5 days ago
Down the road of death, littered with burning vehicles and covered with drone nets,
Fermín Torrano travels into Pokrovsk, home to the most intense fighting of the war.
The flames of a burning car illuminate the roadside, and Andrii puts his foot down: Seventy. Eighty. Ninety-five miles per hour.
Two of his comrades lean out the windows, scanning the darkness. A fourth Ukrainian soldier rides in the truck bed, with an AKS-74U in hand.
A sharp beep cuts through the air as the anti-drone system flashes on the screen: it's the second warning we've had.
'If you see a drone, jump and run after me. Forget your stuff. Understood?' Femida, a drone pilot with the 68th Ukrainian Brigade, said before we climbed into the vehicle.
No one speaks now. The roar of artillery, the rush of wind through open windows, and the steady hum of the tires fill the silence. The road narrows ahead and is lined by the charred skeletons of cars that never made it through.
The anti-drone nets cover just a short stretch of this route. The rest is down to luck.
This is the entrance to Pokrovsk.
The Telegraph entered the city to spend 24 hours with a Ukrainian unit defending what is mostly ruins.
Few journalists are allowed into the most violent part of the front line at such a critical time.
Ukraine is fighting tooth and nail here to prevent Moscow from taking what would be its biggest prize since capturing Bakhmut in 2023.
At stake is a launchpad for Russia to push further west as part of a summer offensive that is already gaining momentum.
The city itself has been all but destroyed after almost a year of fighting. The attrition rate is high, but the soldiers continue to hold on.
Entering Pokrovsk
'Son of a b----!' Andrii slams on the brakes.
The 4x4 stops dead on the edge of the city where an abandoned car blocks the road ahead.
Andrii punches the steering wheel, then swerves and drives around the blockage to take another route.
The tires kick up rubble and shards of metal as we proceed past pockmarked houses and tall apartment blocks, some caved in by Russian air strikes.
What is left of Pokrovsk no longer has traffic lights or signs.
The drone detector beeps again. Once. Twice. A third, after a pause.
Andrii veers off the road and pulls up between two buildings. Our team is receiving live orders through the Starlink satellite uplink fixed to the roof of the pick-up.
Under the canopy of some trees, two civilians grill meat. Graves have been dug in nearby gardens for neighbours with no other place to be buried.
Remarkably, between 2,000 and 3,000 people still live here, less than 5 per cent of the pre-war population. Water, electricity and gas were cut off months ago.
This devastated city still matters to its last weary people, many of whom have nowhere else to go.
It also matters strategically, and to the military units embedded in the debris, perhaps more than ever.
Once a key logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the Donetsk region, the fall of Pokrovsk would open the gate to Dnipro and give Russian forces a path north.
Its capture is a step closer to full control of Eastern Ukraine, Putin's main goal since his armoured columns were forced to retreat from Kyiv in March 2022.
Five major cities still stand in the way of the conquest of Eastern Ukraine: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, Kostiantynivka, and Pokrovsk.
But all of them are now less than 14 miles from Russian-held territory.
Pokrovsk's city centre is just three miles from the trenches.
Relentless Russian artillery has shredded what lies between. And among the twisted concrete, small teams like ours offer their colleagues on the front line valuable cover.
Entering the bunker
Andrii drops us at our destination, an unremarkable building with a basement acting as a hub for drone warfare.
As we arrive, our driver picks up other soldiers rotating out, away from the heat of battle.
Our team moves quickly, unloading backpacks and supplies, shaking hands with their comrades. Like substitutes in a football match, three go in as three come out.
This happens every four days, if conditions allow.
As we enter the bunker, Femida, a big, bald former police officer from Western Ukraine, sighs, finally safe underground.
'The dictator [Putin] bombs schools, kindergartens, hospitals... I don't get how anyone can seriously talk about negotiations," he says, referring to stalled peace talks in the gilded Ottoman halls of Istanbul.
"It's like a thief breaking into your house, pointing a gun at your head and saying, 'Give me your money'. And when you finally get a weapon to defend yourself, he proposes, 'Well, let's split it fifty-fifty and call it peace'.'
The building we are in has several floors. Above ground, there's ammunition and a table to prepare drones.
Below, a small white-brick room with old cobwebs, three cots, two drones hanging on the wall, a shelf, a stove, 15 DJI drone batteries charging and a controller dangling from a cable.
Our team's mission is to fly the Mavic quadcopters that have become so central to the defence of Ukraine.
These tiny drones were once an oddity in this war; now they are the war.
Today alone, they will send their drone up more than 16 times, despite the rain and wind.
They monitor Russian movements and drop mines and grenades over the grey zone no-man's land to stall any advance. Jamal, with the AK-47, has a patch on his arm that reads: death from above.
'We're fairly safe down here,' says Femida, wiping sweat from his brow. 'But if a KAB (laser-guided bomb) hits, that's it. We'll end up under the rubble.'
We hear the boom of rockets hitting nearby, but not on our position.
'They fire a lot of Grads (Soviet missiles) now to cover a wider area. But the truth is, they don't really know where we are,' says Bandera, 22, a father of two from the safe city of Lviv in the far West of the country..
The position is part of a flank holding back the Russian push westward. If this sector falls, the city could be encircled.
Summer offensive
Moscow is attempting a simple pincer – advancing from both the south and the north of Pokrovsk.
It has forced Ukraine to bolster its troop numbers, pull elite reinforcements from Kursk, and split logistics under constant fire.
While the most pessimistic analysis predicted both Pokrovsk and neighbouring Kostiantynivka would fall before 2025, the Ukrainian flag still flies.
Russia's gains since 2023 have been limited, roughly one city of 70,000 inhabitants per year.
That's enough to pin down Kyiv's forces while spreading fear through bombing and death across the country. But still not sufficient to fully control Eastern Ukraine.
However, Russia's advance is now accelerating at its fastest rate for months, and villages are falling by the day – one reason why Putin is in no rush to accept a ceasefire.
Before the full-scale invasion began, Russia already held 30-35 per cent of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Today, despite making it their primary objective for three years, they control about 85 per cent.
As Russia's long-awaited summer offensive gets underway, the Kremlin will soon have to decide which part of the front to prioritise.
In many ways, tactics have not changed. Men are sent to their deaths with wanton disregard to gain the smallest slivers of territory.
Femida lays out the grim reality of the battlefield in our small corner of the war, asking that we look at a screen in front of him.
'To reach our positions, they first have to cross a kilometre of open ground. There's no other way in,' he says, reassuringly.
'They send one with a rifle and grenades. You kill him. Ten minutes later, another. You kill him. Then a third, a fourth... You kill them all. Losing people like that is stupid.'
In different positions along the front, his comrades and soldiers from other Ukrainian units also operate FPV drones, 'Vampire' quadcopters, and fibre-optic cable drones, which have added yet another dimension to the war in the skies. Together, they form a silent force that watches, penetrates, and kills around the clock.
Drones and their operators are so precise that many call them the snipers of modern warfare. Yet they are still not enough to stop Moscow's Soviet-style tactics of throwing endless bodies over the top.
'For the Russians, their own people are like barrels of oil,' says Femida. 'If they have to sell them, they sell them. If they need to get rid of them, they get rid of them.'
Pinned down
Jamal loads the ammunition into a drone's belly and shouts for Femida to take off.
With the skies under relentless watch, launching and landing a drone is when these soldiers are most at risk of giving up their location.
Between missions, Jamal, 26, a shy but good humoured carpenter also from Western Ukraine, charges batteries, cooks, scrolls through his phone, and smokes.
He smokes a lot. Far more than he talks. As he puffs on a cigarette, Femida keeps piloting and Bandera snores.
The three soldiers take shifts to keep the system running day and night, like an assembly line operating a well-oiled killing machine.
'Many Russians surrender, too. They know that if they're wounded, they'll be used as bait. They fear being killed by their own people,' Femida says, shaking his head.
According to the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, more than 109,000 Russian soldiers have been confirmed dead, as of its latest update in May.
But the real toll is believed to be far higher.
Moscow sustains its war effort by offering large enlistment bonuses, turning to foreign recruits, and mobilising relentlessly.
Russia brings in around 40,000 new soldiers each month, compared to 25,000 on the Ukrainian side, according to president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Jamal crouches to retrieve the drone as it lands again, just back from dropping another explosive into the black soil of Donetsk. But the buzz of another drone outside stops him, this time a Russian one.
'F---, the b------s!' he shouts.
We won't move from our basement for several hours now.
The mission to move through the city is called off. Walking in Pokrovsk is no longer safe.
The weather turns foul. Rain mixes with artillery fire.
A little over 24 hours inside our position, the order finally comes. Femida puts on his vest and helmet. 'It's time to move out,' he says.
Exit plan
Instructions from the command are clear: transfer to the meeting point and wait. Any open building will be a good refuge to take cover and avoid detection. We find one and get inside.
Orange lights spill through the door. Seconds later, the detonations begin.
'That's our artillery,' Femida says with a brief smile, which vanishes as the ground shakes.
More Russian Grad rockets fall into Pokrovsk. Then, an aerial bomb. Femida starts to sweat again, and my eyes are drawn to the patch on his chest: 'This heart is protected by a loved one.'
It's no empty phrase. He has a wife and two children. And heart problems, too.
Minutes drag on, and the silence grows heavy. No one has come.
As the first hour ticks, a question hangs in the air: should we stay or turn back? With no internet and the radio off for security, we are completely cut off.
Seventy-two minutes later, the horn of a skidding car breaks the silence. That's the signal.
We bolt outside, jumping into the pick-up. Another man, Yariy, is now at the wheel.
He wears night-vision goggles and is ready to floor it. 90... 100... 110 miles per hour.
The car bounces through puddles, the anti-drone system keeps beeping.
Yariy drives without fear or delay through the empty streets.
A burning house lights up the night once again.
Helmets bang against the roof.
When he finally switches on the headlights, he turns back and smiles like a tour guide: 'Did you like the city?'
Laughter fills the car.
Pokrovsk holds.
