The new ambush tactics are made possible thanks to Russia's increasingly frequent use of fiber-optic drones. These are unmanned, armed flying objects, equipped with a fiber-optic cable up to 30 km long, which connects the operator with the drone.
Unlike radio-controlled FPV drones, this technique allows you to control the unmanned aerial vehicle even from… long distance close to the ground and a lightning-fast strike when needed.
A new enemy of the Ukrainian army
Russian “sleeper drones” are becoming an increasingly bigger problem for Ukraine – confirms soldier Volodymyr from the 4th National Guard Brigade “Rubiezh” in an interview with “Bild”.
— Russian “sleeper drones” can wait for up to six hours for their military target. But if no one comes and the battery runs out, they also attack civilians so as not to lose their chance, he explains to a military reporter stationed north of Pokrovsk.
That's why Ukraine is building more and more mesh corridors along the front lines to protect their logistics and civilians from Russian attackers.
The problem is that fiber-optic-guided “sleeper drones” can be guided with extreme precision and exploit gaps in the network as little as one meter wide to fly through them and wait for their targets in a supposedly safe corridor.
Ukraine is also increasingly using this technique, but to a much lesser extent than Russia. The reason: Russia's defense industry, backed by China, currently produces more than 1,200 fiber-optic-guided unmanned aerial vehicles a day. Ukraine and its Western allies don't produce even 100. And even those are mostly “made in China” – produced in China.
A key moment of the war
According to an analysis by the American think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russia won in November the biggest territorial successes in Ukraine in a year. Within a month, Russian forces occupied 701 square kilometers of territory – the second largest monthly advance during the entire invasion.
According to ISW data, by the end of November Russia controlled 19.3 percent. territory of Ukraine. Before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, it controlled approximately 7%. Ukrainian territory – including occupied Crimea and part of Donbas. Since the beginning of 2025, Moscow has occupied almost 5,400 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory – almost 2,000 square kilometers more than in the same period last year.
At the same time, intense efforts to end the war are taking place. Steve Witkoff, a close associate of Donald Trump and one of the co-authors of the peace plan for Ukraine, flies to Moscow for talks. In the Russian capital will meet with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday afternoon.
On Sunday, representatives of the US and Ukrainian authorities held talks in Florida on ending the Russian invasion. On the American side, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff and President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, participated. The Ukrainian delegation was led by Rustem Umerov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
