They set targets deep inside Russia on fire: the untold story of the 14th Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Regiment
The grey, cold clouds of a February sky hang low over the equally grey slabs of a runway.
Dusk gradually settles over the strategic facility, clinging like dirty clumps of sticky candy floss to the trees around the airstrip, imperceptibly erasing the boundary between the cracked concrete and the fractured clouds.
Under the cover of the evening mist, people begin to gather on the airstrip. Then a group of cars appears. They’re towing some objects that resemble aircraft towards the aerodrome.
As the vehicles drive past us, the silhouette of the Ukrainian-made Liutyi (Fierce) strike drone, familiar from hundreds of videos, is soon recognisable.
Those videos are usually recorded by people who live deep within Russia, somewhere so far out in the wilds that the names of their towns seem like a joke to the average Ukrainian, or at most spark a memory of some long-forgotten, unfunny Soviet comedy.
The videos are filled with screams, panic, and "quintessentially Russian expletives" describing sexual relations with their own mothers, along with the obligatory ingredient – a huge fire at yet another oil refinery, fuel depot, airfield or ammunition warehouse.
Anyone who lives in Ukraine and wakes up holding their phone will have started their day with this fiery content more than once.
Few of them will have stopped to think about the fact that these explosions and fires deep inside Russia are actually the end of a story. And those stories begin at cold, darkness-shrouded airfields like this one, scattered across Ukraine.
"It won’t take long today. There are just over a dozen aircraft at this location, so we'll soon be done," an officer who goes by the alias Casper explains to the Ukrainska Pravda journalists. Casper is the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 14th Separate Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Regiment.
Until recent months this regiment had hardly featured at all in the media, as it is one of the most secretive units in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And for good reason. Its soldiers launch the lion’s share of Ukraine’s long-range strategic strike drones towards Russia, and this unit was once the testing ground for both long-range drone programmes and the first strike FPV drone formations.
Together with Casper and his soldiers, we watch as the Liutyi drones line up on the runway one after another.
"Now their teams will check all the key components – the warhead, engine and so on. They'll apply a special antifreeze solution to protect the aircraft from icing, and then we'll start the launch," the battalion commander explains.
Complete darkness has now fallen over the airfield. Only the service teams, their helmets equipped with red lights, continue working around the aircraft.
"Ready. Let’s go," Casper commands.
The first aircraft is rolled onto the runway, immediately followed by an old but still powerful German crossover in which a visibly tense driver and operator sit ready.
The car's headlights cut through the darkness, lighting up the Liutyi drone’s silhouette as the service crew perform a final check on the propeller. "Clear prop!" – and the engine roars to life.
This moment does slightly undermine the epic nature of the scene. Instead of a terrifying, thunderous roar, the Liutyi responds with the rattling falsetto of a lawnmower. But there’s no time for joking – Casper gives the order and the drone moves off. The car follows close behind, its wheels almost skidding, the crew inside controlling the acceleration and takeoff.
"The first phase of acceleration is smooth, but in the second phase, the drone picks up speed very rapidly and the car has to race after it at full throttle," the battalion commander explains.
In a matter of seconds, the chase between the car and the drone has vanished kilometres into the distance, leaving only a rattling sound trail behind. Then suddenly the sound rises vertically into the air, and somewhere far away in the silent darkness, the crossover’s brake lights flare as the driver slams on the brakes.
The car turns around and speeds back down the runway for round two. Meanwhile, the Liutyi sets off on its long journey. In five, six or eight hours’ time, it will jolt the Russian cities of Tikhoretsk, Kaluga or Syzran awake once again.
This carousel of launches goes like clockwork. But the road to such results has been long and hard – at least by Ukrainian standards, where "long" means just over two years. To our Western friends, this is an unattainable, jet-fuelled rate of progress.
For the first time, Ukrainska Pravda tells in detail the story of how the 14th Regiment was born – out of the audacity of a few officers who stumbled upon a drone in a warehouse, the willingness of senior military officials to take risks, and years of relentless work. Today, it is the only regiment of its kind in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and probably the world’s best-equipped unit for large-scale strategic drone strikes.
Chapter 1. The 14th Regiment emerges and the never-before-flown takes flight
"The first time I came across a UAV was probably in 2021 near Sievierodonetsk. Some volunteers had given us an Autel thermal drone, one of those orange ones. For us, it was a real treasure," a 14th Regiment officer and co-founder known as Fidel tells Ukrainska Pravda.
"So we took this Autel with us on a mission. We had a comrade, Sotyi (‘Hundredth’), who was considered a drone specialist back then. He launched the Autel with a VOG grenade attached to drop on the enemy. [A VOG is a 40mm fragmentation munition designed for under-barrel grenade launchers – ed.] But as soon as it took off, the VOG came off and fell straight down. It didn't land right where we were standing, thank God – it missed us by about five metres. Everyone survived, everything was fine. But we lost the drone shortly afterwards anyway.
In short, there was no understanding at the time that this was a technology that would change the war. It didn’t feel like a game-changer at all," Fidel recalls.
Fidel himself is a towering, broad-shouldered special forces officer – the kind of person whose handshake feels like he’s gripping your arm up to the elbow. Actually, everyone else featured in this story is built the same way.
Fidel was a successful businessman before the war. For security reasons he cannot disclose exactly what he did, but his business basically involved gaining control over problem assets and reviving them.
This principle of creating added value – turning a non-functioning asset into a profitable one – is worth remembering. It explains a great deal about how the 14th Regiment came to be.
After the onset of Russian aggression in 2014, Fidel and Casper, who’d been close friends for years, decided to join the resistance. Casper, now a battalion commander, recalls that moment.
"When the Maidan [the Revolution of Dignity] began, and then the war in 2014, Fidel and I decided we had to join the armed forces. But since neither of us had ever served, or even held a rifle, we figured we should at least take some courses – hire an instructor to learn how to shoot. And several courses later, we ended up signing contracts with the 3rd Regiment of the Special Operations Forces."
This was just before the full-scale Russian invasion. By autumn 2021, the two men were already engaged in classic special forces work – supporting infantry, hunting down saboteurs, and engaging in counter-sniper operations. There was no talk at all of unmanned systems back then. The full-scale war changed all that overnight.
Fidel recalls: "In the first six months of the full-scale war, our group operated during the Kyiv campaign, near Sumy, in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, and on the Kherson front.
It was only then that we realised that drones could complete missions without the need for someone to go in on foot, risking life and limb.
Unfortunately not everyone understood this. The army system is quite inert. There’s still this old-school mindset – 'we have to move in on foot, use classic special tactics'...
But the shift to UAVs was inevitable for us. We’d always been focused on seeking out something new.
And so we transformed our group from a purely tactical, old-school special forces group into the first dedicated unit in the country – actually the first in the world – with experience of operating practically every type of aerial UAV. And not just aerial ones."
The turning point that changed the fate of these men – and in many ways the course of the war itself – came as a result of pure coincidence.
"One day we accidentally came across some drones in a warehouse. Just stumbled upon them in crates. We asked ‘What’s this?’ and were told ‘Some crap that doesn’t fly.’ But we got curious and started figuring it out," Casper recalls with a satisfied smile.
He continues: "We even went abroad for training. And you know what happened? Turned out that so-called crap could fly – and hit targets. We tested it, and it got results.
It was a kamikaze drone with a range of 100-120 km. Foreign-made. Back then we had no concept of our own strike drones at all.
After training, we carried out one mission, then another – both were successful.
And then Fidel got the opportunity to meet Valerii Zaluzhnyi [then the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine]."
In general it would be pretty unusual for an ordinary group commander from the Special Operations Forces (SOF) to go and present some ideas of his to the commander-in-chief of the army. But if ever there was a time when such things could happen, it was the euphoric summer of 2022, after the Russians were pushed out from the north and started being driven back from Kharkiv.
Fidel recalls: "In August 2022, we saw some long-range strike systems that were not being used as they could have been. There was no system, no infrastructure. If we look at all the key units now, like Madiar [the 414th Strike UAV Brigade], Achilles [the 429th Separate Unmanned Aerial Systems Regiment], K2 [the newly-created K-2 Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment], Code 9.2 [the 92nd Separate Mechanised Brigade], Nemesis [the 412th Nemesis UAV Battalion] and so on, they all have their own R&D component and production base.
But none of that existed in August 2022. We were dealing with quite low-level technology. It wasn’t HIMARS or anything like that. What we had was improvised, built pretty much from off-the-shelf civilian components.
And it just so happened that at that moment, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting with the commander-in-chief. We went to him with a specific proposal, saying, 'Give us a battalion and we will save this [long-range strike] programme.'
Literally within 48 hours, we drew up the staff list for the unit, made a list of the people we wanted to recruit, and outlined how we would operate.
Valerii Fedorovych [Zaluzhnyi] quickly approved everything, and by September 2022 we had our first deep-strike battalion, and I became its commander.
Fortunately, they’d created an atmosphere in which you were given the opportunity to make things happen. You could come along, present your idea and take responsibility for it. And you wouldn’t be taking anything away from anyone else; you’d pick up what was there and not working and say, 'I’ll make this work.' And importantly, that atmosphere is still there: Oleksandr Stanislavovych [Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi] is always monitoring the situation."
Fidel and his friends were doing what they did best: finding a problem asset and making it work.
A lot of people, including some who are fairly well-known in the media, helped arrange the meeting with the commander-in-chief and set up the regiment in the initial stages. However, in autumn 2024 part of that team split off from the 14th Regiment and formed their own unit – the 413th Raid Battalion.
Chapter 2. The first missions and the world's first FPV battalion
The 14th Regiment is now one of the most powerful units in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, capable of conducting extremely complex operations involving hundreds of long-range drones. But it all started with much humbler beginnings.
As Casper jokingly puts it, "The regiment’s evolution has been like going from a UAZ to a Bradley."
"The number one problem was that the people attempting to launch the first drones didn't have any specialised training. Simple as that. They were taught by people who’d trained on those drones for two days at best. So they often didn’t fly. We had to travel, to go elsewhere to be trained by professionals.
Our first mission, I think, was in Donetsk Oblast, though I can't remember exactly. But those early missions were a complete mess. Those weren’t the drones we have now, not even close.
My first drone was launched from a ramp – a huge catapult with a rubber band. And to stretch the rubber band, you had to hook it onto a jeep. The car would get stuck in the mud in the field. Well, I don’t want to swear too much... To launch five drones, you'd be struggling with them all night," Casper recalls with a smile.
"But there wasn’t a lot of electronic warfare or air defence back then, so even those UAVs managed to reach their targets. They were small drones with small payloads, but they’d get there and boom – some small fuel storage point would be burning on the enemy's side. It was really interesting work.
Now we have drones that can fly 2,000 km. In fact we have a whole range of drones designed for different tasks and distances. But at the beginning we had just one, flying 100-120 km, electric-powered.
And the planning has changed drastically! We need to understand that at the beginning, no one had any expertise. Physically: how to operate them, where to launch them... Everyone thinks launching a drone is 'Oh, just fly it.' It’s not that simple," the officer from the 14th Regiment adds.
A key factor in the formation of the special battalion that would later evolve into the 14th Regiment was that the core team members came from the SOF environment and were all on the same page.
"Why are special operations groups the ideal human capital for deep strikes? The Russians do the same, by the way. They have special groups operating their Shaheds and other drones. It’s the same with our Western partners," Fidel says.
"When I saw the level of people working with this low-tech stuff from our allies in 2022, something clicked for me. Then it became clear why we needed to be working on this ourselves. Because our SOF group is the kind of unit that can handle any situation.
A group like ours understands all the conventional weapons, even the complexities of moving a helicopter from one place to another. And this component – trained people – is crucial.
Because launching our deep strikes involves a lot of tiny details. It’s not the same as launching a HIMARS, where you press a button, the system does all the calculations, and off it goes. That’s very complicated and responsible work too. But we’re not launching 'wonder-weapons' like those. Sometimes your drone doesn’t fly, the warhead doesn’t fit or the lid won’t shut, so you have to tweak it," Fidel explains.
After the first deep-strike battalion had been operating 100+ km deep into Russian territory for several weeks, Fidel's team and the General Staff decided to experiment further, this time arming small tactical groups on the line of contact with attack drones.
At this point someone else enters the story – an officer who goes by the alias Kyt (Whale). In December 2022, he was asked to lead a new battalion that would eventually form the backbone of all the current FPV strike units.
Kyt, also a former SOF member, had started fighting in 2014, been demobilised, and then returned to the front line when the full-scale invasion began.
Kyt told Ukrainska Pravda that he had become interested in drones even before he went back to the front.
"Even before the full-scale war, I had several friends who flew regular civilian drones. And I was curious to understand what this technology was all about, especially since it was already being used in military units. So I bought myself a DJI Mavic Mini 2 to learn on.
Even if we’re not talking about FPVs, but about drones for reconnaissance or explosive drops, there was already an understanding that this technology gives you at least a slight advantage. And we know that even a small advantage is an advantage, and those small percentages add up to the overall result. You can gain a fraction of a percent, and that’s already an advantage over the enemy."
The potential offered by mobile (then still invulnerable) FPV drones was recognised at the highest levels of command within the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Kyt recalls that the first strike battalion was created in early 2023 and the unit began performing its first combat missions in Zaporizhzhia Oblast in mid-spring 2023.
"Once the senior command understood the idea behind creating such a unit, they realised that this was a technology that would work.
The advantage was that we were introducing technologies capable of doing a job that was previously only possible with heavy weaponry. And we could do it from much greater distances.
In early 2022, only small units and groups of enthusiasts used FPVs on the battlefield. But we were talking about creating an entire large unit that would specialise in this on a permanent basis and be properly equipped and operate much more systematically.
We were the model, and it then became clear that this had to be scaled up. After our group was established, strike UAV companies began appearing within regular units."
When FPV drones became a widespread phenomenon on the battlefield and entire UAV regiments emerged within the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi reassigned Kyt’s unit to work with long-range drones.
As Fidel explains, the simultaneous creation of both a long-range strike battalion and an FPV strike battalion necessitated a rethink of the role of drones in warfare.
"Back in 2022 we didn’t fully realise that different systems could function within a single ecosystem thanks to technology. But right from the start, our regiment was conceived as a unit comprising four components: tactical (20+ km), operational (50-100 km), strategic (1000+ km), and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance).
This represented a certain paradigm shift, one that traditional career military personnel sometimes struggle to grasp. Nevertheless, we were the first to develop complex operations involving UAVs across all levels, from tactical drones to strategic strike platforms."
Fidel’s team was brought into the General Staff in 2023 to integrate UAVs into the army’s structure. There, drawing on the experience of their battalions, they were tasked with developing a concept for the use of drones in modern warfare.
Thus, in the autumn of that year, the General Staff established the Central Directorate of Unmanned Systems, which later evolved into the Main Directorate – effectively the highest level of representation within the General Staff.
To a large extent, these developments laid the groundwork for the eventual formation of a separate Unmanned Systems Command.
"We built our expertise, and thanks to that, we were able to implement these changes at the General Staff level. I’m not afraid to say that if it hadn’t been for the 14th Separate Regiment, this continuity in the development of the UAV component within the Ukrainian Armed Forces would not have been possible," Fidel concludes.
While Fidel shifted his focus to reforms in the General Staff, the 14th Regiment was fully established, and following a job interview with then-Deputy Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, it gained its current commander, alias "Charlie". He has been fighting since 2014, took part in the defence of Donetsk airport, and has been awarded all three classes of the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi.
Chapter 3. Ukrainian drones fly and various parts of Russia burn
Until recently, very few people outside the Armed Forces of Ukraine knew the 14th Regiment existed. Very little information about its operations is publicly available. Even in their conversations with Ukrainska Pravda, the regiment’s commanders try to avoid giving precise answers so as not to provide the Russians with a clear understanding of its scale or range of means.
Yet even these veiled descriptions are enough to take your breath away if you have any interest in modern drone warfare. For example, here’s how Casper broadly outlines the structure of the regiment's work.
"When it comes to combat operations, the 14th Regiment operates from 50 km behind the front line to 2,000 km deep into enemy territory.
We also have a unit of reconnaissance drones. They operate within a range of 50-100 km for our troops.
There are drones that are used for laser targeting to guide other strike systems from various defence forces units. That means our scouts find a target, pass the data to HIMARS, illuminate it with a laser – and the strike lands. Or they pass the same information to our teams that use operational-level attack drones, and they hit the targets.
Then there’s the strategic level. Few people realise that strategic strikes have a direct impact on the front line. I’m thinking back to how enemy military depots were destroyed during the Kursk operation – the Tikhoretsk arsenal was reduced to ashes.
That might seem far away, but it has a direct impact on the front. It was clear from intercepted communications that our enemies were suffering from a severe shortage of shells. And if a large fuel and lubricants depot was destroyed, then their tanks would have no fuel to run on. Everything is interconnected.
There is no other unit like ours in Ukraine’s Armed Forces. In fact there’s no other unit in the Armed Forces that can even be compared to us. There are deep-strike groups within special services – they’re definitely great, no doubt about that. But they’re not a regiment, just separate groups. Their work is not on the same scale.
Our regiment can easily launch hundreds of drones in a single mission. More if necessary. We can carry out a wide variety of tasks independently – although our tactics work exceptionally well in coordination with other structures.
Missions have become far more complex now. And when you work in synergy with all other units, you get outstanding results."
Interaction with other units and the regiment’s place within the structure of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a fascinating subject in itself. When Ukrainska Pravda published its first major piece about the Ukrainian long-range Liutyi drone, the role of the special service groups mentioned by Casper was clearly visible. They were the first to believe in what was then a raw, untested drone, they took the risk of working with it, and they proved that it could be a game-changer.
Today the 14th Regiment is the unit that works with Liutyi on the largest scale – at industrial levels – as well as every other type of deep-strike drone without exception.
There are now several key hubs for deep strikes: the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) and Defence Intelligence of Ukraine (DIU) on one side, and the Special Operations Forces and the 14th Regiment in the Armed Forces.
Fidel explains his regiment’s role within the defence forces system as follows.
"Overall, I believe that the 14th Regiment is involved in 30-40% of deep strikes. But these are no longer operations by a single service. They are complex special operations involving all the defence forces.
Our task as a unit was to ensure that the Armed Forces and the General Staff had a deep-strike component.
Because it’s the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff who are directly responsible for the war as a whole, and only they have the full picture. That is why it is crucial that this component exists and develops under their command within the Armed Forces. Institutionally and from a state perspective, this is the right approach.
When the Unmanned Systems Forces were established, we were placed under their command, although as a regiment we are already a fairly autonomous structure."
One of the regiment’s greatest sources of pride is that nearly all the main strike systems they use are Ukrainian developments.
"It all started with flying lawnmowers, and now we are working with modified lawnmowers. It might seem like the technology hasn’t changed drastically, but we have now reached the point where quality depends on quantity.
We’re currently seeing a significant leap forward in our systems because the government is putting substantial resources, intellectual capital and energy into their development, providing opportunities for progress.
For our part, we have seen that without technical support for the equipment, without R&D and production, nothing happens. From our first attempts to work with certain models, we realised that each one had to be completely taken apart first. That’s how we saw what was what, how it worked, what needed changing, and how to give the manufacturers proper feedback.
One of the biggest challenges we face now is speeding up the cycle from battlefield feedback to production.
Our drones are better than their Western counterparts. When it comes to deep strikes, that's 100% true. Because our manufacturers are in direct contact with the battlefield! Of course they don’t go on all the missions, but they get fast, high-quality feedback. That’s the only thing that works," Fidel explains, revealing the secret behind Ukraine’s success in deep-strike drone development.
Casper fully agrees with his comrade’s high praise for Ukrainian drones.
"About 80-90% of the drones our regiment uses are domestically produced now, and the other 10% come from abroad. At the start it was the other way round. Foreign models are like Toyotas now, while Ukrainian ones are Mercedes. Ours are just leagues ahead.
All of this success is down to the fact that we have constant feedback and are continuously improving. And our manufacturers – honestly, they’re brilliant. They always take our feedback on board.
I’m in touch with them directly, so I can immediately point out any issues: if something goes wrong, I tell them straight away that it needs to be fixed quickly. And our manufacturers are extremely adaptable. They take everything into account, and the very next batch comes with improvements.
That’s why hitting a target is no longer a problem. Drones are now a highly precise tool. And now we have specially trained, experienced people who understand exactly how to calculate a route so the drone gets to where it needs to be.
We’re not fully supplied yet. But manufacturers are ramping up production significantly, so I think we’ll reach full provision by the end of the year. And that’s just fantastic. Especially compared to 2023 – it’s like night and day.
The enemy is fighting back. It’s no longer the case that once a drone flies a certain distance there’s no air defence. Now there are point-defence systems and powerful electronic warfare at the sites. So now we need to refine our tactics – how to calculate the number of drones and the types needed to ensure that the required percentage reaches the target.
And even if only 20-30% get through, the chaos they create is enormous. Say 30 drones, each carrying a 50-kg warhead – that’s what I call a proper 'greeting'. They blow up everything there.
And there are other drones that carry 'a little' more."
* * *
Standing on the runway in the middle of a dark, cold night, watching a well-coordinated stream of Ukrainian Liutyi drones being launched into the sky, you can’t help but feel astonished.
At the moment when the Russian dictator announced the start of his invasion to the world, neither this drone, nor this unit carrying out the launch, nor even a clearly formulated idea of such deep strikes existed.
History is being made before our very eyes.
"I think the key factor in the development of our long-range strike systems is our ability to maintain our capacity for rapid change," Fidel says, as he reflects on the nature of this fast-paced technological evolution.
"The exponential impact of unmanned systems has grown so frantically that no one could have kept up with it. Even if you put the CEO of Google in charge of managing these changes, he wouldn’t be able to.
But this readiness to change is in our DNA – we are open to it. The Russians, as the Kyiv campaign has shown, do everything by the book. If they’re told to dig in a certain way, they dig in exactly that way. They’re being hit from all sides, standing there half-surrounded, and you think: just look at the situation a bit more flexibly – there are other options, other ways to act. But they can’t do that. And we can."
Casper agrees with Fidel: "We’re carrying out missions right now that will go down in history."
He adds: "There are some things we can’t talk about. But those that are public knowledge – like Tikhoretsk [one of the largest Russian military arsenals – ed.] or the 67th arsenal of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Russian Defence Ministry [in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast] – they were completely destroyed.
Our Western partners don’t have units like our 14th Regiment. They simply don’t exist.
Before, our Western counterparts were the ones training us. But obviously it was a bit easier fighting in Afghanistan, where your enemy had neither air defence nor electronic warfare – nothing. It’s a completely different story when you’re up against an equal opponent. That’s why now, our foreign partners are learning from us in every area.
This will be our expertise after the war, no doubt about it. I already have mates who were wounded and unfortunately can’t fight any more, but they’re now working abroad.
Fidel and I once developed the concept of a ‘technological special forces unit’ – one that combines traditional weapons with drones. I think they’ll come back to this idea at some point.
During wartime, the army reforms itself. But once the fighting ends and full attention can be given to reforms, I believe that in a few years, we’ll have the most skilled and experienced army in the world."
Author: Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda
Translation: Anastasiia Yankina, Tetiana Buchkovska and Anna Kybukevych
Editing: Teresa Pearce