Olexander stops in the middle of the road, turns around, and puts his hand to his lips to ask for silence. He stands still, frozen in front of the blank canvas of the snowy field. A distant buzzing makes him open his eyes like a cat in front of the headlights of a truck. The three (military, translator, and reporter) look up at the sky with faces of cold and fear, also paralyzed in the middle of the path. To the left, we have a line of leafless trees. We are all thinking of hiding, but none of us do, as if our predator could sense the movement and our terror. The sound of the propellers approaches. We fail to see the drone among the clouds, but the drone is watching us. I ask Olexander lowering my voice out of fear, as if the drone could hear us.
Olexander remains still, without blinking. The drone moves to our left and, by the sound, seems to be moving away. The three of us let out a sigh of relief. "I think it was a Russian Lancet drone searching for a target. For that type of drone, we are too cheap a target. It is tracking armored vehicles to destroy."
A few minutes later, we will hear another even louder than the previous one passing to our left, beyond the line of trees. The Ukrainians fire bursts of machine gun into the sky when they detect it. We are on the border between Sumy (Ukraine) and Kursk (Russia), in one of the most active fronts, and we visit it during the battle that could decide how this war ends.
On the day that marks six months since Ukrainian troops surprised their invader with an invasion, it seemed like a quiet day to visit Brigade 47, possibly the best trained and armed in all of Ukraine. Putin, humiliated in August, promised months ago to reconquer the area, but the Ukrainians remain well entrenched in this Russian territory.
The journey to this place will be anything but peaceful. The instructions are clear: we cannot step on Russian territory, although we will reach the border, and we cannot photograph anything that could be geolocated. From the moment we left Sumy, the capital of the Ukrainian region, to this place, we have to cross frozen roads where the car skids. In the first villages, there are still elderly people living, but as we approach the war, we find a civilizational desert covered in snow with zero inhabitants and all houses bombed.
In a forest, we see two destroyed armored vehicles and many demining experts around trying to uncover where they placed mines themselves almost three years ago when the invasion began. They do this by sticking old bayonets into the frozen ground. They have already removed several, the size of a family-sized pizza. It is a warning to reckless drivers who continue on the road. Any skid due to ice could result in death.
The last part of the journey is the worst. The road is no longer worthy of the name, and vehicles must slow down if they do not want to break all their axles on the frozen mud. Several burned cars testify that drones also hunt private cars here. A Soviet-era Grad rocket launcher appears out of nowhere and unleashes a barrage of 40 missiles on the Russians that sound like 40 thunderclaps. The final stage is done on foot, skirting the artillery positions of Brigade 47 under the protection of the trees. The crews of these pieces have come out of their shelters, and we see them moving around their cannons.
After some hesitant turns and several questions to soldiers hidden in the trenches (the snow confuses the landscape), we find our target: three crew members of a Bradley named Petro (vehicle commander), Anton (gunner), and Yuri (mechanic and driver). They live in a shelter next to their steel monster, which rests under the trees and hidden from drones under camouflage nets. "I'm sorry you see it covered in mud," Yuri comments, "but it's the consequence of weeks of use on the front line".
The Bradley is an American infantry fighting vehicle. In this invasion of Ukraine, it has proven to be the best possible on the battlefield for the type of warfare being fought here. "We are privileged to be able to use it. This contraption has saved the lives of many good soldiers due to its design. The vehicle can be attacked and destroyed by drones, mines, missiles... but its crew will remain protected. The Soviet-made ones go up in flames at the first shot. Here, we can open the hatches and run out when the vehicle is hit," says their commander, Petro.
The three light up a cigarette, one of the most common activities in war, while talking about their experiences with the Bradley: "They are very easy to handle, even for people who knew nothing about this type of vehicle before. In two weeks, we already knew the essentials even without looking at the instruction book. We just had to work on team coordination, which is essential," Petro comments. Yuri climbs to his position and invites us to enter through the driver's hatch: "Look at this. Under our green paint is the original sand color. That's because this vehicle fought in Iraq against Saddam Hussein with US troops. Although it was designed during the Cold War, it has not been surpassed yet."
One of these Bradleys from Brigade 47 came face to face with a Russian T90 tank, the most modern in the Russian arsenal and a source of pride for Vladimir Putin, theoretically much more powerful in tank-to-tank combat. Instead of retreating, the Bradley fired several bursts with its 20-millimeter cannon until an explosion disarmed the Russian tank. "First, they blinded it by attacking its laser sights, and then it was easy to finish it off," recounts gunner Anton. "We just stick to our mission and aim where we are told. I always feel the adrenaline rising, but I try to behave like a robot." Today, the Bradley is the main weapon of several Ukrainian brigades. "If we had more, we would have already stopped the Russians in the Donbass, but Western weaponry arrives to us in dribs and drabs," Petro comments.
An order crackles on the commander's portable radio. "Don't be alarmed now, but we are going to fire."
The conversation ends soon because a cannon mouth of the battery we have on the embankment opens fire. Then another. And another one... In a few seconds, like steel trumpets, the clangor is so metallic and so painful that you have to cover your ears with both hands and go down to the shelter. On the way, the sky seems to light up with a yellow flash, and an explosion three times more powerful shakes us and seems to steal the oxygen from our lungs. Petro sees our scared reaction and explains, "The Paladin just fired. It's heavy artillery."
Petro refers to the huge 155-millimeter M109 Paladin cannon, also delivered by the United States, hidden just a few meters away from us. Already inside the shelter, the Russian response reaches us: a projectile falls near their dirt ladder, and the shockwave moves the black curtain so the cold doesn't come in. "That's nothing. The other night, a guided bomb fell near the shelter. You should see how the ground shakes," Petro says. Upon returning, we find out that this artillery preparation was the first step of a Ukrainian attack to retake three lost villages.
But the hot coffee and conversation temporarily dispel our fears. When the shelling stops, we go outside. We walk back, listening carefully and compulsively looking at the sky. There will still be one last scare: we start the car, and a thin cable crosses in front of the windshield with a whip-like sound. "A Russian drone with an optical cable flew over us," Olexander says. Not even a kilometer later, we see a Ukrainian armored vehicle in flames by the roadside. "Maybe it was the drone that flew over us just before. Thankfully, it chose others instead of us," Olexander says. This was the true face of war.