A heavy rain began just as we started our journey toward the latest front line in the war for Ukraine. “Perfectly bad weather,” our driver said with a smile.
The downpour, and a forecast of thunderstorms later in the day, would be unwelcome news in much of the world. In eastern Ukraine, though, it means the drones that now dominate the skies over this country would struggle to stay aloft, with the high winds and lashing rain also making it harder for them to track targets.
Our driver, Denys Denysov, declared that it was about as good a day as any to head to Kramatorsk.
We had interviews set up with residents in the last corner of the battle-scarred Donbas region that is still under Ukrainian control. Russian troops are now just 10 kilometres east of the city.
Along with the neighbouring city of Slovyansk, Kramatorsk has become a focal point in U.S.-brokered negotiations, with President Donald Trump suggesting that Ukraine should accept the seemingly inevitable and surrender all of Donbas − a predominantly Russian-speaking region that Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to “liberate” − as part of a ceasefire deal.
The negotiations hit a dead end when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made it clear he would not cede any land – or the people who live here – to the invaders. Mr. Putin, meanwhile, remains set on conquering all of Donbas. And so the two sides fight on.
Ukrainian forces rely on supply drones, like this hexacopter near Kramatorsk, to stay provisioned for the fight.
The weather Wednesday held long enough for us to sprint into the city – a 230-kilometre drive along roads protected by white netting meant to catch drones before they crash into their targets.
We sped past rows of Ukrainian military vehicles, as well as perhaps half a dozen burnt-out shells of cars that appeared to have nothing to do with the conflict.
For the first two-plus hours of the drive, we listened to Denys’s playlist, an eclectic mix of Ukrainian pop songs and hard rock and grunge from the 1980s and 1990s.
Then, as we approached Kramatorsk, we turned the music off. It was time to listen to the sky.
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Nets protect Kramatorsk’s vital roads from drone attacks, up to a point: There were many ruined vehicles when The Globe visited.
The war for Ukraine has changed several times over the four years and seven months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
The opening chapters were dominated by fast-moving tank battles and special-forces operations. Then, for much of 2023 and 2024, it settled into a war of attrition, with both sides digging trench lines and pounding the other side from afar with artillery.
The past year and a half has been a war of drones. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVS, have been used by both sides since 2022, but back then they were almost exclusively a reconnaissance tool. Today, the most feared weapons along the front line are first-person view, or FPV, drones that are remotely controlled by operators who choose targets via the drone’s on-board cameras.
The two sides have also been trading deadly long-range drone attacks.
A few months ago, Ukraine appeared to have seized the initiative with a series of significant strikes on Russia’s oil and gas production facilities, including in the Moscow region.
Today, it’s a Russian invention – jet-powered drones that fly at speeds of as much as 600 kilometres per hour – that’s tilting the conflict, particularly as the U.S. war against Iran has led to a worldwide shortage of air-defence missiles.
More than 200,000 people lived in Kramatorsk at the start of the invasion. Today, there are barely 30,000 left – with several hundred fleeing each day.
“We are planning to leave as soon as possible,” Olga Mikhailivna, a 52-year-old day care worker, told me as we sat outside her family’s small home near the city centre.
Artillery boomed somewhere in the distance, but she didn’t flinch. “An absolutely ordinary day,” she said, matter-of-factly.
The daycare closed at the start of the war, and Ms. Mikhailivna’s husband, Oleg, the editor of a local newspaper, was recently drafted into the Ukrainian army. There’s no reason for her and her elderly mother to stay in Kramatorsk any longer.
On Wednesday, they were packing their clothing and kitchen supplies into bags and pondering how to transport a goat and two energetic dogs across the country.
“I don’t want to stay and see how they destroy my home,” she said, alluding to horror stories from Ukrainian cities that have fallen under Russian occupation. “I don’t want to bury bodies in my yard.”
While Olga Mikhailivna is leaving her Kramatorsk home intact, Katerina Seledtsova’s got damaged in an explosion. Ms. Seledtsova still runs a café in the city, but commutes from Kharkiv.
Not everyone has given up on Kramatorsk just yet. After an explosion damaged her home in the city, Katerina Seledtsova moved to the relative safety of Kharkiv, along with her mother and eight-year-old son. But she still commutes to and from Kramatorsk twice a week to resupply the café she owns and operates there.
Before each journey she packs her pickup truck full of everything Kramatorsk lacks: coffee, milk, meat, water and diesel fuel for the generators that power her business during long blackouts. She says she’ll keep making the trip as long as she can.
“When I talk to my customers, they say: ‘Please don’t go’ – because they need me in the city,” Ms. Seledtsova explained. Then she burst into nervous laughter. “Their mental health is the same as mine. And I’m not okay.”
In Kramatorsk’s main square, driver Denys Denysov consults ‘Chuyka,’ a drone detector, to warn of danger from above. The Church of St. John the Baptist is a recent casualty of Russian drone attacks.
After interviewing her, photographer Olga Ivashchenko and I headed to the site of a deadly attack Tuesday that saw a guided aerial bomb – yet another cruel invention of this war – sail into a 14-storey apartment block, killing at least two people. The nearby Church of St. John the Baptist was badly damaged by the blast.
We were at the scene for only a few minutes before we heard the booms of artillery fire – much louder this time – from somewhere nearby. “It’s ours,” Denys shouted reassuringly, meaning we were hearing Ukrainian artillery targeting Russian lines to the east.
Seconds later came the dangerous hiss of something incoming. Olga and I sprinted back to the car, and Denys – who grew up in the city and knows every back road – yanked his SUV into a nearby parking lot, then spun around again until we were under the cover of an archway between two apartment buildings.
We all looked at each other. The rain, we noticed for the first time, had stopped. Our drone detectors – a tool that any journalist heading near the front line now needs to be trained to use – were beginning to beep warning sounds. It was time to go.
Denys hit the gas and pointed his vehicle back along the potholed backroads west of the city. As we sprinted away from Kramatorsk, the number of beeps from the drone detectors grew into a cacophony.
Some, we knew, were reconnaissance UAVs that both sides use to help target artillery fire. Others were Ukrainian interceptor drones that posed no danger to us as they hunted for enemy FPV and fibre-optic drones.
As we headed west, the beeping grew louder. One drone hovered close enough that we could use our drone detectors to see the video signal being broadcast back to the operator (FPV drones use local mobile networks for navigation). The screen on our drone detector showed the drone was surveying the area from high above, without fixing on any specific target.
No immediate danger, or so we thought. But the buzzing through the sunroof – which was open so we could listen to the sky – grew louder.
Denys pulled our car over to the side of the road. “Run!” he shouted.
The three of us abandoned the car and dove separately into the nearby fields. It was a tactic we’d learned at drone safety courses that are now de rigueur for anyone working near the front lines in Ukraine. The drone is likely to be faster than your car, so best to abandon it if you think you might be the target – and scatter so you don’t make it easy for the operator to follow you as a group.
I lay for a long moment in the mud, listening to the sky while fumbling to make sure that my helmet was fastened and that I still had my phone and first-aid kit.
The buzzing overhead grew fainter. Whatever the drone was hunting, it wasn’t us. We got back into the car, with Kramatorsk and Donbas in the rearview mirror.
When I got back to my hotel room in Kharkiv, I scanned the Kramatorsk city council’s Telegram channel to see how the city had fared after we left.
The hissing we had heard was the sound of an incoming Grad rocket attack – one of eight drone and rocket strikes on the city over the course of Wednesday. Two people were killed and 12 injured.
It was the quietest day Kramatorsk had seen in almost two weeks.
War in Ukraine: More from The Globe and MailThe Decibel podcast
Don’t provoke the soldiers. “If he shouts – do not argue, hide and wait.” These are some of the things captured Ukrainian children are told to do in pamphlets from Russian detention centres. Last fall, reporter Janice Dickson spoke with The Decibel about the documents and Russia’s strategy for indoctrinating youth. Subscribe for more episodes.
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