Meet Ukrainian drone team that demolished NATO forces in war game in Sweden

In a light pine forest on Sweden's fortress island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, a state-of-the-art Leopard 2 tank was in trouble.

The tank had barely begun moving out on an offensive mission before it had been spotted and tracked down by a drone belonging to the opposing forces.

Its pilot: 37-year-old Ukrainian reconnaissance drone pilot Kvita, who had, just weeks before, been fighting on positions outside the town of Rodynske in Donetsk Oblast, spotting and destroying very real Russian soldiers in a very real war.

"A soldier got out of the tank, took an anti-tank machine gun and started to shoot at our drone. It looked very funny from the outside," Kvita recalled.

"We were getting closer to it, and the tank started moving backwards and lifting up its main barrel."

The contrast — between a high-end piece of armor belonging to the world's most powerful military alliance and a cheap Chinese-made drone bought online — was bordering on the absurd.

"He thought we could hit him, and that's why he tried to kill us, to shoot at us. But a tank shooting at a Mavic is like trying to kill a fly with a machine gun," Kvita told the Kyiv Independent at a training ground in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

The episode was just one amusing anecdote from Aurora 26, a Swedish-led exercise in May involving Swedish troops and forces from 11 other countries, including France, the United States, and the Netherlands, all countries taking their own steps to try and absorb the lessons of Ukraine's drone war.

For the 15 Ukrainian soldiers from the 1st Azov Corps invited to play the opposing force, the mission was to test how NATO units would fare against a drone-savvy enemy, i.e. Russia.

Soon after their return, the Kyiv Independent spoke to two of the Ukrainian drone pilots involved, both serving in the National Guard's 20th Brigade, better known as Lubart.

"We didn't like the idea of the red duct tape (commonly worn by Russian soldiers in Ukraine), so we didn't wear it," said Kvita.

"But in general, we were OK with playing the Russians, because we understood that's the only way they can learn."

Aurora 26 was not the first case of combat-tested Ukrainian drone teams picking apart NATO forces.

In February, teams from two top brigades in Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces produced similar results at alliance exercises in Estonia.

But with NATO forces spread across dozens of separate militaries, each with their own internal cultures, progress in adapting to the paradigm shift of modern drone warfare continues to be sluggish, especially without any comparable combat experience.

High-stakes games

All in all, the Ukrainian contingent, coming both from Lubart and the 1st National Guard Brigade, took part in three separate exercises: a hybrid-style attack on an airfield, a mechanized assault, and a special forces mission.

On each mission, only six Ukrainians would be in the field at one time: a simple setup of one reconnaissance and one first-person-view (FPV) strike team each.

In the airfield mission, OPFOR, boosted by the Ukrainian drone teams, aimed to suppress NATO drone and electronic warfare (EW) assets before attacking on the ground.

"They were trying to jam us, they were trying to locate our drones," said 30-year-old FPV pilot Kozache, "and whenever we hit their jamming system, they turned it off."

Even on a simple technical level, the matchup of Ukrainian drones — honed by years of fighting in conditions of Russia's often powerful EW — with NATO's countermeasures proved very much lopsided.

"There was no problem with the drones or whatever. We didn't even use the (unjammable by EW) fiber-optic drones that we took," recalled Kozache.

The next exercise was the one that made headlines after the fact.

Simulating a mechanized assault across a wide front, NATO armored vehicles, including the same Leopard 2 tanks and CV90 infantry fighting vehicles used by the Ukrainian army, attempted to take the OPFOR positions by storm.

But just as in Ukraine, where mechanized assaults have become suicidal in almost all conditions for either side, the armor was spotted and neutralized long before it even reached the imagined line of contact.

"They did not expect that we would see them very early and destroy them; they could not even reach the target," said Kvita.

In total, Kozache said, the Ukrainian team started to lose count of the NATO equipment destroyed once the number passed 30.

"At some point, we found all their drone squads with fixed wings, so they couldn't see anything," Kozache recalled.

"By the time 50% of the vehicles were destroyed, there was no purpose to continue, but they still needed to do the exercise the right way, so they thought about the problems that caused them to lose so many vehicles, and we can try again."

Tables turned

Since drones, especially the mass use of FPV drones, began to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine from 2024 onwards, most NATO militaries have taken at least some early steps to integrate the new weapons into their force.

"They take in as much information as they can. They're trying to learn," said Kozache, "but it's not up to them to change, not the regular soldier."

"You need it to happen on the highest level, you need to prevent all the bureaucratic stops that can get in the way of really working with the drones."

NATO crews are learning the basics of FPV drone operations, Kozache said, but they still lack many of the battlefield habits Ukrainian units have learned over years of brutal fighting against a heavily armed enemy.

"They need to think about the safety of the pilots, they only have small antennas that don't cover the distance that we will cover with our systems." Kvita said. "They need to think about engineering, camouflaging positions, because whenever we were asked to locate the vehicles and stuff, it was only the camouflage net."

"They also need to practice their flying itself; they can control the drone, they can fly it around, but not the way that we can do."

After more than 10 years of war in which Ukraine constantly looked to NATO not only for material support but also for training standards and best practices, the rise of drone warfare has quickly and dramatically turned the tables.

"After the exercise of the tank battalion, they were gathering all the soldiers, and they were asking, can you tell us what we did good in that exercise, what we did bad?" recalled Kozache, "'Can you point to the mistakes? Can you show us something that we can improve?'"

After returning from Sweden, the drone teams of the 1st Corps returned straight to the real war, where, for the first time in years, Russian forces are struggling to advance anywhere on the front line, even in the peak of the spring summer offensive season.

Meanwhile, with the United States distracted by the war with Iran and President Donald Trump casting doubt on the commitments that bind NATO together, the question of who needs whom in the alliance’s relationship with Ukraine has become more fluid.

"They will become much stronger together with us, because now, from what we've seen, we're carrying a really big, powerful force, we have experience which we can share," said Kvita on Ukraine's future membership in NATO.

For Kozache, the last few years of war have taken the idea of NATO membership being a protective umbrella for Ukraine and turned it on its head.

"I wouldn't say it's crucial for us to join NATO because we have a strong army right now," he said.

"As long as we can give a fight to Russia — well, that's the purpose of NATO — to prevent Russia from carrying out wars of aggression."