{"id":2428,"date":"2026-10-11T18:14:03","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T22:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/?p=2428"},"modified":"2026-10-11T18:23:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T22:23:27","slug":"the-political-ontology-of-ukrainian-drone-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/2026\/10\/11\/the-political-ontology-of-ukrainian-drone-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"The political ontology of Ukrainian drones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m going to make a case here that would have struck most observers as counter-intuitive, if not absurd, five years ago. (That\u2019s less true for observers who know Ukrainian history, but part of my point will be that knowledge of Ukrainian history is not exactly widespread among western, or any<\/em>, non-Ukrainian observers.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the last couple of years, Ukrainian drones have been targeting Russian oil refineries, fuel storage and logistics hubs, military bases, airfields, and shipping assets (see full list below). That makes Ukraine\u2019s drone warfare a leading edge of democratic resistance against Russian neo-imperialism. That Russia\u2019s attempt to take over Ukraine is a neo-imperial project, and that Ukraine\u2019s resistance represents not some western plot but the genuine desires of the majority of Ukrainians, can hardly be questioned any longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukrainian drones have more recently begun to target Russian data centers<\/a>, hitting at least three of the largest belonging to tech\/AI giant Yandex<\/a> (sometimes called “Russia’s Google”), as well as the Wildberries and Ozon e-commerce distribution warehouses. This development is noteworthy for reasons I want to expand on here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The larger context is one in which US support for Ukraine has declined to practically nil, with Donald Trump just announcing a deal to purchase Russian diesel, and then calling for President Zelensky to be replaced by a president who\u2019s willing to cave in to Washington\u2019s and Moscow\u2019s pressure to end the war on Putin\u2019s terms. The absurdity of Trump\u2019s announcement<\/a> after last month\u2019s signing<\/a> of the Lindsay O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act<\/a>, which authorized tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil, has not gone unnoticed. Trump\u2019s long history of coziness with Putin\u2019s regime is of course well known; Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s summary from yesterday<\/a> is as good as any on that topic. None of this is veiled anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Zelensky has pledged to continue<\/a> drone attacks on Russian oil for as long as Russia continues bombing Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. But the attacks on Yandex are noteworthy because they\u2019re in fact connected to what underlies all of this for Trump: the upcoming U.S. elections. Trump knows US voters are unhappy with high gas prices, and he knows they know that his failing war on Iran is to blame, so he wants to deflect the blame onto Zelensky for attacking Russian diesel. Most of the US public won\u2019t buy this, but he\u2019ll keep repeating it so that at least his own base (which is still about 30% of the population) buys it, and to scare his Republican toadies into accepting it or at least not disagreeing with him publicly. The rest, he hopes, can be engineered through the US\u2019s manipulable electoral system to keep him and Republicans in power. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attack on Yandex, however, is an attack on the infrastructure that enables Russian disinformation to spread around the world \u2014 which makes it an attack on the global far-right disinformation machine. It is that machine that shares a good part of the blame for the rise of MAGA in the US, along with the other pro-Russian or strongly Russian-leaning right-wing parties<\/a> across Europe: Germany\u2019s Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland<\/a> (AfD), France\u2019s Rassembelement National<\/a>, Britain\u2019s Reform UK, Austria\u2019s Freedom Party (FP\u00d6), Italy\u2019s Lega, Hungary\u2019s Fidesz, Slovakia\u2019s Republika movement, Poland\u2019s PiS and Konfederacja parties, et al. It also reaches well beyond Europe into the Global South, where parties on the right and the left are subject to its influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gauging the impact of Ukraine’s targeting of Russian internet infrastructure is not so easy, but the reports I’ve seen so far, while not authoritative, appear promising. Cloudflare<\/a>‘s traffic measurement site seems to show<\/a> that Russian bot traffic “dropped dramatically” after the first two attacks on Yandex. Cybersecurity and digital governance site Netblocks<\/a> reports a drop of more than two thirds<\/a> in Yandex Cloud traffic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Anecdotally, observers report a drop in those voices who are thought to be Russian bots and trolls. Retired US meteorologist Dan Satterfield<\/a>, for instance, writes: “I deal with Russian bots daily here. Most you never see. After the Yandex drone hits by Ukraine, I can tell you that over 95% are gone. It happened very quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More amusing is the social media meme announcing that “hundreds of thousands of prominent Trump allies” have been “reported missing” after the Ukrainian data center strikes \u2014 which some are taking to be a form of Ukrainian interference in the upcoming US elections (let’s see where Trump takes that!):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So, where are we going with this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the upshot: I think it\u2019s fair to say that Ukrainian drone warfare has become the leading defense strategy against the global far right<\/em>, embodied in the Putin and Trump regimes and in all of the pro-Russian and pro-Trumpist political parties and movements around the world. Ukrainians, in other words, have become the cutting edge of global anti-imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mentioned that this would come as a surprise to most international observers, and it\u2019s especially so for those who associate Ukraine with its post-Soviet history of oligarchic semi-democracy. But it\u2019s consistent with a longer history of democracy-from-below that Ukrainian historians have known about for some time. The theme of grassroots self-organization in Ukraine\u2019s political culture has been probed in recent years by scholars examining Ukraine\u2019s three recent \u201crevolutions,\u201d including Emily Channell-Justice (Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine<\/a><\/em>, 2024), Svitlana Krasynska (Self-Organization: The Power and Limits of Ukraine\u2019s Informal Civil Society<\/a><\/em>, 2024), Larysa Tamilina (\u201cTracing the Historical Origins of Contemporary Political Cultures: A Comparative Analysis of Russia and Ukraine,\u201d 2025), and others. Understanding the longer history of Ukraine\u2019s political culture<\/a> requires understanding episodes of state building and consolidation, as well as uprisings from below, at least from Cossack times through to the revolutionary period of 1917-21 and into World War Two. Historians like Serhii Plokhy<\/a>, Serhy Yekelchyk<\/a>, and many others provide tremendous insights into this. (See Marta Dyczok\u2019s Ukraine not \u2018the\u2019 Ukraine<\/a><\/em> for a wonderfully brief, open-access introduction to Ukrainian history.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the better places to read about the democratic and anti-authoritarian impulse in Ukraine\u2019s history is a 42-page essay by political scientist, Sotsial’nyi Rukh<\/a><\/em> activist, and Commons<\/a><\/em> co-editor Denys Pilash<\/a> in the recently published book Davyd Chychkan: With Ribbons and Flags<\/a> <\/em>(I Lost My Library, 2026). Chychkan was an artist and anarchist activist who died in battle last year, and who I\u2019ve written about here before<\/a>. Pilash calls his essay, which he dedicates to Chychkan’s memory, an “attempt at outlining the historical development of anarchism and broader revolutionary leftist politics in Ukraine.” (I’ll com back to the “leftist” part of it momentarily.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pylash’s history details the many episodes of “liberatory and revolutionary movements” in Ukraine’s history: from peasant and urban uprisings in the Cossack period, and Robin Hood-style folk heroes like Oleksa Dovbush and Ustym Karmaliuk, to the agrarian socialist narodniks<\/em>, early Ukrainian leftists like Mykhaylo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka (two of whom, alongside Taras Shevchenko, constitute the “triumvirate” of authors every Ukrainian will have heard of and maybe even read and learned by heart), women’s emancipation activists like Nataliya Kobrynska and Olha Kobylianska, the Jewish Bund movement, the revolutionary socialists of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-21), the peasant “Green Armies” and anarcho-communist formations of the revolutionary period (most notably the Makhnovshchyna<\/a> that spread across a large swath of the country at its maximum), and the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance of the 1940s. (The latter, emblematized by OUN, or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, took some Nazi-allied forms, but also some left-leaning anti-imperialist forms, especially once it fractured in the diaspora.) Pilash includes the cultural movements of the late 19th century hromadas<\/em>, the “Red Renaissance<\/a>” of the 1920s, and the dissident writers and artists of the “Sixtiers” generation, and follows his political trajectory to the reappearance of independent trade unions, of anarcho-syndicalism, and of a “New Left” since the late 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, this history is neither a monolithic nor a uniformly bright one. Some of the freedom movements, like the Khmelnytsky Uprising, included their “dark side,” such as pogroms against Jews, perceived to be on-the-ground allies of more distant feudal (usually Polish) landowners. But the Cossacks were also state-builders (of a sort), practiced an early modern form of democracy, and inspired so many of Ukraine’s later cultural and political leaders, up until that leadership was systematically strangled<\/a> and eliminated by Stalinism in the 1930s. At the same time, the history not only of coexistence, but also of political collaboration between ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, and others, especially prominent during the fledgling Ukrainian People’s Republic,<\/a> is a history that has its parallels today, when “civic” Ukrainians of diverse ethnic backgrounds work together to defend the country against its imperial aggressor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spirit of resistance among today’s fighters for Ukraine’s freedom is not so easy to pin down politically, at least on the traditional left-right axis. Pilash focuses on platoons and networks like the anarchist Solidarity Collectives<\/a>, but one can argue that all of Ukraine’s military units, from Azov<\/a> to Zaporiz’ka Sich<\/a> (to be alphabetic), are fighting for self-determination and against imperialism in the form that’s most obviously confronting them. That that form of imperialism is not only territorial (that of Russian expansionism) but technological \u2014 and that its influence is working its way around the world to prop up the conjoined imperialism of today’s fossil-fuel driven, resource-extractivist authoritarians \u2014 makes the Ukrainian struggle a leading part of the struggle against the multipolar imperialism that is aimed, wittingly or not, at wrecking our planet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I rest my case. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Appendix: drones and more drones<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukrainian drone targets have included<\/p>\n\n\n\n