"Death from above
The front line of the war in Ukraine stretches 750 miles, almost the distance between Chicago and Dallas. Armies of drones fly over all of it, constantly. They watch. They hunt. They strike. It makes for a new kind of battlefield, one where anything that moves is a target.
It was not that way when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. Then, the boundaries were clear, as front lines have been for centuries: Troops massed in trenches on opposite sides of a no-man's land, battling one another in a narrow area. No longer. The drones have widened the front by miles and miles, making it a huge and dangerous area in which neither side really holds control. Death stalks everyone within it.
The Times wrote about two Ukrainian soldiers who spent time in that crucible, which some call the kill zone. They hid out from buzzing drones in a house half-destroyed by attacks. To keep from being targeted, they hardly left it, relieving themselves in bottles and bags rather than going outside. They slept pressed together in winter, rather than lighting a fire. When they managed to kill Russian soldiers, they dragged the bodies into the house, so that Russian drones would not see evidence of fighting.
Those Russian soldiers were close, sometimes extremely so. Once, when one of the Ukrainian soldiers turned on his phone, it offered to connect to a Russian Wi-Fi router. "I immediately turned the phone off," he told The Times.
The front, transformed
The rise of drone warfare has changed how armies fight. Soldiers used to march to the front. Now they have to crawl there at night, under thermal blankets that block the heat signature that would give them away. Armored vehicles could scout the roads before a ground assault on a village or town. A few soldiers on A.T.V.s play that role now, riskily. And trench warfare? That's over. It's easy to target a trench. So soldiers hide out in abandoned buildings or dig underground bunkers.
And they stay a long time. Regular rotation of troops in and out of battle is too dangerous under a drone-filled sky. Henadii and Mykhailo, the two Ukrainian soldiers The Times interviewed, were in the kill zone for more than six months. (Like all Ukrainian soldiers The Times spoke to, they asked to be identified only by their first names or call signs, for security reasons.) Their experience was hellish. Vehicles can't bring supplies, so drones dropped them food and water, at least when the drones made it to them. Sometimes they didn't. Each man lost 40 pounds.
Getting home
Leaving the kill zone was the most dangerous part of the deployment. Russia's drones can patrol six miles into the enemy territory, and the soldiers had to hike through that zone. It took the two men days, as their commander guided them by radio, moving them on and off their path by watching a live feed from a reconnaissance drone floating above them. "Move left. Move right," Mykhailo said, recalling the orders. "We zigzagged like hares."
They slept in bombed-out houses and picked their way home through the front slowly. It had to have been terrifying. One day, a Russian drone blew up a house where they'd slept, just 10 minutes after they left.
The men who eventually arrived at their unit's command post looked very different from the ones who had left it a half-year before: thinner, with haunted expressions and thick, unruly facial hair.
The unit posted a video of Henadii inhaling a chocolate cake, The Times reported: "His wife saw it and called. In all of their years together, she said, he had always insisted he hated chocolate cake. 'Must have been the hunger,' Henadii said, smiling."
New York Times
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