Ukraine's expanding drone web

There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising change has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online. It has become clear that a huge part of the drone war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired. Those wires are fiber optic cable, stretching from drone operators to the drones, which spool out cable across the ground and over trees along the battlefront. These drones are often single-use rarely returning from the mission they set out on. And the spools of fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. We explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 0:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, I want to show you a photo.

• 0:29Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 0:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  A photo that I have thought about and wondered about for months.

• 0:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  And even when I figured out what this photo was of, it still has kind of haunted my thoughts.

• 0:43Amory Sivertson?

  Cool.

• 0:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, take a look and tell me what you see.

• 0:50Amory Sivertson?

  All right, I see a landscape with a very beautiful, I'm guessing sunset in the background, an orangey, peachy, orangey sky.

• 1:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Amory Sivertson?

  I'm going to go to jump to the bottom where you see some dirt and some grass. The middle is hard to parse, but it looks like it's either

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  wire that's running through the grass, or it's string that's kind of a cluster of gray, but made up of tiny, tiny threads of something.

• 1:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  How much of it would you say there is? Like, there's like...

• 1:32Amory Sivertson?

  It's creating a similar visual effect to the Grand Canyon, where you're like, this is either five feet, or it's five bajillion feet

• 1:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40Amory Sivertson?

  in depth. It looks vast.

• 1:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  The first thing you should know when looking at this photo is that it is a photo from the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

• 1:53Amory Sivertson?

  Okay.

• 1:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  What does the war in Ukraine mean exactly? Well, people who study this war with any scrutiny or have ever experienced it firsthand would probably say that the Russo-Ukraine war began over a decade ago in 2014. But as we know, there was a massive Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border in 2021. Russia began attacking Ukraine in early 2022. And we're now going on four years into that intensified part of the conflict.

• 2:25Amory Sivertson?

  Once you know that information that this is Ukraine, I get the haunting of thoughts that you were talking about here because you can't tell.

• 2:36Amory Sivertson?

  It's simultaneously the antithesis to what we think of as like a war zone where the pictures that I've seen coming out of Ukraine are leveled buildings, rubble, people, chaos, whereas this is just a field with stringy stuff.

• 2:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, here's another piece of information for you. This is a photo of fiber optic cable.

• 3:05Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, like internet cable.

• 3:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep, and let's say fiber optic cable is mostly used for transferring data and information. Do you have a guess about what kind of information this particular web of fiber optic cable, crisscrossing this field as far as the eye can see, might be transferring?

• 3:24Amory Sivertson?

  My head goes to two places. It's either, you know, intelligence information, crucial intelligence information, or it's super mundane, people just trying to communicate with family and friends during a time of great upheaval.

• 3:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  So what I learned from comments under this photo when it was posted on Reddit months ago was that this massive amount of fiber optic cables were left behind as a byproduct of one of the biggest parts of the conflict in Ukraine right now. And that is drone warfare.

• 4:02Amory Sivertson?

  I think of drones as being wireless, like, remote controlled.

• 4:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 4:10Amory Sivertson?

  And not needing cables or tethers of any kind. But that's not the case, I guess.

• 4:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that's what I thought, too. And even though, over the past four years, I've seen a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia, I never knew that currently, a bunch of the drone action in Ukraine is wired warfare. And I wanted to know how we ended up with drones that do this wired warfare? Where did drones that do this come from? I'd never seen this cable mess from the drones before. And it really kind of shocked me when I saw this photo, because it appears to be strewn everywhere in Ukraine. And when I finally got on a call with a guy in the thick of the war, I found some answers.

• 5:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 5:05Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Emery Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 5:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR.

• 5:11Amory Sivertson?

  Today's episode? The Drone Web.

• 5:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, I want to know what you want to know.

• 5:30Amory Sivertson?

  Um, I want to know what fiber optic cable has to do with drones flying. It feels like drones feel very now, you know, like, very now technology. And fiber optic cable feels

• 5:50Amory Sivertson?

  like the AOL dial-up equivalent.

• 5:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 5:54Amory Sivertson?

  You know, so.

• 5:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Amory Sivertson?

  Why? Yeah, there's some dissonance there for me.

• 6:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  These are all good questions, and I got answers to a lot of them from Alexei Zelensky.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  My name is Alexei Zelensky.

• 6:08Amory Sivertson?

  Where in Ukraine is Alexei from?

• 6:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is an important question, and the answer is part of this idea that where you point to the beginning of the war says something about you. So outside or inside of Ukraine.

• 6:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alexey's hometown of Stokhanov, the Russian name, or if you're Ukrainian, Kadivka, is in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  For me, a war was started not in 2022, but in 2014 because I was born and raised in Uvansk region, in the city of Stokhanov. It is a small town where a lot of coal mines and miners.

• 6:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Paramilitary groups from Russia took over the region as part of what is called the Donbass War between 2014 and 2022. Alexey fled the area when he was a student. He had to finish his schooling further west.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I'm relocated to Kyiv, passed my exams and started to study in university, in a Kyiv Polytechnic University.

• 7:23Amory Sivertson?

  OK, so he flees to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and goes to a polytechnic university. What does he want to do for work?

• 7:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, here's the thing. He can't get out of his head that he had to flee his home because of the war.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  When I end the school, I have some thinking about to go to anti-terroristic operation because I was a patriot of my country. I love Ukraine.

• 7:56Amory Sivertson?

  He's saying anti-terroristic operation?

• 7:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Amory Sivertson?

  OK, so he wants to fight.

• 8:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  He wants to fight. But in 2014, he's not old enough to join the army without his parents' permission. And his parents do not want Alexey to fight. Then the Russo-Ukrainian war kicks off in 2022, and the motivation to fight is compounded tenfold. Everybody's joining up. Cities way further into Ukraine are being bombed and attacked, including Kyiv. So Alexey, at age 25, volunteers for the Ukrainian army.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is the warning of President Putin to the world.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  Whoever tries to interfere with us or threaten our country should know that Russia's response will be immediate and lead to such consequences that have never been experienced in history.

• 8:51Amory Sivertson?

  And what does he start doing?

• 8:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  He goes right into some pretty heavy stuff.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Firstly, I was a grenadier. I using RPG for maybe anti-tank, uh, tank missions.

• 9:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we are talking here about rocket-propelled grenades. This is an explosive attached to a rocket, gets pointed by a soldier, fired out of a tube. Uh, Alexey does about 10 missions with that weapon, and he does well. He gets moved to another squad, moving up in the ranks. And his commander tells him, "You're gonna learn how to use mortars." Bigger weapon, bigger explosive, pointed at a higher angle up into the sky. But Alexey has no idea how to use a mortar. And he tells his commander, "I don't know how to use these things."

• 9:37Speaker 04

  And he says to me that you have internet, you have YouTube, and I need to learn how to work with mortar by YouTube and internet.

• 9:49Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, God, okay. He's using internet to get to YouTube to learn how to use these explosives in war.

• 9:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep. Training has been a consistent challenge in the war in Ukraine, at least from the Ukrainian side. Because of everything from general resource challenges to the speed at which the war is developed, to the kinds of fighting that's happening, like trench warfare, which is a kind of older style of conflict, combined with new tools like drones. And because of the human resource challenges in the Ukrainian army, as we might say, while they are trying to beat back this tidal wave of Russian attacks, Alexey gets put in charge.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  And after maybe one week learning in YouTube, we go to the, our first combat mission.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  First combat mission for me like a commander of mortar unit.

• 10:53Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, man. I don't even want to like tile my kitchen after learning how to do it on YouTube. This is, this is intense.

• 11:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah. One week watching YouTube and you're suddenly a commander of a mortar unit in your late twenties headed out to the front lines.

• 11:12Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so I'm trying to picture this. They have big explosives they're using. Are they, are they on foot? Are they in a tank? Are they in an aircraft?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  It was in our combat mission with my squad. There are four guys in the car.

• 11:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  They're not in a tank. They're not in an aircraft. They're in a car. I'll give you one guess as to what kind of car they're in.

• 11:43Amory Sivertson?

  Well, our Toyotas of War episode makes me want to say a Toyota, what's that truck called? The cute truck?

• 11:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hilux.

• 11:51Amory Sivertson?

  A Hilux.

• 11:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're close. It's a Nissan Trail. This is the kind of car you might see in suburbia. And unfortunately for Alexei and his unit, this car is not armored. Unfortunately, because the car eventually hits a 20-pound Russian mine. The impact is devastating.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  And we are run into a tank mine, the M62. It is a Soviet Union mine. It is maybe nine kilos of explosion or exposed. I was so out from the car and I stay in my legs on the ground. I see that car was on fire. Look on my hands and my hands was on fire too.

• 12:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  The kind of explosives in these mines, Amory, they have stuff in them that catches you on fire. And it's not like, I don't know, a match or a lighter catching a piece of your clothing on fire. You are covered with a substance that is on fire and you cannot get it off.

• 13:06Amory Sivertson?

  Oh my God. And he lived to tell the tale, clearly, but

• 13:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 13:11Amory Sivertson?

  What happened to him?

• 13:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  So when this happens, he's really determined to get his team out of there and get them help. And they do have communications technology with them.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  I'm one person in the squad who has a radio. And I tried to send a message with hands on fire. And it was very scared. But I drew this and after that I was I was passed out. I'm passed out.

• 13:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  When Alexei wakes up, he's in a hospital.

• 13:55Amory Sivertson?

  Do we know what happened to the other guys in the car with him?

• 13:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  So of the four guys in his unit, two are dead. One has multiple injuries and Alexei is also badly wounded. Bad enough that even in a war where everybody is needed, where Russia is importing North Korean soldiers and conscripting prisoners and sending them to the front lines and Ukraine is signing up almost any able bodied adult, Alexei isn't likely to go back towards the battle anytime soon. But he's still going to make an impact on the war, one that will lead us back to that photo we talked about at the beginning and the way that the drone part of the war has evolved in terrible and fascinating ways. We'll be right back.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 15:03Speaker 07

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• 15:12Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 15:30Speaker 07

  I'm Alison Aubrey, longtime health and science correspondent with NPR. And I've got a new podcast all about the science and wisdom of life after 50. It's called Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. We want to take you on a journey to help you explore all the opportunities to make change and feel good as you step into middle age and beyond from WBUR and NPR.

• 15:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your Turn with Alison Aubrey from NPR and WBUR. Supported by AARP. New episodes every Thursday. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

• 16:10Amory Sivertson?

  But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or

• 16:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Politics.

• 16:16Amory Sivertson?

  Country music.

• 16:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hockey.

• 16:17Amory Sivertson?

  Sex of bugs.

• 16:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not-science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers.

• 16:26Amory Sivertson?

  And hopefully make you see the world anew.

• 16:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

• 16:32Amory Sivertson?

  Wherever you get your podcasts. So Alexei Zalinsky is wounded in a Ukrainian hospital after his mortar unit was hit with a landmine while driving a Nissan. So Ben, how does he get involved in the drone aspect of the war?

• 16:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK, the first step is that one of his friends brings him a present while Alexei is trying to recover from his injuries and stuck in the hospital.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  My friend Roman Arkov bring for me some 3D printers because it's like a gift for me.

• 17:08Amory Sivertson?

  He said a 3D printer that his friend brings him?

• 17:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Amory Sivertson?

  OK, what's, what's he printed?

• 17:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'll tell you.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  And I start thinking how it can be helpful for maybe

• 17:29Speaker 04

  For defense for my country.

• 17:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alexey's first thought is to print out the bodies of drones with his printer, but he has no idea how to do this. He just has a 3D printer and a boatload of time on his hands. Can you guess where he went to figure it out?

• 17:43Amory Sivertson?

  YouTube.

• 17:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep, he goes to YouTube and he starts trying to print something that isn't being used heavily in the war yet.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  I'm trying to print frame for the FPV drone. The FPV drones.

• 17:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  First person view, right?

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a first person view drone. It's drones maybe for the racing, for the freestyle. But Ukrainian army starts using these types of drones for the combat missions.

• 18:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this starts happening maybe in 2023. And it is worth pausing here and talking about why drones are so heavily used in the war in Ukraine.

• 18:31Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm, which brings us back to Toyotas of War.

• 18:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 18:35Amory Sivertson?

  Um, because we talked to a guy, Ed Nash, who's a military focused author and YouTuber about the future of so-called technicals. These are vehicles with heavy artillery attached to them.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  What we're seeing now is drones. Civilian drones which are armed or either with the explosive warhead or dropping explosive warheads. That's a great counter to a technical. It's super cheap, super simple to get, uh, super simple to operate.

• 19:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Light, mobile, destructive. You've maybe seen headlines about Ukrainian drones dropping explosives on Russian airplanes, for instance.

• 19:13Amory Sivertson?

  I have. This came up a little bit in my Hidden Levels episode about joysticks and drones being operated with game controllers, basically.

• 19:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  And these consumer level drones that they retrofit to carry explosives are pretty cheap compared to tanks and planes. Maybe a thousand bucks a pop.

• 19:31Amory Sivertson?

  And I assume there are drones on both sides here, right? The Russians are using drones as well.

• 19:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  They are. And between the years of 2021 and 2023, this kind of cat and mouse drone game between Ukrainian and Russian forces evolves at breakneck speed. One of the big issues that pops up in this cat and mouse game is countermeasures. For instance, jamming. Most drones are controlled via radio frequencies. You have to talk to the drone to tell it what to do. But if someone has a frequency jammer, that messes with your ability to talk to the vehicle you are controlling. This is a common tactic in warfare, but it really exploded in this particular war because of the sheer number of small drone craft being used. Alexei, who has by this time started building first-person view drones to be used in the field with his 3D printer,

• 20:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  says the radio jamming has also evolved.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  We are trying to change frequencies using double frequency systems to fly in two frequencies on one time. Yeah. But now jamming systems are very strong. And there are some areas in the front line where a radio drone can't do the combat mission. And this is a very big problem.

• 21:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, how to solve this problem? What do you do when you can't control a drone with radio frequencies anymore?

• 21:15Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm. Well, the radio frequencies aspect of this felt new to me. Internet, fiber optic cables.

• 21:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Correct. Fiber drones start to enter the battlefield.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  Because of optic fiber can fly anywhere. You can fly to the buildings. You can fly under the ground to the trenches and bunkers.

• 21:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh huh. Oh, because the radio frequency isn't interrupted.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Good connection in all situation. There are some tactic for using this type of drone.

• 21:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alexey says fiber optically controlled drones are a relatively recent development in the war.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  I saw some prototypes maybe in twenty twenty three. It was Ukrainian Ukrainian company. It was the drone on optic fiber, FTV drone. But this spool maybe up to one kilometer or two kilometer.

• 22:21Amory Sivertson?

  Which seems close to me to the person, one or two kilometers. That's your your target is not that far from you, which presumably means you can find the person who is operating the drone or find the drone following that cable.

• 22:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that's right. It's it's better than breadcrumbs, right? You can just like follow the cable back to the person.

• 22:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is a good example of how war messes with our sense of scale. Like, when you think about one piece of fiber optic cable and other applications having like having a one kilometer piece of internet cable, that sounds really long, right? I don't think I've ever seen an internet cable that long. Like, I feel like twenty feet is the longest internet cable I've ever seen. But if you're thinking about one kilometer between you and the people you are fighting, that is not far. That is like you are on the front lines. You are in the extreme danger zone. And fiber drones can create a solution in avoiding radio jamming, but they also create this problem of reach.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  There are very big difficulties maybe to make good drone on optic fiber.

• 23:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Alexey realizes to really make these fiber drones effective, he needs longer cables. The way these fiber optic drones work is that they have these spools on them, almost like a fishing reel on a fishing pole. The spool lets out the cable as the drone travels. Getting spools of high quality fiber optic cable longer than one kilometer is tough. But as jamming becomes more and more popular, people start to find solutions to the cable length problem. It's a solution that it feels like everybody eventually comes up with. It's a very familiar solution. Get your product made in China.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  I see there maybe ads on Instagram, some videos on reels that Chinese produce optic fiber spools. I think that it's a good idea to connect this technology, this spool, on our drone.

• 24:38Amory Sivertson?

  Oh my god, the geopolitics mixed with technology, mixed with humans continuing to want to hurt each other.

• 24:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, it's a lot, man.

• 24:50Amory Sivertson?

  It's a lot, man.

• 24:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Alexei and others in Ukraine start getting their spools imported from China because China makes bigger, longer spools.

• 25:00Amory Sivertson?

  Which could be complicated because China is more allied with Russia in this war than with Ukraine, right?

• 25:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right, and fiber optic cable is, well, kind of fragile. It is usually made out of long, thin strands of glass or plastic. And it's usually surrounded by protective layers, but the spools need to be as light as possible to attach to the drones. So these much longer spools of cable coming from China don't have any protective layers.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  When spools are transported into Ukraine, there are some damages.

• 25:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, long story short, the shipping logistics and political logistics of getting big, long spools of fiber optic cable from Chinese manufacturers to Ukrainian side of the fight are complicated.

• 25:45Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so Alexei, he's like a startup guy now.

• 25:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Amory Sivertson?

  He's, he, he found the need for a tech product and he is filling the need.

• 25:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  He totally is. He's basically created this company that uses 3D-printed components and fiber optic cable spools shipped from China to first-person view consumer drones that are being used to drop explosives.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  In September 2024, we already have a good drone and started serial production of it.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  We sent some samples to soldiers. But not many soldiers are realizing that it is can be a useful technology for the drones.

• 26:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  It takes a minute for the Ukrainian army to get used to this new kind of drone that Alexei is building. But eventually, these new kinds of drones start to catch on.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Have no schemes how to fly to these drones. They don't know tactic of using these drones.

• 26:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Who's buying most of these drones?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  All branches of the military.

• 27:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alexei says that includes the National Police, Combat Units, the National Guard, the Armored Force, Border Guard. Basically, everybody who fights for Ukraine is starting to buy these drones. The litany of problems continues, though.

• 27:20Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, man, Alexei. He's done so much. He's come so far. He's found something that the Ukrainian army needs. He's made it less vulnerable to that radio frequency jamming. He's found a way to get longer cables for it with those fiber optic spools from China. He's gotten the military to use them.

• 27:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 27:47Amory Sivertson?

  What else have you got for Alexei?

• 27:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  So there are three things that are still kind of bedeviling Alexei's inventions here. Cost, weight, fragility. His solution to the first two comes when, as with many things in Ukraine, Ukrainian fighters figure out how to repurpose peacetime tools to help them fight the war. Are they machines that were making just regular internet cable that you've kind of

• 28:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  now been using for the drones?

• 28:21Speaker 04

  No, these machines are in normal life for using for the electrical spools, for the generators, maybe, motors. Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  But we are upgrade these machines to

• 28:41Speaker 04

  to wind in the optic fiber spools.

• 28:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  Repurposing these Ukrainian machines from winding electrical cable to winding up spools of fiber optics drops the price of the drones that he is making from maybe $1,000 a pop just to drop a single payload down to $300 a pop. The Ukrainians can also create longer and lighter spools of cable. So from one kilometer to way longer.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Now we are produce 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 kilometers.

• 29:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cost and weight challenges solved. Alexei now has spools that are cheaper to make, easier and faster to get to the battle front, and way longer. And they're lighter because Ukrainians have figured out how to cut down on the thickness.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Maybe like a hail right over his scene.

• 29:39Amory Sivertson?

  You said weight, cost, and fragility, but these, these thin hair-like cables sound more fragile to me.

• 29:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, and this is a big part of the final problem, the one that isn't solved. And I really want to think about this. You know, these drones are flying with explosives, maybe for an hour to get where they are going. These are active battle lines. And you want to know the worst part?

• 30:07Amory Sivertson?

  I cannot believe that we are not at the worst part already, but sure.

• 30:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you kind of already know and can guess, but I think it's best to hear Alexei say it.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  If we speak about cable, it can't be used again because it is very thin and very long.

• 30:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yep.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  You can't to came back each from the fields, from the trees, and it is a very big ecological problem.

• 30:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alexei is, of course, talking about the problem in that picture I showed you at the beginning of a field absolutely covered in a web of fiber optic cable.

• 30:46Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, yeah, I get that in a, in a time of war, the environmental concerns are not top of mind. And yet, that is something also eerie about that picture is this sort of.

• 31:02Amory Sivertson?

  What it represents, but also just the fact that it will be there in perpetuity.

• 31:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, and look, Alexei, other Ukrainians, they know this.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  And the farmers are very, uh.

• 31:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Upset.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, very upset.

• 31:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  That they testing their optic fiber drones on their fields, it is the problem.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  I'm sad, but I understand that now very difficult time. And we need to try to maybe defend cars, try to stay alive.

• 31:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, Emery, I want to show you another photo.

• 31:58Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, no. This is a, another Reddit post. The subject line is Ukraine, Birds on the Front Lines Weave Their Nests From Fiber Optics. There's a picture of a nest seemingly made out of fiber optic cables. Well, yep, that kind of encapsulates what this part of the world is going through right now. Where you have, you have war, you have people just desperately trying to come up with solutions to save lives and protect their homeland.

• 32:38Amory Sivertson?

  And then nature finds a way to, to repurpose our materials for their own survival and survival. It's like, sort of, it's definitely sad, but it's also sort of hopeful in a weird way to me.

• 33:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, birds, you know, they scavenge human trash to make their nests all the time, right? Like, that's a normal thing that happens. Uh, so you could consider this a form of recycling.

• 33:12Amory Sivertson?

  Upcycling.

• 33:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Upcycling, there you go. You know, and I'm just, I'm kind of.

• 33:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  I am fascinated by this story because of what it says about just how technology gets tangled up in war and how it changes war and how war changes technology. And I'm horrified to watch plastic wires cover the battlefield as part of war is lasting and like destructive force. And it makes me deeply sad. And I just imagine the cleanup of war. And whether it's like landmines from the past or the drone web of the present.

• 33:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  You know, getting back to a state of peace and a state of environmental stasis, I guess, seems so far away. And I think it's far away for Alexi, too.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  I want to see the end of the war. But when

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Ukraine win the war, it's

• 34:20Speaker 04

  maybe what I want to see. But what really happened, I don't know. And maybe

• 34:31Speaker 04

  no one know.

• 34:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  As we were wrapping up our call, Amory Alexi turned off his voice memo and we started saying farewell. And I wanted to stay on the line with him for some reason, I guess. I don't know, maybe because it was it was just hard to get him on the phone in the first place because of where he is and what's going on around him. And I just have no idea what his life is and trying to get a sense of it through the conversation was hard. The language barrier and the reality that we are living completely different lives was really weighing on me.

• 35:04Amory Sivertson?

  It was hard for me to tell in that last clip of him. When he says, you know, when Ukraine wins the war.

• 35:13Amory Sivertson?

  It was hard for me to sort of parse whether he thinks that's a likely outcome, or he's just like speaking it into existence.

• 35:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Amory Sivertson?

  Do you have a sense of how he's thinking about Ukraine's future, his own future?

• 35:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I asked him about that.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  In a positive scenario, I want to come back

• 35:40Speaker 04

  to my motherland, my home.

• 35:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh huh.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Uh, it is maybe was

• 35:51Speaker 04

  uh, one of my motivation to go to the armed forces. But now I'm understanding, I'm thinking that this scenario not so realistic. But I really know that I want to develop drones for the civilians. Drones can be used in a civil life too.

• 36:23Amory Sivertson?

  Other than a world where Alexei can work on drones for civilian uses,

• 36:29Amory Sivertson?

  did you get a sense of what other positive futures he might imagine?

• 36:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, he really wants to go home.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  I'm miss our country house that my father are built. There are some horses, some other animals like deer. Yeah, and it was a very good place to rest, to have time on it. There are fishing, you can go to the hiking, to the river. And it was very good place, but Russians came to this place and and this is very pity that people's lives are damaged

• 37:23Speaker 04

  because of someone's came who without request, yeah, to your land.

• 37:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Emery, this fall, I had this thing strike me. I sometimes sit outside of my office and I look west as the sun is setting. And I was doing that this fall, and I noticed something I had never noticed before. As I was looking at the grass and the fallen leaves, I started to see these hundreds of tiny, glistening strands of spiderweb silk. And I think maybe I wouldn't have noticed that if I didn't know Alexi's story. And as we head towards the new year, I want to say that I hope that Alexi and everyone in his position, displaced, injured by war, might at some future date be able to reflect

• 38:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  on the past in a more peaceful environment and know that while the past is set, the future is unknowable. And in that unknowing, there can be hope.

• 38:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was co-hosted by Emery Sivertson and myself, Ben Brock Johnson. It was produced by Dean Russell, Franny Monahan, and yours truly. This episode was edited by Meg Kramer, sound designed by production manager Paul Vikes. Our managing producer is Sumit Ajoshi. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter and Emily Jankowski. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the drone web and a bird's nest. If you have an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, [email protected]. We also have a secure line for tips.

• 39:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you need to share something on background or off the record with us while protecting your identity, you can text or call us on the app Signal at 646-456-9095. That is 646-456-9095 on Signal. And we should say WBUR is an NPR member station, and the CEO of NPR, Catherine Marr, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit that supports that messaging app. That's it for this week. Stay healthy, stealthy, and wise. See you next week.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to explain why you're excited about it. Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.