Falling Skies: Part 1 – Ukrainian drone, artillery teams beat back Russian onslaught
SLOVYANSK, Donetsk Oblast —
The road to war splits the world in two: between terror and hope, between blood stains and beauty.
“It’s a big contrast when you look around,” said military chaplain Gennadiy Mokhnenko. “Flowers, sunshine, summer. And the Russian drones who want to kill you.”
Under a canopy of netting stretched over the road to help protect against drones, Bogdan Timura drives former Nebraska state Sen. Tom Brewer, attorney Dick Clark and me into Ukraine’s most embattled region.
“Guys, welcome to my beautiful homeland, Donbas,” Timura said with a smile.
Outside Sloviansk, a city that is being killed, the front line convulses.
The boundaries between the zero line and countryside have blurred into a vast and valley of death. Our goal on June 4 was to walk into it.
We met a group of Ukrainian soldiers who drove us as far as they safely could toward a frontline artillery position. Inside the vehicle, a drone detector blared warnings about the skies.
“If it’s detecting drones, it’s showing intercepted video,” Timura said.
The directive is simple: If a signal is detected, get out of the vehicle and find somewhere to hide.
Our driver, Vitaly, knew the danger firsthand.
“We were heading to the mission,” he said. “One of these drones that was waiting in the low power mode, and it just went up. I did not see that at all. And it hit me in the windshield.”
The explosive, incredibly, did not detonate.
The rest of Vitaly’s team now talks about him like a hero. But the haunted eyes of the lifelong carpenter bear unmistakable despair.
“When you think about that, death everywhere,” he said. “No family next to you. Nothing good.”
At one point, driving in terrain bearing the weight of a Russian offensive became too dangerous, so we hopped out and took to our feet.
“Almost every day, it’s always tense,” an artillery commander named Roman said. “They just very slow movement, and they cannot really get too far in, but they’re pushing.”
Clouds curtained the skies ahead, offering an unexpected measure of protection.
“When drones are out, they say, bad weather is good weather,” Dick Clark, the Nebraska lawyer and legislative staffer who was among five Nebraskans making the trip, said. “And we had some of that bad, good weather.”
Clark came to Ukraine to see firsthand a war that he says has become increasingly abstract to many Americans.
“You can read about war, you can watch war on TV, but until you see the real human beings that suffer in the context of war, you can’t understand it,” he says.
Along the way, we picked up a companion—a charismatic dog, one of many animals that have taken shelter around Ukrainian soldiers.
We continued down a winding path bordered by razor wire until we reach a massive metal artillery turret hidden among the trees.
The war in Ukraine has increasingly become a drone war, but artillery crews remain essential to holding the front line, Roman said. These beasts of war roar beneath gray skies, through sleet and snow.
“Nobody really can cancel artillery because it can work in any weather,” Roman says. “We still working.”
Roman compares drones to scalpels because of their precision. His 152 mm cannons are something far larger.
“Guillotine,” he said. “There is a huge range that is nothing alive after that. We are also being called the landscape designers.”
Roman’s crew fired two shells toward Russian positions. We knew the shots would likely draw a response, so we began the journey out, stopping along the way to see another Ukrainian artillery team.
We passed through a charred forest, where the trees stood like spent torches. Then the clouds part, and I learned that in an age of drone war, dread is a blue sky.
Multiple drones, likely packed with explosives, appeared overhead. We scattered into a thin strip of foliage on either side of the path, hoping to hide from the machines responsible for most of the casualties in the war.
The skies scream overhead for what feels like an eternity.
“Praying that that operator won’t see, won’t see your friend,” Clark says. “Those were some of the longest short moments that I’ve ever lived.”
I fixed my eyes on the nearest soldier, hoping his courage could be my own.
“Being hunted like that is a sick, sick feeling,” Clark says, “because it’s something that’s so out of your control.”
The drones eventually turned their attention elsewhere on the battlefield, so we wiped the leaves and branches from our vests and sprang along the rest of the path.
For the soldiers, the encounter barely registers. It is just another day at the front.
“This is terrible,” Vitaly says. “And this is terrifying. It’s a nightmarish war. It should never happen in my country.”
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