Ukrainian Drones vs NATO Training – 5 Things to Know

A news article broken by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that a Ukrainian drone unit participating in NATO training in Germany was pitted against a US Army tank brigade and that the outcome of that simulated engagement was a decisive Ukrainian victory with almost all the American armored vehicles “destroyed.” Kyiv Post researchers dug into the details of the exercise and the units involved. 1. Where, when and what was exactly going on in these exercises and why were Ukrainians there? The exercise was a two-week field wargame called Combined Resolve that took place in the second half of April 2026 and into the first days of May. The main unit doing the training was a US-based “heavy” unit – primarily armed with tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery and helicopters – called the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team of 1st Cavalry Division, based in Fort Hood, Texas. The brigade was deployed in Europe as part of a US deterrence plan, now probably cancelled by the Trump administration, to field US ground combat brigades in East Europe. About 3,500 US soldiers participated in the exercise. Hohenfels is NATO’s largest training area for maneuver training. Force-on-force training at Hohenfels has been a standard NATO training evolution since the 1950s.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Since Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Hohenfels has become NATO’s premier training site for practicing maneuver warfare against a peer adversary in conventional combat conditions. Weapons effects are simulated by using weapons loaded with blanks and lasers attached to the weapons that shoot when a blank is fired, and by fitting laser-sensitive sensors to soldiers and combat vehicles. Observation officers/judges use artillery simulators and lasers of their own to simulate artillery and some long-range systems. Although the training, amounting to a giant wargame using laser tag, can’t replicate the fear of war, most soldiers say force-on-force exercises at Hohenfels fairly accurately replicate how weapons work in simulated battles: intelligent tactics mostly work, and bad tactics almost always fail. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine Receives Bodies of 261 Fallen Soldiers From Russia The remains were returned to Ukraine as part of repatriation efforts involving Ukrainian security, defense, and law enforcement agencies. Units deployed to Hohenfels for the training included, according to open sources, the 3rd ArmoredBrigade headquarters, 6th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, a heavy reconnaissance formation, alongwith attachments of combat engineers, artillery, and support units. The brigade HQ at the exercises,with call sign Greywolf, was beefed up by helicopters and M1A1 tanks from 2-37 Armor. These are all Regular Army ground combat formations mostly based in Ft. Hood, Texas, with the permanent mission of immediate readiness to deploy to and fightin a conventional war. The Hohenfels training area has a permanently based US Army unit called 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, whose full-time job is simulating the “enemy” for units coming to fight simulated battles there. The unit, usually called OPFOR, tries to use Russian/Iranian/Chinese tactics and operates vehicles that simulate tanks and other fighting vehicles from those countries. In December 2025, the unit stood up a brand-new company that only uses drones, primarily a short-range quadcopter aircraft called Archer Nero. The OPFOR drone unit at Hohenfels is nicknamed Eerie Company. A small number of Ukrainian operators and aircraft, reportedly two or four actual flight teams or fewer than 20 pilots and technicians, participated in the Hohenfels training. They were from a well-known Ukrainian drone unit called the 412th Brigade of the Unmanned Systems Forces, “Nemesis.” Ukrainian drone units participating in NATO maneuver training dates back at least to 2025. During the exercise, the Ukrainians first flew on the side of the OPFOR against the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division units, and then later on switched to work as support units and trainers for the 3rd ABCT units as they continued their battles against the OPFOR. The simulated war was fought on mostly dry ground in fair weather, so flying conditions were good. 2. Is it true the Ukrainians in simulated combat demolished a major US force operated by 3rd Brigade? The answer to that is clearly “yes,” but there are some qualifications. According to the WSJ and US military news reports, in at least one of the battle scenarios, a movement to attack or an actual attempted assault by US forces against an OPFOR position, operators from 412th Brigade “Nemesis” easily located the approaching Americans thanks in part to dust plumes. Ukrainian pilots scored simulated hits on the attacking tanks and infantry fighting vehicles with first-person-view (FPV) drones with relative ease, and that US armored vehicles evaluated damaged and stopped were hunted down and destroyed by follow-up bomber drones, as were US infantrymen and light vehicles that took to cover once their protecting armored vehicles were lost. The tactics used by the Ukrainians at Hohenfels were, per reports, identical to tactics used by Ukrainian drone units in combat against Russia for more than two years.According to the reports, the American units had standard electronic warfare and counter-drone systems, and the supporting intelligence networks had full access, at least theoretically, to tactical intelligence generated by major US reconnaissance assets like satellite overflights, electronic intercepts, and deep spy networks. Nevertheless, at least in the large attack/heavy reconnaissance evolution of the training, the Ukrainian drone operators inflicted heavy enough “losses” on the US forces to render them combat ineffective and force judges to “bring back to life” destroyed equipment and soldiers, because had the 3rd Armored HQ been obliged to make up the losses using standard replacement and supply, the training would have ground to a halt for lack of US combat units available to go fight. Available sources don’t specify the actual numbers of US “casualties”; however, a 3,500-man US brigade battle group would normally field at least 200 armored vehicles of various types. The main training unit, 6th Squadron 9th Cavalry, if performing a movement to contact with reinforcements, would probably field about 30-40 infantry fighting vehicles or other light armored vehicles, and about a dozen tanks.In the Russo-Ukrainian War, probably the most massive Russian armored assault to be stopped by drones took place on March 30, 2024, near the city of Tonenke, just west of Avdiivka, during which Kremlin forces pushed 48 armored vehicles towards prepared Ukrainian defenses and lost half that force in a few hours to drone strikes backed by artillery. A similar defeat was suffered by Russian forces this year, attacking near the village of Shakhove, on July 22, with some 70-80 vehicles sent out into the open and at least 65, among them seven tanks, destroyed by Ukrainian drones. It’s important to keep in mind that the Ukrainians’ use of drone tactics widely practiced throughout the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to “demolish” six of nine US Cavalry took place in only one of several battle scenarios during the Hohenfels training. 3. What else happened in the exercise and what was the Ukrainians’ role? Open-source information covering the exercise points to a standard set of training scenarios intended to put the training units through their paces and to force them to work under pressure. One description of the training event script, unconfirmed, suggested that in the early phases of the exercise the Greywolf/3rd Armored force conducted a reconnaissance and advance to contact into territory held by OPFOR, and then set up a hasty defense to hold ground gained and recover from casualties. In subsequent days, elements of the Greywolf force probed the OPFOR position to find strongpoints and other targets, while dispersing and concealing friendly forces. Later on in the exercise, the Ukrainians switched sides and worked side by side with 3rd Armored headquarters officers and NCOs to practice cooperative reconnaissance and fire support. According to an official report on Eerie Company’s activities, a main focus of the exercise was determining best practices and tactics in a drone-dense battle environment. As OPFOR, Eerie’s job was to “replicate modern battlefield threat” using drones to detect and attack training units and electronic warfare systems (jammers) to make communications for the training units more difficult. A May 4 article published on the US Army website army.mil identified the main drone used by the Americans to simulate “enemy” drones as a Neros Archer, a small quadcopter aircraft similar in performance to Ukrainian FPV drones used in actual combat, but costing about three times more. The 412th Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) Brigade “Nemesis,” like most Ukrainian drone units, is armed with a packed golf bag of combat aircraft ranging from throwaway FPV drones costing less than $400 to Vampire hexacopter bomber/minelayer drones, Hornet interceptor drones, Morrigan fixed-wing drones, and R18/R34 heavy octocopter drones. Reports did not say which pieces of that inventory deployed to Hohenfels to augment the Americas’ Archer drones. A little surprisingly, given the Ukrainians’ skill and actual performance in the training, the US Army write-up on Eerie did not mention the Ukrainians’ presence. US Army video and still images from the training, likewise, showed plenty of drone activity, but gave no hint of Ukrainian soldiers or aircraft ever participating in training with 3rd Armored Brigade at Hohenfels. 4. What’s there to know about this Ukrainian drone unit Nemesis? Ukraine’s USF Brigade Nemesis is usually considered one of the most experienced and combat-effective drone units in all the AFU, and therefore, likely in any military anywhere. Yaroslav Honchar, a former IT marketing consultant and co-founder of the unit in 2014, during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, is the commander. According to the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned forces, a former grain trader named Robert Brovdi, a typical Ukrainian Unmanned Aircraft Brigade usually numbers between 1,000-1,500 men and women and fields around 300 individual drone teams collectively able, under normal circumstances, to control and absolutely deny Russian advance across 100 kilometers (62 miles) of fighting front. Based on open sources, aside from support elements like headquarters, medical, personnel, and logistics, in a typical day of combat, a brigade like Nemesis flies somewhere between 150-400 air missions daily, along with another 10-20 field movements by ground drones. As the NATO training exercise was happening, with a probable 15-20 operators absent, the majority of the men and women of the 412th Unmanned Systems Brigade “Nemesis” were in combat or supporting tactical combat operations in the southern Hulyaipole sector in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. Per the unit news feed, back in Ukraine, in wartime operations, both the brigade’s FPV and bomber drone units reported successful strikes against Russian armored vehicle parks 10-30 kilometers behind enemy lines, including an April 14 night of sorties destroying most of the vehicles and earth-moving equipment of a Russian combat engineer battalion. A count of vehicle kills for March and April published by the brigade identified 260 Russian vehicles, some motorcycles, and dune buggies, destroyed by drone strikes. All kills reportedly were documented by drone video, but Kyiv Post was only able to review about 10% of the strike imagery. Five days later, the brigade anti-aircraft division scored a rare kill using an interceptor drone of a Russian Shahed kamikaze drone. An elite long-range strike element of the brigade, during April, flew more than 30 attacks against Russian shadow fleet tankers operating in the Black Sea, and against Russian shore facilities servicing shipping and oil transfers. Reportedly, seven ships were hit. The brigade’s air defense suppression unit claimed 17 Russian anti-aircraft missile systems and 12 Russian air defense radars destroyed in 2026 strikes through April. 5. Is NATO learning the lesson that Ukrainian drones and drone tactics (which don’t differ significantly from Russia) are devastating to conventionally configured and commanded NATO ground units? That doesn’t seem to be the case. The Combined Resolve exercise was not the first but the third in two years, in which NATO training units were pitted against Ukrainian drone units and found themselves cut to pieces in simulated combat. The very first time such a training defeat took place was during NATO’s Hedgehog 2025 exercise in Estonia, from May 5-23. More than 16,000 troops from 12 countries participated in the exercise, among them, ironically, bomber and reconnaissance drones from 412th Brigade Nemesis.During the maneuvers, 412th operators, along with FPV crews from another highly competent Ukrainian drone unit, 427th USF Brigade “Rarog,” helped play the role of OPFOR against a crack British infantry unit (1st Mercian Battlegroup) and the 1st Infantry Brigade, the Estonian Division. During a simulated counterattack by those NATO units, a group of about 10 Ukrainian drone operators found and, in simulated combat, destroyed at least 17 British/Estonian combat vehicles, inflicted dozens of notional casualties, and bottled up survivors on woodland roads overflown by Ukrainian FPVs. Trapped vehicles included Challenger 2 tanks, Warrior IFVs and artillery. Exercise commanders following the Ukrainian successes “brought the killed and wounded back to life” so that the training could continue.The second time NATO forces encountered Ukrainian drones in training was during the Aurora 26 exercises held in Gotland, Sweden, taking place from April 27-May 13, almost simultaneously with 3rd Armored’s rotation to Hohenfels. The main training formation was the professional Swedish Gotland Regiment under the command of the Gotland Brigade Combat Group, with Danish Home Guard, US air defense, and British infantry attachments. The Ukrainian contingent was drawn not from the elite USF forces but from frontline drone units supporting the veteran 1st Corps of the National Guard of Ukraine “Azov,” among them pilots and technicians from a former public duties brigade called “Presidential,” and a newly raised infantry brigade called “Lubart.” News reports put the total number of Ukrainian soldiers participating in the training at 15-17. Drones used were only FPV replica drones carrying sandbags. According to one report, the Ukrainians also brought along jamming-proof fiber-optic drones but found them unnecessary because the training NATO units seemed either unwilling or incapable of jamming the drones attacking them. According to Swedish news reports, the Ukrainians repeatedly located and notionally destroyed Swedish/NATO vehicles, and in one scenario “destroyed” 28 of 32 vehicles attempting an advance. According to Ukrainian military news reports, the casualty-producing NATO tactics inappropriate to drones used in the Hedgehog exercise in 2025 had not changed in the Combined Resolve and Aurora exercises taking place a full 11 months later. A news report in Ukraine on the Gotland training from that time, unconfirmed but widely reported, said that Ukrainian pilots quit counting once the kill count passed 30.