Anatoli, the only inhabitant of a village near Pokrovsk that no longer has a name, is not our friend but offers us a glass of vodka. He wants to finish off the bottles he has left so as not to leave any loot for the enemy. "That way, he won't drink alone." The poisonous breath of war is very close and could arrive in a few weeks. "I'm preparing a soup with all the meat I had left," he says with a smile missing several teeth. "It will be the best I've ever tasted in my life."
We leave Anatoli with his vodka and travel back on the road towards the front. We do it without GPS, guided only by our contact. The electronic warfare waves to mislead drones confuse all geolocation elements, and we must travel the old-fashioned way, with a map and asking the military at the checkpoints. We finally find a seemingly empty house, the only one still standing, with windows covered with black plastic, where one cannot tell from inside whether it is day or night. A group of young people live in it. At the door, a fierce-looking dog trembles in fear from the nearby explosions. Several cows lie dead from artillery shells, but the cold and snow soften the foul smell.
If Bill Gates and Paul Allen revolutionized computing in a small garage, we have just arrived at one of the laboratories of future warfare. Inside, the activity is frenetic. We meet a commander nicknamed Chaplain who gives orders to two profiles more typical of urban teenagers: the nerd and the gamer. According to the RAE dictionary, a nerd is a studious and intelligent person who tends to show a withdrawn and unsociable character. Volodimir, 22, quiet and taciturn, sits in front of us, illuminated by a desk lamp, focusing all his attention on a device with four arms ending in propellers. With a few tweaks, he modifies commercial drones from China and turns them into killing machines.
Around us, columns from floor to ceiling with these aerial predators await their turn to fly.
- Do you enjoy doing this work?
- It's very mechanical but I love it. Plus, it allows me to be further away from the front line.
- How many can you assemble each day?
- Dozens, maybe hundreds. We sleep little here. While I rest, another works. This chair is always warm. I don't mind not sleeping. Every drone I assemble is a soldier who doesn't have to fight in person, who can kill from a distance. I'll sleep when all this is over.
The other profile is even more valuable: the example is Timofil Orel, 25. He has already been awarded the Golden Cross and the title of hero of Ukraine. His officers claim that he alone has killed 434 Russian soldiers, wounded over 300, destroyed 42 tanks, and 60 other military vehicles of all kinds. With his lethal figures, this gamer has surpassed Vasili Záitsev, the Ural sniper who shot down 242 German soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad.
They sleep in a room full of bunk beds that resembles the belly of a submarine. Some rest while others fight in a Stakhanovite rotation. We ask Dmitro, one of them, to show us his combat goggles and the controls of the hell's angels he launches against the enemy.
- How do you feel when you attack the Russians with these drones?
- The same as a fighter pilot. We accumulate the same stress and have the same nightmares.
- We have to launch our drones from the front line to take advantage of their autonomy. That's why we have become a prime target. It's a duel to the death. We search for the hiding places of enemy drone pilots, and they search for us. There are hardly any human-to-human combats anymore. Only drones against humans. We fight against machines.
Dmitro, Timofil, and hundreds of thousands of young people were raised in a world where killing a person was the most serious crime one could commit. Moreover, for religious people, taking a life is a sin. Now they splash around in a dystopia where they are decorated for killing a lot, and military priests bless them every Sunday as if they were weapons of God.
Chaplain ensures that thousands of drones now fly over the front. Some are kamikaze, launching themselves at the enemy at high speed. Others are spy drones that fly high, but their keen eye can see if a soldier has shaved that morning. There are also bombing drones that drop increasingly heavy grenades, others that spread streams of incandescent thermite as if they were dragons, and even signal repeater drones, serving as antennas to coordinate the others and operate further and further away. There are even drones equipped with speakers to broadcast demotivating messages to the enemy, such as the list of captured soldiers with their full names.
The new invention, introduced by the Russians and copied by the Ukrainians the same week of its debut, is the tethered drone, that is, a device capable of traveling 10, 20, or even 30 kilometers linked to its origin by a cable as thin as fishing line. These drones are impossible to shoot down by cutting their frequency with electronic warfare. The inhibitory antennas mounted on armored vehicles are useless against them. In recent days, the battlefields have been crisscrossed by these transparent threads as if they were flying cobwebs.
Volodimir Zelenski has just approved measures for under 25-year-olds, who are not yet conscripted, to volunteer with great economic benefits and a salary well above average, as well as facilities to buy a house. Kiev wants teenagers with gaming skills. Minimizing casualties with remote attacks is now the only way Ukraine can withstand this brutal war of attrition, as Russia, with its size and population, can continue to put people in the trenches. The veteran trench soldier, a true war dog, is becoming less important every day.
The Special Military Operation that was supposed to take Kiev in three days is now three years old. Last year around this time, this reporter visited the outskirts of Avdivka, the city that had just fallen into Russian hands, and ate in Pokrovsk, 35 kilometers away. Today, the Russians are six kilometers from this latter city, which they have already completely destroyed from a distance. That is the result of the Russian advance, with a toll of hundreds of thousands dead on both sides since 2022, although the real figures of the carnage are the best-kept secret. In total, Russia has conquered 20% of Ukraine in three years, filling cemeteries on both sides and their cities with disabled. This will be the war for which Putin will be remembered, and not for the better.
The current feeling is a mix of shock over Trump's betrayal and the fatigue of three years of death and destruction. After fighting Putin's lies, now one must endure those of what was supposed to be your best ally. The moment is so Orwellian that telling a Ukrainian that the war is Zelenski's fault, as Trump does, is equivalent to telling a Washingtonian that the attack on Pearl Harbor was initiated by the US.
The Russian autocrat wants to declare victory by May 9, commemorating the triumph in the so-called "Great Patriotic War," but the reality without propaganda is that he has not achieved any of his military objectives, neither conquering Kiev, nor installing a puppet in power, nor ending Ukraine's sovereignty. At this rate, Russia could only take all of Donbass when Putin is already dead from old age.
A line of trucks arrives in the city near the front (which we will not reveal) loaded with soldiers with blackened faces. Through the gaps in their wooden seats, one can imagine how many casualties the enemy caused. Several ambulances pass us with wailing sirens loaded with the wounded. In the field hospital, we visit the soldiers arriving from the front. We see some wearing dog flea collars around their necks to avoid parasites.
One of them has a very severe lung perforation. Another arrives with an arm riddled with shrapnel, as if suffering from leprosy. Another, still conscious, refuses to look at his own leg, tied with two tourniquets, because the foot has disappeared and now only a pulp of bones, flesh, and cartilage remains. They have been fighting for days without showering. The stench is somewhere between the smell of the living and the dead. The doctor, with permanent dark circles under his eyes, attends to us while giving orders to his staff:
- What type of weapon caused these wounds?
He points to the row of beds where four patients wounded in the last few hours are resting.
- That one was injured by a drone. That one, another drone. That one over there, a suicide drone exploded next to him, and the last one by a Lancet drone that blew up his armored vehicle.
- Have only Russian drones caused this destruction? Are there no gunshot or artillery injuries?
- Drones are now responsible for 90% of casualties in both armies. They also cause great psychological terror because they reach farther and are more powerful. If a drone locates you, you have little chance of escaping.
The terrestrial nightmare
We leave the hospital and meet Alona Bogachuk, a sergeant in the Ukrainian army after 18 years in Spain, whom readers of this newspaper may know from previous visits. Thanks to a personal obsession, she has developed a ground drone design with a camera and tracks capable of carrying a powerful anti-tank mine and detonating it in enemy positions: "Yes, we have used it and have already conquered several trenches. The Russians do not identify the sound because it is silent, and by the time they realize it, the explosive goes off. We also have a larger one to evacuate the wounded from the combat zone or carry a remotely operated machine gun."
In December, a historic event that went unnoticed but will change wars forever occurred. The Ukrainian army carried out a meticulously planned operation using drones of all types to take a position where Russian occupants were well entrenched. It took place in the village of Lypsi, north of the city of Kharkiv. First, spy drones determined enemy positions. Then, aerial drones bombed them from above, and after that, a dozen ground drones, armed with machine guns and explosives, and others shaped like dogs armed with flamethrowers, occupied Russian fortifications one by one. When Z troops realized they were being attacked by robots, they fled in panic.
Buzzing bombs
In the capital, Kyiv, the facade of normalcy ends when night falls and the inevitable curfew begins. Then, the anti-aircraft alarms sound punctually, the searchlights turn on, and the early morning turns into a battle in the sky. Every day, Russia sends nearly 200 Shaheed drones against the main cities of Ukraine, especially targeting its energy network. But as two can play at that game, Ukrainian drones bomb Russian refineries, the vulnerable link in the Russian economy.
Like Hitler's V-1 bombs over London in 1940, these drones buzz in the night, flying over the downtown hotels, the golden domes of Orthodox churches, and Maidan Square where Ukraine stood up to Russian domination in 2014. The population, accustomed to the buzzing of their engines and the bursts of anti-aircraft artillery, turns over in bed and continues sleeping with disarming fatalism. "Putin has been at it for three years, and here we are," says a Ukrainian waiter in a pizzeria. "We have paid a high price, but we are free."
Ukraine wants peace, but not Putin's peace. No one in Kyiv trusts the Russians. The Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement is being replayed: one wants the rare earths, and the other, the conquered land.