“Either we invest all our resources in technology and protection against enemy technology, or we lose”— Mariia Berlinska

“Russia is about to start working with much more sophisticated systems. Either we invest all the country's resources in our technologies and protection against enemy technologies, or we will lose,” says Mariia Berlinska.

Back in 2014, at the front, she discovered that the state was not providing the army with either specialists or drones. Then Mariia found like-minded people and created the Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center.

A conversation between Serhii Hnezdilov, a soldier and host of hromadske, and Mariia Berlinska, the “mother of Ukrainian drones”, is about attempts to reach the political leadership, idiots in the army, the Victory Drones project, and what and how every Ukrainian should prepare for.

About the Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center and Victory Drones

In 2014, I joined one of the volunteer battalions as an aerial reconnaissance specialist. When I worked at the front, I realized that the whole problem of aerial reconnaissance in Ukraine is divided into two components: the lack of specialists and the lack of drones. When volunteers send drones, it is often a one-way flight because people don't know how to fly them.

The next three years were divided into life between the front and Kyiv: at the front, I was an aerial reconnaissance officer, teaching people to work with technology and bringing drones, and in Kyiv, my like-minded friends and I founded the Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center at the end of 2014. It was the first institution in Ukraine to train aerial reconnaissance specialists.

Over three years of work, we have trained more than 300 specialists. In fact, we taught the army to fly and gave the industry a boost. In addition, from 2014 to early 2018, we were engaged in advocacy work. This is when we come to government officials and explain that the main person in the country is an engineer and a manufacturer, and we need to allow manufacturers to create robotic systems. To do this, we need to remove all bureaucratic obstacles for them: from importing components, as 90% of them are currently imported, to not giving them hard times with inspections, not forcing them to pay inflated taxes and bribes, and removing corruption risks.

The Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center is an institution that has largely launched the development of the industry. We advocated for each manufacturer, and we believed that the state would pick up on this sooner or later. This happened, but not to the extent necessary for the scale of the challenge. The enemy does not stand still, we are always at least one day late, and this means that we are constantly trying to catch up. The Russians are fast learners, they know how to play the long game, and they have much more resources. What we could make a difference with is technology.

In 2022, we reformatted the work and named this project Victory Drones to make it simple and clear, because Aerial Reconnaissance Support Center is a long name. And now Victory Drones operates as part of the Dignitas Army Technological Enhancement Fund. Through the capabilities of a team of more than a few hundred volunteers and instructors, we prepare the security and defense sector and teach people at training grounds to work with technology. We are creating a community so that there is a collective mind and people can exchange engineering thoughts, ideas, and tactics of application.

About robotic warfare

Imagine a flying system that cannot be suppressed by electronic warfare in any way. Because the system flies on an automatic route and has computer vision, it can automatically optically capture and engage a target, and make decisions based on artificial intelligence - the “neuron” can recognize objects.

Imagine swarms of such drones flying in hundreds, overloading our air defense system at the same time. Any opportunity to shoot them down becomes very difficult, because the electronic warfare system, which we have not yet deployed at the front, will not work, and it will be very difficult to mechanically shoot down drones flying at such speeds. We will have to look for other ways, work with laser systems, try to influence their electronics directly and use kinetic means.

We are on the verge of this process: Russia is about to start working with much more sophisticated systems, even than the Lancets, which have proven to be excellent at the front, unfortunately, and have destroyed a lot of our equipment.

Imagine a war where ground robots are used to clear mines, where Boston Dynamics dogs with automatic weapons can be used to clear the area, and where they can shoot infantry. Imagine swarms of drones flying into trenches and burning out equipment at both tactical and operational depths.

As of the fall of 2021, the state has done a lot — so many production facilities and so many drone purchases have never been made before. But is this enough for the challenge we are facing now, given that the Russian military-industrial complex works in three shifts? They produce the same FPV drones several times more than we do; they are producing thousands of operational-level strike systems per month.

More and more, their developers and programmers are working to robotize the war and make it as unacceptable to us as possible. And then politicians come into play and start bringing us to the negotiating table. So either we invest all the country's resources in our technologies and protection against the enemy technologies, or we lose.

About the previous and current defense ministers

Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov created the image of a good-looking, friendly, European, sociable guy who could drink to the “Russian warship” to the hilt and tell good jokes. He was objectively a fairly educated, erudite man who could maintain the image of a reformer. But being a nice guy is not a profession.

Oleksii Yuriovych failed to realize that there was an elephant in the room he was in. This elephant is technology. An example of his failure to realize this was not the phrase about wedding drones. Here I completely agree with him: drones can indeed be called wedding, tourist, or toy drones, and to our shame, we are using just such drones in the tenth year of the war.

The problem is that in the winter of 2023, a year after the full-scale invasion, he said in an interview with Livyi Bereh that these drones do not have a serious impact on the course of the war. And when the Minister of Defense does not realize that his army is holding the front line with these fucking wedding drones, and if they are removed from there, our losses will increase not at times, but by orders of magnitude… if he does not understand this even a year after the invasion…

What do you have to do when you come to a position in a country where an invasion could happen in a matter of months? You have to run around to all possible industries, contract them all, and look for someone to give more money to produce more electronic warfare, intelligence, and attack drones. This is if you have a vision and understand what the war of the future will be about. If you don't have this vision, then you turn it all into a beautiful buffet table, where your only role is to be a representative at the international level.

Whether he did it badly, I don't know, I am not a professional diplomat. Definitely, there were certain achievements, either his personal ones or at the expense of those years of blood that flowed, and the whole world saw from newspapers and television screens that Ukraine was bleeding, that Ukrainians were being buried in mass graves. Did this give us a certain advantage in the negotiations and the argument that we were being killed? Yes, it did. Was there a team effort involved? Yes, it was. I don't want to somehow zero in on his achievements as a negotiator, but the Minister of Defense is not only a representative function and not only about international negotiations.

We talked to Rustem Umierov long before he became minister: I told him about drones, and he asked questions, so it looked like he wanted to understand. I see several sane people in his team. Unfortunately, not all of them.

Was there any time lost during the onboarding of the new team? I think there was, and I think the previous and the next teams did not communicate properly to transfer these cases as quickly as possible. And this slack in the work of the Ministry of Defense, in my opinion, took a month and a half at least. Now some work processes are starting, but much slower than necessary. Do I wish them success? Absolutely, as well as the previous team. I believe that their success is the success of all of us.

How we can avoid losing

For me, the right question now is not when we will win and peace will come, but how we can at least not lose, save people and increase the ability to fight with robotic systems. The land can be liberated, and we can only do this if we say that robots come first, and then people.

You don't want to be sent into an assault without having scouted and cleared the trench. Of course, you want to have a look at it first and be told what the situation is, and ideally, you'll be guided by drones, so you can hear when something happens. Second, you want to know what is mined there. This can also be done by ground-based systems, not necessarily by live people. Thirdly, you want to know that the trench you are about to jump into will not be hit by a machine gun, because 20-30 attack drones have already flown in, and everything is really cleared.

Of course, there may be some losses, some of your comrades may be wounded. You can't calculate everything. There is no war without casualties, but there is a big difference between liberating a kilometer or two of your territory, losing half a brigade or more, and losing at most a platoon or half a company.

We will not have a different army, a different reality, or a different military and political leadership, at least shortly. I am the type of person who works in the reality that exists. You do what you can and let things happen.

About the “oldest adult in the room”

I know that there are many idiots in the army, unfortunately, sometimes even in command positions. At the same time, the vast majority in the army are intelligent, patriotic, honest people who came to defend their homes and their children.

I believe that the only way out in this case is to work with those short-sighted commanders, explain in a friendly manner, avoid conflicts as much as possible (very often people get frustrated and it all ends up in nothing), and stand in an effective position as the oldest adult in the room.

I have traveled to dozens of countries around the world, and I saw how people in America at the beginning of the invasion (I was there when the war started) were amazed by our boundless heroism. Ukraine as a country and we as a people have become the oldest adults in the world's room. Now each of us has to become this oldest adult: not to be led by all these waves of hatred, resentment, and ambitions, but to find the opportunity to convince and explain.

We are in the same submarine, we are in the same trouble. Tens of thousands of people gave their lives and health so that we could sit, work, talk, and, most importantly, create everything to ensure that the frontline is supplied. Therefore, it is our great responsibility to find a common language with all Ukrainians. In this equation, time is a very important unit, so it is important not to waste it, because we exchange time for people.

About what everyone should do

I ask all of us to get ready. It is imperative to get the tactical and medical training, because the war is going on all over Ukraine, and you must have the knowledge to help yourself and your loved ones. Secondly, you must learn to work with robotics. It's not difficult: install a simulator on your computer, buy a remote control, and fly FPV drones.

The third is to learn how to build drones. It's very simple: an FPV drone is a Lego set that high school students around the world assemble.

We have created the People's FPV project, where we teach for free, recruiting groups every two weeks, 8 lectures with the opportunity to ask questions in Zoom. We are currently training the second group. We want to teach 10 thousand people and show them how it can be done.

Even if each of these 10,000 people builds one drone, it's already 10,000 drones. As of November 2023, we need at least 200 thousand FPV drones per month.

We have also recorded a course on basic UAV engineering on Prometheus, which is open to the public, allowing you to listen to lectures, study, get information for free, take tests, and get a certificate.

Donate to technology, because everything in war, to put it crudely, is divided into two components: working with the causes or working with the consequences. When a Russian tank goes to its position, it can destroy half a village, which can mean hundreds of dead and wounded, or it can mean rebuilding infrastructure, roads, schools, and houses. That is, if we estimate it purely economically, the damage is worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of hryvnias, and sometimes dollars.

Medicine, surgeries, and payments to orphans are all consequences, and the cause is a Russian tank that can be destroyed by an FPV drone for $500-600, having previously been scouted by a Mavic or something else simple. That's why I encourage everyone to work with causes to destroy Russian equipment. If we produce more drones and faster than they produce their tanks, guns, infantry fighting vehicles, and mortars, we will win.