US and NATO doctrine is to establish complete air and signals supremacy over a battlefield. That means, nothing flies or is able to communicate unless it's on the blue team.

The Russkies were never able to knock out the Ukrainian Air Force and they've never been able to take out the Ukrainians' ability to communicate back and forth. They can still use cell phones and satellite internet. So with that they can fly their drones around at will and take all the pictures of the Russian defensive positions, then direct other attacks.

In a US conflict those drones would be jammed and attempted to be shot down with a variety of systems. We learned the hard way in Iraq how to detonate IEDs by jamming cell phone signals and/or directing multifrequency signals at the bombs to make them go off.