The men pay no attention to the distant bursts of automatic fire and explosions. Within minutes, Serhiy hooks up the drone to a huge slingshot on the edge of a field. The motor screams as the rear propeller spins up, and Yevhen counts down, “Three, two, one, launch!” Serhiy launches the drone, and it whooshes up into the sky. Dmytro watches the drone’s-eye view on his computer, the ground shrinking away. Yevhen, studying a battlefield map marked with enemy positions, vehicles, and fortifications, gives precise instructions to Dmytro. “Go higher. Ten degrees left.” A pause. “Five degrees right.”
Once the drone returns, they move to join an adjacent unit working with kamikaze winged drones a few hundred meters away. Soon after they arrive, one of the soldiers points to the sky, “FPV! I see it!” The men crouch down. The X-shaped silhouette of an enemy drone circles above the trees.
After 10 long minutes, the drone leaves and detonates somewhere to the west, and the men get back to work. They prepare their winged kamikaze drone, which is also an FPV but larger than the more common X-shaped drone and thus can fly further and carry larger explosives, making it effective for striking high-priority targets deep behind enemy lines.
The men watch the dead screen, waiting. Then Yevhen shakes his head, “I think it was a miss. You overshot, maybe, by 100 meters.” The sun sinks lower, stretching long shadows through the trees. The temptation is there—to stay, to send up another drone, to try again. But the next flight will have to wait. This is the reality of combat. Most missions are trial and error—misses, signal loss, moving targets. Success comes from persistence, not just one lucky hit. “Better to try again tomorrow,” Yevhen says, packing up his rifle. The others nod. The war doesn’t end tonight, and neither does their work.
Oleksandr sits in the warm light of the kitchen with a cigarette between his fingers. He has his wife’s name tattooed on his hand. “Come in, come in,” he says, waving Yevhen to smoke with him. He and his wife, Natalia, decided to let the soldiers stay at their home for free. Their own son, Vitalii, is with infantry in one of the hottest spots of the front line, in Pokrovsk, and it comes naturally to the couple to offer a meal, a place to rest, a bit of warmth to Yevhen’s unit.
Late at night, a laptop screen lights Serhiy’s face as he lies in his sleeping bag, watching a movie. Yevhen, heading out for a cigarette, glances over Serhiy’s shoulder. “That’s my movie,” he says.
Before the war, Yevhen was an actor. He repeatedly calls it “a different life” or “a peace life.” The war has split his life into two unrecognizable halves. Pointing at the screen where his movie plays, he says, “The director is in the army now.” Then, “That actor is in the army too. That one was killed in Kupiansk.” A pause. “And him—he’s dead too.”
In the morning, the green van speeds past the freshly dug trenches, curls of barbed wire, and lines of dragon teeth back to the stretch of trees under which the unit’s dugout hides. The trees shiver in the cold wind.
Yevhen’s unit typically outfits its drones with rocket-propelled grenade warheads, but today they use fragmentation shells. They’re submunitions salvaged from unexploded Russian cluster munition rockets. Yevhen laughs, “Russians sent them here, and they didn’t work. No problem—we’ll recycle them and send them back for refund.”
Silence. Then Serhiy climbs out, brushing dust from his jacket. He picks up a jagged piece of shrapnel that landed less than a meter from where Yevhen was standing when the glide bombs exploded. He examines the van. “Wheels punctured?”
No more discussion. After years of fighting, close calls become routine. The men return to their work without a word. Serhiy checks the trebuchet tension. Dmytro confirms the drone’s systems. Yevhen gives a final nod.
The trebuchet snaps forward, and the drone shoots into the sky. Luckily, the clouds are high enough today. The screen shows a battlefield carved up by months of war. Below, artillery shells detonate along the front, sending thick clouds of smoke into the sky.
Serhiy shrugs. “We will see what happens.”
“I’m a realist.”
On the screen, the target comes into view—a trench line tucked beneath a sparse tree line. A red square with a cross appears, locking onto the position. The drone slows down, stabilizing for the drop. The screen reads, “Seconds to drop: 3, 2, 1,” and then: “BOMB DROPPED.”
As soon the drone returns, they start preparing for the next launch. Tomorrow will be the same—more drone launches, another long day spent staring at screens and counting down to impact. The work is endless, but here on the front, no one expects it to be otherwise. There is no grand conclusion, no moment of finality, as long as they manage to stay alive. Just the next mission, the next drone flight, and the war that keeps going.
* Since the soldiers allowed the photojournalist access without their commander’s approval, they asked to be identified only by their first names and call signs.
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