The ASGARD unit, part of the Unmanned Systems Forces, has so far logged thousands of successful missions. Started as a team of three volunteers, it eventually developed into one of the most effective UAV units within Ukraine’s Armed Forces. ASGARD continues serving in the hottest sectors of the frontline, changing the game on the battlefield. The team stepped on its combat path in 2022, when the world did not yet see the massive use of drones in combat.
Herman Isayev – deputy commander of the ASGARD Battalion, part of the 412th NEMESIS Regiment within the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) – spoke in this Victory Commanders series interview about his unit’s combat history and the battlefield situation, and shared his views about potential peace negotiations with the Russian Federation and the feasibility of mobilizing 18- to 24-year-olds for war. This conversation was recorded on December 11, 2024.
Відео
– Tell us about your journey in the army: how did it all start and how did you become a commander?
– I am a civilian, not a career military man. I volunteered for war in the first days, joined the ranks in early March [2022]. I was serving as the chief sergeant at a sniper company in my first unit. I had been trained for sniping since 2014. When we got to the front, it turned out to be not very effective, because sniping skills have little use in this war, except that only during some special operations, sabotage actions or urban battles. And in general, in the broad sense of the word, there is no such thing as sniper duels or anything like that in this war like it was in 1941 or 1943, because the gray zone is very expansive, and targets are located much farther than 1–2 kilometers as it used to be back then. Realizing that the skills I acquired would not be useful in any way, I had to look for a different field where to use my skills and experience gained.
– Tell us about the history of your unit? What makes it unique, and where does its greatest strength lie?
– Our unit originally consisted of just three people. To be clear, in late 2022 – early 2023, we were gaining our combat experience right on the battlefield, not somewhere on training grounds. And this experience was being gained from our mistakes, from our decisions. Until 2022, before the full-fledge war began, there was no such extensive use of drones on the battlefield at all. Never before has the world seen such experience, never mind Ukraine. No one trained career officers for four years how to use drones on the battlefield, how they should work. That is, no one taught us. Now we are teaching young crews, the mobilized ones.
The USF, by the way, is manned by recruiting contract soldiers. That is, people join voluntarily, no one is “busified”, no one gets dragged by the ears to serve in the military. And so the unit began building an engineering component, consisting of a mine-warfare element and an UAV pilot element. We were among the first frontline units to use selected individual principles of FPV drone tactics, which allowed us to successfully engage enemy personnel, heavy equipment, tanks, self-propelled artillery pieces, guns, trucks, light armored vehicles — at long ranges and irrespective of radio horizon distances. And we started doing this in the summer of 2023 quite systematically, quite constantly. Back then, we were deployed in the same sector as the 3rd ShBr (Separate Assault Brigade), so we burned quite a few enemy tanks there, which initially went out into direct line of sight, at direct fire ranges. Our task was to drive them away from the front line so that our infantry, assault troops, our positions would suffer fewer losses and that the enemy could not carry out fire strikes as effectively as from line-of-sight distances…
Our unit was manned with mobilized servicemen. It was small, of a platoon size. By the way, the unit has so far logged thousands of successful strike missions, eliminated 1.5–2 thousand enemy personnel, engaged 150 tanks, of which 50 were fully destroyed, and over four hundred out of a thousand targets hit were fully destroyed. That is, this collection of the engaged targets includes everything excepting only helicopters and planes. You just have to be lucky to do it.
– Who are the people who are members of one of the most effective units, as it is rightly ranked? Are they mostly civilians or professional military personnel?
– The first thing that means is that these people are all volunteers. As the commander of this team, I don’t understand how a person who was forcefully drafted into the army can be motivated only by fear or something else to start doing something. Our task is not to die, our task is to kill – that’s the main thing that means the most. We go there not to die, but to kill. Because the enemy is ten times more numerous than we are. They have a greater mobilization resource, which is growing, have a greater material resource. If we all start dying (after all, it’s easier to die or get wounded, and so each of us doesn’t kill a certain number of enemy personnel), then we won’t win this war. Each of us is tasked to kill from 10 to 100 enemy personnel and to destroy enemy equipment. Therefore, I don’t understand how to motivate people who think from day one how to get out of there. What is a commander or a squad leader supposed to tell them so that to persuade them and make them think: no, I still have to defend my country here, I have to be here, because tomorrow the enemy will come to my own house?
We are actively recruiting new soldiers… By the way, the ASGARD group is expanding, now the last steps remain for the battalion to expand into a regiment, and for the ASGARD group to expand into ASGARD battalion. Therefore, I invite everyone who doubts, thinks that they will be forcefully driven to serve in a dangerous location. Everyone will find a place in the battalion, where they will do everything they can for the unit, give away everything they can. I mean, be as effective as possible in this position. Therefore, we invite everyone – regardless of whether you have an experience serving as a staff member or a combatant. We need both, in addition to lawyers, clerks, accountants, that is, all specialties.
Фото
– But the main criterion for you is that a person should be motivated?
– For me, this is the most important thing that means, because if a person is lacking motivation, you will have to constantly control him, tell him what to do. For this job, we want motivated people who joined the ranks on their own good will. This is a fact. I realize that there are quite a few of these people in the country, but they do exist. The young guys who are joining us now are very interesting. Extremely interesting, because they are smart, high-class engineers. That is, we were learning on our own, we are not professional engineers. My personnel are not professional engineers who studied at a university, received some kind of specialty. That’s not the case, but they have learned it. It’s long, boring, but they have learned. These are already professionals, it’s much easier for them, just change their specialization a little bit – and they become like that. We have examples of young guys becoming crew leaders, navigators, mine warfare experts, and engineers.
– So volunteers are leaving?
– They are leaving. My approach is like that: I don’t keep anyone. I don’t keep a single person in my unit by force. If someone doesn’t want to serve with our unit, there’s no point in forcing him to stay.
– How do you train new soldiers?
– We are working extensively training these people. We talk to each person. That is, experts in FPV drones join in a company or a platoon, for example. There is a commander there, his task is to determine in a short time what qualities a person has and in what position to put him so that he is effective to the maximum extent possible, brings the maximum benefit. That’s all, and in that position he, above all else, is learning. If you are a pilot, then you learn to pilot. If you are a navigator, you learn maps, learn coordination with people, with everything else. And so everything is written down according to each specialty. We train them in field conditions, in combat-like environments. And only then do they go on training and combat missions. The composition of these groups includes people with very extensive combat experience, in order to preserve these people, beginning from the first mission departure. They do not perform missions on their own until we see that they are ready to do it independently and it is safe for them. War is associated with dangers, but there should be minimal risks to their lives.
– How would you describe yourself as a commander? What principles are you guided by? Perhaps there are rules that apply in your team?
– The principle is simple: deception is not forgiven in the unit. What kind of deception? There is a story: someone got into some unpleasant situation and hopes that he will solve it by himself, he has some connections. As a result, this story climbs across the vertical to the top, to the battalion commander. Everyone gets punished for this, and he says: I didn’t mean it. Therefore, I tell each of my personnel: whatever happens, you must report to your immediate commander. Also alcohol, narcotic drugs – of course, we have stories like these in the unit, those written in blood. We had such an instance. An engineer had died…
He says: yes sir, but does it his own way. It will not be case here. If someone does it even once, we will most likely say goodbye. After all, we are striving to become like the 3rd Assault Brigade, with the same ideology. We are working on it. I think we will achieve this goal soon, because it is of great importance for us.
– You have gone the path from three volunteers to expanding into a battalion, there are only a few steps left. How difficult was it? Is there a period, a moment that, in your opinion, was the most challenging? And how did you overcome these challenges?
– In our unit, there were times when we did everything we could, but nothing worked out for us. It didn’t work out because we didn’t invest, but because we lacked knowledge and experience in both engineering and combat operations. Indeed, at the training ground they taught us how to shoot and something else. Real-world combat operations are catastrophically different from what we were learning at the training ground, catastrophically different, really. And you will never be able to gain this combat experience at the training ground. Yes, you can be fit, athletic, physically ready, but you will not gain this experience unless in combat. Nowhere else. And this experience cannot be taught but only shared. And the experience of using the drone tactics… There was simply no one to share this experience with us. That is why these were hard times, but we survived them, everything is fine now.
It depends on the actions of a small unit whether ours, the 3rd ShBr, will storm something or not, whether the enemy will storm our positions or not. And we reduce their capabilities. We understand that we are influencing events on this particular section of the frontline. And this is important. We used to have hard times previously, because we could not influence these events in any way. For people with inherent motivation, it is very difficult. To say that it was easy to get accustomed to, or to say that we are not afraid of anything, that we are immortal, no, everyone is afraid. I understand that a person who is fearless is more of an exception than a rule. That is why everyone is afraid, everyone has to get used to it. This path must be passed by these younger people, because each person reacts to it differently. Well, it is all the experience that you gain at the training ground.
– Regarding successful operations… Are there perhaps some that you are proud of the most?
– I am most proud of our first four tanks hit, because no one had hit such a quantity in just one day before. It was an operation we executed in coordination with the 3rd ShBr. We have very close relations with the 3rd ShBr, the 24th Brigade, the 92nd Brigade, Achilles [strike UAV battalion]”, with the 93rd Brigade, that is, we were fighting on this section of the frontline for a long time, so we have developed very close relations in terms of coordination. And so, together with the 3rd ShBr, we made a certain technical component. And on the first day, when we exited for a mission equipped with this technical component, enemy tanks moved out at a direct fire distance, and the 3rd ShBr was smashing their frontal armor. It was such a trash! And we engaged four tanks on the first day, completely destroying two of them. And there was such an emotional and psychological explosion. I won’t say we didn’t spend anything, but compared to tanks that cost 3-6 million dollars each, and an UAZ “Bukhanka” that costs 10 thousand dollars, we spent almost nothing. And it was such an emotional surge, one of the brightest emotions we ever experienced.
By the way, the highest number of tanks we hit in one day is six. It happened in the same Donbas sector. Yes, it was cool, too, but it was not the same emotion as the one you feel when you first used a $500 drone to burn down a $3 million tank. There was a T95, by the way, one of the first produced, nicknamed “Proryv” (“breakthrough”). Thus, these are my brightest emotions I’ve experienced during this war thus far. There were lots of different emotions; there was the 2S4 Tyulpan [self-propelled 240mm (9.4 in) heavy mortar] that exploded in another sector, there were Nona’s [self-propelled 120mm mortars], Buk’s [medium-range surface-to-air missile vehicles], and Osa [self-propelled, medium-range air defense missile] vehicles. We were engaged in diverse operations.
Фото
– Are drones in sufficient supply? How do you provide for the needs of your unit?
– Insufficient provisions is an ongoing problem. As regards drones, they are in sufficient supply, more or less, provided both by the government and civilian volunteers. The greatest demand and shortest supply is for consumables, because the engineering component requires constant updates and upgrades. If upgrades and updates and not made constantly, we will not be able to work that effectively. And this is not a story about someone giving 10 thousand dollars and saying: buy us 20 drones. Everyone wants these to be drones, something that can be picked up, used to burn down some of enemy equipment or personnel, so they could say: we bought the drones, they flew and killed. But these drones will not be airworthy if we do not have the consumables… And this is a big problem that every unit has to solve, not just us.
– Do you have anything exclusive in your arsenal, maybe some interesting new products?
– We have such a coalition of effective units, I have already mentioned them — the 3rd ShBr, the 24th Br, the 93rd and 92nd, with which we coordinate, exchange these products, provide assistance to each other. This is important, because all units can follow the same path. And just imagine all the units following the same path, which is a wrong path; some unit follows one path, and, coordinating with another unit, it says: we are developing a new product, and you say: but we have already gone through it, tested it, it does not work, – they do not waste time… Therefore, there are new products, indeed, Our philosophy is that the unit starts with an engineering calculation. If there is no engineering calculation – you cannot do it at all. Drones, regardless of the brand, they do beautiful things, but everything is manufactured far from the frontline, this is a fact. The frontline is constantly evolving, and the counteraction tactic is constantly evolving as well. Therefore, if someone thinks that it is possible to just buy a drone product, take money, or the government provided these drone products, and you taught a crew to fly it, tomorrow it will kill the enemy, then, in my opinion, this is not the case. The engineering component comes first, followed by crews that kill. Therefore, this is a constant path to something innovative. If you stopped today, then expect that the unit will stop engaging enemy targets tomorrow, because you will not have that half step in reserve to continue working. That is why we are working constantly, and that is how everyone is working.
– So, the enemy is in for surprises?
– Absolutely yes. Soon it will be three years since I joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine ranks – it is a lot, and it is hard. We are changing the war’s trajectory on a small section of the frontline… And if you do it and see the result, then, in principle, you can continue fighting. Our work is not as difficult as that of the infantry, as that of assault troops, because one needs to be trained emotionally and psychologically for what they do. It is also difficult, and we too are being hunted. Currently, the enemy is hunting for our UAV operator crews. There have been a lot of instances recently where the guys have died or got wounded. But still, it is not as difficult for us emotionally and psychologically as it is for the infantry or assault troops, they are the heroes of this war. We can protect this infantry, these stormtroopers. If you are effective on this section of the frontline, you can contribute to their work, save them so that they suffer fewer casualties dead and wounded.
– Would you like to say something to the civilians, to those who stay in rear areas and are, perhaps, a little bit discouraged and disoriented as the war entered its fourth year?
– People who are saying: I will not go to war unless called up, then this is history, you are not going to fight with anyone. This is a technological war of the future. In fact, it does not work that one just picks up a rifle and goes to shoot someone. This is a combined-arms battle involving the use of drone tactics, UAVs, ground vehicles of all kinds, a coordinated work. There are no lone partisans here, like in 1941, who were in the forest. Now there is no place to hide in the forest. They will find you wherever you hide: in the forest, day or night. Therefore, there is no need to wait, if you want to defend your family, your home, your Motherland, now there is a chance. You can sign a contract and go to serve wherever you want.
– You said that there is no place to hide in the forest or anywhere else. So, in your opinion, will this affect everyone, everyone will have to fight?
– My opinion is yes. I was saying this from long time, a year ago. Let’s imagine, although it won’t happen, that we lost this war. Are you expecting they will come to take care of us, or of those who were hiding? They will be the first to be compulsorily enrolled into military service, as was the case in Donbas, in Kherson. Who were the first to be mobilized for war? Those residing in occupied territory. Who were the first to be thrown into “meet-grinder” assaults? Those residing in occupied territory, in Donbas, Kherson. And if someone thinks that the enemy will not go further, it will go, and these people will be sent to assault those forested areas, with retreat-blocking troops shooting at their backs. What they are doing, and how many of them died before my eyes, they are dying by full companies, and they continue advancing – this spells one thing (and prisoners tell the same story): there is no way back for them, only forward. No one asks them whether they want to go or not. All will be mobilized, and they will go to storm Poland, the Baltic countries and everything else they will be told to. So, where does the choice lie? Maybe it’s better to defend your own country than to fight for someone else’s? I would rather fight for my own country. There is every chance to fight for your country and win.
– What do you think of the initiative to lower the mobilization age for combat duty?
– I am neither for nor against it. I believe that people at 18 years old are mentally unstable, not fully developed personalities, emotionally and psychologically. I understand that you can mold anything out of them, but I think it is too early. 24–25 years old is OK, more or less. I just remember myself at 18, you just don’t understand anything, they told you to run – you run. Maybe in Soviet times, the army used this: you can’t think very well, they told you to dig – you dig, they told you to run – you run, they told you to kill – you kill. “The party said it is necessary, the Komsomol answered: Yes!”. I can’t force anyone, it’s like putting up barriers. You crossed that execution zone, you can’t go back; if you go back, you’ll be killed. We won’t do that, will we? We won’t. And what will it give us if we mobilize people who will be waiting for an opportune moment to run away from service, become an AWOL? The number of AWOL soldiers, of which there are already so many, will increase. In my view, it is better to deal with them, motivate them to return to the ranks, understand the problems that exist there, figure it out why they did it. For some reason, we punish the AWOL soldiers instead of their commanders who gave a bad order, I don’t know; each case should be investigated by the bodies authorized to do this. I understand that we have a big problem with unauthorized leave from service, and no one is handling it; you have heard the official figures, they are terrible.
– And what’s a solution?
– First of all, the decision has already been made – this is to decriminalize AWOL, because lots of the guys ran away and then realized that they are afraid to return to service, afraid that they will be put in prison for this. Secondly, we need to identify a mechanism so that they can choose. Those mobilized for combat duty have a choice. Why not give this choice also to the AWOL persons so that they can select a unit to serve with? I don’t know if this is right or not; in my opinion, some people would return, I am more than sure of it. Many would return to the ranks, and this would be a good end to this story. That is, in my opinion, we should not perceive each of the individuals who are absent without leave as bad guys. The circumstances may be different, very different.
Фото
– There are different dates discussed on the networks, different options are suggested as to the end of the war, negotiations, scenarios, how it could be. How do you feel about this?
– I don’t feel this way. I don’t believe in this story, whoever may say what. When you are fighting at the front, you don’t see all this, because there is no time, there are many tasks to deal with. And when you return home and look at this whole story: everyone will be killed, everyone will be finished off, all is lost… Those people we intended to mobilize begin thinking: why go to war if the war is coming to an end, I will better wait until it ends. Do I, or you, or someone else have the impression that – some experts are telling us that the war will end soon, it seems that they have established links with the general staffs of all the armies of the world, with commanders, presidents, counterintelligence, that they know more than I, a frontline soldier, do. Here at the frontline, I know one thing: if we execute our tasks well in our small responsibility zone, then everything is fine with us. If we execute our tasks poorly, then we fail everything and retreat, it is very bad…
God grant, peace will arrive. But, again, what kind of peace, on what terms? I personally clearly understand (this is my subjective opinion), if it will be like in 2016 where there was a ceasefire agreed, a kind of peace, there will be a new war in two or three years, they will prepare, revive their capabilities. If someone thinks that this will not happen… This may not happen only under one condition: if we are accepted into NATO, into the European Union. And we understand that these issues, the war, will be resolved in the political realm. Understanding our country, our people, we realize that there is only a truce and everything else – we are unlikely to think about war. People will start building roads, bridges, we are already building these roads, bridges, etc., everything is fine… I understand that this is a necessity. I understand that there must be jobs, wages, salaries in place, that we will not get away from this anywhere. But if there is a truce in place, no one will think about how to build a NATO compliant army so that to be ready in two years. And I believe that our partners are thinking in the same vein: why give anything, if they have a truce? Why send weapons, spend money? And we, for our part, will be like: Let it be as it is, or, even worse, our army and everything else will be reduced, but they will be preparing for a new war. Therefore, in my opinion, we must do what you do; if we can do more, we must do more. We are doing our job, we are forming ourselves. Our short-term task should be to ensure that there are a lot of people who will fight after us, and they are professionals.
– Can one person change the course of history?
– There have been such examples in history. I think yes.
– What is your biggest fear in life?
– My fear, which appeared in my dreams even before the full-scale war, is that I would be drafted into the army for the second time, then the third. And my biggest fear is about my family, its safety and security.
– What is the biggest reward for you?
– Our victory will be the biggest reward for me.
– War for you is…
– For me, war is not just about death but also about life as it was before, but with one nuance – there are many more life risks. So, life goes on; in war, everything is the same.
– What can you never forgive?
– Betrayal.
– Your life credo?
– You need to be where your strengths and expertise can be leveraged to their fullest potential.
– What does independence mean to you?
– Independence means everything to me. That is, independence is freedom of decision-making.
– What will you do first after the victory?
– I will go to the seaside.
– Thank you.
Diana Slavinska led this conversation
Photo: Yevhen Kotenko
The interview can be watched in full here
