October 25, 2025: About 16 percent of Ukraine’s land area consists of forests. During the current war, those trees have been lifesaving props for thousands of soldiers. The trees provided protection from the ever-present drones that dominated the fighting between Ukrainians and Russians. Drones came to dominate the Ukraine War because the most popular model, the FPV (First Person View) drone, could capture video of surveillance and attack operations. This provided dramatic and often gory visual evidence of the drone war. Drones were soon responsible for most of the casualties and changed the way wars are fought.

The forests were one of many factors that contributed to the development of new weapons and tactics. In 2019, Ukraine, as part of ongoing military reforms and reorganization, created a Jäger/light infantry brigade for the Ukraine Special Operations Forces. Described as similar to the American Ranger Regiment, part of SOCOM (Special Operations Command), the Jäger brigade used an existing infantry brigade but replaced conscripts with selected volunteers. The Jägers received upgraded equipment and intensive training. The Jägers were initially assigned to provide security and timely intelligence about what happened along several hundred kilometers of the northern border with Belarus and Russia. In this area, the terrain consists largely of thinly populated marshland and ancient forests. The western end of this border zone contains the abandoned and restricted area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which exploded in 1986 and is now encased in a very expensive structure built over it. The reactor complex is surrounded by 2,600 square kilometers of depopulated territory that includes the city of Pripyat and a short stretch of the Pripyat River. This exclusion zone has come to be known as the Red Forest and is full of animals that have adapted to the high radiation levels. The area is constantly monitored and regularly visited by intrepid tourists who carry radiation detection devices indicating how much radiation they have been exposed to. The Jäger Brigade was mainly concerned with the forests and marshland east of the Red Forest.

The Jäger Brigade did not have many personnel, at least not initially. The core of the brigade was several hundred Special Operations veterans plus several hundred selected volunteers from among career volunteer soldiers. In addition, the Jägers recruited personnel who had a forestry or wilderness management background. This included young men who grew up in this forest and marshland frontier area. The terrain, lack of population, and lack of roads have made this a borderland, even after Ukraine lost its independence in the 14th century and was eventually absorbed into the Russian Empire.

The Jäger Brigade was a major expansion of Ukraine’s Special Operations forces, which, in 2016, became the fifth branch of the armed forces. At that point, the Special Operations command had fewer than 5,000 personnel. This was one of many changes made to the Special Operations units since small numbers of special operations troops proved crucial in stopping the Russian-backed separatists who, in 2014, tried to take control of the two provinces that comprise eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Mainly because of the timely and effective intervention of a few hundred special operations troops at key points during the early months of combat, the pro-Russian separatists, reinforced by a growing number of Russian troops and even some Russian Spetsnaz commandos, failed to achieve much. In the first year of fighting, Ukraine’s special operations forces lost nearly a hundred dead in combat, and most of those losses were suffered during 2014 as the Russian advance was halted. The special operations forces even took back some key areas the separatists had already seized. Because of that, the separatists agreed to a ceasefire in early 2015, but some fighting continued as Ukrainian forces kept taking back territory from the demoralized separatist forces until the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022.