American Firepower Vs Russian Positions: Hunted by Drones, Ukrainian Artillery Crew Make Each Shell Count

“Jimmy” quickly ventures his head out of the dugout, checks the sky, and takes a deep drag on his cigarette. He’s only a few meters from artillery shells, chaotically stored further down in the dark dugout to protect them from a spark that could blow us all into pieces. 

Jimmy is a young artillery gunner in the 28th Brigade, part of a crew manning a US-made M109. Originally from Odesa, he’s cracking jokes easily, and it seems the war hasn’t taken its usual toll on his seemingly even mood. 

The machine itself is concealed on the other side of the dugout under camouflage nets. Between two cigarettes, the crew is waiting for the next order to shoot at the Russians, also hiding a few kilometers away.

Staying out of sight

The entrance to the shelter is hard to find, even when we arrive in broad daylight. As soon as we arrive, we need to hide the car and quickly run into the shelter’s shadow. 

In this area, the more you’re hidden, the better. The only things that could betray the position’s presence are the movements of Ukrainian soldiers from one part of the dugout to another. Staying too long in the open has become a luxury nobody can afford anymore. 

“Can you smoke here, near the shells?” I ask, with a nervous laugh.

“No, no, we've moved away from the shells—we're not smoking there, we're smoking right here,”  Jimmy says, pointing out at the metallic mess behind us with his cigarette butt. “As one of my good friends says, the best thing is to be careful when smoking,” he adds with a large smile. 

This position wasn’t there a few months ago. Like many brigades around, the 28th Brigade had to operate a tactical retreat from Chasiv Yar, a town only a 20-minute drive north of Kostiantynivka, the Donetsk region. 

Back in July, Russia claimed to have captured Chasiv Yar, a small city of 12,000 people before the war, now lying in ruins like nearby Toretsk. It took them a year and a half to claim to capture the razed town, yet in August, Ukraine was still denying Russian forces full control of the city. 

Still, Russia’s potential foothold in Chasiv Yar allows its drone pilots to expand their kill zone to the road between Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, to try and hit logistics between the two cities, as well as cut reinforcement and support coming from the Ukrainian side. 

The city hasn’t been spared, with the latest Russian artillery shelling claiming three lives and injuring six people on September 13, according to local authorities.

Only a couple of hours earlier, our team was crossing the deserted city’s main street, in broad daylight, windows down to hear drones, while Yevhen, the 28th Brigade’s press officer, was fidgeting with his drone detector. 

All we could hear was the rumbling of artillery, the beep of the drone detector, and all we could see were burned cars on the side of the roads. Some of them weren’t there a month ago. 

“How’s the situation?” we asked, knowing the answer already.

“Not great,” Yevhen laconically replied.

On the road,  trucks were already carrying dragon’s teeth for new fortifications, while workers were erecting pylons in haste for anti-drone nets to protect vehicles from the Russian drones. Some hastily excavated dugouts scarred the surrounding countryside, adding to the palpable sense of foreboding.

Artillery vs. drones

“Things might be good today, bad tomorrow,” Jimmy confirms. “No one really knows how it’ll go in this situation. Sometimes we have more people, sometimes they do. Sometimes they shoot well, sometimes we shoot well.”

The risks have worsened since the start of 2025, when the Russians began using fiber-optic drones, which can’t be jammed or detected until the last moment. Russian forces’ drone pilots' positions have become a priority for Ukraine’s artillery. 

Both the crew and their self-propelled M109—designed for shoot-and-scoot tactics—can’t afford to leave their dugout anymore. 

With its 6-meter-long cannon and 155-mm NATO standard caliber, the M109 can shoot up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) and up to 21 kilometers (13 miles) with a special fragmentation shell. It won’t need to shoot that far, because the Russians are only a few kilometers away. 

Suddenly, the walkie-talkie sizzles. “Crew, into position!” says a voice on the other side. 

“Copy that!” Jimmy says, before running to the artillery gun, quickly followed by the rest of the crew. 

As one soldier goes and lifts the camouflage net, the driver has already jumped inside the vehicle. He ignites the motor, and the 30-ton beast moves on, just enough to give the cannon enough space to move without being spotted by some Russian drone. 

Meanwhile, Jimmy and another crew member swiftly bring shells into the hull. They have to assemble the explosive charge and the shell inside before closing it with a detonator and feeding it to the M109’s launcher. As the loaders scatter around, another soldier prepares to pull the rope.

“Ready?”

“Fire!”

The blast is deafening, and smoke fills the position. The crew is already correcting coordinates to send more shells in a war fog. They have done this a thousand times, and everyone knows exactly their role. Every second counts to do as much damage as possible to the other side. 

The buzz of death

All of a sudden, Jimmy freezes, listening to the sky. 

“FPV, guys, FPVs!” he yells, pushing us to run back under cover. “Quick, in the shelter, and the machine too!” Chaos ensues. 

The spades stabilizing the guns are stuck in the wet sludge, meaning getting the machine back into the dugout is painfully slow—these are precious lost seconds for these men when drones are flying.

“Fuck that!” the soldiers swear while scratching the mud with a shovel before putting the spades back in a heavy grunt. 

“Serhii, we’re getting the artillery back into the dugout, give me the gun!” he says, while grabbing an anti-drone shotgun to take it down. 

We see Jimmy heading out and running under a nearby tree near the entrance. “Here it is!” he says, breathing loudly. 

In a suspended, floating moment, everybody freezes and waits, preparing for the drop of its deadly charge. After a few seconds that seem to last an eternity, the buzzing sound finally flies away.

Here, the crew can only count on drone detectors and rifles to take down drones. One is a Ukrainian-made semi-automatic Safari HG-105M shotgun with 12-gauge cartridges and magazine capacities of 5 or 10 rounds. The other is a 1952 rifle with a double trigger, which wouldn’t stand out in a museum.

This is yet another example of how Ukrainian forces have had to resort to ingenuity and sometimes primitive technology to counter the resources Russia has launched into battle.

“It’s older than me, but it works,” one of the crew members laughs. 

Russian infantry waves

Despite the close call, everyone soon relaxes and takes a breather before heading to the main part of the dugout, the “command center” where everybody’s bunkbed is tightly done. 

There we meet “Chess,” the commander, a solid-built fighter with a no-nonsense look and piercing eyes, sits enthroned in the middle of the room, keeping a close look at maps opened on this tablet, waiting for the next order to hit at Russian positions. 

The targets were some infantry and Russian FPV drone pilots' positions that the Ukrainians used to hold a year ago, he explains. The Russians keep on assaulting daily, but they keep their heavy equipment aside so far. 

“Recently, there were those 'mangals’ (military slang for tanks and heavy armored vehicles) moving in, and we hit them,” Chess explains. “Artillery hits them, FPV drones hit them. So far, everything has been stopped. God willing, it’ll keep going that way.”

Russia has remained “committed to slow, grinding advances on the battlefield through attritional infantry assaults—constraining the maximum possible rate of Russian advance to foot pace,” according to an August 16 report by the US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War.

However, that doesn’t mean Russia won’t try another push before winter settles. Icy roads, bad weather, and a lack of foliage leave soldiers at the mercy of drones and complicate further assault in the open. 

Shell-hungry war

The big unknown is whether or not Ukraine has enough shells to sustain this fight, as the US seems to have stopped weapons delivery to Ukraine in July, threatening the frontline in this shell-hungry war. 

At the time, the US decision reportedly involved not only Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, GMLRS missiles used by HIMARS rocket artillery, but also 155mm artillery shells originally promised by the Biden administration. 

However, on Sept. 16, the Trump administration reportedly cleared its first U.S. weapons aid packages worth $500 million paid by NATO allies for Ukraine, according to two Reuters’ undisclosed sources.

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that in August 2024, the advantage of Russian troops in artillery ammunition was about 1:3, with Russia using more than 44,000 artillery rounds per day. However, as of July, this ratio had dropped to almost 1:2.

Meanwhile, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said on July 17 that shell shipments to Ukraine for 2025 are expected to reach 1.8 million rounds, in the framework of a Czech-led initiative backed by 11 countries and frozen Russian assets.

Overall, Ukraine expects to receive approximately three million artillery shells this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in May.

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Ukraine Expects to Receive 3 Million Artillery Shells in 2025

May 05, 2025 10:52

As of July,  the initiative has delivered 850,000 rounds of ammunition to the front, including 320,000 155 mm artillery shells, according to the Czech Ministry of Defense.

Like every artillery brigade, this brigade is using 155mm NATO shells at an extremely high rate to obliterate Russian assaults.

Watermelon

“They come in small groups, but there are many of them,” says Jimmy. “And there aren’t that many of us. Right now, we’re mostly on the defensive. But damn, we’re trying—we’re doing what we can.”

Then he paints a picture of the shifting front line.

“One kilometer is ours, then one kilometer is theirs, then it’s ours again, then it’s theirs again. Like that—bit by bit. I think it will all end by the New Year. By then, I’ll already be by the sea, in Odesa,” Jimmy says with a smile.

After three and a half years of full-scale war, these soldiers’ motivation to hold the line is intact, despite yet another bleak winter of war ahead of them. 

We turn to Chess to ask him what keeps him going, but he’s deep into his maps and doesn’t seem to hear us at first. 

Any vehicle moving out after 3 pm around Kostiantynivka has a higher chance of getting targeted by drones because only soldiers can drive after the daylight curfew, but the soldiers insist we stay a bit longer. 

They brought a massive watermelon and insist we share it with them before we go. Everybody eats in silence, before Chess finally answers the question. 

I have my family at home. I have four daughters and grandchildren. This war has taken everything from me. I’ll be here until the very end, and we will win no matter what.

Chess

M109 Commander

“I want to live in a free country, so that our children can walk safely without anything falling on their heads,” he adds. “Someday, our children and grandchildren will appreciate what we’ve done. I believe we’re doing the right thing, and in any case, we will be victorious.”