The drone web: how consumer drones have covered Ukraine's battle lines with fiber optic cable

There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising evolution in the conflict has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online.

A growing part of the drone activity in the Russo-Ukranian war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired: fiber optic cables, stretching from drone operators to the drones themselves, spool out 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 fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. In today's Endless Thread episode, we explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.