UKRAINE, IZIUM-SLOVIANSK HIGHWAY, KHARKIV, Sep. 14 — Ukrainian soldiers liberated Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast in the summer of 2014. In the aftermath, locals said that they had to go on a section of M-03 from Izium to Sloviansk as fast as possible, with zero stops. To avoid getting shelled by Russian and Russian-backed forces.
On September 7, 2025, people driving on M-03 towards the administrative border between Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts had to move through the smoke rising from the surrounding fields after Russian attacks.
There were no anti-drone nets covering the road to Sloviansk. Lonely cars, military vehicles, and buses, deformed into scorched wreckage by Russian drone strikes, stood to the sides of the highway. Signs warning about the danger of FPV attacks ahead were installed to flank the most dangerous section of the road.
Most of the cars moving along chose to take a turn after passing these signs. Avoiding the threat.
How Russian drones reach the highway
Russian troops started attacking the Izium-Sloviansk highway at the beginning of autumn 2025. On September 5, Maksym Strelnykov, a people’s deputy at the Izium city council, wrote about the danger of FPV-drones on this road. He urged not to use the highway at night and to look for alternative routes, especially after sunset.
In the evening of the same day, the DeepState war tracking project wrote about Russian FPV strikes on this highway. Just over a few days, they wrote, Russians hit up to 10 vehicles, including a civilian bus.
In the autumn, according to DeepState’s map, Russia has advanced in the Lyman direction towards this highway, near Derylove and Novoselivka.
As of the time of this article’s publication, the M-03 and the zero line are separated by ~20 km (12,4 miles).
DeepState’s analysts wrote: It’s not news that Russia can hit targets 25+ km away from the zero line. The fact that they started launching strikes at the Izium-Sloviansk road, though, is a cause of alarm.
This highway passes through the Donetsk upland. In some areas, the surface here rises up to 211 meters above sea level. Russians use this geographic feature to their advantage, wrote DeepState. It is easier to fly drones above the uplands.
Russians probably “deliver” their FPVs to the highway via mother drones, said a strike drone pilot, “Vados,” from 116th Mechanized Brigade and an aerial reconnaissance soldier from the Unmanned System Forces (USW) working in the area.
A mother drone is a large drone with a longer range than usual FPVs — meaning it can fly farther than 10-15 km (6.2-9.3 miles).
The mother drone works as a signal transmitter between several FPVs it carries and the pilot. Because of that, trench EWs have zero effect on these “carriers,” said Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, an electronic warfare specialist.
One example of a Russian mother drone is a modified “Orlan.” This August, one of Ukraine’s brigades downed an “Orlan” that carried two FPVs. Before 2025, “Orlans” were only used for aerial reconnaissance — to help Russians target their missile attacks.
Usual “Orlans” have a flight range of up to 600 km (~373 miles) and can rise up to 7 km (4.3 miles) in the air, becoming untouchable for most of Ukraine’s air defence. With new “baggage,” those numbers will be smaller, but still — “Flash” said the mother drone’s pilot can remain 40 km away from where FPVs are dropped.
In these conditions, it’s hard to pinpoint from where exactly Russians launch drones that strike the Izium-Sloviansk highway, says an aerial reconnaissance soldier. Mother drone gathers intelligence, drops FPVs on the targets, and flies away.
“Vados” said Russians can attack the highway with cheaper “Molniya” drones, too. This year, they used them extensively to hit Kharkiv. “‘Molniyas’ are FPV wings that can fly farther than the usual FPVs,” he explained.
How to protect the roads
“All roads close to the frontline must be covered with anti-drone nets,” “Vlados” said. “Yes, that’s not a panacea, not 100% protection. But EW is not a panacea, either. Of course, when they put the nets up in disconnected patches, it does shit all. FPV would just get under and fly through the corridor. But when nets cover everything properly for dozens of kilometers, they are pretty efficient.”
The Donetsk military administration referred Gwara to the “Dnipro” operational group of forces with questions about the installation of anti-drone nets in the region.
Andrii Zadubinnyi, the head of the public communication department in “Dnipro,” said that he can’t reveal the measures taken to build anti-drone defences on the Izium-Sloviansk highway because of safety concerns.
“Anti-drone nets installation is the latest stage of these measures. It’s one of the hardest stages, but it can be efficient only in combination with others. Currently, measures to defend this object from the enemy’s drones are already implemented. The preparations for installing anti-drone nets are ongoing,” Zadubinnyi said on the morning of September 10.
In the evening of the same day, Gwara talked to a senior sergeant of a drone unit working in Kharkiv oblast.
“Yesterday, our car went there, and the Izium-Sloviansk highway was blocked by burned-down cars,” he said.
Gwara’s journalist drove through the highway on September 7. The highway was not blocked then.
Theoretically, “Dnipro” group of forces has to install them, says a senior sergeant, but they only have to issue an order to do it.
“There are engineering units, city- or military-civilian administrations. They (“Dnipro”) might have given an order to install EWs there. But the ones responsible for doing it might have not known the relevant frequencies. Maybe they didn’t have the number of EW units needed to cover the entire highway. There are lots of ‘buts.'”
Maksym Strelnykov from the Izium city council wrote that the “primary task” to install anti-drone nets protecting the roads of Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblast from Russian drones is extra complicated because it requires cooperation between regional authorities.
On September 10, Gwara wrote official inquiries to the Donetsk and Kharkiv military administrations, asking whether they were involved in installing or financing anti-drone nets in the region. The law says they’re obligated to respond within five business days.
Where unprotected highways lead
When asked about the consequences of Russian FPV drones reaching Izium-Sloviansk highway, a aerial reconnaissance soldier from USF was blunt:
“Logistics is fucked. Will be. If they don’t start taking countermeasures.”
He said that, with their drones controlling the highway, Russians will be able to completely demolish Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka. Those cities comprise the southern part of Ukraine’s fortress belt. Russian drone control will also disrupt the movement of Ukrainian troops.
Above all, he said, it’ll complicate the evacuations, arms, and food deliveries. “We will need to look for alternative routes or plan time-consuming special operations on delivering all that not from 10 km, but from 30.”
Overall, there are two main ways to reach Sloviansk from Kharkiv Oblast: from Izium, once-occupied city to the north of Sloviansk, and Barvinkove, a city to the east of Sloviansk.
According to a senior sergeant of a drone unit, Russians launched drone strikes on the road from Barvinkove, too. Strelnykov also wrote about attacks on Barvinkove-Sloviansk, particularly about Russian drones hitting a car near the Nikopol village close to Barvinkove.
Oleksandr Balo, head of Barvinkove urban hromada, told Gwara he doesn’t have information about these attacks. Gwara asked if there were any records of Russian FPV drone strikes across the hromada in general. Balo responded, “Not yet.”
“The military doesn’t report to them,” explains the senior sergeant. “Here, my car got crashed, I told my commander, and that’s it. Local authorities might not even know that Russians control their highways.”
“If those two logistic routes are constantly controlled by Russian fire, we’ll get the same situation that happened in Kursk oblast,” the senior sergeant continues. “Back then, Russia also got two highways under drone control with lightning speed, and the rest was history.”
What’s next?
“This night, there were a lot of enemy FPV drones active in the Lyman-Raihorodok-Sloviansk section,” wrote a senior lieutenant of the Defence Forces with a call sign “Alex” on September 8. “Alex” was confident Russians are using mother drones to attack the roads — the distance to zero line there was also over 20 kilometers (12,4 miles).
Lyman-Raihorodor-Sloviansk highway is another route to Sloviansk, but from the northeast.
Stanislav “Osman” Buniatov, senior sergeant of the “Aidar” battalion, believes that these attacks are Russia’s first step in preparing a large-scale offensive on Donbas. In this way, he says, they’re looking for opportunities to fully control logistics to Sloviansk and nearby Kramatorsk, cities that comprise the northern part of Ukraine’s fortress belt.
“(Controlling these roads from the air) is a pretty complicated task because they’re located relatively far from the zero line. But it’s already brought painful consequences for us,” “Osman” said. “This situation proves, once again, that the staple of defence and offence is strict control of logistics, not hunting down solitary (Russians) in the forests.”
Cover photo: Izium-Sloviansk highway covered by the smoke rising from the hills burnt by Russian attacks. Sep. 7, 2025 / Yana Sliemzina, Gwara Media
Thanks for reading this article! It’s Yana, a journalist who worked on this article (and was in Sloviansk last weekend). I wanted to publish and translate it ASAP to show you how Russians operate in 2025 when they want to occupy the city. If you want to support our war reporting, please subscribe to our BMC platform or simply buy us a coffee there, or support us on Patreon. For our Kharkiv-based newsroom, even a $5 subscription is an immense help.
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