When you travel through a country at war, you cannot blindly trust the routes offered by your mobile phone’s navigator. It is also necessary to notice the detours that are not marked on the maps, and to know how to scrutinize the type of check point what you are going through. Because those details tell you how close you are to the zone of hostilities.
At least they indicated it before; before unmanned aerial vehicles changed the Ukrainian war forever. It’s been months since these Drones took over the skies of Donbassand now you have to pay attention to new signals to know if you are getting too close to the combat front.
The most unmistakable sign is that the road you are driving on is covered by a kind of giant mosquito net, made of Ancient-dog. And the main function of these networks is to stop the FPV (first-person vision drones) that the Moscow Army launches indiscriminately against vehicles circulating in the north of Donetsk.
“Technically they are designed so that the drone gets stuck in them, entangled,” explains Evgeny Varchenko, head of the civil-military cooperation department of the 11th Army Corps of Ukraine.
The soldiers under Varchenko’s responsibility are in charge of installing these protective barriers on the roads leading to the combat front of the Lyman-Kostyantynivka axis. “We have already covered more than 200 kilometers of roadsand the work continues,” he assures.
And to understand what this work is like – which is carried out while avoiding traffic and Russian air attacks that do not let up for a single day –, it is best to accompany the military units that carry out the entire process for a day.
almost invisible
The vision you have when approaching one of these work teams is very strange: it seems that the soldiers are manipulating the air, with nothing in their hands. But this has an explanation: the new meshes that Ukraine is installing are so fine, that are not perceived well from afar.
Upon reaching its height, everything makes sense, and what seemed like air turns green: a group of men carry enormous rolls of mesh – made with a very fine plastic of this color – which they deposit on both sides of the road. Several more soldiers begin to unroll them, and the rest raise the nets several meters above the ground perched on cranes.
There are about a hundred people working in a coordinated manner. And in addition to spreading the nets from side to side of the road, wooden posts must be erected every few meters, and weave a skeleton of steel cables that works as support.
“The regional Administration helps us with some of the materials,” acknowledges Varchenko, who emphasizes that the networks also protect civilian vehicles in the area. The truth is that the Russian FPV do not discriminate, and attacks against NGO facilities, rescue workers and even ambulances do not stop growing both in Donbas and in Kherson.
“We have seen that when the enemy begins to attack a specific section of road, it launches its drones against civil and military transport in the same way; but after installing these networks, the FPV are not effective, the Russians need larger drones and they only launch them against large military equipment,” says the officer.
deterrents
Varchenko insists that the mere presence of these networks has a deterrent effect on Russian drone pilots: “They understand that they will not be able to attack their target with precision, and that they will most likely lose the vehicle without achieving anything,” he continues detailing. “Since they began to settle in this part of Donbas – in the summer of 2025 – the number of attacks has decreased considerably”, he adds.
However, anti-drone networks are not completely effective and they are not suitable for the entire territory either. “This is precisely the danger of FPV drones, that there is no 100% effective mechanism to neutralize them,” this officer emphasizes.
“If we talk about drones that operate with a radio signal, the enemy continually modifies them to evade our signal inhibitor systems; and if we talk about FPVs that operate with fiber optics, currently the only countermeasure is brute force,” he asserts.
“Urban areas of cities cannot be protected with networks, and at this time there are only two options: it is evacuated to all the civilians of Donbas, or we put a hunting weapon in their hands to each one of them and we teach them how to shoot down drones,” he emphasizes emphatically.
The problem is that there are 198,500 civilians living in the part of Donbas that is still under Ukrainian control, and more than 15,000 are in active combat zones, where it is already very difficult to carry out evacuations – and it is impossible to install anti-drone networks.
From the combat front to civil use
These anti-drone barriers began to be used in frontline positions, where Ukrainian soldiers used fishing nets to protect their posts. The idea was then developed to protect roads, where civilian vehicles were increasingly attacked.
They tried nets of different densities at first; But after verifying that it is enough for the holes in the grid to be smaller than a drone, a standard size began to be used – with larger cells – to reduce costs.
“The value of cooperation lies in the fact that it allows us to face unexpected challenges,” reflects Varchenko. “And thanks to the help of regional administrations we can respond to the changes that occur in the midst of war and, for example, install these infrastructures that improve everyone’s security.”
“But today it is impossible to completely guarantee the safety of the civilian population living in the most compromised areas, because there is no technical means to stop these drones,” the officer insists before saying goodbye.
The UN wants to elevate these to the category of crimes against humanity. “manhunts” with FPV drones that are being carried out by Russian troops in Ukrainian cities, resulting in the forced displacement of tens of thousands of people.
But while waiting for this United Nations complaint to be of any use, it seems that the only option that the citizens of Donbas have to protect themselves from Putin’s FPV is to abandon their homes, their memories and everything they have. And yet, they can be blown up with a drone while they are fleeing to leave the war behind.