He is from Kropyvnyckyj, in the eastern region of Kirovohrad, but was sent straight to the southern area, close to the Black Sea. In April 2022, he led a grenade-launcher team deployed to operate in Tavrijsk, ‘the only unoccupied settlement in the Kherson region’. Having received orders to move, they went to a nearby village; their task was to operate in the estuaries. ‘We’d been told that wherever we were headed, we’d find everything – even saunas. There was nothing there; we could only stay at the home of an elderly man who, as well as us, had taken in all the village’s dogs and cats. We slept on the floor; he cooked flatbreads for us in a frying pan using water and flour. We could hunt wild boar, but there was no electricity, so we cut up the meat and salted it. We managed to refill a gas cylinder by cycling to the command post; when we got back, we started living like lords.” Until the Russian assault began – the one Slon and the others had been expecting, knowing they were only seven against a much larger enemy: “I’d never seen seven people under such heavy fire; they were firing at us with everything they had – Grad rockets, bullets, mines. We were dazed, but we held our ground.” With their eardrums shattered by the Russian barrage, they went to hospital as soon as reinforcements arrived. The war has changed completely since that April 2022; the Ukrainians now have far more resources at their disposal, and the Russians, too, have learnt to use drones for all manner of purposes, not just for attack. When Slon talks about the aim of expanding the ‘kill zone’, he means making it inaccessible and terrifying; he wants the enemy to fear losing their vehicles as well. Slon calls the Russians ‘orcs’, as many in Ukraine do. For some, the term alludes to something terrifying; for others, like the lieutenant, it refers instead to something clumsy and stupid: ‘Before, you could see the orcs driving their vehicles into areas like Oleshki and Hola Prystan. Now I can’t even tell you when the last time was that I saw an orc vehicle – perhaps a quad bike moving through the forest.” Getting vehicles through is tricky under the watchful eye of drones, and the Russians try to send in soldiers, forcing them into operations whose outcome is already a foregone conclusion. “Sometimes we use drones to get them to surrender. Once we dropped a bottle of water with instructions on how to surrender. Sometimes we’ve even fitted a loudspeaker to drones to address the Russians directly, but there have been instances where the orcs used their own drones to kill soldiers who had chosen to surrender.”

It’s clear that there’s one thing Slon particularly likes about its drones, and that is seeing, tracking, understanding and imagining. In a war fought from a distance, the drone is the eye through which the Sloniki study the enemy, looking them straight in the face. It’s the way they show them the way to safety or decide to kill them. From kilometres away, it seems that here, on both sides, the enemies know each other well: “We even talk; they’re the first to call us ‘sloniki’. We reply: ‘Yes, that’s us, and you’ll all die’.”