The man sitting in front of the two monitors asks the drone operator to zoom in on a town: it is the village of Pervomaiske. Located on the outskirts of Donetsk. The Russians have recently conquered it. There isn’t a house left standing. The operator narrows the field even further on the courtyard of a house. There are three of their dead soldiers. They look like puppets thrown on the ground along with debris and garbage. The drone moves slightly past a shed with an Eternit roof. The drone’s camera zooms in further. A fourth Russian soldier, his face distorted in a grin of pain, is lying in a meadow. The Kalashnikov next door.
“These were eliminated a few days ago. Every day they try to infiltrate the gray zone, the no man’s land between our lines and theirs.” The speaker is a lieutenant major of the Ukrainian army. His name is George and he commands a unit of the 59th Brigade. This is drone aerial warfare, and it’s a race to see who will be the first to bring death onto the battlefield from above.
In Slavic mythology Baba Yaga is an evil old witch with magical powers. Here, in the tragic reality of this war, Baba Yaga is a large drone, which can carry multiple munitions, guided through a Starlink satellite system. The Russians called it this way, like the witch, giving it the name of an evil and mischievous being endowed with magical powers. He appears at night, in the dark, sowing terror among the Moscow troops. “We need trained and certified people to pilot this type of device. These are not things that can be handled by beginners. And above all I need motivated people. Not everyone would go racing towards the front on a vehicle loaded with over two hundred kilograms of explosive”. A group of engineers, technicians and pilots work together with George. And there is also a cat in the team, ‘Mavic’, born in a trench.
Devices created for agricultural use that are now transformed into killing machines. Drones are being modified with more powerful antennas. The pilot remains at a distance while the assembly group must go to positions a few kilometers away from the Russians. They replace mortars, hitting with precision ten or fifteen kilometers beyond enemy lines. The Russians also have drones of different types. The subjective view of an FPV drone appears on the monitor, kamikaze devices that carry an explosive charge directly against the enemy, generally armored vehicles but also positions and individual soldiers. It says ‘Sudny Den’ on the monitor.
“This is not ours, it’s Russian. It means ‘Judgment Day’ and they are our direct rivals in this combat area. We intercepted the communication between the drone and the pilot and we see what they see. Now let’s try to neutralize it with electronic countermeasures. The Russians have changed tactics on the ground: they advance in small groups of two, three men and then they hide in ruined buildings or under destroyed vehicles. When they reach sixty, seventy men, they group up and try to attack our positions.” A Ukrainian drone has identified two of them: they are running in the middle of a bush. They know they are being filmed. One tries to hide by going around a group of trees several times. They will be killed.
We move to a location on the front line of fire, near Ocheretyne. The 47th Mechanized Brigade operates here. Geolocations must be turned off, bulletproof vests and helmets worn, the car parked under the vegetation. The exchanges of artillery fire are continuous. That of the Russians is very close. The whistles of the bullets pass over our heads crashing nearby. You have to move quickly along the road. Russian reconnaissance drones are flying everywhere. Inside a bunker, a group of men are working in front of monitors and computers. Olexander Shyrshyn, 29, a deputy company commander, is directing operations by giving orders over the radio. They must stop the Russian advance in their sector.
“Putin can give all the orders he wants. He has already done it before, he wanted to take Bakhmut by May 9th and he didn’t succeed. For almost eleven months they were blocked. This year too his military parade in Moscow will not take place with a symbolic conquest. Of course the situation is difficult now, we can safely say that it is critical, but at the same time it is controllable. Every day we eliminate a huge number of Russian vehicles and soldiers and with this we must do something accounts. They don’t care about how many resources they lose, they only care about the territory, even if there is nothing left above it” they explain.
“We’ve been keeping them nailed here for nine months. We’ve already put tens of thousands of them underground”
“It is possible that they can advance, but as a soldier I cannot rely on chances, I fight. We have kept them nailed here for nine months. How many have we already put underground? Tens of thousands. I am here to thwart their plans and the words that are said outside the battlefield are of little interest to me. Our Western partners must understand one thing: we are happy with the release of American military aid, but if they do not help us consistently, a very tortuous road opens up for them, because Putin will not stop”.
We move again, by car, towards a warehouse. ‘Kubik’ awaits us. Commander of a Bradley, the American armored infantry vehicles. He is only 25 years old but has gained great experience participating in the defense of Avdiivka. Now his ward is located in the area of Ocheretyne village. “This craft is capable of withstanding a 155-millimeter hit, and, most importantly, it manages to save the crew inside it. No other craft of Soviet production is capable of this. It is formidable. Our main mission in these days, we have done it several times to take our comrades back to the front line under enemy artillery fire.”
As we write, the Russians have entered the village of Ocheretyne and there is house-to-house fighting. Kubik, together with Mykola and Vitaly, his crew, have already returned on a mission, this time to directly counter the advance of Russian troops.
