In a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian soldiers have been honing what they believed will be a decisive weapon in their effort to repel the Russian invasion.
Inside, the weapon glows from a dozen computer screens – a constantly updated portrayal of the evolving battlefield to the south. With one click on a menu, the map is populated with hordes of orange diamonds, showing Russian deployments. They reveal where tanks and artillery have been hidden, and intimate details of the units and the soldiers in them, gleaned from social media. Choosing another option from the menu lights up red arrows across the southern Zaporizhzhia region, showing the progression of Russian columns. Zooming in shows satellite imagery of the terrain in sharp detail.
It is called Delta, a software package developed by Ukrainian programmers to give their armed forces an advantage in a contest of which side can see the battlefield more clearly and therefore predict the enemy forces’ moves and strike them faster and more accurately.
While many scenes from the war in Ukraine look like a throwback to the first world war, with muddy trench networks and blasted landscapes, the conflict is also a testing ground for the future of warfare, where information and its dissemination in instantly usable form to individual soldiers will be critical to victory or defeat.
A screen showing battlefield positions, past and present. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
Vitalii, a computer expert at the defence’s ministry’s centre for innovation and development of defence technologies, said Ukraine had a natural advantage as it had a younger, less hierarchical political culture.
“The biggest differences between the Russian army and Ukrainian army are the horizontal links between the units,” Vitalii said. (Like other soldiers at the innovation centre, he provided only his first name.) “We are winning mainly because we Ukrainians are naturally horizontal communicators.”
The suite of offices in Zaporizhzhia house one of six “situational awareness centres” that Ukraine’s armed forces have set up on different fronts. A seventh is being established in the Donbas.
The Zaporizhzhia site, contributed by a local businessman, is the centre’s sixth location – it has had to move repeatedly for security and logistical reasons. It is due to be transferred to a more permanent, custom-fitted home underground this month.
Delta is run by the innovation centre, whose staff have been drawn to a large degree from a volunteer organisation of drone operators and programmers called Aerorozvidka (aerial reconnaissance).
Positions of Russian tanks spotted by drone. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
Tatiana, another official at the innovation centre, said the nature of its origins, as a private-public partnership, also gave it an edge.
“These were not bureaucrats from the defence ministry. They were from the corporate sector who were mobilised to serve in the army,” she said. “They started to make Delta with their own minds and hands, because they had this culture of agile development. The creative process has a short circle. You develop it, you test it, you launch it.”
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