Russia is treating Ukrainian border towns as its testing ground, regardless of the civilians who live there. The occupiers have for several years used the Bilopillia community in Sumy Oblast to test new types of weapons, first deploying the KAB glide bomb there and later fiber-optic drones that now also strike Sumy, said Nataliia Kalinichenko, a deputy of the Bilopillia city council, according to Espreso.
The pattern Kalinichenko describes is a border community used to debut weapons before they spread deeper into Ukraine. Bilopillia sits close to the Russian border in Sumy Oblast, and it was there that the first KAB glide bomb in the oblast fell on 23 March 2023, killing two people and damaging more than 40 residential and non-residential buildings, a school, and the district police department.
A year ago, residents of the community encountered fiber-optic drones when almost no one knew such a weapon existed, and today, she said, both weapons reach Sumy city, roughly 40 kilometers from the border.
The town saw the KAB and the fiber-optic drone first
Kalinichenko's account traces two weapons from their first appearance in Bilopillia to their spread across the oblast. The first was the glide bomb, in March 2023.
"The first KAB in Sumy Oblast fell precisely on Bilopillia on 23 March 2023. At that time, we did not even understand the enormous destructive power this weapon has," she said.
The strike killed two people and damaged more than 40 residential and non-residential buildings, a school, and the district police department.
"We learned what a KAB is," she recalled.
The glide bomb, a Soviet-era aerial bomb fitted with a guidance kit and wings that lets Russian jets release it from tens of kilometers away, has since become one of the deadliest weapons of the war, with Russia dropping thousands a month and using them to systematically level Sumy border villages into "buffer zones."
The second weapon was the fiber-optic drone.
"We already saw this fiber-optic web lying across Bilopillia. Today, unfortunately, all these types of weapons are already used against Sumy too. They reach the regional center," Kalinichenko said.
The tangled cables the drones left behind became a visible marker of the town's role as the place where the weapon first appeared.
The fiber-optic drone is dangerous because it cannot be jammed
Kalinichenko explained why the fiber-optic drone is so hard to stop, and it matches what Ukraine's specialists have documented. The drones are especially dangerous because they are practically impossible to suppress with electronic warfare, and the optics mounted on them let operators make out the smallest details, including license plates or elements of clothing, she said.
The weapon's design is what makes it immune to jamming. A fiber-optic drone is guided by a thin glass fiber that unwinds during flight rather than by radio signal, so it emits nothing for Ukraine's electronic warfare to detect or disrupt. When the first such drone reached Kharkiv in February 2026, Defense Ministry adviser Serhii Beskrestnov called it a serious technological challenge, because radio-electronic reconnaissance is useless against a drone that broadcasts no signal.
That the same weapon appeared in Bilopillia even earlier fits the town's role as the leading edge of Russia's deadly experiments.
The border communities are the war's early-warning system
Bilopillia's experience is a preview of what the rest of Ukraine faces next. Weapons that debut against the border communities migrate inward as Russia scales them and extends their range, so what a Bilopillia council deputy describes today is often what a larger city reports months later.
