Inside the Lives of Ukraine's Tired, Determined Drone Pilots

Yahoo

06-04-2025

A column of smoke rises on the horizon, and birds scatter from the trees as the green van barrels down the muddy road. It's January 21, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, and a Ukrainian Army drone unit is on a reconnaissance mission on the border of the Volnovakha region of Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine. The van comes to a stop under a tangle of branches, concealing it from enemy drones above, and the soldiers jump out. Yevhen, the unit's navigator, unloads a V-shaped drone and begins unspooling cables for the Starlink. Dmytro, the pilot, sets up computers in the back of the van. Serhiy, the technician, puts up two four-meter-high green antennas.*
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.'
A reconnaissance flight can last hours. With the drone on course, the men settle in. They adjust controls, smoke, and chat. Politics comes up. (Earlier in the day, they laughed at Trump's campaign promise to end the war in a day. 'Maybe today is the last day of war, and tomorrow we go home,' Yevhen said sarcastically.) After 20 minutes, the drone's video feed breaks up. The clouds are too low today, and flying any lower would expose it to enemy fire. 'Recall it,' Yevhen says.
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.
The soldiers stay motionless as the drone buzzes above them—growing louder, then softer, then louder again. There is nothing to do but wait and hope the drone won't find them under the trees before it runs out of battery. 'I flew with FPVs a lot,' Yevhen explains. (FPV stands for first-person view: The pilot's goggles show the drone's-eye view.) 'It's better to move slow and not to run. It is harder for the pilot to see someone who does not move, especially under the trees. I know because I destroyed a lot of Russians that were trying to run away.'
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.
Days earlier, with their reconnaissance drone, Yevhen's unit had identified an enemy artillery gun hidden in the trees. That's the mission objective for the kamikaze drone, which is now airborne and approaching its target. It darts down in a suicide drop toward the artillery gun, which is only half-hidden by camouflage netting. The video cuts out before impact. The pilot exhales, grins, and stretches his fingers.
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.As the sun sinks below the horizon, the unit returns to its billet, a squat brick house with a slanted roof in a village close to their outpost. Yevhen, Dmytro, and Serhiy drop their gear in the hallway and change their muddy boots for slippers, moving quietly, knowing that after all they are guests in this home.
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.
The soldiers eat and chat with the elderly couple, but their work for the day hasn't ended yet. They prepare equipment and upload the photos and videos collected from the drone. Throughout the evening, enemy Shahed drones buzz nearby, heading toward central Ukraine.
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.
'I know,' Serhiy replies, grinning.
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.'
Yevhen joined the army as soon as the full-scale invasion started. 'Once the war ends, I would like to be an actor again,' he says. 'But even if I could, I don't know if I can shoot movies now. I have closed my mind from certain things in war. I don't have an empathy like an actor now. Anyway, my country needs a defender now, not an actor.'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.
The men move through their usual routine, only today joined by a fourth member, Volodymyr. Today, the drone carries a bomb, and that changes the launch procedure. A misfire could detonate the payload, so Serhiy puts together a trebuchet powered by a car battery to catapult the drone safely into the air.
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.'
In the van, a red warning flashes across the screen—incoming glide bombs. A single glide bomb can level an eight-story building. The first two land on the horizon, sending up black mushroom clouds. Then the air cracks above and the third slams into the field next to them. The blast throws dirt and shrapnel in all directions. The shock wave rattles branches, and the men sprint for the dugouts as dirt and shrapnel shower the ground.
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?'
Yevhen glances over. 'No.'
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.
'Three, two, one—launch.'
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.
'We will hit the target,' Yevhen says.
Serhiy shrugs. 'We will see what happens.'
'You're not romantic.'
'I'm a realist.'
The men laugh.
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.'
The bomb spins slightly as it falls, shrinking into the landscape below, and then an orange fireball fills the screen. The men barely react.
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.